"An example from Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland: If you’re a top executive, turning up to work on a bicycle is a high-status activity because it was a choice and not a necessity. But if you work at Pizza Hut, turning up on a bike means you can’t afford a car."
This tidbit reminds me of a similar anecdote (that my experience aligns with) re: the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style. They probably still own a $70k Volvo (or now Tesla) anyway :-). In these scenarios I think it's because the $2k watch or $70k car is too easily attained by lower classes that they are no longer considered signals by the upper classes. However blowing $500k renovating a perfectly livable home, or $10k on an appliance you could spend as little as $1k on.. is not.
Another countersignal that the article points in the direction of is level of professional vs casual attire in the workplace. My friends and I are far enough in our careers that personally I've worn sneakers to work for the last 10 years, no business slacks, and sporadically tuck in my collared shirt. The last round of job searching doing zoom interviews, I wore my hoodie for half the calls. If I had done this while job searching out of college, during my internship, or at my first job.. I would not be where I am today.
I think there's a bit of an idea now that you should be expressing yourself with your money, not expressing society's ideas. Around cars and watches, this creates a little bit of a "dead zone" for prestigious professionals.
For example, if you aren't showing up in a $200k Maserati, your car had better be under $50k (maybe $70k with inflation). Only posers who aren't really into cars but want to show off their wealth spend $120k on a car.
For watches, the same thing happens: if you're wearing a watch less than $50k, it had better be under $500. Otherwise you probably don't care much about watches.
Clothing seems to be the same at many companies: you had better wear tailored suits and shirts or be less dressy than "business casual."
Yes this is very well put, you really hit the nail on the head here on the sort of reverse bell curve of signaling..
For the very wealthy..
If you show enough interest in something to make signaling purchases, it's expected to be "up to snuff" .. this can mean very very high expense or high esotericness.
So that might mean a $200k sports car, or it might mean some uncommon though inexpensive limited production vintage vehicle even though it may be of reasonable price, the time & effort you took to acquire & maintain it is a signal of taste.
Otherwise you'd be better off signaling complete disinterest with a very vanilla middle of the road options.
On menswear I think to your example, you could say you'd be better off not wearing a suit than in wearing a $200 Men's Wearhouse suit. To that end, these days, the type of people you tend to see in suits are either security / front desk staff or very senior corporate executives. Those in the middle have enough labor negotiating power to not be required to wear a suit, but probably not the desire/wealth to spend $2k on a properly tailored suit.
Very senior/wealthy people can get away with whatever they want. It's why Zuckerberg can look like a total slob at Facebook (notice he still wore a suit while testifying to Congress though).
If a senior executive wore a $200 suit to work, nobody would say a word.
Zuckerberg wears $800 tshirts amongst other carefully selected pieces of his wardrobe. He isn’t rummaging through a local Target for a basic tee and jeans. I think this is a good example of countersignal interpretation!
> Zuckerberg can look like a total slob at Facebook
Huh, custom tshirts and well fitting jeans counts as "looking like a total slob" now? Fwiw I'd rather work with / for someone that dresses like that over formal any day of the week.
Notice how that's all for show too. Relatedly, Japanese people often don't work harder than Americans, they simply stay at the office longer. I also prefer what lack of formal attire signals: in Japanese workplaces, the more senior, the more respect for their ideas, regardless of whether the idea is actually better. Formal attire legitimizes their seniority but I'd rather have a meritocratic system of vetting ideas, and informality signals that too.
Japanese suits/uniforms are often pretty cheap (and look that way) - thus the low end “recruit suit”. They are tailored, but the level of body-fitting they are would be actively unacceptable in the US. By which I mean, everyone would think you’re gay.
On the other hand, Japan is the home of expensive high end recreations of American casual clothes - look up Take Ivy, BEAMS, nice selvedge jeans, etc.
> On the other hand, Japan is the home of expensive high end recreations of American casual clothes - look up Take Ivy, BEAMS, nice selvedge jeans, etc.
I remember some acquaintances running a decent side business buying and then selling vintage American clothes back in Japan (shipping or flying back).
When Japanese enthusiasts scoured American thrift stores for the last remaining stock of vintage American denim, it supposedly constituted the largest ever transfer of clothing from the USA to Japan, exceeding even the postwar used clothing charity drives.
But the point is everyone looks like they’re trying to conform to the dress code. Much better than America, where just when you think it’s hit bottom, people plumb the depths further. (Most recently, by way of hair, tattoos, earrings on men, etc.)
That you are a barista at Starbucks or someone with self image issues. On a more serious note such people appear to me as conformists. Everyone has tattoos today. They buy them like burgers at McDonalds. In the past you'd eaen them in navy, army or prison. It said something about the person - it doesn't say anything about you now. Except perhaps that you want to seen in certain way without living it. E.g. look like a rockstar without being one. Why take the risks of adventurous life you can just buy a tatoo with the money from your IT job. Just another form pf consumption. Of course all depends on tatoo, I'm talking about your typical tatooed dude from western country.
We shouldn't be. Barring dominance by some fundamentalist group, be it religious, cultural, or political, humans have had piercings and tattoos. I like that fact that it is no longer countercultural to adopt these basic human expressions.
Tattoos are frowned upon in most cultures in the world. It's not just "fundamentalists" (whatever that means). And who cares about "human expression?" If you need to "express" yourself, write a book or something where the rest of us don't have to look at it.
America would be a lot better if people thought less about how to “express” themselves, and more about how to keep the social environment around them tidy and orderly.
It's true, I'm expressing support for the Yakuza, and helping them tear down the social fabric of western society. That's been the left's plan all along.
>By which I mean, everyone would think you’re gay.
Is this really true, though? Plenty of straight dudes wear tight fitting clothing, especially if they work out.
Perhaps it's just a higher ratio of gay guys that work out vs straight guys that work out that's skewed your views.
Well, it's only in the context of the radical casualization of menswear since the mid-60s that jeans and a t-shirt can be seen as stylish. When men first started wearing this outfit, it was considered rebellious in part because it was so obviously inappropriate to wear in public. The t-shirt originated as a military undergarment and jeans as mining equipment.
If a sr exec wore a $200 suit to work, it would be noticed. Maybe in a warren buffet folksy sort of way. How they tell defense attorneys not to dress too flashy
I had a business associate point out once how my mont blanc watch didn't have its own movement.
Singapore is an interesting place in this regard. We had several young guys in our office who wore $10k plus watches while still living with their parents.
There is a chance he was trying to help you and not be condescending to you. I am not a watch person, but even I know that Mont Blanc, kind of like Beats Audio, is not really known for their fine craftsmanship in watches. They're more about marketing, like Beats.
Having plenty of experience in both the car and watch worlds, what you're saying is somewhat true but it's based on brands, models and exclusivity rather than the price (which is a derivative of those factors).
It's knowing which car or watch to buy, and also recognizing it on others, that acts as the signal.
This rings true to me. My hobbies aren't especially expensive, but in all of them there are certainly ways to spend money that would tell me that you don't "get it". "It" being what I find interesting about the hobby. Not that it's necessarily worse or that I want to pass judgment on it, just that the connection isn't there.
But I wonder, in cultures very different from mine, which we generally see as more status-competitive, is that also true? Is it a faux pas to buy an expensive gold chain over a "proper" one?
Not faux pas, but there are obviously "cool" items. Often it's because of some history, provenance, technology/construction, or some other story that bestows that notoriety and a few times it's just because the group collective considers it special.
Where is this place where showing up in a Porsche 911 outs you as a car dilettante because you didn't shell out an extra $90k for the Maserati? I think the status symbols there might be reversed.
This is the kind of thing people who see cars as appliances go 55 in the left lane in a Prius (or maybe if you're a homeowner you've traded up to a Tacoma) say.
People buying "100k+ rich man's toy" cars don't care about value for money the way you or I do.
Maseratis aren’t exotic cars though, that’s the thing. They’re mediocre luxury cars marketed as exotic cars. You can get a new Maserati for less than a new BMW M3. Not exactly exotic car territory.
That entirely depends on the models. People who only know brands aren't "car" people anyway, and price isn't a great comparison.
Modern Maserati's are great driving cars with Ferrari heritage (and engines) that do command more prestige than a typical M or AMG model, especially in the Trofeo versions.
Yeah, if you want a 911 and have a little more money to spend, then there are more expensive variants of the 911 that Porsche will be happy to sell you. And they’re generally very good cars. Would get a Carrera GT over a Maserati any time.
LOL, Carrera GT is in a different league (~$1.5mm). 911 is kind of like a Speedmaster, it's a classic, and even a basic one is "acceptable" for most car folks. The S, GTS, GT3, etc would be the more premium. Countersignalling might be to buy older versions, as most folks won't expect the prices, and they're "classics" (e.g. 993s, 964s).
I'm not a car person, but I think showing up in a 911 is okay, but showing up in a random Mercedes is not. Other commenters have pointed out that a Maserati is also not a great brand to be driving, despite the price.
> Clothing seems to be the same at many companies: you had better wear tailored suits and shirts or be less dressy than "business casual."
There’s a running joke in my circle about the “dad professional class”. People who are older (40-60s) and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home. They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks. The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt. They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously, and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.
TLDR: stop telling people you try to avoid your family, and start tailoring your clothes, it’s honestly not expensive.
Or maybe by their 40s-60s they have lost all interest in what 25yos, tee-shirted or not, think about their attire. They have seen the fashion wheel spin more than once, and are no longer compelled by it.
(Source: upper 60s, go into the office mostly because a) it's not far, b) my office setup is a bit better, c) I don't want to wake my wife with Zoom calls. I do have some tailored shirts but seldom wear them.)
> maybe by their 40s-60s they have lost all interest in what 25yos
Its not about the fashion, its about looking put together. Its signaling that you care. Of course, there's the article which says that people who made it can stop signaling, so maybe that's you.
Doreen dropping the knowledge. I just learned another fun Coco Chanel quote:
"Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger."
Little known fact: before he was Pied Piper's cool attorney in Silicon Valley, but after his first job at a Superstore, Ron LaFlamme lived in NYC where he was told that he "wasn't thought about at all" by Don Draper. https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k
There are a lot of people who think signalling you care [about fashion, to be clear] is somehow essential, and that to not care about fashion is to show you don't care about life, or about yourself...
Sorry, no. There's nothing wrong with me for not putting effort into what aesthetic "signals" I'm sending, because there is no true signal. It's noise. If someone's unclean, that's one thing, because cleanliness matters to health. Fashion does not.
Arguments that fashion matters are all circular, which tells you something. (It matters because people think it matters, and is therefore worth taking seriously!)
If you want to look put together, put your body together first. Clothes are a cheap signal, one that many older people have given up caring about because clothes and appearance are less relevant at their age. And genuinely fit people look good in almost anything.
You can tailor your slacks and shirts too, and it's pretty cheap. It will make you look a lot better than what most people expect if you're the type to dress business casual. That is, if you care.
I’d be careful making assumptions about a group of people like you’ve done here. I’m not quite old enough to be in the “dad professional class”, but I’ve been around long enough to have worked with plenty of people who are. In my experience, the people who dress “like shit in ill-fitting [overly professional button downs and slacks]” have been dressing like that for at least the last 20 years, and that it was common (at least in IT/development) to dress like that.
Tech workers dressing casually at the office is only a (relevantly) recent phenomenon. Working from home, for a lot of people, is even more recent.
You’ve made a lot of assumptions, and I would consider that this group of people are just defaulting back to what they’re used to, rather than “avoid their wife and collect a salary”.
I don’t know where you work, what industry, or the demographics of who works there, but if “people [who work there] don’t always take them seriously”, and it’s based on older people dressing like older people, then there is a culture problem.
If people like that dressed like you, you'd probably be laughing at them even harder and sending around the Steve Buscemi "how do you do, fellow kids?" meme in the group chat.
> There’s a running joke in my circle about the “dad professional class”. People who are older (40-60s)
I fit this demographic.
> and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home.
There’s some truth to this, though I’ve avoiding coming in. It’s not about escaping the family but just a change of scenery.
> They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks.
I have a reasonable taste in fashion, but my cost-conscious self doesn’t allow it.
Age also forces a more conservative style and colors; and it says I’m sacrificing for the kids.
