1.1 Summary & contents

This is the first of two blog posts where I try to make sense of the whole universe of social-status-related behaviors and phenomena:

This post is focused on a special case of two people interacting, where they have different object-level preferences—maybe one wants to order pizza for dinner while the other wants sushi. This gets us into various topics like “leading and following”, averaging different people's utility functions, being more or less “pushy”, “ask culture versus guess culture”, plausible deniability, politeness arms-races, and more.
Then the next post, “Social status part 2/2: everything else”, will layer on another heap of complexity on top of all that, related to the fact that people also have preferences related to the interaction itself, like “a preference not to be rude”. That gets us into topics like dominance, prestige, getting offended, passive-aggressiveness, status, self-deprecation, and more.

Some context for how [...]

---

Outline:

(00:07) 1.1 Summary and contents

(04:55) 1.2 What are “negotiations over object-level preferences”?

(07:07) 1.3 If two people in an interaction have conflicting object-level preferences, one will “mostly lead” and the other will “mostly follow” (or they could both “half lead”, etc.)

(09:42) 1.3.1 “Leading” versus “following” applies to both dominance and prestige

(10:42) 1.4 The “Weighted Average” Toy model: A range from “0% leader” to “100% leader” in an interaction, summing to 100%

(14:06) 1.4.1 Worked example

(16:01) 1.4.2 What about intersubjective utility comparisons—a.k.a., that thing about affine transformations?

(22:10) 1.5 Another toy model: An unspoken map from (subjective) “desires” to (external / behavioral) “pushiness”

(23:30) 1.5.1 “Ask culture versus guess culture”

(25:32) 1.5.2 More on “culture” clashes

(27:48) 1.5.3 I think the terms “ask” and “guess” are somewhat misleading

(29:54) 1.5.4 I think plausible deniability is mostly orthogonal to ask-vs-guess

(34:30) 1.5.5 Tug-of-war analogy

(35:49) 1.6 Explaining cross-cultural differences

(35:54) 1.6.1 Another toy model: Communication cultures may result from “arms races”

(39:51) 1.6.2 Combat-vs-nurture is different from ask-vs-guess

(44:06) 1.7 Conclusion

The original text contained 15 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
March 5th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SPBm67otKq5ET5CWP/social-status-part-1-2-negotiations-over-object-level

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Social status part 1/2: negotiations over object-level preferences” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma)