Making the Outdoors into a Status Game: Humans Are Weird, Volume # 178,822,941

Cross-posted to MDK10 Outside.

A friend of mine had lived in Philadelphia and Atlanta, and then moved to Olympia, Washington. She immediately fell in love with the place. She noticed - or thought she noticed - two things: that people there were really outdoorsy, and that they weren't concerned with the silly oneupmanship status games that she witnessed constantly back East.

That was before she witnessed, at a party, of grown-ups, two people arguing over who had the lower REI co-op number, and therefore who was the more genuine outdoorsy person.

I've had similar experiences in Moab and Banff, both of which towns I despise. I mean, really stomach-turningly hate, like a pagan hates the squat stone gods of an enemy tribe. I love where these towns are. Of course I love the Canyonlands and slickrock trails and rock mazes, and the Canadian Rockies and meadows. But I hate the people that congeal in these towns. Not all of them of course. But there are many people who just really need you to know how active and outdoorsy they are, by their branded gear, by the conversations they steer you into...exactly the sort of nonsense we go outside to avoid! (And, full disclosure, maybe I despise it so much because I catch myself doing it.) Let's not leave out Rainier Mountaineering Incorporated. Are they still around? I ran into one of their guides in Mexico once. He wasn't nearly as revolting as I expected he would be. (But still pretty bad.) The Red Rock Casino in Vegas on the other hand is much more open in using the name and theme and proximity to the canyons on the west side of the strip as their particular mechanism to part outdoorsy folks from money. There's an honesty in that which I very much appreciate.

Here we take a time out for a little exploration of the bizarre psychology on display among your fellow humans. And exhibit A in such a discussion is always the very fact that it can even seem bizarre: if you're human, and you spend by far the most time interacting with other humans versus other species, shouldn't understanding and acceptance of our cognition and behavior be automatic? The fact that it can even seem bizarre is bizarre!

Of course if you went to Moab for a race or some other competition, that is explicitly a zero-sum game, so that's a little different. You can't run a marathon and complain that everybody was just trying to win, because the race is explicitly and only a zero-sum status game (even if your goal is a PR). Along these lines, I had another friend in college who would play video games with us and criticize us for trying to rack up points instead of exploring the world inside the game. "Oh, points! Points for Mike!" he would cry with contempt. To which the rest of us offered "It's a game you moron!" (He was, and still is, in fact, a moron.)

The reason that Moab and Banff (and maybe even Taos) can feel so strangely claustrophobic and annoying is that we go out into the wild blue beyond to get away from this nonsense, but by the very fact of people with these interests and personality compositions being concentrated in one place, the games we all play when we socialize become all the more annoying and ridiculous. What my naive friend in Olympia learned that day is that humans will make anything into a status game, even outdoorsiness, as is clearly the case in outdoorsy towns, where outdoorsiness defines status. While life certainly does have zero-sum games, it also has a lot of games which are not. But status games, relying on relative position as they do, are necessarily zero sum. You can't become first in any order without displacing the person who's already there. Have you ever noticed how perspicacious people seem to avoid status games? My bet is that it's because these folks wisely learn to minimize competing in zero-sum games to the extent possible, status-oriented or otherwise. And like it or not, if you spend a lot of time doing outdoor activities, unless you hide those activities, it's likely an important part of your identity, so on some level you're using that to signal qualities about yourself, and to protect our identity we have to puff up our fur in a kind of implied social threat display. (Yet another of my dubious friends wanted to cloak himself in a featureless black sphere, a social event horizon that permitted no information to escape from him - but he soon realized even this would be in vain, as lookers-on would inevitably start commenting on what he was trying to say with such a dramatic choice, and anyway a guy I know has a much better event horizon, no I had an event horizon before it was cool, well I'm so cool I don't need an event horizon, etc.)

Instead of wearing branded gear, signaling by having a blog would be much better. More cultured. It would tell you, if you were a sophisticated observer, that the person is not only outdoorsy but also a man of letters, perhaps even with some capacity for ironic self-reflection.

Almost All Wines Taste the Same, Even to Experts

Report and data here, commentary here.  New Jersey has scored a coup in the wine world just like Napa did in the 1970s.

It may be that there's nothing special about fermented grape juice as a beverage, relative to other alcoholic drinks.  In its current context, tasting wine signals class and erudition and time invested in culture; so for developing a taste in wine to be rational, the status signaling effects must outweigh the costs of (otherwise foolishly) making your marginal unit of pleasure more difficult to obtain.  Of course that latter consideration might not matter at all if it all tastes the same.

Surfing as Signalling

Recently I learned to surf. And I'll tell you what, I was pretty pissed at how many kooks there were at my break yesterday. (Just kidding.) But seriously, it was pretty flat, which left me with plenty of time to wonder why people surf. I haven't seen a rigorous quantitative survey, but from my own discussions, it seems to be some combination of it's fun, and the "lifestyle". This raises questions, most of which have obvious answers, but which people in the surf community nonetheless don't usually seem to address directly:


1) If it's really just for fun and lifestyle, then why do such things as surf competitions exist? Why would anyone care to enter them, unless status was involved? (An unrefined reader might also be tempted to ask why someone would blog about the experience. But you're not such a philistine as to ask such an uninteresting question.)

2) Heterosexual women seem often to be attracted to heterosexual males who surf. This would seem to be a benefit of the lifestyle. So why are males who surf so coy about explicitly citing this reason? (Yes, there are female surfers but they're in the minority, although that I'm aware of there's no taboo or pressure against women who would otherwise be interested in surfing. In the lineup I would estimate it was less than 10% and this seems ballpark for what I've noticed before. If males are using surfing to signal fitness to females, then the gender disparity makes more sense.)

3) It seems strange that, for the combined total of less than 1 minute per hour you're likely to be standing on their board, people are willing to take hours out of their day, secure the equipment to the car before and after, clean off the wetsuit, etc. There are other forms of recreation where the activity itself is less than half the time doing it, but even (for example) the most crowded East Coast ski resort features a better activity-to-prep time ratio. It could be that just relaxing on the board in the water is part of the reward, or (referring to #2) being seen going back and forth with the equipment, to signal you surf.


There is certainly an opportunity to do some North San Diego County cultural anthropology here. Every time I'm in Encinitas I can't help but think there must be a PhD thesis waiting.

Refine Your Taste, Pay the Price

I argued previously that the main benefit of drinking wine is the ability it confers on you to signal your cultural refinement. At the end of the post I stated the reasons for intentionally destroying one's taste in wine:

I apply the same dismissal to wine as I do to sake. I've come to the conclusion that intentionally refining one's palate is a form of masochism that any self-respecting hedonist should reject. Why the hell would I ever deliberately make my palate more difficult to please? By developing your taste, you're intentionally making your marginal unit of pleasure more expensive - you're making yourself more difficult to please. If you have a bad case of wine signal-itis and you enjoy announcing to dining compatriots all the flaws you've found in the wine on the table in front of you, you might put it in perspective this way...That's why I'm intentionally letting what little refinement I've achieved go fallow, and I automatically order the cheapest table wine on the menu. Or I don't, and get a Coke.

Of course the counterargument is that if your ability to signal results in increased attraction of mates, business partners, or some other benefit, it may offset the greater expense of achieving the same hedonic experience.

So it was with some amusement that today I read about how Seth Roberts did the opposite - he inadvertently destroyed his enjoyment of sake by greatly refining his taste - all in a single day.

Dressing for Success: Signaling and Savings Rates

Small Company Culture

I like small biotech companies (less than 100 headcount) better than big ones. There are consistent differences in culture between the two types. One of them is that dress tends to be more informal at smaller companies.

Why would this be? Simple. Chances are that at the small company, everyone has some interaction with everyone else, and is able to form an opinion of competence and character based on repeated interactions. If one morning I come in with a nice suit on, no one would be impressed, because they know I'm the same slob as yesterday. On the other hand, at the bigger company employees are constantly encountering unfamiliar people, and are forced to draw conclusions based quick first impressions. The chance that your nice clothes will actually make a difference is consequently greater. The danger is that you've now moved to an evaluation based on cheaper signaling, but you have to work with the limited information you have.


Therefore, More Signalling In Big Cities

The analogy to small towns and big cities is obvious, although outside work, signals are typically intended to convey wealth and prestige rather than competence. In a large city, the vast majority of people you encounter every day are strangers, even the ones your interact with. In a small town many or most people know each other through extensive prior contact, so cheap signalling (through fashion, jewelry, or other displays of wealth) is useless. This may explain why people living in poor neighborhoods will buy expensive cars (that lots of people will see, and draw conclusions based on them), rather than saving money to move out of the poor neighborhood. Conversely, walk through a very high-end neighborhood. You won't see a lot of Lamborghinis or Aston-Martins. You will see newer model Volvos and BMWs: safe, reliable cars, because the owners care less than middle- or lower-class drivers (proportionate to their wealth) about trying to signal status.


Ethnic Admixture Makes Signaling More Difficult

The phenomenon of conspicuous consumption identified by Thorstein Veblen tends to take specific forms: sometimes it's how many horses you can bring into a marriage (post-contact Lakota), sometimes how much gold you can give away to guests (medieval Germans in the Nibelungenlied), sometimes how many canoes you can give to visiting diplomats (Pacific Northwest natives). Restricting conspicuous consumption to certain channels like this makes it easier for everyone to signal each other: you don't have to tally up a pile of diverse possessions to determine how rich the chief's new son-in-law is, you just have to count horses.

In the industrialized world, freedom of movement ensures two things: first, that people of different ethnic communities will reside in the same cities, and second, that people of different communities will eventually mix in business, socially, and romantically. Consequently signalling becomes a problem: more subtle carriers of information give way to more garish and explicit means of communicating status or intention. Anecdotally, Americans are more likely to wear clothing with writing on it than citizens of other countries (garish, explicit signalling instead of subtle cues from style and quality of dress). In addition, those pre-defined channels for conspicuous consumption signals are not the same for Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, Chinese or Iranians. If that particular combination makes you think of Los Angeles, that's because I had Los Angeles in mind when I wrote this post.

The study to do would be to establish a measurement for "bling", establish a statistical measurement for ethnic intermingling (intermarriage between first-generation ethnic community members?) and look for a correlation between the two across multiple cities. If a relationship can be shown, this can partly explain Americans' historically poor savings rates relative to ethnically homogenous countries in Europe and Asia. One suggestion to encourage saving and improve rates in the U.S. is to devise costly (i.e., inseparable and therefore reliable) signifiers of savings so that signalled wealth and prestige is pinned to individual savings rates.