> “The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt.
Business attire is like a uniform. You don’t need to spend a lot to look presentable.
> They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously,
Is this a bad thing?
> and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.
Rise in the ranks?
There’s nothing wrong with working to live. You get my best for 8 to 9 hours.
We live in a world where “leadership” is valued, and everything else is devalued. For engineers, this is purgatory.
Like, it’s a huge mental and emotional burden and I’d gladly take a 1/3 paycut to be an IC; except nobody else really wants it.
I think the idea you should get your clothes tailored is just foreign to them. Uniqlo is the only brand that offers it in the US at mall clothes prices.
Youths are like that. He'll learn better over time, but by then a new gaggle of pretentious younglings will be making fun of him for not wearing fruit replicas on his head, or something similar.
> re: the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon.
always has been moon meme.
unless you're neveaux rich or stupid or both it is in your absolute interest not to show what you have. driving a Prius used to be that signal but today it has shifted. My direct boss was a Schenker heir (the freight forwarding company) and the only way he showed off is by living in a rental house (albeit manged by his management company so he essentially paid rent to himself), drove a Nissan, didn't spend unless you took a closer look (art purchases for his 4th wife) didn't brag with fancy dinners in Michelin star places (but certainly bragged to his wife about putting her on the map with her silly paintings as a wannabe artist - lol "Sex rules everything around me C.R.E.A.M get the money").
Only lower ranks criminals and new-rich idiots show what they have. Everyone else has learned the lesson: if you show it (the plebs and the IRS), they'll come for you.
Also all the people who're truly rich do NOT play by the same rules as the rest of you. YOU decide where, and how much tax you pay, if you have the cash to pay lawyers and accountants to insulate you from the Plebs.
The US is the biggest tax[1] haven in the world today forget the Hollywood propaganda about Cayman or Panama - only idiot cartels and Victor Bout use these jurisdictions but not the white collar crime lords ...
Rolex hatred seems like it is about expressing contempt towards the previous establishment. Presidents used to wear them (still do actually) but it's not uncommon to see very rich politicians wearing very cheap watches probably deliberately. Same goes for suit wearing.
I think pg wrote an article on his blog about how suit wearing was for people who thought like conformists and obviously being a conformist was not for hackers. I am paraphrasing because I can't remember now exactly what he said. But I just think it was contempt of previously established people working in finance or law. Now, the largest companies in the US skew towards tech companies.
I don't know why that happens that newly successful people seem to dislike the symbols of the previous elite rather than just mind their own business. Wearing a suit to a tech company will probably get you ostracized even if you just like wearing suits. This is in spite of the claim that the hoodie culture is not concerned what you dress up in, in fact they are. Maybe you could call that counter counter-signalling. It's just like taking a large salary at a tech company instead of having a $1 salary and getting enormous options and stock payouts. Somehow taking a large salary is worse despite that being normal for CEOs previously.
> Wearing a suit to a tech company will probably get you ostracized even if you just like wearing suits.
Not true. If you are a menswear enthusiast who is genuinely into fine tailoring, then people will respect it and even show interest. Generally, having hobbies and interests adds to one’s character. Now wearing a suit because you think it will make people take you more seriously will get you some side eye.
Which is a shame. Someone wearing business casual is so much more pleasant to the eye than typical sloppy hacker wear. Especially once you start getting older and flabbier.
These are also culturally dependent, and are in-group/out-group signals. Many people in Silicon Valley explicitly want to keep people who believe that business casual is more pleasing to the eye out of their social circles. It's a value judgment; to them, hoodies are more pleasing to the eye, and more comfortable, and they don't want people who believe otherwise in their companies.
Right, that's the point of the parent of this subthread. They (the hoodie-wearers) would probably insist that they don't judge based on dress or appearance, but they do, and maybe more harshly than the suit-wearers. It's just what people do. I grew up wearing suits to work, shaving every day, and wearing a short neat haircut. I don't as much anymore, but I don't wear hoodies with pizza sauce stains either, and I don't respect the people who do as much as the ones who look like they at least glanced in the mirror before they left the house.
You'll meet suit-wearing people, business casual people, and pizza-stained-hoodie people. Some will be conventionally attractive, some not. Some old, some young, some male, some female, some of one race, some another. Some will be skilled, diligent, and productive, some will be well-spoken and good communicators, some will be honest, some will be punctual... some will be not.
Some of those things are choices that matter and should impact your respect for someone else. Some are not, do not, and should not.
Personally, as a controls engineer who frequents messy manufacturing facilities, dressing in a suit gets in the way of getting work done. It subtly conveys "I'm too important to get my hands dirty, I'll leave the grunt work to the grunts." That kind of unwillingness to do whatever's required to get the job done is a point against those folks in my circles. I do understand that people who come to work in a suit may have different struggles vying for status and trying to send the right social signals in conference rooms, and I don't envy them those tasks - but please don't think less of me as a human because of what I choose to wear.
> please don't think less of me as a human because of what I choose to wear.
But doesn't:
> dressing in a suit gets in the way of getting work done. It subtly conveys "I'm too important to get my hands dirty, I'll leave the grunt work to the grunts."
mean that you think less of others because of what they choose to wear?
Only because it affects the ability to accomplish our shared goals. If we're sitting in an office at keyboards, and you want to wear a suit, go right ahead! A woman in heels in an environment that ought to have steel-toed boots, or a hoodie wearer in an office whose hygiene is so poor that the smell affects those around them, both impact things that are actually important.
But when those personal choices are immaterial, whether choosing to over- or under-dress, they shouldn't affect what I think of others or what others think of me.
It’s more about the effort I think than the style. Well fitted suits and business casual looks good, but so does a well fitted shirt and jeans. On the flip side, a poorly fitted suit looks only marginally less sloppy than poorly fitted hacker wear. Comp-sci types who don’t put effort into their wardrobes don’t really look any better in business casual, at least in my experience from working in places where such clothes were required.
Depends on the context. When I was a SV biglaw associate, I wore slacks and button down, generally without coat (only for meetings). On 'casual Friday' I wore polo, typically with jeans. Basically, SV law firms are always 'business casual' unless you're going to court or a deposition. And on casual Fridays, it's even less formal.
I assume tech companies are more casual than big law firms, and that things may have gotten more casual in the decade since I left the law.
maybe. I'd like to think that is true but was not in my experience but I wish I had experimented more before everything went remote so maybe take what I am saying with a grain of salt on this matter. I definitely took shit for it although some people were fascinated. I think the exception is if you have long hair or are a steampunk enthusiast. I am not really kidding. Even then you might come off as odd.
I sometimes would have to go to nearby tech companies we worked with and the leads who would greet me would mention something like "oh sorry we didn't tell you that you don't have to wear a suit". You have to explain yourself and there is the implication that wearing a suit is somehow inappropriate.
If you need someone to disrespect you for being a steampunk enthusiast, I’m available. Nobody looks good in brown, and it seems to be the kind of people who think wearing a sleeveless vest is “fancy” - they actually look like wedding bartenders.
Interestingly, the $1 salary (with large equity) gives you massive flexibility in how and when you get taxed, and also a lot of additional negotiating power and flexibility with ex-wives (and the Court) on child support and alimony, at least in California.
The calculations are based on income, which equity (until sold) is not. In most cases even then (capital gain).
Stock also varies a lot in price/value (sometimes being nearly impossible to value, say for private companies) and many arguments can be made (up or down) as to its value or potential.
A good lawyer can start to get traction there of course, and it won’t get ignored, but it is not easy compared to, say, a $5mln/yr salary, or 5 years of bonuses of $10mln, which you can just plug into the calculator and go.
I’ve never understood where this meme came from of hoodie culture having some kind of disdain for suits. I enjoy a nice suit when the time calls for it! Say, a wedding or a holiday party.
The reason I prefer a hoodie to suit on a daily basis is that putting on a suit is kind of arduous and owning 20 well-fitting suits gets expensive. It has nothing to do with signaling or whatever. Hoodies are far more practical and comfortable! They’re a continuation of what I wore in high school and college, though sadly the skateboard logos have been replaced by tech company logos.
Anyway, if you want to wear a suit, that’s fine, just don’t expect it from me.
>the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon.
There was a time, not that long time ago in which good clocks were expensive and expending 2ks on a good clock was similar to expending 2k on a laptop today, a functional, reasonable decision.
My uncle earned a much more expensive Rolex than 2k in a Golf tournament and wearing it nobody believed it was genuine, even a watchmaker could not differentiate it from sight, there are very good Chinese knockoffs for cheap anywhere.
Also, after quartz oscillator clocks, a 2k clock does not work better than a 100 one.
People spend their money on whatever they see fit. One of the great things of having money is having freedom in your life but few people knowing that you have it.
In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.
Is it envy, or disgust? If someone tells me they live in a castle, my initial instinct isn't "wow I wish in a castle too", but "wow what a wasteful needless thing to brag about".
Be cautious, the word "envy" is typically thrown around by folks that want to justify "greed". OC, there are reasonable scales between the two but equating success to having nicer material things is really a subjective value judgement.
In all honesty the salient points in the OP about judging instead of thinking, is a commonly attributed aphorism to Carl Jung yet there is no reference to it. The point about tardiness and drawbacks this apparently has on socialising and career progression comes across as utilitarian to the point of sounding sociopathic.
I'm going to make the assertion that personal clocks were basically never with that much. They were as functionally useful as a gold bracelet for the best majority of owners.
> In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.
You're saying that wealthy people in France and Spain don't show it, and if they do they are commonly robbed?
Technically a Rolex, however expensive, will always be much worse as a watch than a 20$ Casio. But recently there's another aspect to this: there are now watches that are technically (mechanically) identical to rolexes. Same design, same mechanics, virtually impossible to tell the difference when you tear it apart. Rolex has always been more about marketing (artificial scarcity, waiting list etc) than mechanics, but now it's pretty much exclusively about marketing, since you can get the same engineering orders of magnitude cheaper. It's like DeBeers' diamonds.
Prestige cars, mega yachts, private jets, and corporations that make rockets and satellites are also male jewellery.
But the article: it's repetitive and slightly rambling and reads like it was written by some variant of GPT.
The point is fair, but it's also well known to class watchers. In the UK nouveau means a gigantic new build mansion full of chrome and glass, a private gym, and plastic and dental surgery. Old means a small country estate, a Georgian pied-à-terre somewhere near the City, tweedy clothing, and perhaps some pedigree dogs. And horses.
Old money tends to underdress - sometimes sloppily - and on casual acquaintance is indistinguishable from the merely middle class.
It's not until you get an invite to the manor house that you discover the ridiculously impractical and expensive Aga stove, the collection of wildly expensive antiques whose prices are never mentioned [1], the relaxed air of charming quizzical bafflement. (Very few of these people are unusually bright or talented. But socially polished - yes.)
The visuals are not the point. Anyone can tweed, but not everyone can tweed like they've been doing it their entire lives and really mean it.
[1] A 17th century silver spoon for £5000? How fascinating!
Somewhere I read that a Rolex has a very practical purpose - a real one is a commodity that can fairly easily be turned into cash or a bribe in an emergency, but as a watch, it's not susceptible to being seized by authorities in many circumstances where cash or gold might be.
I don't know if this is true, but it makes a good story.
Along this vein, I've heard somewhere that pimps wear lots of jewelry because they can pawn it for bail money. Apparently cash can be seized on arrest, but jewelry is classified as some sort of personal property and thus won't be taken.
I have a more obscure watch, but one that those that care recognize. It has signaled me as part of the 'correct' crowd more than once and definitely done it's purpose.
People with money and power respect you more and are more likely to drop their guard in some ways. This applies to in-group signaling generally. In this case the in-group is the rich and powerful.
The search term you want is just "Replica." RWI, RWG, RepTime on Reddit, and other private forums will analyze the quality and details of these clones in ridiculous detail. They also have reviews of each reseller and each factory.
I don't even own any fake watches at this point and I've found these forums highly addictive/interesting - honestly, the average skill/knowledge level is quite high compared to most "watch enthusiast" forums.
Thanks for the hints. About the replicas: Yes but usually you’ll find a few challenges with those. First, pure replicas are illegal, so what you can find legally are called hommages with another logo. That doesn’t make them worst by itself, but here are the drawbacks:
First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years? I own a watch that’s more than 50 years and wear it regularly because it is still maintained by the company who made it.
