"Cate Hall is Astera's CEO. She's a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world."
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
There is absolutely nothing low status about being present-day Cate Hall. But present-day Cate Hall probably tried and pushed through a lot of really tough stuff in part because yesteryear Cate Hall had this mindset. It so happened that she also had the talent to actually end up in impressive places.
The real lesson one should probably take from a person like this is that learning to eyeball your own strengths and weaknesses before you start down the long path of honing them is really important. If you are low status now but you have reason to believe you will become much higher status in the future by persevering, then persevere. If not...
She’s a VC-backed founder who went to Yale, and her very first job was at Goldman. What she’s describing in the article is not “low status” because she hadn’t experienced that. But the feeling she describes reveals what she thinks “low status” is - embarrassment.
It was "[dead]" or "[flagged]" ? If it was the first it was automatic and probably caused by previous comments, not by this one. New accounts (green name) can be auto-flagged quite fast if they have downvotes or reports on multiple comments.
Getting into Yale is indeed pretty good prima facie evidence that you have what it takes to be high status in the future, in quite a few domains. Persevering is great advice for most people along most trajectories who get into Yale.
Getting into Yale directly confers high status, and it is fairly well gated by other status-related tests: honors classes and private schools nudge you to learn the kind of thinking that does well on the SAT, not the kind of thinking that keeps you out of danger, as well as pushing you to AP exam prep classes; and access to extracurricular activities is gated both implicitly (by school choice) and explicitly by disciplinary measures for low-status behaviors. Rednecks like JD Vance are a tiny minority of the Yale entering class, and lower-status groups like illegal immigrants are as far as I know completely absent.
Also, I think the idea that there is something that it takes to be high status is incorrect. Social status is its own phenomenon with its own rules, and sometimes it's pretty random: you get a good job against the odds, or a good spouse, or you narrowly escape a disabling accident. You could argue that "what it takes" in such cases is luck, but graduating from Yale doesn't indicate that you will be lucky in the future, only of things that have happened before that.
>the idea that there is something that it takes to be high status is incorrect
>Getting into Yale directly confers high status
Don't these two ideas contradict one another? It sure sounds like we have at least one known pathway to becoming high status, and that is getting into Yale.
No, "something that it takes to be high status" would be some characteristic (in this context, one that is stable over time) that was necessary for high status, while something that "directly confers high status" is something that is sufficient for high status. It's entirely possible for something to be sufficient and nothing to be necessary. You're making the basic logical error of confusing ∀ with ∃.
Consider the set S of all properties which confer high status. "Got into Yale" is something we have assumed is in S, so S is nonempty. 'I have at least one property in S' seems like it would be a fine candidate for the necessary characteristic you're after, and it's not vacuous either, it can actually be achieved in reality. Therefore there is something that it takes to be high status, in your words.
That doesn't follow; you're just making the same logic error more verbose, perhaps in hopes that if the argument is so hard to understand that it has no obvious flaws, people will mistake it for an argument that obviously has no flaws.
I genuinely do not see it. If you have a collection of all sufficient properties for Q, you can construct Q's necessary property by just rolling them all up into a big or-statement. "You are high status if you get into Yale or have a lot of money or are really funny or ...", like that.
Again my specific claim here is merely that such a statement exists, nontrivially, for this kind of problem. Not even that we can write it down in full or whatever. I don't see why that's illegal.
For the specific question, I gave some examples upthread: for example, there isn't something that "it takes" to marry a spouse who confers high status on you, except for luck later in life, which Yale's admissions office can't predict and thus can't use as an admission criterion. There are persistent attributes that improve your chances of marrying well and staying married—pre-existing high status, conventional attractiveness, health, intelligence, sanity, etc.—but none of them are either necessary or sufficient.
If we're talking about the abstract problem in classical propositional logic, there's no requirement in classical logic that a proposition Q be true for some external reason. It can just be true. Causality is outside the scope of propositional logic.
It's true that, in classical propositional logic, there is necessarily a proposition that is necessary for Q's truth, that is, a proposition that Q implies. There are infinitely many of them, in fact. Q implies Q, for example. It also implies Q or not Q, because in classical propositional logic, any proposition implies all tautologies. You can't list them all, and it wouldn't help.
