How much of “loss of attachment to extended family, etc.” is interwoven with “satisfaction of basic needs”? If you can satisfy your basic needs without extensive support from family/community, do you then deemphasize that extended group in your thought process?
Just this past weekend my youngest sister and her husband had a gathering for my neice's 4th birthday party. It consisted of myself and my mother and my brother-in-law's mother and his only sibling. There were so few because that is the only family close enough and still alive to attend. It made me sad- when I grew up, I grew up where my parents and their parents et cetera had been born and raised- I had more than 200 blood relatives 2nd cousin and closer living within a 10 mile radius. I feel sorry for all five of my neices and nephews- none of them will ever have that extended family experience, and part of it is my fault for never having a family myself.
My family scattered widely. My father's family scattered to Kansas, Michigan, Indiana, and Maryland. In the end, my sibs and I scattered to Washington, Texas, Michigan, and North Carolina. In most cases there was additional movement between sites for many of the families, so getting together as a family was always a major endeavor. Since I graduated I have lived in 5 states, and several locations in some states. It makes for a loose family structure.
I agree, but you get a lot of criticism if you post IF or let people know you hold it as an ideal - although my youngest daughter (now a structural engineer) recited it in high school about 10 years ago tas her favorite poem - o considerable shock, Kipling is not acceptable anymore.
When my first marriage broke up the counselor asked me about myself - I was doing a startup at the time and replied that I held Kipling's IF as an ideal. I was essentially told that I was a hopeless barbarian unsuited to a civilized wife. There was no point of talking to that idiot.
My teen daughter by that first marriage's comment when I remarried was that "I was so old fashioned that I had to marry a woman from the old country".
If you refuse to play the standard status games, you are very much an outsider.
Yes, you are right. But then, that is what the poem is all about. The current madness will in time pass (and be replaced with some other?). As for criticism, I am retired and not subject to cancellation, and couldn't care less about it coming from the kind of people that dislike or hate "If-".
A comment re the military being a bit of a suck-up culture in “peacetime.” (I note that this is my understanding of the situation and I could be wrong.) H.R. McMaster retired as a Lieutenant General and National Security Adviser. However, he almost did not make first level general. At least back then, the Army convened a promotion board once a year which decided which colonels got promoted to general. You got three chances. If you were not promoted in those three times, you didn’t get promoted.
H.R. McMaster did not get promoted the first two times. The third time, David Petreaus, even though he was commanding the surge in Iraq, came home to chair the promotion board and, perhaps among other things, get then-Colonel McMaster promoted.
Why did it take three times for H.R. McMater to get promoted and almost not happen? Could it be because McMaster wrote his dissertation on the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Johnson administration and was then silly enough to have it published under the title Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam?
Apparently, in the Army, you need to keep your head down not only when you are in combat.
I think social media is a positive feedback system, in the control systems sense. Before, there was generally a negative feedback system. Perturbations would occur, but most of the time they would be dampened at the system would return to the steady state. It took a lot of effort to move to a new steady state. With social media, the same perturbations occur, but get magnified instead of dampened. The whole system loses the steady state and gets thrown around wildly.
To me, posts like these where Arnold points out that the perturbations always existed miss the salient point. The presence of a new positive feedback system is itself a meaningful change.
I think a reasonable refuge from some status games is small business and start-ups. Sure there are staus games there ( which VCs do you know, what connections do you have?, etc.) But one can still prosper there, if you aren't into kissing up. Unbeknownst to many is the huge universe of non-tech or moderate-tech small businesses. My guess is that a big chunk of 0.1%ers reside here. The owners of hardware stores, lumber yards, car dealerships, farms, machine shops and apartment buildings. A great place to be if you're not a tech enthusiast and want to stiff-arm much of the poser crowd. But only if you're willing to risk possible failure and can work hard for little pay during the early years of your career.
“The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.” I think the causality goes the other way around. A complex mix of multiple titles in parallel hierarchies could actually be a way to ameliorate the problem.