Second the value holding. Sure you can sink your money in any gear. The special value of great mechanical watches is that they maintain their used value well on the second hand market for decades. An hommage will have little reputation of its own to maintain.
Of course this is all subject to special cases, but, etc because the watch world is very complex. For example many brands copy each other, some replica brand make great quality, and some great brands barely hold their value (which is a good thing for passionate collectors).
No doubt there is a great skilled and passionate community around reproduction, like in music or art. To build a replica you need way more skill than the average watch enthusiast. They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.
Invicta has made some watches that are pretty similar for a long time. They aren't "high quality" replicas or counterfeits, but if you just like the look of a Submariner they seem to have similar watches for well under $100.
A Seiko SKX (or a spiritual successor) with a regulated NH35 will fall into the same “100m water resistance, accurate to within 10 seconds per day” category as a Rolex for about a 10th of the price.
It's pretty common now to find "Super Fakes" of designer brands, that are very difficult to tell apart from the real thing. They'll be expensive but not as expensive as the real thing.
Back in the 1990s my dad's oldest brother went to the outskirts of NYC and was really impressed with the fake "Rolex" he bought. My mom was indignant about it because she sold men's clothing for a living and could tell you exactly how a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt was worse in so many ways than a real one.
Two weeks later the watch stopped running.
Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.
>Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.
I don't get what this has too do with the fake rolex.
> My mom was indignant about it because she sold men's clothing for a living and could tell you exactly how a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt was worse in so many ways than a real one.
Gomorrah opens with a description of Italian clothing manufacturing. As described there, the difference between a fake shirt and a real shirt is that they were made to the same specifications under one and the same contract, by different factories, and the real one got delivered faster than the fake one did. Only the first guy to deliver gets paid.
They also made a movie of it [0], I lived in Italy during the financial crisis and it had become commonplace to see large migrating Chinese coming from the North (likely illegal migrants in Milan's clothing factories) come to the central part of Italy looking for work on farms and restaurants. It was hard times as this was taking place as the large migration from N. Africa was happening and they were living in the parks and making the locals irate.
It all came to light when our resident cheese maker, who used to work in the fashion Industry, had to tell them in broken Mandarin that we were fully staffed and couldn't accommodate them, but to try elsewhere further South--a typical way to brush-off a problem as is the running theme with Gomorrah.
I soon realized how dirty the Fashion Industry was as the Zara scandal was ettin into full swing and the workers were taking to writing messages about not being paid for the garments they made [1] as the factories were in sweatshops in Xinjiang or Brazil.
I wouldn't all it interesting so much as it is sobering and eye opening to the perils of offshore manufacturing practices and Italy's fashion Industry was just one of many of these horrors; Foxxcon's electronic manufacturing reliant on African rare earth mine exploitation make all of this pale in comparison.
> That's Italy!
It's anywhere you want to see where manufacturing costs get pushed to be the smallest possible line-item/expense in a value chain; the US is notorious for using forced labour in prisons for these kind of things, too. It's sad because it is a common practice in the worst labour camps/prisons in Russia (Siberia). It's where Britney Griner was going to serve her sentence, which incidentally is also where the Nadya of Pussy Riot spent several years in and was very candid about what was awaiting for her there.
I got some fakes from a big warehouse in Shanghai. They had all levels of prices/quality. Our corporate guide found the shop for us. They had a whole wall of fake watches of different brands. My ex-wife got purses. I much preferred my real watches, but the fakes were for fancy dinners downtown in the big city in case I got mugged.
Is the escapement running at the same rate? A big part of the "rolex" appearance that is very hard to copy is the 8 ticks per second that the second hand goes through. I have seen very high quality Rolex copies before that don't do that, and are instantly recognizable as a fake to people who know a little bit about watches.
Absolutely. Modern fake Rolexes can only be told apart from a real one by an expert examining it with a loupe. And 8 tick pr second isn't that hard to replicate. Several ETA and Sellita calibers do it as well.
> wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" […]
Isn’t this conflating status signal with lifestyle?
The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies. In and of itself, expensive hobby equipment is not a status signal (it can be, of course, if you plaster it all over your personal social media)
> The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies.
Sorry to jump in.
There is a 2003 documentary by the name "Born Rich".
This is about the children from the wealthy people and how they are coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.
Many are naturally isolated and invent obscure hobbies and life-styles not fitting their "wealthy statuses".
Not sure how it is changing in more responsible adulthood, when it is becoming their turn to manage the estate. I guess this is then mostly about turf-wars among relatives.
> ...coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.
That’s mostly a lack of sufficient education and rearing to arm them with enough knowledge and grit to choose and tackle from an infinite number of problems to advance towards a possible solution. Most of those problems don’t take generational wealth scale money to make a dent into, but a tremendous amount of hard work for years and even decades without expectations of acclaim commensurate with their generational wealth background.
Which points out the other problem: most of them want (or are pushed since childhood to want) the acclaim accrued by their inherited wealth also attached to their efforts in whatever direction they choose. It’s why we get the dilettante phenomenon among them so much.
Tightly coupling wealth to accomplishment across generations is possibly a very leaky abstraction.
I am into collecting slightly obsolete audio gear, I've spent maybe $600 on the hobby in the last six months.
I know some people would think $120 is a lot for a minidisc player since you can get a flash player for so much less. Other people would think it's a trivial amount of money. Like all these things it comes in multiple scales: back in the day there were people who would spend 50x that on audio gear (there are some $20,000 speaker sets that sound great)
I don't expect to impress anybody: the last person I showed my portable minidisc player was a professor in the music department who's won one more than one Grammy award and teaches sound engineering who I ran into at the bus stop and his comment is "God, how can you listen to something compressed like that?" ("... yeah, I've been wondering about some of the coding tools they use.")
We are probably going to have some people over for a party and I don't expect many people to notice the difference with the 5.1 DTS discs I have in my CD changer but I do.
Used ones cost slightly less than they cost new, particularly considering inflation.
I started watching Techmoan and similar YouTubers. I have some nostalgia for compact cassettes and saw a video where they used a Dolby S deck and metal tapes and made very good recordings... Hardware like that came in around the time I was in grad school and went into a hole so it was "better than I remembered". There are Dolby S decks on the market for prices that seem within reach but the metal tapes are like $40 a piece now.
Optimal cassettes might sound as good or better than minidisc but rewinding is a hassle. They still make cassette decks and tapes but they are much worse than what was made 30 years ago. With NetMD you can record audio from your computer to a MD the same way you do with a computer which is easy: there's something to say for media that let you record your own music so you aren't stuck with what got released on SACD or can find on vinyl (which isn't too bad.)
It still seems silly when I've got several devices in my backpack usually that can play music including the Tracfone I use for emergencies.
I’ve been tempted to dig out my minidisc recording deck and player from storage, and use them for to add a bit of friction for more constrained listening. I’m probably projecting other problems onto music streaming services, but I often shut down with the endless choices and frustratingly flippant auto-generated playlists. Of course I can, and do, curate playlists for specific moods and tasks, but I also seem to lack self-control these days to not jump to another music tangent without getting lost from my original intent.
The nostalgia/quaintness of burning/updating a dozen or so minidiscs seems like an “fun”enough construct to build a deliberate ritual that outweighs the friction—similar to friction of making a pour over coffee helps force a nice 10min break and tends to limit number of cups/day to something reasonable. Either way, just more of a thought exercise at the moment.
In my case it is YouTube I am trying to get away from. Really listening to music on YouTube is a pretty good experience, it is great for discovery, and it even does a good job of making mixes for me. For many reasons though I don't want to be plugged into it and I try to listen to files on my computer, jellyfin or minidisc when I use my computer.
Upstairs I have a home theater receiver, I also have one downstairs where the HDMI out is burned out but it is good for music. I have an XBOX ONE plugged upstairs and it works for games but it seems to get worse all the time as a media player, it doesn't even play CDs although it plays DVD and Bluray. Upstairs I have the minidisc player for stereo music and one of these
which is connected to the receiver with an optical cable and is full of 5.1 DTS discs which I am a huge fan of. There are some good 1970s quad recordings such as Fragile by Yes but also a lot of good stuff in the the 2000-2010 period such as Supernature by Goldfrapp and some artists like Donald Fagan who always believed in multichannel. Like stereoscopic cinema I think a lot of people don't see a big difference but I like it a lot.
I worked for a company that sold products and services to sales managers. The CEO and his wife (who was also an owner of the company) lived in a house in Rochester that had the biggest kitchen I'd ever seen anyone actually use. We would have holiday parties there and it was clear cooking was a hobby they liked to but that entertaining is also a way to enjoy your status.
Yes I think my point is that they simply signal differently by for example regaling you about how they spent $5000 on custom designed esoteric tiles from a local artisan for their shower.
Personally I don't think things that are 90% purchase/consumption (housing/renovations/appliances) are hobbies in the same way as photography/kitesurfing/gardening/cycling which may be expensive but have some sort of skill/learning/activity attached.
I have a couple clients like that. 40k on this, 25k on that. Doinky little overpriced home-improvement geegaws. And I'm thinking, "I could pay off my credit cards and take a year off for my own serious projects, for what you're spending to upgrade your stupid crown molding".
I think a lot of what this thread shows is that everyone has a different utility function.
That's kind of whats interesting about the modern economy is we can all express our preferences in how we spend. The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.
This contrasts a lot with the 1950s boom era where there was a big thick middle end and not a huge range from bottom to top.
I have a t-shirt I bought at the Gap around 1996 that is still wearable, though a bit worn-looking where the collar meets the shoulder seams. Thick, sturdy cotton. It was probably around $15, which would be about $30 today.
There is no such plain ladies’ fit t-shirt consistently offered anymore. Either tissue-thin and less than $20, or involves a silly print and/or ruffles and lace.
> The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.
This enrages me so much. I hate cheap crap, but I equally hate over the top, necessary, expensive crap.
I prefer something well made, with minimal functions, for a middle price. But finding this is becoming increasingly rare as time goes on.
Renovation isn’t the hobby here, they’re not doing it themselves. But a passion for cooking justifies the high end kitchen. An interest in architecture and design justifies bringing good examples of it home.
Sure, if you have the money and interest, spend it.
But people often conflate "investment" & consumption when its anything related to home renovation. I'd still argue these types of "hobbies" are 90% consumption, and for most of the people I know.. usually financed with loans.
No one I know with a $100k kitchen cooks any better than my poor immigrant grandmother did.
Think of it like a machine shop. Expensive tools work way, way better than cheap ones.
I also have a restaurant grade toaster. It costs quite a bit more than the usual toasters do. But the usual ones would always break after a year or two. The restaurant toaster makes better toast, and has worked fine for 25 years now. It was actually cheaper to get the restaurant grade one over the long haul.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
On the other hand, if the wealthy person bought the $10 boots and invested the other $40, the investment could throw off enough money to keep him in annual $10 boots forever.
What are you doing to your toasters? My toaster had a good 10+ year run before I ultimately gave it away because I purchased a toaster oven. This was a Target/Walmart unremarkable kit that must surely have cost <$40, most likely something around $20 because I was a broke college kid.
They would just quit. Like my drip coffee maker. The heating element or the switch always breaks after a couple years. It's hard to buy an expensive one, as those always come with lots of buttons and a manual. I just want one that I put the coffee and water in and turn it on.
There are but it's considered a personality disorder.
There are folks that are genuinely uninterested in social status, and it usually goes along with being uninterested in social relationships. Think of autistic/Asperger's individuals; certain psychopaths & sociopaths; people with schizoid, schizotypal, avoidant, or antisocial personality disorders; et al. No relationships = no status = no need to worry about social status and social signaling.
It's much like how where there's people, there's politics. Where there's social, there's status. Take away the social and you take away both the performance and the status.
Sure, this is vacuously true in the sense that if you are studying peoples behavior then any lifestyle option is a data point that can be correlated across other metrics, and hence we can call any lifestyle “a performance of one’s status” for the sake of study status and lifestyles.
But that’s not really relevant. From an individuals perspective there’s a big difference between keeping up with the joneses and focusing on what makes you happy.
