Had a great conversation with Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast. We talked about status games, happiness, the difference between happiness and meaning, what makes things interesting, why social media is brain-poison, the problem with our desires
Small amendment about the growth mindset thing. The original claim was never that you can make yourself smarter ONLY through belief. It's not the Law of Attraction. It was "If you believe it's possible to get smarter, then you'll be more willing to put in the effort to actually do so."
Even if the specific interventions being tested didn't work in meta-analysis, the basic idea is intuitive enough that I think it's worth keeping. You only bother trying to improve if you think that improvement is possible.
I hoped you would cite a seminal work of Harry G Frankfurt "On bullshit". After reading that essay I started to use BS only in this technical meaning which is something along the lines of "using rhetoric to obfuscate the true intention behind the utterance without any regard for its truth value". I think it is very helpful in pinpointing what BS really is.
Status has clearly gained some cultural salience in the last few years. One thing I haven’t heard addressed is how people who have some significant challenges with the usual status games, the disabled for example, can respond to mitigate the harms of living with lower status. Ideas and practices from Stoicism and Buddhism are a fruitful place to look no doubt. And as you’ve said elsewhere, just being aware of status as part of the landscape in which we move is probably a key first step. Perspective would be another important approach — seeing ourselves and others as the intelligent-ish apes that we are struggling by on this sphere of rock and and water in the middle of cold and infinite space before we get sick and die. Just thinking aloud here.
I think everyone on the autism spectrum needs to read it. A lot of baffling behavior and conversation starts to make a lot more sense if one pictures people as monkeys with language battling for status and power.
In case you haven't read it, one piece of work I'd highly recommend is Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language"
Watched your Modern Wisdom episode yesterday and enjoyed it very much. You made many interesting points—too many to cover here—but the one below stood out to me because it suggested a possible path forward:
"I'm not saying that because these sacred values are bullshit that they're necessarily bad. I think some bullshit is better for the world than other bullshit. If you look at science, it's bathed in sacred values of knowledge and wisdom and disinterested truth-seeking. And in some sense those values are bullshit. But in another sense, it's really good that those are the values that are being pursued, or at least being pretended to be pursued. Because the institution of science needs those values in order to persist, and in order to uncover genuine truths. For the same reason, status games around success in business or athletics or whatever, they can motivate genuinely good behavior. And yes, you could say that, at the end of the day, it's motivated by status. But at some point you've gotta shrug your shoulders and just say, that's human nature, and we've gotta deal with that, and we've gotta accept it. And if we wanna change the world for the better, we have to recognize that. Because if we want to create a better world, there's no way to do that other than by changing the social norms, which ultimately means changing what gets us status and what doesn't. That's what social change is at the end of the day. It's changing what gets us status and what doesn't. And if you don't realize that that's how social change works, you're not gonna change anything. So I think being realistic about how this works is going to make us wiser both consumers of culture and producers of culture."
This idea of making the world better via social change via changing what gets us status and what doesn't is compelling to me, and it helped to quell some of the rising cynicism that I've been struggling to keep down for some months or years now.
Related: In your Status Is Weird post, you wrote:
"So if there’s a status game you dislike, expose it. Tell satirical stories about its vainglorious players. Translate the covert signals into a lingua franca. Attack the game’s supposed values and reveal its hypocrisy. If you succeed, the game will collapse. That’s what happened to dueling, foot binding, powdered wigs, and all the other defunct status games throughout history, and it’s sure to happen to many of the status games we’re currently playing, like educational credentialism and performative wokeness."
I agree with the thrust of your argument here, but I also struggle with it. Performative wokeness is a good illustrative example in that it's all, in my view, about gaining status via (supposedly/performatively) holding sacred values around justice and equality and so on. But, borrowing from your point on science, is it "really good that those are the values that are ... at least being pretended to be pursued"? I don't think its is. I think the status-seeking pretend-pursuit has created or worsened more social problems around justice and equality (re: race, sex/gender, identity, etc.) than it has solved or improved.
What I think I struggle with, then, is exposing the performative status games, and making them defunct, while simultaneously holding the non-performative ones as "sacred" and desired. Is there even such a thing as a non-performative status game? Maybe the answer is a shift in focus from empty words to meaningful actions? E.g., exposing mere tweets and pronouns in bios and whatnot on the contagion formerly known as Twitter as junk status games, and then reserving status for actual behaviors and actions that bring actual positive changes? I don't know. That's the best I can come up with at the moment.
If you have further ideas, I'd love to hear them. (On that note, the progress-focused org that I work for —work that I must admit has left me more cynical and skeptical about social progress—might also be interested in hearing them. I'd have to discuss it with them first, but there could be a cross-posting opportunity or something if you're interested.)
"Maybe there’s an unspoken symbiosis among bullshitters—a kind of “I’ll buy your bullshit if you buy mine” kind of thing?"
100%! This is almost like an axiom for me; I see this everywhere.
"Why do we judge people on the internet as evil in every possible way, when all they did was say something tone-deaf one time, and we don’t even know them?"
I think we do this in "real life" too, not just on the internet. Probably the same reason explains both phenomena.
Small amendment about the growth mindset thing. The original claim was never that you can make yourself smarter ONLY through belief. It's not the Law of Attraction. It was "If you believe it's possible to get smarter, then you'll be more willing to put in the effort to actually do so."
Even if the specific interventions being tested didn't work in meta-analysis, the basic idea is intuitive enough that I think it's worth keeping. You only bother trying to improve if you think that improvement is possible.
Are you serious? The one thing you think is not bullshit is a defense of free will? 🙃
Will be curious to read how the magic happens…
I hoped you would cite a seminal work of Harry G Frankfurt "On bullshit". After reading that essay I started to use BS only in this technical meaning which is something along the lines of "using rhetoric to obfuscate the true intention behind the utterance without any regard for its truth value". I think it is very helpful in pinpointing what BS really is.
Status has clearly gained some cultural salience in the last few years. One thing I haven’t heard addressed is how people who have some significant challenges with the usual status games, the disabled for example, can respond to mitigate the harms of living with lower status. Ideas and practices from Stoicism and Buddhism are a fruitful place to look no doubt. And as you’ve said elsewhere, just being aware of status as part of the landscape in which we move is probably a key first step. Perspective would be another important approach — seeing ourselves and others as the intelligent-ish apes that we are struggling by on this sphere of rock and and water in the middle of cold and infinite space before we get sick and die. Just thinking aloud here.
Great blog with valuable insights!
I think everyone on the autism spectrum needs to read it. A lot of baffling behavior and conversation starts to make a lot more sense if one pictures people as monkeys with language battling for status and power.
In case you haven't read it, one piece of work I'd highly recommend is Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language"
I really appreciated your conversation with Chris Williamson. It was a great way to become acquainted with you and your work.
Modern Wisdom episode was great! Looking forward to seeing more from you.
Watched your Modern Wisdom episode yesterday and enjoyed it very much. You made many interesting points—too many to cover here—but the one below stood out to me because it suggested a possible path forward:
"I'm not saying that because these sacred values are bullshit that they're necessarily bad. I think some bullshit is better for the world than other bullshit. If you look at science, it's bathed in sacred values of knowledge and wisdom and disinterested truth-seeking. And in some sense those values are bullshit. But in another sense, it's really good that those are the values that are being pursued, or at least being pretended to be pursued. Because the institution of science needs those values in order to persist, and in order to uncover genuine truths. For the same reason, status games around success in business or athletics or whatever, they can motivate genuinely good behavior. And yes, you could say that, at the end of the day, it's motivated by status. But at some point you've gotta shrug your shoulders and just say, that's human nature, and we've gotta deal with that, and we've gotta accept it. And if we wanna change the world for the better, we have to recognize that. Because if we want to create a better world, there's no way to do that other than by changing the social norms, which ultimately means changing what gets us status and what doesn't. That's what social change is at the end of the day. It's changing what gets us status and what doesn't. And if you don't realize that that's how social change works, you're not gonna change anything. So I think being realistic about how this works is going to make us wiser both consumers of culture and producers of culture."
This idea of making the world better via social change via changing what gets us status and what doesn't is compelling to me, and it helped to quell some of the rising cynicism that I've been struggling to keep down for some months or years now.
Related: In your Status Is Weird post, you wrote:
"So if there’s a status game you dislike, expose it. Tell satirical stories about its vainglorious players. Translate the covert signals into a lingua franca. Attack the game’s supposed values and reveal its hypocrisy. If you succeed, the game will collapse. That’s what happened to dueling, foot binding, powdered wigs, and all the other defunct status games throughout history, and it’s sure to happen to many of the status games we’re currently playing, like educational credentialism and performative wokeness."
I agree with the thrust of your argument here, but I also struggle with it. Performative wokeness is a good illustrative example in that it's all, in my view, about gaining status via (supposedly/performatively) holding sacred values around justice and equality and so on. But, borrowing from your point on science, is it "really good that those are the values that are ... at least being pretended to be pursued"? I don't think its is. I think the status-seeking pretend-pursuit has created or worsened more social problems around justice and equality (re: race, sex/gender, identity, etc.) than it has solved or improved.
What I think I struggle with, then, is exposing the performative status games, and making them defunct, while simultaneously holding the non-performative ones as "sacred" and desired. Is there even such a thing as a non-performative status game? Maybe the answer is a shift in focus from empty words to meaningful actions? E.g., exposing mere tweets and pronouns in bios and whatnot on the contagion formerly known as Twitter as junk status games, and then reserving status for actual behaviors and actions that bring actual positive changes? I don't know. That's the best I can come up with at the moment.
If you have further ideas, I'd love to hear them. (On that note, the progress-focused org that I work for —work that I must admit has left me more cynical and skeptical about social progress—might also be interested in hearing them. I'd have to discuss it with them first, but there could be a cross-posting opportunity or something if you're interested.)
"Maybe there’s an unspoken symbiosis among bullshitters—a kind of “I’ll buy your bullshit if you buy mine” kind of thing?"
100%! This is almost like an axiom for me; I see this everywhere.
"Why do we judge people on the internet as evil in every possible way, when all they did was say something tone-deaf one time, and we don’t even know them?"
I think we do this in "real life" too, not just on the internet. Probably the same reason explains both phenomena.
"Are we anti-bullshitters missing out?" No way, the concise love the concise!