The obvious reason is that in an information/knowledge economy with individual differentiation, personal reputation ("brand") matters a lot. Steelworkers don't care about status at work because they are treated as undifferentiated labor, where hours worked (and perhaps seniority) completely determine one's paycheck. Of course, there are problems with such rigid enforcement of equal outcomes and status too.
"Can it be unhealthy to worry about your reputation on Instagram or Twitter but perfectly healthy to care about getting promoted from Deputy Associate Director to Associate Director in a division at the Fed?"
I'm not sure about "healthy", but it can be rational to care about one's job title if it affects one's future professional opportunities yet "unhealthy", or at least superficial, to care about reputation on Instagram. To the extent that Twitter might also affect one's professional reputation, that is an indication of superficiality and lack of seriousness in the corresponding professions.
Another reason for status games: grade and degree inflation. When everyone has a college degree, then people look for other ways to differentiate.
My parents noted that when they went into a retirement community that while many residents would compete with trips and cruises, the real status markers were the number and accomplishments of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. And that those whose descendants were most accomplished would tend to be rather discrete about it to keep things civil. I know that my brothers and I all gave presentations about topics in our expertise domains at the retirement community - I am sure part of the status games as well as a way of bringing in experts for a presentation and discussion of interest.
One thing to keep in mind is that status matters for reproductive success. It's pretty deeply embedded into human (and non-human) strategies. Yeah, it's often dysfunctional, but over evolutionary time scales it's up there with starvation in significance.
Ever since Grok hung a bear claw on a cord around his neck to impress his fellow cavemen (and women), humanoids have been seeking status, so yes, status games have been around a long time. What’s different between Grok’s time and now are these:
WHAT GROK NOW
Material goods Scarcity Abundance
Occupation Survival labor Leisure time
Span of info control Family/Clan Any stranger on the planet
Technology Word of mouth Internet
Status seeking now is on steroids since the means to send status signals has been amplified beyond imagination. Instead of bragging around the campfire to your dozen or so clansmen, you can twerk your booty in front of millions of fellow boneheads. Status seeking was not a full-time job 50,000 years ago since there was an everyday problem of making sure you had food/shelter to survive. Today, thanks to technology, we can bark our idealized version of ourselves all day and night into the cybersphere. Our underlying, implanted desires and tendencies related to status were shaped by various forms of communication and media throughout history. Today, some might say we have perfected the status game. I do not.
I think you have brought up an interesting point. It would seem that Haidt, Lukianoff, and others have come very close to proving that social media is harming the mental health of heavy users, particularly young girls. True or not, let's also assume comparison and ranking is central to this issue. What does that tell us about the mental health affects of other hierarchies? Could they have similarly bad impacts on mental health? Do some hierarchies such as in the military and, as you suggest, the Fed maybe have offsetting benefits whereas maybe in social media and academia they don't?
Weaker attachment to family and other groups seems a plausible factor.
I agree with your general point about it not being the game but the way we keep score. I disagree that scoring by financial success is something new or unusual. I'd even disagree a bit that social media has made much of an inflection. The big shift I see, especially in the post WW2 era, is that being an influencer or somebody who works primarily with words and symbols (celebrity, academic, politician, media person, etc) has a much higher status now than somebody who works in the physical world. This is reflected from the top to bottom of our society. Arnold's bowling steel worker in the 1950s not only had a tighter circle of family and friends but enjoyed the reflected prestige of his employer. This shift wasn't just driven by modern social media but the whole transition from printed books to mass market periodicals to movies to radio to TV. Each step along that route gave more prestige to a wider and wider group of people who worked primarily with ideas and words than physical objects. Social media has just further democratized who can capitalize on our society's obsession with interpersonal communication.
How much of “loss of attachment to extended family, etc.” is interwoven with “satisfaction of basic needs”? If you can satisfy your basic needs without extensive support from family/community, do you then deemphasize that extended group in your thought process?
Just this past weekend my youngest sister and her husband had a gathering for my neice's 4th birthday party. It consisted of myself and my mother and my brother-in-law's mother and his only sibling. There were so few because that is the only family close enough and still alive to attend. It made me sad- when I grew up, I grew up where my parents and their parents et cetera had been born and raised- I had more than 200 blood relatives 2nd cousin and closer living within a 10 mile radius. I feel sorry for all five of my neices and nephews- none of them will ever have that extended family experience, and part of it is my fault for never having a family myself.
