14 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
  2. Jan 2024
  3. Feb 2023
    1. Kawakatsu et al. (1) make an important ad-vance in the quest for this kind of understanding, pro-viding a general model for how subtle differences inindividual-level decision-making can lead to hard-to-miss consequences for society as a whole.Their work (1) reveals two distinct regimes—oneegalitarian, one hierarchical—that emerge fromshifts in individual-level judgment. These lead to sta-tistical methods that researchers can use to reverseengineer observed hierarchies, and understand howsignaling systems work when prestige and power arein play.

      M. Kawakatsu, P. S. Chodrow, N. Eikmeier, D. B. Larremore, Emergence of hierarchy in networked endorsement dynamics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2015188118 (2021)

      This may be of interest to Jerry Michalski et al.

  4. Dec 2022
    1. It is possible to replace irrational status-seeking behaviors with healthier alternatives in which the value is found in the act itself rather than by the aimless collection of status symbols
  5. Sep 2021
    1. Given the fact that super-rich consumption is preoccupied with the importance of sign rather than use values, it is the space as much as the commodity that is consumed by the super-rich.

      This is an important observation that can be used to develop a transformative strategy. There is a culturally-constructed, positive, psychological affect associated with being in these spaces. How can these be deconstructed?

  6. Jul 2019
    1. The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages and customs.
    1. might markets just not work?

      Same thing in publishing, too. Lots of people say journal costs are inflated & they can run one cheaper. They're right, but there are two considerations: a) in a market economy prices reflect more than just costs. They reflect the economic value, which includes things like brand value, prestige and also, as this & the other posts argue, an inflation due to productivity rising in adjacent market sectors. So the market failures seem to come from a) the difficulty knowing how much something should cost (having comparables and not having too much complexity to understand) and b) too high value ascribed to the status or prestige (which, if understood as a social consensus proxy that reduces the complexity of actually understanding the business & what it's value to the consumer should be, collapses b into a).

  7. Nov 2018
    1. Humans participate in social learning for a variety of adaptive reasons, such as reducing uncertainty (Kameda and Nakanishi, 2002), learning complex skills and knowledge that could not have been invented by a single individual alone (Richerson and Boyd, 2000; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner, 1993), and passing on beneficial cultural traits to offspring (Palmer, 2010). One proposed social-learning mechanism is prestige bias (Henrich and Gil-White, 2001), defined as the selective copying of certain “prestigious” individuals to whom others freely show deference or respect in orderto increase the amount and accuracy of information available to the learner.Prestige bias allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively choose from whom to learn, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavioral so lutions toa specific task or enterprisewit hout having to assess directly the adaptiveness of every potential model’s behavior.Learners provide deference to teachers in order to ingratiate themselves with a chosen model, thus gaining extended exposure to that model(Henrich and Gil-White, 2001).New learners can then use that information—who is paying attention to whom—to increase their likelihood of choosing a good teacher.

      Throughout this article are several highlighted passages that combine to form this annotation.

      This research study presents the idea that the social environment is a self-selected learning environment for adults. The idea of social prestige-bias learning is intriguing because it is derived from the student, not an institution nor instructor. The further idea of selecting whom to learn from based on prestige-bias also creates further questions that warrant a deeper understanding of the learner and the environment which s/he creates to gain knowledge.

      Using a previously conducted experiment on success-based learning and learning due to environmental change, this research further included the ideal of social prestige-biased learning.self-selected by the learner.

      In a study of 167 participants, three hypotheses were tested to see if learners would select individual learning, social learning, prestige-biased learning (also a social setting), or success-based learning. The experiment tested both an initial learning environment and a learning environment which experienced a change in the environment.

      Surprisingly, some participants selected social prestige-biased learning and some success learning and the percentages in each category did not change after the environmental change occurred.

      Questions that arise from the study:

      • Does social prestige, or someone who is deemed prestigious, equate to a knowledgeable teacher?
      • Does the social prestige-biased environment reflect wise choices?
      • If the student does not know what s/he does not know, will the social prestige-bias result in selecting the better teacher, or just in selecting a more highly recognized teacher?
      • Why did the environmental change have little impact on the selected learning environment?

      REFERENCE: Atkinson, C., O’Brien, M.J., & Mesoudi, A. (2012). Adult learners in a novel environment use prestige-biased social learning. Evolutionary Psychology, 10(3), 519-537. Retrieved from (Prestige-biased Learning )

      RATINGS content, 9/10 veracity, 8/10 easiness of use, 9/10 Overall Rating, 8.67/10

  8. Sep 2018
    1. Experiments 4 and 5 advanced the investigation by using experimental manipulations to prime an orientation toward prestige.

      We should try to replicate this

  9. Oct 2017
    1. it does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read.

      I think that this is true to the extent that the content of the work is very important. Prestige of the author does not always mean that the work has importance. I believe that you can find merit in most work even if the author isn't well known as an intellectual or a scholar. I think Said is trying to emphasize the fact that we need to focus more on the content of the paper than the person who wrote the paper.

  10. Mar 2016
    1. To publish. And sometimes publish in the right journals.... In my discipline ...there’s just a few journals, and if you’re not in that journal, then yourpublication doesn’t really count

      Importance of "top" journals

    1. vulgar monetary gain...

      I think it is more in terms of "vulgar prestige gain" and how we extract value by promoting a cult of personality around community leaders which in turn increases the prestige value. Reminds me of corporations buying back their own stock in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of stockholders aka executives with stock options. Employees could be paid better wages and in turn could fuel the economy by buying more, but that is not how it works because it does not benefit those who own the capital.