Even if it turns out that what makes you happy is actually still correlated to your status and you’re not really a unique snowflake.
> But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style.
Or maybe they just like to cook and enjoy having good hardware?
Not everything is for signaling purposes. It's really cynical to start viewing everyone's personal expenditures as some sort of socially manipulative tactic. This is especially true when it comes to people's hobbies, where many of us are just trying to enjoy ourselves and appreciate having good hardware around.
When I worked at Google I always had the distinct feeling that my hard work was paying for some manager’s $500k home renovation. I’m way more interested in working hard to help people who really need it, and I’m glad I’m not working at a place like that anymore.
I’m doing an open source solar powered farming robot nonprofit thing! [1] It’s an amazing feeling finishing a huge PCB design project for work and then immediately pushing the changes to GitHub. I’ve got a new brushless motor controller in the works that costs under $40 per board fully assembled for high current dual motor control, and anyone can order them (ideally wait till design is slightly more mature). [2]
The food part is big. It’s wild how in the US especially there are about three classes of grocery stores and each cater almost exclusively to a certain social class. You don’t see many laborers or fast food workers grabbing a meal from the local co-op or Whole Foods and the local Aldi or Walmart rarely sees an executive unless they’re infamously stingy
You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas.
I have friends who would kind of scoff at a Rolex but proudly describe the latest $500-for-2 dinner they went to last week.
Similarly I had a friend who only upgraded his iPhone with hand-me-downs from his teenage daughter, so he'd be like 3-4 years behind the curve. Meanwhile he owned like 4 homes and dined out similarly to my other friend.
> You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas.
This won't resonate withh you unless you are or were ever a cook, I fear we had so much more left to capture and were forced to leave on the table that was taken away because of COVID, but this transition in the US food culture was paid with lots of hard work and countless sacrifices that most will never get beyond watching an episode of The Bear.
Two big blows came in hard after Bourdain's death (so many concepts and projects were abandoned that never came back) and then followed with COVID destroying the Industry in such a way that I'm doubting will ever get much further than this in my Lifetime any more: food culture in the US still has so much left to catch up with Asia and Europe but we were making massive progress towards that, but I'm staring to accept this will probably be the high-water mark that the next generation of tech workers and cooks alike will need to build off of. And no, ghost kitchens and burning VC money from Softbank on DD is not a solution.
So far, outside of small boutique restaurants and kitchens, all I've seen is a race to the bottom profit seeking with almost no motivation other than to capture what marketshare remains from corps who benefited from PPP and ZIRP at whatever cost it takes and cutting corners until they got bought out by a large Restaurant group. This may seem like hyperbole but ~60% of all restaurants shutdown forever [0] after covid in what was already I high-failure sector with incredibly costly CAPEX/OPEX business models and low profit margins even during the best of times.
My last encounter with a delivery driver from a large vendor (think Shamrock or Sysco type corp) brought it all home: they had essentially succumb to the same exploitative delivery and monitoring systems that an Amazon delivery driver has, which was a stark contrast to getting deliveries from local farmers for produce/protein ha were the highlight of the menu and accompanied with items from small artisans and purveyors for cheeses, deserts breads etc...
We've lost something very vital coming out of COVID, and I'm not sure what can be done to not undo the progress that was made since the culture-shift has swung so hard to this Amazonification of this Industry.
In the US, there was clearly a consolidation where the big corporate run restaurant groups were able to weather the storm better nationally in the early COVID days.
However, pretty quickly in NYC by say summer 2021 the industry seems to be back and stronger than ever. Everyone was dining indoors again, they kept their expanded outdoor space, maintained their new more extensive to-go services, and did it all with reduced staff never seeming to re-hire their pre-pandemic staff levels.
NYC restaurants are once again annoyingly crowded and hard to get reservations to, with eye popping prices compared to 2019.
So great for restaurant owners but not great for employees.
That said, the wages being offered are crazy compared to 2019 and they are still unable to fill roles. So one would take it that they've found better employment prospects elsewhere, so good for them.
> In these scenarios I think it's because the $2k watch or $70k car is too easily attained by lower classes that they are no longer considered signals by the upper classes.
Or it's about signaling that you're "in the know" with the in-group.
I read some list from (I believe) the 1800s that listed the different vocabulary used by aristocratic vs. middle class English people. It wasn't anything fancy (e.g. graveyard = aristocrat, cemetery = middle class). But as soon as that list was published and the middle class strivers knew to imitate those parts of the dialect, I'm sure the aristocrats quickly deprecated those signals.
when I had my last kitchen remodel done (a modest one,but very nice), the builder that did it said with all his clients there is an inverse relationship between how much people spend on their kitchen and appliances, and how much cooking they do - i.e. the people who spend the most, actually do the least cooking, and vice-versa. In my own limited experience, I tend to agree.
I'll take an awesome cook (my spouse in this case) and a modest kitchen, over a modest cook and an awesome kitchen any day.
I was appliance shopping recently and it seems like the most expensive appliances are often not the best. If you just want to cook, you're usually better off with a good LG or GE oven than with a Viking, which test notoriously poorly. Same with many consumer products - a Honda or Toyota will be more reliable with more convenience features than a BMW or Rolls Royce; a Chicco or Britax carseat is often safer, more comfortable, and more convenient than a Peg Perego; a Samsung or Apple smartwatch has a lot more features than a Rolex. A good rule of thumb I've had for getting good consumer products is to buy the high end of the mass market; don't skimp on budget items, but also don't buy products that are priced so the average person can't afford them.
Makes sense economically. Mass market manufacturers can amortize their R&D and quality control over many more units than luxury brands. The point of the luxury brand is explicitly countersignaling, showing that you can afford to spend more money on an inferior product.
More cupholders, the ability to seat 3 carseats abreast, fabric rather than leather seats, better gas mileage, fits more easily in tight parking spots (and you care less if it gets dinged because you didn't pay $70K for it). Only thing the BMW really has on them is soundproofing (and probably acceleration & handling, but I don't care much about that).
And I care more about how reliable it is at > 10 years of ownership, not < 3 years (when nearly everything is reliable). My Honda Fit is coming up on 14 years old and runs like new.
Right, but this subthread is explicitly about efficiency, i.e. getting value & quality for your money, and not about what's adapted to rich people's lifestyles. The context is people who cook a lot but don't spend a lot of money vs. people who cook only infrequently but spend a lot on kitchen appliances.
Yes, many of the more expensive finishes are extremely cosmetic and have negative utility.
Stone backsplashes require frequent maintenance and special chemicals. If you don't stay on top of it, they are basically impossible to keep looking clean.
A lot of newer kitchens have wooden floors, which is insane.
I've seen kitchens with thin coated bright shiny copper/brass handles on everything which immediately tarnish and can never be maintained in new looking shape.
A lot of modern gas ranges are fairly hard to clean with lots of parts you have to remove, while a solid middle class electric glass countertop one is zero effort.
I once rented a place where the guy had wooden edges on the kitchen counters which of course aged poorly, plus a porcelain kitchen sink which immediately broke any glass wear that dropped even a couple inches while cleaning.. and was impossible to keep clean looking.
> A lot of newer kitchens have wooden floors, which is insane.
What's insane about this? I grew up in a pretty basic old house with a wooden floor in the kitchen, I don't recall it being an issue in any practical sense.
Exactly.
To me, a $500k unnecessary renovation throws more money away than a $70k vs $40k car.
At least with the car you are likely getting safety features and extensive sensor suites for driver assist for the money, that have tangible impact on your driving experience.
Or Spending 5-10x on a $10k appliance where a $1-2k one would do. These people tend to get the whole set, so it's a good $30-40k worth of kitchen appliances that could easily be replicated for $5k total otherwise.
Does a better fridge/freezer really help you cook better? Do even most experienced cooks get noticeable benefit of a $10k range or oven?
I dunno. We recently bought a house where the kitchen had been recently renovated. I don't know if our appliances are super high end but they are definitely on that side, and it makes the kitchen feel great. We probably wouldn't spend as much time in it otherwise. So let's say that kitchen cost 40k (I have no idea)...but lasts us 20 years. That's 2k a year for a very enjoyable part of our house, probably the most used space by far.
On the contrary, if we had spent an additional 40k on our car, how much of a game changer would that have been and how long would it have lasted?
Again you are talking a $40k renovation, I am talking $500k renovation.
$40k for a kitchen is on the order of magnitude of getting all your appliances reasonably up to date, plumbing/fixtures, electrical and cabinetry/countertop refreshed, without anything being exotic or luxury. The bare bones one could probably refresh everything in the kitchen has to be easily $20k, so the incremental "above bare minimum spend" here is only $20k and therefore very reasonable.
That is a reasonable level of taking something outdated which is hard to market and making it up to date move-in ready and therefore quicker to sell.
To contrast for example in my experience, a Miele dishwasher for $800 washes dishes vastly better than a $400 GE. To the point it is significantly labor reducing.
On the other hand, does a $10k subzero freezer/fridge keep my vegetables better than a $2k Samsung?
Most people underestimated how much of their homes value appreciating over the 5-20 years of ownership is purely the land value increases over the long term due to real estate inflation and the relative performance of their local markets. Ie - if all the condos in NYC went up 2x from 2004-2007, mine going up similarly isn't because I put fancy tiles in my toilet.
One slight different is that spending on your home will generally add value to it. It may not be necessary, and you may not get a dollar-for-dollar out of it, but it’s added value nonetheless.
I cook a lot, I personally would like a higher quality stove - I’ve killed one before because I (an)use the broiler a lot (it wasn’t terribly old), but I probably would do an NXR or something. maybe in the $2k. Or a used Wolf/viking from one of the people you mention
I’d rather buy a nice oven than a bunch of shit appliances though. People love their air fryers, over the stove microwave, countertop oven, instant pot, etc…
I think most people delude themselves that their big renovations added any incremental value to their home. Usually the cost was financed and thus even higher than the sticker price, all-in. Further, the holding periods are measured in a decade +/- often, so the general market moves contribute more to the sales price than whatever you'd done to the kitchen/bath.
On the margin, having a move-in ready home that's been renovated well enough recently enough, generically enough, ensures reasonable liquidity of being able to sell the home for a reasonable price reasonably quickly.
For many this means replacing some dated appliances, repainting, and strategic spending on a few items that may be out of style or more aged, like bathroom vanity or replacing a linoleum top.
Extravagant, expensive, specific renovations may actually detract because the general markets taste are not your taste and so you've either reduced the number of likely buyers, or half the universe of buyers are going to actually deduct value of your renovation because they may want to undo whatever you've done.
Spending $2k replacing a worn appliance or buying a $200 air fryer are two orders of magnitude off from the expenditure levels I am referring to.
Renovations basically never add value unless you check more checkboxes or add on-paper features. Cramming a shower stall into a half bath, adding a dishwasher where there wasn't one, finishing an attic/basement, that kind of stuff.
>On the margin, having a move-in ready home that's been renovated well enough recently enough, generically enough, ensures reasonable liquidity of being able to sell the home for a reasonable price reasonably quickly.
This is the motivation I have to invest further in what already feels like a generally "move-in ready" home; my "move-in ready" is not others' "move-in ready", so my goal is to find all the objections and invest in making them less objectionable :)
In my area, if I were to spend $50k renovating my home, the value would increase by approximately $0.
If I were to spend $300k renovating my home, the value would increase by approximately $100k.
The only real increase in home value comes from additions which add bedrooms. If I were to spend money converting an attic, a basement, or adding an add-on, I'd probably come out even at the sale.
And renovations are quickly depreciating assets. I'm much better off doing that right before a sale. A new dishwasher will be an old dishwasher before too long.
>I'm much better off doing that right before a sale.
I would love to see industry averages on if pre-sale renovations make any sense at all. Considering the outright financial expenses, possible financing, potentially weeks/months of organizing contractors, dealing with overages, delaying the house sale, yada yada.
If the work takes more than a week (so not just appliances, painting, etc) is there generally a positive expected return?
> I would love to see industry averages on if pre-sale renovations make any sense at all. Considering the outright financial expenses, possible financing, potentially weeks/months of organizing contractors, dealing with overages, delaying the house sale, yada yada.
They must surely make sense, given that there are people who "flip" houses (buy a house, do a quick paint/bathrooms/kitchen renovation on it and sell it for a nice markup).
I was considering that, but flippers are likely better prepared to purchase a house, do the N activities which make time/financial sense, and get out of the market as quickly as possible. They likely possess the skills to do some of the work themselves, have existing relationships with plumbers/electricians to perform specialized work, know how to handle required permitting, have a realtor on the ready, and a dozen of other things which I am ignorant.
The average homeowner is unlikely to have any of those relationships or knowledge, so there are a lot more things that could go wrong that delay the project or cause costs to balloon. Maybe a lot of people mistakenly believe that renovating the kitchen for $20k will add $40k value to the house, but in practice, the project will cost $34k, take five weeks, and ultimately only raises the final sale price to $35k.
500k or 500m in renovations will increase the value of the property. A car is worth 20% less the day you drive it off of the lot and keeps losing value. Having freezer space can save you thousands of dollars in food.
However a $70k car generally has a much better set of class leading accident avoidance & safety features than a $25k car which will generally be minimum legally required for compliance. A new car has a much different safety profile than a 10 or 20 year old car. Watching crash videos on YouTube is very illuminating as to how far we've come even versus a car from 2000.
Modern advanced cars will warn you about rear & front cross traffic, actively keep you from driving off the road if you fall asleep, emergency brake for obstacles, keep you from changing lanes into a car in your blind spot, and many other things that were pretty unheard of 10-20 years ago. My car even flashes lights and beeps at me if I am opening the door and it detects oncoming cars or bikes.
A $500k renovation of a home is usually financed and adds less than the $500k of value to the resale price to the homes (lets say, $400k to be generous), while costing north of $750k by the time all the payments are made. So $100-350k of waste, conservatively.
The crash videos of old vs new cars are very interesting (and scary). Especially 1959 Bel Air vs 2009 Malibu. In the older car, you smash into the dashboard and then the passenger compartment collapses and crushes you. In the new car, you hit the airbag. Of course you don't expect much from 1959, but even 1992 Nissan vs 2016 Nissan is a huge difference in survivability.
You will never see a matchup that makes the old car look "eh, good enough" because the incentive for the kinds of organizations doing these kinds of tests is to showcase their work. If they produced content downplaying their work heads would roll.
Eh, a bit conspirational much.
There have been dramatic improvements in car safety in each of the last few decades. Accidents that used to be death sentences are now dust yourself off and walk away.
Actuarially as well, the value of a human life is so high that a few $1000 in safety options on a car for marginal increases in safety will almost always be worth it.
Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit. Looking at the state level auto fatalities stats is pretty striking how much lower fatality rates are in the low limit / high traffic (and therefore low speed) northeast .. whether you measure per capita or per mile driven.
The most interesting but hard to measure metric would be per vehicle hour, I would suggest. Commutes are driven more by time than distance, and in congested areas people commute shorter distances at lower speed vs some of the super commutes people do at 75mph+. You can see this sort of reflected in the stats where the per capita fatality rates are 1/3 to 1/2 the level of the Deep South, however on a per-mile basis closer to 2/3. You can also see that the northeastern per-capita miles driven is 1/2 ..
I'm not being conspirational. You can F right off with that implication.
Follow the incentives. You will NEVER see them show you the difference between like a 93 and 94 of a given model (tons of vehicles went from airbags optional to airbags standard over that year so that's basically what you'd be testing) because a single variable or low variable test doesn't get them the DARE-esque messaging and "look how far we've come" back patting that these sorts of old vs new comparisons are meant for. Watching a dummmy face plant into the steering wheel of a 93 OJ bronco and then do the same thing into the airbag of a 94 (to just pick one example) just doesn't scratch those itches the same way comparing vehicles that are half a dozen major engineering revisions and 20yr of model bloat apart from each other.
>Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit.
Eh, I think you're reading too much into it.
Speed limits don't reflect reality, anyone from the northeast will tell you that limited access highway speeds are predicated on traffic, weather and road conditions and 80mph middle lane speeds aren't uncommon pre and post commuting "hour" (in sarcasm quotes for obvious reasons).
Reducing potential for high speed traffic conflicts probably matters a lot more than you're giving it credit for. You almost never have cross roads just dumping traffic onto a state highway where traffic goes 70+ in the northeast. This is pretty standard once you get out of the beltway in the more rural states and account for a lot of avoidable crashes.
> However a $70k car generally has a much better set of class leading accident avoidance & safety features than a $25k car which will generally be minimum legally required for compliance.
That’s empirically false. Toyota and Subaru both make 25k cars with vastly better active driver assistance features than Tesla, as shown by every independent test that’s ever been done.
Yeah I’m not gonna put Tesla on a pedestal for class leading active driver assist by any measure lol.
Subaru specifically punches above their weight in terms of safety per dollar and given their close relationship with Toyota I could see them being similar.
And to my point - the $25k Subaru with all the option stay be a historical memory or marketing fallacy.
If you open up the pricing tool on the cheapest Subaru wagon/SUV model, the Crosstek, and want all the active driver assist options, you quickly end up at the $30k top-tier "Limited" spec which is $31k after fees, and if you add any functional options/accessories (GPS nav, auto dim mirror, etc) is more like $35k.
Similarly their most famous model, the Outback may START at $28k, but if you want the trim with all the safety options, thats the $41k Touring. You can knock a few of the safety options off by going with the Limited for $36k (and add a few of the safety features on optionally to end up at $39k).
And I'm not even including markups, which dealers spent the last 2 years adding. Personally my mom spent 6 months hunting down a Subaru dealer who would sell her a car at sticker price after having her old one totaled in an accident. Then another 2 months waiting for it to arrive. This is probably over now, but again the $25k car is so rare as to almost be mythical.
> Likewise a $70k car is neither particularly rare or exotic
Just for the sake of nitpicking, but going back to the BMW example, you could get a well-optioned Z4 in this range, which I would argue is rather exotic and will make heads turn, if not very expensive.
You CAN get something rare/exotic for $70k these days.
However you can get a lot of pretty surprisingly run of the mill vehicles at that price range as well, especially for at truck or EV. Like a Ford F-150, Tesla Model 3/Y, entry level Mercedes or BMW electric car, even a Ford Mach E, etc.
The slowing inflation, high interest rates and collapse of the economy in the coming 6-18 months will probably wind some of that back.
It's truly crazy to me how quickly pricing has ramped up especially in EVs. Imagine telling someone 10 years ago that people would line up to buy a $60k Hyundai EV, or $80k on a luxury Hyundai sub-brand EV?
The Tesla Model 3/Y range can easily run up above $70k with options now, and the bigger Tesla Model S/X is a six-figures vehicle!
Likewise, gas powered BMWs seem to have disappeared in the $30-40k range and pretty quickly get into the $50k+ range.
I figure GP's talking about gas trucks. We're talking working class people spending over a year's gross income on a truck, when in the past they'd be buying a "work truck" with a single bench seat, no A/C, and an AM radio.
I don't want to make assumptions, but it's my understanding that they're usually on finance which means they're paying much more than sticker price.
I certainly don't know many middle class people with 70k in savings to throw around, either everyone is doing a lot better than they otherwise expose or there's easy money on the table.
I think we'll see price corrections downward for cars over the next 5 years, as interest rates change. I've asked a handful of importers while I try and source a car from Japan, with the Japanese import market being hyper inflated. They've all suggested that during the pandemic, financed purchases were making up the majority of their sales. I imagine that's set to change as interest rates change and loans get harder to acquire.
Of course people are financing them. Vehicles are expensive. I believe the average used car price is over $40K now here. Even an average used car was about $20K.
Let's stick to the truck, though. F-150s are everywhere.
If I head to the Ford Canada website, an F-150 XL (the cheap one) is $39K before you get started. A Platinum brings you up to $87K, and the Limited brings you up to $98K.
The website is definitely NOT including taxes, licensing fees, financing fees, interest, etc.
I couldn't imagine paying that for a work truck. The trades are fairly well payed, but to that extent?
I can't see the logic in it either, by the time they're done paying off a typical loan even for the $87k variant, you would be up into triple figures for it. It could have cost as much as some people's homes.
I’m…old now? Old enough to be shocked how much car prices have gone up. And I follow the industry.
Why, back in my day, you could get a “stripper” model of a truck (my dad’s term for the most-basic-possible model with crank windows and a stick shift) for like $15,000. Now?
They do still sell a truly cheap-and-cheerful truck. Will it tow much? No. Is it going to take you to the bottom of the Grand Canyon or whatever off-road macho fantasy? No. Will it get several bags of mulch back from Home Depot? Absolutely—which is what people actually use trucks for. (If that.)
Well its nearly 2023, and we have had 10%-ish inflation going on about 2 years.
In specific areas such as cars, you had complete dislocations.
For example used cars which normally depreciate 15-20%/year, instead inflated about 15%/year for 2 years.
Over the summer I traded in a 4 year old car at the end of its warranty of 85% of what I paid for it new. I probably could have sold private party and haggled harder to get closer to 90%+ Normally 85% is what you can expect to sell your car for right after you drive it off the lot on your second day of ownership.
This was a knock on effect of new car production shortages, and pent up demand from low 2020 sales and people having a lot of cash on hand.
Related to this you had dealers adding market (ADM) on not even luxury/exotic vehicles of $10-15k in some areas. So never mind not being able to negotiate a few $1000 off, people were paying sticker+$15k for new vehicles for the privilege of being able to buy one. And this was on top of the sticker prices ticking up over the course of the pandemic and related inflation.
So no, for many things, it was not "just a year of 11% inflation".
Similarly for watches, luxury watches basically doubled during the pandemic in pricing before crashing from their springtime 2022 peak. Still +40% versus pre-pandemic levels.
Not to mention a fully specced out Tesla Model 3 is $80k and Model Y is now.. $90k, and the tax credits are basically gone! I remember getting a pretty well configured Model 3 for $50k after tax incentives in their first year of production.
For ~$70k you used to be able to get a Model S, which now STARTS at $105k. Easily configurable into the $130-160k range now.. insane.
Agreed that they are expensive cars that have gotten even more expensive over the last decade.
But comparing absolute numbers for a car you bought five years ago may be misleading because the majority of the increase is likely due to inflation.
Back of the envelope math: If you were in CA and got $7.5k federal and $2.5k state credits that means the Model 3 you bought in 2017 was ~$60k or ~$73k in today's dollars. If it's now $80k then that's a real price increase of ~$7k in today's dollars.
That's certainly an increase, but making an expensive car slightly more expensive doesn't seem particularly insane to me.
Inflation is a huge factor here for sure.
Most people probably can't get their heads around a well equipped Toyota Corolla approaching $30k or Honda Accord hitting $40k. Mentally to me these are BMW 3-series prices, but that's not been true for some time!
If you are in the market for a 3-row / 7 seater, you can spend $55k on a Toyota Highlander SUV or $40k on a Toyota Siena minivan.
It's genuinely pretty challenging to spend under $30k on a new car now outside fairly basic 2-4 door smaller sedan/hatchback vehicles in their base trim without options.
> outside fairly basic [...] vehicles in their base trim without options
Nothing wrong with basic vehicles "in their base trim without options", we have two parked outside the house right now, and the vehicle we owned before them was similar.
I am only trying to illustrate that the line between luxury/excess in autos has shifted substantially in the last few years partially inflation driven and partially cheap credit / long loan terms driven.
The universe of under-$30k cars is now quite limited whereas 5 years ago, one could possibly describe $30k+ as being luxury.
Hell, somehow my brain is still stuck in the 90s, where $30k would get you a very nice car indeed. I was a teenager then, so perhaps I'm anchored there because it's when I first started getting interested in things like that, and first started driving. (Gas was also 92 cents per gallon for a bit while I was in high school, oof.)
My family also always only bought used cars (and I continued this practice), so I guess that further skewed my conception of car cost downward. I only just bought my first new car recently, and I still haven't really adjusted to the reality of both what current prices are like, and how much more expensive a new car is.
I could have written the same comment and have mixed feelings about turning into the old person who feels that everything was cheaper "back in my day".
I try and remind myself that for the most part it's not that cars are that much more expensive but that dollars are worth so much less.