My family scattered widely. My father's family scattered to Kansas, Michigan, Indiana, and Maryland. In the end, my sibs and I scattered to Washington, Texas, Michigan, and North Carolina. In most cases there was additional movement between sites for many of the families, so getting together as a family was always a major endeavor. Since I graduated I have lived in 5 states, and several locations in some states. It makes for a loose family structure.
I know that feeling. :(
Rudyard Kipling had something to say about this in his poem "If-." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---
"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too..." Take a moment to read the whole poem.
I agree, but you get a lot of criticism if you post IF or let people know you hold it as an ideal - although my youngest daughter (now a structural engineer) recited it in high school about 10 years ago tas her favorite poem - o considerable shock, Kipling is not acceptable anymore.
When my first marriage broke up the counselor asked me about myself - I was doing a startup at the time and replied that I held Kipling's IF as an ideal. I was essentially told that I was a hopeless barbarian unsuited to a civilized wife. There was no point of talking to that idiot.
My teen daughter by that first marriage's comment when I remarried was that "I was so old fashioned that I had to marry a woman from the old country".
If you refuse to play the standard status games, you are very much an outsider.
Yes, you are right. But then, that is what the poem is all about. The current madness will in time pass (and be replaced with some other?). As for criticism, I am retired and not subject to cancellation, and couldn't care less about it coming from the kind of people that dislike or hate "If-".
Did Rudyard include the specifications for a sophisticated implementation? 🤔
A comment re the military being a bit of a suck-up culture in “peacetime.” (I note that this is my understanding of the situation and I could be wrong.) H.R. McMaster retired as a Lieutenant General and National Security Adviser. However, he almost did not make first level general. At least back then, the Army convened a promotion board once a year which decided which colonels got promoted to general. You got three chances. If you were not promoted in those three times, you didn’t get promoted.
H.R. McMaster did not get promoted the first two times. The third time, David Petreaus, even though he was commanding the surge in Iraq, came home to chair the promotion board and, perhaps among other things, get then-Colonel McMaster promoted.
Why did it take three times for H.R. McMater to get promoted and almost not happen? Could it be because McMaster wrote his dissertation on the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Johnson administration and was then silly enough to have it published under the title Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam?
Apparently, in the Army, you need to keep your head down not only when you are in combat.
I think social media is a positive feedback system, in the control systems sense. Before, there was generally a negative feedback system. Perturbations would occur, but most of the time they would be dampened at the system would return to the steady state. It took a lot of effort to move to a new steady state. With social media, the same perturbations occur, but get magnified instead of dampened. The whole system loses the steady state and gets thrown around wildly.
To me, posts like these where Arnold points out that the perturbations always existed miss the salient point. The presence of a new positive feedback system is itself a meaningful change.
I think a reasonable refuge from some status games is small business and start-ups. Sure there are staus games there ( which VCs do you know, what connections do you have?, etc.) But one can still prosper there, if you aren't into kissing up. Unbeknownst to many is the huge universe of non-tech or moderate-tech small businesses. My guess is that a big chunk of 0.1%ers reside here. The owners of hardware stores, lumber yards, car dealerships, farms, machine shops and apartment buildings. A great place to be if you're not a tech enthusiast and want to stiff-arm much of the poser crowd. But only if you're willing to risk possible failure and can work hard for little pay during the early years of your career.
Until a "pandemic" comes along and small businesses are forced to shut down while big box stores and online retailers can stay open.
If grandparents are winners, that means only people with children have a chance to win.
Stay at home mothers like me are apparently in this competition.
“The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.” I think the causality goes the other way around. A complex mix of multiple titles in parallel hierarchies could actually be a way to ameliorate the problem.
"other?"