If you have some finite list of atomic propositions to try to compose your set S from, there is no guarantee that listing all of the sufficient conditions from that list (other than Q itself) will give you an S whose disjunction is a necessary condition. A simple model of this is P = no, Q = yes, S = {P}.
These thing aren't talked about much. But think the proper way to discuss is that "social status" exists among groups of rough peers and "social position" better describes someone's privileges of wealth, education and employment relative to society as a whole.
Just as an example, a whole lot of dysfunctional dynamics happening lately seem to involve billionaires jockeying for status with other billionaires.
Edit: I'd recommend Paul Fussel's book Class since it involves discussion of these two dynamics.
From my research the whole Alvea thing was an Effective Alturism cooked up project that only lasted 3 years and made no money, and then now they are at Astera which seems to be some rich persons plaground where they throw money at researchers to do “stuff”. What that stuff is, I don’t know.
The real moral of this story is you should get rich eccentric friends from the Ivy League elite who throw money at you to do AGI. Like you really think this company of like 40 people is going to crack AGI?
Man I should cross the moat and get some rich friends.
Well yeah , being high status does not always mean you actually contribute a lot of value to society. And being medium status does not mean your value is mediocre - take a nurse or a kindergarten teacher - their value is substantial but the status they get is mediocre at best.
So if you get a feeling the "game" is somewhat rigged and twisted, perhaps the feeling is correct...
"Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape."
To be honest Alvea doesn't sound like a crazy idea on paper. Reducing lead times on new drugs is a really good idea that seems like it is bottlenecked more by bureaucratic concerns.
A company which focused on that as its sole mission could be really profitable, if they could sell their professional services to a group that already had plenty of in house expertise on actually creating the drugs. My very low resolution guess is that they slipped up when they actually tried to make the drug themselves. That may have been a requirement to get funding from the US government at the time, I don't know.
Talented people don't have to go through as much embarrassment as others because they learn faster than normal & will impress through that, even if they're worse at what they're doing. Also, once you are truly good at something, it's easier to be bad at something else. But not disagreeing with her.
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
As far as I can tell, you jargony phrase means that this is something like the humble part of "humble bragging". I'd disagree, I think the article gives honest good advice, an honest "meta-analysis" of social status and jumping into new things. It's "actionable", something you can do.
I would add that its advice for the sort of person who is normally always thinking about and fairly competent with social status and is held back from new skills by this. I personally was never too worried about social status and have learned massive new things by just being willing to try them but wound-up bitten by my ignoring of status. My advice for my younger me is to be strategic about publicly ignoring status but keep going into private.
Also statements like "she succeeded 'cause she was tough" are meaningless as advice or actionable/verifiable statements. Maybe she succeeded 'cause she had a bunch of strategies like the one she outlines, maybe she succeeded 'cause of good luck, maybe she succeed by family positions, maybe "luck", "toughness" or "mojo" did it.
>statements like "she succeeded 'cause she was tough" are meaningless as advice or actionable/verifiable statements
The action you are supposed to take from this is to figure out whether you're tough, and if you find out you're not, to give up and go to something else you're better suited for. This seems like exceptionally actionable advice - just not advice that strokes anyone's ego.
I will give you an example. When I was 17 I spent exactly one day as a door to door canvasser for an environmental charity. I got dropped off into a neighborhood I had never seen before, told to walk up to people's doors and beg them for money for something I was pretty sure wasn't particularly effective at solving anything important, and then do this about a hundred times.
Door #1 gave me one dollar. Door #2 let me call my parents in tears to come pick me up. Whatever
Unusual characteristic that particular job needed, I did not have it. I do not have it to this day.
Thanks for pointing out that it is counter signalling, but I would also say that it is good advice regardless. It's like an efficient highway - the road is straight and unadorned because looking "scientific" and sensible is how you convince government and the public it is a good idea. The fact that being efficient is also a net good is almost a side effect but still not to be ignored!
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
There is absolutely nothing low status about being present-day Cate Hall. But present-day Cate Hall probably tried and pushed through a lot of really tough stuff in part because yesteryear Cate Hall had this mindset. It so happened that she also had the talent to actually end up in impressive places.
The real lesson one should probably take from a person like this is that learning to eyeball your own strengths and weaknesses before you start down the long path of honing them is really important. If you are low status now but you have reason to believe you will become much higher status in the future by persevering, then persevere. If not...