Franchise dealers typically stock few if any vehicles in their base trim without options. Those vehicles often exist only in token numbers so that the manufacturer can advertise a low starting price, but they're not readily available to most consumers. Of course that varies by brand.
> For ~$70k you used to be able to get a Model S, which now STARTS at $105k. Easily configurable into the $130-160k range now.. insane.
For a shit car with the interior fit and finish of a poverty-spec Skoda, and all the important controls replaced with a bloody great iPad that blinds you at night.
Oh, and it's from an obscenely "techbro" company.
Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?
> Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?
I am very impressed by their batteries and I like the look of the Model S but I'm utterly unimpressed by the build quality of the interior and the cheap materials used.
At that price I'd except to be entering a comfortable car using luxurious materials.
FWIW I tried the Porsche Taycan and the interior is leaps and bound ahead of the Teslas (but the batteries aren't up to par yet and the software ain't either I think).
Look at really any of the competition at the Model S price level from the Germans and the interior is spectacular. Honestly the battery range on the Germans is also better than you realize.
Tesla exaggerates their range and few actually achieve the quoted EPA range, so you can deduct 10-15% for real world.
The Germans, especially Porsche undersell their range and real world you can get about 10-15% longer out of the BMWs & MBs and something insane like 35% more out of the Taycans.
> Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas
I could excuse the drawbacks you cited and the cost if they were the Framework laptop of the automotive world. But at those price points, and a repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’ll buy a Tesla.
> repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”
I have a couple of old Range Rovers. There are very few things you can't fix with a half-inch spanner and a hammer, and those you can fix with a 7/16th spanner and a bit of sticky tape.
They run on propane, so they get cheap tax and can be registered as Low Emission Vehicles, which is pretty hilarious for a 4-litre V8.
Combined they probably still have a smaller ecological footprint than making one Tesla Model S.
How does fueling work? Perhaps I just haven't noticed (because I have to reason to), but I have never seen a fueling station advertise propane, outside of tanks for grilling and similar.
Big doughnut-shaped tank in the spare wheel well, bit of plumbing to the front (copper in old installs, plastic on newer ones - my "old" Rangie has plastic pipe because I refurbed it about seven years ago), and a thing like a diving regulator that lets the engine "suck" gas through after boiling it off using engine coolant, and feeds it into the throttle body. More sophisticated ones use solenoid injectors that work alongside the normal petrol injectors and provide a more "direct" flow of fuel and better performance. On my oldschool install there's a stepper motor that adjusts the fuelling based on what it reads from the existing lambda sensors. When you switch to gas, a pair of modules (four cylinders each so a V8 needs two) switch some resistors in series with the petrol injectors so they cannot fire but the ECU still sees continuity, cutting off the petrol, and the gas solenoids switch on allowing propane through.
To fuel up you just go to a filling station with an LPG pump (getting harder to find here unfortunately) and instead of poking the nozzle down the filler neck and holding down a trigger on the filler gun, you plug in a hose with a fitting like a BNC plug the size of your wrist and hold down a button on the pump until you've put enough in. It clicks off when it's full.
No difference in performance (in theory you could adjust it to get more because it's the equivalent of 115RON fuel!) and a bit more fuel consumption, but roughly 2/3 the price of petrol.
LPG (liquified propane gas) stations are slowly on the wane but still common enough for practical use in Germany.
Common enough and cheap enough that I still feel a bit prescient for buying a 2017 Ford Focus wagon with about 30k km on the clock that was factory modified for LPG, in August 2021, for about half what the original owner paid.
I'm impressed in the sense that Tesla has done amazing things with battery technology, and has made EVs "cool". It's sometimes easy to forget, but before Tesla, EVs were ugly and nobody wanted them.
But yeah, whenever I'm in a Tesla, the interior looks cheap, and the giant iPad (in the Model 3 at least) looks bolted-on rather than designed-in. Not to mention the real-time display of what's around the car is laughably bad, with cars and pedestrians flickering in and out, and sometimes not even showing up at all.
I'm glad people drive them, though; more EVs on the street is a good thing.
No, you're not alone, but they still have a cachet in a certain crowd (the "green" and "forward-thinking" types love them). Hopefully it goes away soon.
i dunno my parents fit in that category and told me they will not consider a Tesla as long as it’s associated with Musk. EVs of other companies are really quite nice these days so i don’t think they are losing anything. Right now that have a new plugin hybrid RAV4.
We came close to that with a Camry my mother-in-law owns. She drove it, my sister-in-law drove it for a while, and then they tried to pawn it off on my oldest. At the end of the day, I didn’t want my kid driving a car missing out on 25 years of safety enhancements.
Both of my Range Rovers are 25 years old. One's heading for a light refurb and overhaul at nearly 300,000 miles, the other has just had its first "big" service at 100,000 miles.
Fuel availability considerations notwithstanding, there's very little that would stop them going another 25 years.
Way more. Land Cruisers can last 40+ easily. Do a craigslist search and you’ll find them in fully working condition.
I don’t think the so-called “safety features” developed in the next 20 years are as valuable as the others predict. We’re already very safe in cars, especially massive modern ones like the cruiser. If you’re driving fast/reckless enough to get killed in one today more safety features aren’t what you need.
I don’t think many people are scrapping their cars for the safety of pedestrians. Also, personal accountability. If you’re going too fast/distracted to react in an area with the potential for pedestrian interference, that’s a you problem, not your car’s.
People need to be more mindful of the fact they’re operating multi-ton death machines, not sit back behind increasing layers of technology and text their buddy while driving because they know their “safety features” will protect them.
This is partially why I disabled my airbags - pedestrians don’t have them, why should I? Gives me more skin in the game.
Nah, it's from someone who hasn't owned a car in over ten years.
I can totally see how a car could get passed down from father to son, but a single car and "many generations" doesn't really add up in this part of the world (could be totally different in other parts of the world, of course).
Interesting observation. I agree with what you've written, but I might even go one step farther, the wealthy like extremely expensive things that don't require much money.
Yeah, I'm being a little glib there. But what they love is golf, tennis, violin lessons for kids. Yes, they own expensive golf clubs (and memberships) and tennis rackets and violins. But what they love is that they can slum it with a very inexpensive tennis racket or golf club or violin, whereas the expensive gear is useless in the hands of someone who hasn't had a lifetime of lessons that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you have the money, you can't buy the technique, and people who play these sports/instruments can recognize instantly if you know what you're doing (even in movies, tennis, golf, and violin, faked technique is immediately recognizable). It helps a lot of your parents had money and trained you up in these things when you were a child.
Let's take a step back from the signalling perspective and recognize that hobbies (expensive or not) are a lot more fun than watches, which provide almost nothing but status. The same goes for remodeling, which is an extended form of decoration and also a hobby for some people.
I find mechanical watches to be fascinating. This is obsolete technology, and yet, innovation continues. This is precision engineering, but at least for the high end, mostly done by hand. A lovely anachronism, which is a fitting word for a timepiece. It is like real life steampunk. I fully understand the appeal beyond status signalling. How can geeks not be at least a little interested in watchmaking?
I know some people don't care and for them it is just status signaling. But it the same as for supercars: just because it is status doesn't mean there isn't something behind it.
> * The last round of job searching doing zoom interviews, I wore my hoodie for half the calls. If I had done this while job searching out of college, during my internship, or at my first job.. I would not be where I am today.*
That's not just status, it's got change over time mixed in.
It's partially status in that, I'm advanced enough in my career that I don't really care to work anywhere that would ding me in a zoom interview over my outfit. Earlier in my career I could not have afforded to be so picky.
One of the starkest power dynamics in dress code I've observed is in non-tech firms that have large tech orgs to support the revenue generating roles. While there were official dress codes that tech largely abided, our internal customers who generated revenue often showed up in tee shirts or wore ball caps in the office ...
I’ve heard someone say a few months back that a zoom setup is the new business suit/attire. After spending the pandemic working from an unfinished/unheated garage near a loud expressway, I definitely felt there were situations where I was “dinged” for it at a FAANG company.
LOL yes, thank you. People might argue somehow the appliance makes them cook better but the countertops and cabinetry is a pretty tough sell.
Every time I look at my 30 year old kitchen & bathrooms, and tally up what it would cost to update them, I can't help but think I'd rather just retire a bit earlier.
Yes things need to be replaced as they break, and ultimately some renovation will be needed.. but I know people gutting 10-15 year old kitchens & baths purely for aesthetics every time they move. Full employment for tradesmen.
> and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style
This is basically the cost to add a second floor to your crappy home you bought a several years back because that’s all you could afford to buy in Seattle at the time. Probably even worse in some other cities.
Renovations that increase the square footage are a rare exception that genuinely add serious value. They are rare often due to the zoning rules and permitting requirements in most areas.
I’m speaking of interior renovations of basically aesthetic changes that are generally negative value add.
I had learned a saying recently "cars for the poor, watches for the rich". The idea is that cars have higher utilities so even though cars are higher price in general, watchers show higher status signal.
As it turns out, this was an old Chinese saying a couple decades ago, where "cars" really meant bicycles.
This makes me think of Adam Carolla's Rich Man-Poor Man. E.g. "Made love next to a fountain." "Doesn't drive himself to work." Many examples on Twitter and Reddit.
> If a chimpanzee views a person perform a series of superfluous actions, along with one single necessary action, in order to obtain a piece of food, the chimpanzee will skip the superfluous action, and perform only the necessary one.
> In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones.
I watched the video, but I'm unconvinced. They tell the kid the box is "magic". Children know the box is not magic. Children know how spells work in cartoon and books. So "magic" is a code word for "please copy all the silly steps as accurate as possible".
The apes have no instruction, so they don't understand the must copy all the silly steps.
I'll also blame school. Children are expected and trained to follow orders of adults even if they don't understand them, because it will be better for them in the future. Did you ever played basketball? Why should you put the ball in the basket if it has a hole in the bottom and the ball will fall down?
I agree. The nature of our verbal communication is that they were implying to the children that this is a game and that they must copy each step. In contrast, had they said “your goal is to get the gummy bear. Do only those things necessary to get the treat” it would have gone much differently.
Even by not using ANY words and only having then children watch a person and then leaving them alone with the contraption would have gone differently. Some would likely have “played the game” because that is what we teach children. But at least some would have likely just gone for the treat.
In any case, it is an interesting thing to ponder!
I also wondered about the difference between doing this with young children and adult chimps.
I think it’s fairly obvious that if you gave the clear box test to a teenager or adult and said “get the treat out” they’d look at you funny and then many or most would just reach in and grab it. I think even in the black box, they’d probably look at it real hard and maybe try going straight for the treat after investigating the box a bit.
By contrast very young humans operate in “game mode” almost all the time, and are basically “playing along” with whatever game you put them in. It’s a lot of fun, and often silly.
So my question is, what about juvenile chimps? Do they also operate in game mode, or would they follow the adult chimp behavior of going straight for the reward?
They have tried this with juvenile non-human primates! For example, Horner & Whiten (2005) tried this with 2-6 year old chimpanzees. Clay & Tennie (2017) tried this with juvenile bonobos. Neither group overimitated. They do play, but overimitation is probably underpinned by the ability/proclivity to infer Gricean intentions, which non-human primates lack.
There is a strong normative element to this, as well as the play element you mentioned — I expect, as adults, we’ve all engaged in some form of overimitation as an act of conformity.
Anecdotally, some human kids don't like being tested and will deliberately fuck with a researcher.
(I don't remember this, my mother was hidden behind a one way mirror.)
I had some pretty severe co-ordination issues as a child, no learning related problems - but fuck knows who decided that I needed to be evaluated on both fronts.
Anyway this woman comes in to test me with one of those boxes with different shaped holes in the top, and a matching block for each hole.
I grab a random block and try to shove it in a hole into which it obviously does not fit - and keep trying with the same hole until the woman gets up and leaves in frustration (she'd been trying to hint that I should perhaps try another hole).
It’s important to clarify this question. Children, especially young children, do not have a clear view of what is real and What is not real. The line is different for everyone, but I’d say at 7 or 8 that starts to come into focus. Even then, there are plenty of grown, intelligent adults who believe things without any substantial evidence.