The obvious reason is that in an information/knowledge economy with individual differentiation, personal reputation ("brand") matters a lot. Steelworkers don't care about status at work because they are treated as undifferentiated labor, where hours worked (and perhaps seniority) completely determine one's paycheck. Of course, there are problems with such rigid enforcement of equal outcomes and status too.
"Can it be unhealthy to worry about your reputation on Instagram or Twitter but perfectly healthy to care about getting promoted from Deputy Associate Director to Associate Director in a division at the Fed?"
I'm not sure about "healthy", but it can be rational to care about one's job title if it affects one's future professional opportunities yet "unhealthy", or at least superficial, to care about reputation on Instagram. To the extent that Twitter might also affect one's professional reputation, that is an indication of superficiality and lack of seriousness in the corresponding professions.
Another reason for status games: grade and degree inflation. When everyone has a college degree, then people look for other ways to differentiate.
My parents noted that when they went into a retirement community that while many residents would compete with trips and cruises, the real status markers were the number and accomplishments of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. And that those whose descendants were most accomplished would tend to be rather discrete about it to keep things civil. I know that my brothers and I all gave presentations about topics in our expertise domains at the retirement community - I am sure part of the status games as well as a way of bringing in experts for a presentation and discussion of interest.
"Think of a steel worker in 1950. He plays his status game in the bowling alley; at work, all he cares about is his paycheck."
I really don't that think that's true. Small-team status dynamics at labor-intensive organizations in the 1950's could get pretty ridiculous.
One thing to keep in mind is that status matters for reproductive success. It's pretty deeply embedded into human (and non-human) strategies. Yeah, it's often dysfunctional, but over evolutionary time scales it's up there with starvation in significance.
Ever since Grok hung a bear claw on a cord around his neck to impress his fellow cavemen (and women), humanoids have been seeking status, so yes, status games have been around a long time. What’s different between Grok’s time and now are these:
WHAT GROK NOW
Material goods Scarcity Abundance
Occupation Survival labor Leisure time
Span of info control Family/Clan Any stranger on the planet
Technology Word of mouth Internet
Status seeking now is on steroids since the means to send status signals has been amplified beyond imagination. Instead of bragging around the campfire to your dozen or so clansmen, you can twerk your booty in front of millions of fellow boneheads. Status seeking was not a full-time job 50,000 years ago since there was an everyday problem of making sure you had food/shelter to survive. Today, thanks to technology, we can bark our idealized version of ourselves all day and night into the cybersphere. Our underlying, implanted desires and tendencies related to status were shaped by various forms of communication and media throughout history. Today, some might say we have perfected the status game. I do not.
OK my little attempt at a chart with WHAT GROK NOW didn't come out so good but hopefully the idea comes across.
A modest proposal: how about some group of people decides to do differently, for the first time in the history of the world?
I think you have brought up an interesting point. It would seem that Haidt, Lukianoff, and others have come very close to proving that social media is harming the mental health of heavy users, particularly young girls. True or not, let's also assume comparison and ranking is central to this issue. What does that tell us about the mental health affects of other hierarchies? Could they have similarly bad impacts on mental health? Do some hierarchies such as in the military and, as you suggest, the Fed maybe have offsetting benefits whereas maybe in social media and academia they don't?
Weaker attachment to family and other groups seems a plausible factor.
This is a great column! Thanks.
I agree with your general point about it not being the game but the way we keep score. I disagree that scoring by financial success is something new or unusual. I'd even disagree a bit that social media has made much of an inflection. The big shift I see, especially in the post WW2 era, is that being an influencer or somebody who works primarily with words and symbols (celebrity, academic, politician, media person, etc) has a much higher status now than somebody who works in the physical world. This is reflected from the top to bottom of our society. Arnold's bowling steel worker in the 1950s not only had a tighter circle of family and friends but enjoyed the reflected prestige of his employer. This shift wasn't just driven by modern social media but the whole transition from printed books to mass market periodicals to movies to radio to TV. Each step along that route gave more prestige to a wider and wider group of people who worked primarily with ideas and words than physical objects. Social media has just further democratized who can capitalize on our society's obsession with interpersonal communication.
We could try talking about the phenomena themselves, rather than only talking about the consequences of them.