I will say that kids are way smarter than we often give them credit for. They’re natural scientists, and I think we probably educate that kind of learning out of them.
modified quote> I watched the video, but I'm unconvinced. They tell the kid the box is "magic". Children now know the box IS magic. Children know how spells work in cartoon and books. So "magic" is a code word for "please copy all the silly steps as accurate as possible".
The main problem is that humans and chips get different instructions.
Are all things that work best when you are (contextually) high-status.
Yet we are still culturally promoting them as the things we should all strive for in any situation.
However, it's way easier to be open about my professional mistakes now that I'm recognized by my peers and that I don't do too many of them.
It's simple to expose my vulnerabilities now that I've built a social network that will not hurt me with it because they like and respect me.
And it's certainly great to be able to be myself, now that people around me will say I'm eccentric, and not reject me.
It's like the behavior of men in romantic comedy. If you were to be ugly and awkward, doing what they do would get you arrested. You don't get to play "50 shades" or "twilight" if you are the hunchback of Notredame. It's also why energy, humour and culture are such great assets, allowing you to somewhat help with social status.
One day maybe we will stop selling to our children that life is about this one thing that works in all cases, and admit each life advice is highly contextual.
Agreed. Admitting mistakes and showing vulnerability works best when you have nothing to lose, not because you have nothing but because you are untouchable. A good example would be a CEO who neither takes a pay cut nor resigns after laying off 20 % of their workforce. It is usually accompanied by a press release saying that they have seen the errors in their way, but as a consequence other heads have to roll, mine still stays attached (and then blame inflation or something). An upside down world, really.
> “Some writers are so well known that, despite having millions of followers, they literally don’t promote anything they write on social media. That is some strong countersignaling.”
This was every writer until about 13 years ago. That’s not a long time in a field where people can have 70 year long careers.
It’s interesting to consider how “doing the thing I’ve always done” can quickly become seen as countersignalling when society changes around you.
Yeah, and I don't think its counter-signalling either. Successful authors are likely to have people actively promoting their work for them; the one thing others can't do for them is write (unless they're willing to have other people perform the work they are known for).
It's seems to be hard for people to imagine there are more channels than Twitter. They are on twitter, everybody they know is on twitter, and by that they judge everything.
And people on Twitter vastly overestimate Twitter's importance. That some people think it's a "public town square" is just laughable. It's the trash-laden alley behind an Arby's, at best.
"Tweeting, but not tweeting about your new book" is very different from "Not tweeting about your new book" when Twitter doesn't exist. One is lack of a signal channel, the other is spending time and effort on a signal channel and not transmitting your signal. Countersignaling relies on the SNR being biased against you; it's about noise floor vs signal and having no channel at all is very different.
But how is "I can get by very well without that newfangled thing" not countersignaling? Even if it's completely devoid of deliberation it still is. And from the upstart's perspective this is written for, they can certainly try to cosplay grey eminence from the start, but that sure has its price. If they succeed nonetheless, good for them, but telling them to try would be bad advice.
This could still be a conscious choice to counter-signal though. When society is changing, you can go with the flow or you can choose to stick to your guns, and if your position is solid enough, maybe you don't need to be on the front of every trend. Of course, like all the risky signals, you don't know if your position is actually strong enough until it's too late.
Not going to university or dropping out of it is the most expensive countersignal of all, and it also knocks away the ladder for people who might try to follow you into your chosen endeavour.
I've been articulating this dynamic for a long time and tell anyone who thinks I am an example that it's a terrible example to follow - mostly because the countersignals become the signal, as really, if you really want to prove how smart you are, go win a Fields medal, or perhaps you have a cancer cure to help my friend, or maybe you can make something somebody else actually wants for a change - and if you aren't that smart, then maybe you should work less on seeming smart and more on demonstrating you are good at something and use the opportunities that come from the respect of your competence and ability to share it with others, instead of affecting the aura of brilliance at being a failed or frustrated genius. These admonishments are as much to myself as anyone else who resembles them.
Countersignals are vulgar artifacts of the 90s that a bunch of nouveau middle class people are just starting to figure out now, and they only fool rubes and are a way to figure out who to follow and how to climb socially, but never how to do something beautiful or great. I call them fart-connoisseurs because I know what it is like to be one. These days I use this quote a lot, which is, "Don't be so humble, you aren't that great."
When I'm great, I will be humble. Until then, check out how awesome my effort that yielded something objectively crappy is, and even though it's not above criticism, it did the job, which is more than brilliance ever did. Maybe that is knocking the ladder away too, but that ladder went nowhere anyway. :)
Forgive your imagined mistakes. It was a handicap I chose and controlled, based on a very deep seated mistrust of authority, which led me to avoid taking on a small challenge that millions of other normal kids do all the time. Live and learn.
The 90's counter signal trope of success without school was as misleading as the trope you had to get a degree to amount to anything, which was contemptuous of the generations of working class families who created the culture that produced those institutions. None of it means anything so long as you own it, but it is a different life, literally, a different trajectory by degree.
> Not going to university or dropping out of it is the most expensive countersignal of all
Pure survivorship bias.
If facebook flopped zuck would have been back at university after a "sabatical" and would now be middle management in a cubicle at a consulting company.
Wealth signaling and its effects are rather depressing. People going into debt to buy a Rolex and a sports car to create the illusion of success is bad enough. Someone falling for an individual mismanaging their own finances to create a lie is quite sad.
I was listening to a pop station yesterday and a song was playing that was like a top 5 of fashion brands, they way the singer kept listing them off. So I think elements of our culture pressure people into doing this kind of painful signaling.
I think signaling or counter signaling should be avoided if you want to preserve your sanity. Find something you’re passionate about and find others who feel the same. Hang out. Make best friends. Date. Get married. Be happy.
I saw this greatly affecting Eastern European youth, who have mostly no chance of ever wearing Balenciaga or LV. But they get this image blasted 24/7 on Instagram, so they are stuck forever in a sad feedback loop.
In Soviet republics you could be murdered by the state every day, or declared an enemy of the pepople, or sent to gulag for a thing you didnt do - and all of those negative experiences ingrained a type of short-terminism among the society.
The state could take away your apartment and make you lose everyrhing apart the clothes on your back - so why bother fixing the apartment, go and buy some nice clothes... at least you look good NOW and maybe you can keep them.
This negative trainig (easy to lose everything) makes people care more about looks. With so many relatively poor people maybe it is some sort of a "lipstick effect" too - for everyone.
It happens everywhere, specially around lumpenproletariats around the world, it is a foul situation without an honest fix.
It Latam it leads to horrible levels of asocial behaviors, theft, drug trading to acquire money and use it to purchase luxury items with which signal success
Buying a Rolex today or for the past few years, would have actually been a pretty solid investment - it's hard to purchase a new one, because there's usually waiting lists, and most stores prioritize their VIP clients. Used market blew up around COVID, and people have made some pretty nice returns on flipping Rolex. Hell, I have a couple of co-workers that collect watches, and they mostly just store the real-deal in their safes, and wear high-end replicas in public.
But I get your point. Unfortunately there seems to be lots of kids in the the lower socio-economic classes that spend all their money on expensive sneakers, hoodies, and other luxury brand clothes. Spending $1k on a designer hoodie, when you make $15k / year, isn't the smartest financial decision - to put it mildly.
Not really. You can’t buy one at the stores - massive scarcity. And the grey market have appreciation priced in. Grey prices have dropped significantly in the past few months. The crypto bubble in watches has burst.
Pure trash. Be yourself, emulate whoever you want (or no one). Do what feels right. If someone looks down on you for riding a bike to work (regardless of your current "status"), #1 they are idiots and their respect and admiration is worth zero and #2 choke them out :). Life is too short for such ridiculous minutia.
I knew you were someone who could afford to "ignore" social cues. I used to think the tech-type was not like that until I observed some common threads, at lest in the Bay Area (driving an EV or planning to buy one - likely a Tesla, Patagonia vests, loves to hike, has an Apple watch)
I work in DevOps and check off literally none of the items you listed. I still get paid relatively well, and I don’t signal unless it’s required to maintain my job. I’m happy enough.
Seems to work pretty well for me, and I'm not rich and never have been. But I've always been very happy not caring about what other people think or making an impression.
Well... Copernicus did take a cue, he wrote his book and ideas and only published them when he was about to die (or postmortem I don't remember/can't lookup the details rn)
How dare you express anything that resembles sincere courage here. Elon Musk can afford that, but if others were to follow his lead, imagine how bad that would be for Big Tech management! Who knows, they might even get fired and replaced by one of these Elon Musk "imitators". What a horrible, horrible thought. /s
> In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones.
The example that immediately springs to mind, in the tech industry, is the "Steve Jobs Asshole" archetype.
Steve Jobs was a notorious manager, in that he made heavy-duty demands, did not suffer fools, and was blunt to the point of abusive.
But he was also able to filter for talent, cultivate it, and encourage excellence. He wasn't just an asshole. He was really smart, driven, and impatient with things that got in his way.
I have worked with two people, in my time, who worked directly with him at one time, or another, and they both hated him, but I have also worked with a number of folks like Steve Jobs, and have learned how to navigate them. It isn't pleasant, but it's generally worth it, to get on their good side.
Unfortunately, a lot of not-so-smart, and not-so-creative people have picked up on the "demanding asshole" part, without the "smart, selective, and creative" part, so they are just assholes. They honestly believe they are channeling Steve, but they don't get the same results (for the record, Steve Jobs had a lot more failures than successes, but his successes were off the charts).
The Steve Jobs example I immediately think of when talking about imitating unnecessary behaviors are all the people who started dressing like Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind as people who did this in an obvious way.
But the 'asshole boss' or authority figure archetype is an old one, from long before Steve Jobs, and it can be an effective motivational tool, although many of us, myself included, don't have the stomach for it. Obligatory pop culture example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrnAl6ygeM
Holmes yes, so obviously so that people remarked on it. Zuckerberg? The archetype of Steve Jobs' dress code is the black turtleneck and jeans. Zuck is famous for his consistent grey t-shirt and jeans, or sometimes hoodies.
Steve wore the same thing every day because that’s what Japanese workers at Sony did at the time.
It was common for Japanese engineers to wear uniforms just like factory workers do. You can look up pictures from Nintendo where they’re wearing jumpsuits designing Mario.
You have to be really careful about these sorts of things otherwise they become like the reccomendation algorithm on youtube or something.
One stray "water is nice out of a glass bottle" or picking out the yellow m&m from a bowl turns quickly into an assistant with a list of demands like "water, glass bottle, 9.4 degress. Bowl of plain M&Ms, no more than 76 no fewer than 38, yellow only"
> the people who started dressing like Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind as people who did this in an obvious way.
Zuckerberg was never known for copying the look of Steve Jobs. I doubt you can find multiple photos from different dates that demonstrates the claim.
Zuck wore zip hoodies and flip flops; the version of Jobs that Zuckerberg would have been exposed to did not dress that way (Jobs might have worn flip flops to work in the 1970s, given the era). Zuck wore plain, grey-blue, short sleeve shirts; Jobs did not. There isn't much to Zuck's sense of style beyond that it's simplistic and very casual - which is from the era he grew up in and how his young peers around him dressed.
Holmes by contrast did attempt to directly mimic the look of Jobs.
I'm not referring to copying the actual style but rather copying the habit of wearing the same thing as a way to avoid spending time making the decision of what to wear. This concept was written about ad nauseam about a decade ago, with Jobs as the inspiration.
I don't assume Jobs was the first one to do it, and it's certainly more conspicuous that Holmes was copying Jobs' style, but I do assume that people like Zuckerberg copied Jobs directly as a result of hearing that this was some little productivity hack for Jobs. I associate this period as the same time the 'personal brand' was becoming more popular, and people started aping Steve Jobs as a way to either deceive people just through perception or as a good faith attempt to be like Steve.
> “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. There’s actually a bunch of psychology theory that even making small decisions, around what you wear or what you eat for breakfast or things like that, they kind of make you tired and consume your energy. My view is I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than 1 billion people, and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life, so that way I can dedicate all of my energy towards just building the best products and services and helping us reach our goal and achieve this mission of helping to connect everyone in the world and giving them the ability to stay connected with the people that they love and care about. So, that’s what I care about. Even though it sounds silly that that’s my reason for wearing a grey t-shirt every day, it is true.”
> He then pointed out that others throughout history have done the same, like Steve Jobs, who was usually wearing a black mock neck.
I don't think that behaviour is an attempt to mimic Steve Jobs, or any kind of signalling strategy. It's an effective strategy for minimising cognitive load and energy.
> In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones.
That video was super interesting but I'm not sure the conclusion is correct. In the experiment with the children an authority figure (including full medical suit) was put in front of them and told them "do these instructions".
The chimp wouldn't have that pressure. It's not quite the same experiment.
It would be interesting if you put 5 boxes in front of children and told them they had 1 minute to get as many sweets as they could, if they would still follow all the steps.
There's no excuse to tolerate bad behavior. It's like an abusive relationship. When such a situation happens, you should start thinking of an exit plan ASAP.
There are also shockingly few areas where zero tolerance works. That is, don't silently tolerate bad behavior, but realize that many punishment oriented corrections are themselves bad behavior.
I will tolerate W amount of X bad behavior for duration Y if I receive Z million dollars at the end of duration Y, for values of Z that equal or exceed 1.
There is also example of devs thinking they are another Linus Torvalds. Being assholes because they think they are brilliant coders. Unfortunately most of the times these people were inventing unnecessary complexity not writing some great code.
Unfortunately I’m afraid the current version of this is the Elon Musk wannabes. What they don’t know is that many people that have worked for Musk have come forward from SpaceX and the like that say the only way to progress projects is to avoid his interference and/or learn how to present things to him in a way that he doesn’t sabotage it. I’ve worked for bosses like that before and it is terrible. Not only are you doing your difficult job task but you have a constant mini boss that pops up trying to spoil any forward progress.
In business, failure is the default outcome, not a negative. Someone who has failed 9 times and won big once is pretty much in the same place as someone who has tried once and succeeded once. Both are way ahead of someone who is 0-0.
I've seen the same. People see that to get things done, often you need to be unpleasant. So through logical acrobatics being unpleasant means they get things done. It even works for a while because it's true that if you're unpleasant you must be getting things done or you'd be gone.
Unfortunately, there’s an entire school of thinking that basically boils down to “pro-social behavior is ineffective and slows you down”. Their take is the “creative, selective” Steve Jobs was part of the myth. His real key to success was being able to push people. We are seeing history repeat itself with Elon Musk: so expect a new generation of entrepreneurs who think being a hardass is the key to running a successful enterprise.
Now, to be clear, shepherding great work out of your team is a hallmark of a good manager. But if you don’t even know what “good” is your efforts are in vain and you’d be better offer handing that autonomy over to someone who does. You cannot verbally-abuse your way to greatness.
In my non-U.S. hometown (people in the U.S. are, on average, much more shy in this context, oddly enough), this would have been considered extremely rude and awkward, and the boss would have been made fun of forever.
And not because he was in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, a respectable attire at the beach or pool, but not when other people are striving to present themselves at their best. Putting people down should never be fashionable.
Also, how could you ever know that for the purpose of the discussion? I feel like it would have to be pretty damn specifically made for a "generic" t-shirt fitting that specific example with "bespoke" brand indicia or something... Prolly overthinking this
Or it's just a miscommunication: The boss was throwing the party with the intention of everyone having a chance to relax and have fun, but everyone else saw it as a career opportunity and "dressed for success".
Then the boss doesn't understand that people aren't not going to treat him like their boss so long as they work for him. Ultimately that guy signs their paychecks, that dynamic is going to be unequal for the entirety of that relationship.
Yeah, there are multiple interpretations possible of such a situation; my describing this kind of situation in the context of a discussion of counter-signalling biases our interpretation. A host dressing the most casually possible means that none of their guests will be under-dressed, for example. Also, the culture and expectations of the work place matter.
The poorer you are, the more you are interested in appearing rich. Higher EV in that play allowing increased chances to mingle with rich class.
The richer you are, the more you are interested in appearing humble. Higher EV in signalling "money speaks, wealth whispers" message and appearing "down-to-earth" to win people over.
Very often it pays to do the opposite of what is expected from you.
there’s this paper scissors rock thing with wealth & money
poor: got to say you work hard when talking to middle class
middle class: got to say you work smart if you’re talking to upper class
upper class: got to say your work hard to peers, middle class, and poor, but reasons are different. for peers it’s because nihilism isn’t cool neither is being overly epicurean
everyone says the right narrative to the right people, no one really knows the truth
Oh I never lie about the fact that I don’t work hard. Literally never worked a hard day in my whole life. Yet I make bank for some reason that still eludes me.
I am painfully aware of my privilege working in tech which is why I don’t hide it, and try my best to spread it around in ways that aren’t self-gratifying. I’ve paid my friends’ rent, car repairs, groceries, plane tickets so they could be home for the holidays, venmoed my struggling friends so they could go out with the group, hooked them up with jobs, bought concert and festival tickets. Literally no one in my social circle is allowed to say, “sorry I can’t money’s tight.” My only conditions are that they not thank me, never pay me back in any way whatsoever, and tell no one.
One of the managers in my office does the same thing since he also grew up poor
and hungry. When your out to dinner with him you not escape without being stuffed to the brim, and dessert, and leftovers.
> The richer you are, the more you are interested in appearing humble. Higher EV in signalling "money speaks, wealth whispers" message and appearing "down-to-earth" to win people over.
Is that really the case though? Because I see a lot of university buildings and foundations named after really wealthy people. That's hardly "whsipers".
Yeah, but they aren't wearing Gucci loafers and drive a Toyota Corolla instead of a pimped out Rolls Royce Phantom, therefore they are "humble" and their names on University buildings just solidify how much they value "intellectual substance" over superficial things...at least that is what they want us to believe
If the actually rich people are dressing down-to-earth, why would you dress fancily to appear rich? Surely you want to also dress down-to-earth so you appear like the rich people do.
Because if are a nobody and noone recognizes your face people will heuristically assume you aren't a "down to earth billionaire", but are instead just a poor, average person and thus insignificant. Zuck can appear to be humble in his clothes, because everyone knows who Zuck is and people expect famous billionaires to be smug assholes, so this is a way to countersignal and pretend to be "just like one of you, guys". Since you are "just one of us", it's in your interest to appear as something more.
You may not be mistaken as a famous tech billionaire, but you may be mistaken as a well-to-do tech worker or even a tech startup lottery winner.
An example of this is in luxury retail stores, fancy/business clothing used to be such a strong signal of high status that retail workers there would often ignore you if you walked in wearing T-shirt & jeans because they'd think you couldn't afford it. Nowadays, that's a lot less likely, they know too many people dress like this for a retail worker to safely assume anything. There are a lot of wealthy people who aren't in the news all the time and a lot of them don't dress like a traditionally wealthy person.
"Higher EV in that play allowing increased chances to mingle with rich class" means that your intended audience is the actually rich people because you want to mingle with them.
I stand corrected; in that case I'd wholeheartedly agree. Do you have any concrete instances of when/where one might do this? (I'm having a failure of imagination, because IMX in capitalist countries people dress to impress their peers; the system is self-sorting as in Brave New World)
A techy scenario I just made up: you're in a common space (eg a bar, gym, or conference) in San Francisco where rich venture capitalists tend to visit, so you dress like they do to fit in. Your goal isn't exactly to portray yourself as rich, but you want to portray yourself as a certain class: not necessarily a millionaire but someone who is doing well and has industry experience & connections and looks like they could lead a successful startup.
One approach is to dress like other famous & successful tech founders: a nice T-shirt & hoodie. T-shirt & hoodie is also just comfortable and common, which is exactly why those famous & successful founders wear it, they're not showing off traditionally by wearing $10,000 tailored suits, they're wearing a T-shirt & hoodie that anyone could wear. Dressing up with a fancy suit might actually look odd amongst the Silicon Valley upper class.
Edit: Another interesting example I thought of when replying to another comment is in luxury retail stores, fancy/business clothing used to be such a strong signal of high status that retail workers there would often ignore you if you walked in wearing T-shirt & jeans because they'd think you couldn't afford it. Nowadays, that's a lot less likely, they know too many people dress like this for a retail worker to safely assume anything. There are a lot of wealthy people who aren't in the news all the time and a lot of them don't dress like a traditionally wealthy person.
> An example from Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland: If you’re a top executive, turning up to work on a bicycle is a high-status activity because it was a choice and not a necessity. But if you work at Pizza Hut, turning up on a bike means you can’t afford a car.
It must be so tedious to live having internalized this perspective on people. The vast vast majority of people are not "signaling" when they do things, they are just doing things. This constant meta game mostly exists in the minds of this iamverysmart crowd. Most people who ride bikes to work just like to ride bikes and find it to be a convenient way to get to work, they aren't giving a single thought to how it plays in some status game that nobody else they interact with is thinking about either.
Most of this is unconscious for the general population, the consequence of mimicry + social cues + emotional rewards. The person who shows up to Pizza Hut on a bicycle isn't thinking about social status consciously. Instead, they get slightly pitying looks from coworkers, which make them feel slightly inferior and ashamed, which makes them not do it again. The top executive who shows up on a bicycle gets no such feedback, and so they keep doing it.
You see "accidental countersignaling" from people who are generally oblivious to social cues, like folks with Aspergers or recent immigrants to a country, because the subtle feedback from other people doesn't register for them. These people tend to exist apart from the social reality and inhabit only economic and physical reality.
Articles (and comments) like this one are describing what's going on, not prescribing it. Basically nobody goes into a social situation thinking "How can I raise my social status?" The people who do come off as phonies, because the emotions involved operate very subtly and quickly and if it's not unconscious it's apparent to other people. But you can analyze the situation after the fact and describe what's going on, as well as try to train your unconscious offline to have better responses to the situation you were in.
> Instead, they get slightly pitying looks from coworkers, which make them feel slightly inferior and ashamed, which makes them not do it again.
No they don't! Is my point. This is almost entirely a story made up by this bizarro world of smart people who think themselves into circles (and aren't working at pizza hut). Nobody cares how someone gets themselves to their job at pizza hut; the other people working there aren't thinking about this, the person riding the bike there isn't thinking about this. This is just people like us with too much time on our hands to write substacks and debate silly things on internet message boards constructing castles in the sky.
> Articles (and comments) like this one are describing what's going on, not prescribing it.
I recognize that it is attempting to describe what's going on. I am saying that I think it is failing to accurately describe what's going on.
You seem to be in denial that this phenomenon exists. I’d suggest reading _The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are._ Quite insightful. Status matters more than you’re letting on, and the perception of it is subconscious. No one (hopefully) is actively making an effort to look down on someone for riding their bike to their job at Pizza Hut - but many subtle things get registered by humans around us every day whether you or they are aware of it.
From my perspective, it looks like you are in denial that this phenomenon doesn't exist. (Actually what I would say is weaker than that: what I think is not that stuff like this isn't a thing at all, but that it is ridiculously overblown by clever people who find it interesting to have this weird perspective on human nature.)
So cycling is high-status because most people do it? I can assure you that has nothing to do with high-status. You just can‘t break down everything into status-games.
Yeah. Off the top of my head I can think two pieces of popular media - The 40 Year Old Virgin and Cobra Kai - that had a scene where a guy lucks out and meets an attractive woman, asks her out on a date, the woman asks when he'll pick her up, he awkwardly tells her he has a bike and not a car, she makes a "what the hell?!" expression and then says how she guesses she'll be the one picking him up.
We can say that society exaggerates the importance of some of these things, or that they're less of an issue in certain circles. Or that it's easy to psyche yourself out about those issues and miss many of the opportunities around you. All true. But the issues actually exist, and aren't just from the imagination of a small group of people that overthink things.
Equally, it's possible to go even further in the "bicycle" direction to end up ahead of those with cars. Here's a delightful example: Rubberbandits "Horse Outside" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8 (NSFW at one point if you are listening closely and can understand the Irish accent, but unlikely to actually offend). The beginning might be boring, but it's short, so stick with it.
Riding your bike to work (what OP is talking about) and not having a car to pick up your date (what TLC were singing about) are two pretty different things. Coworkers don't care how you get to work. Dates care bacause they don't want to have to take the bus home afterwards.
> The person who shows up to Pizza Hut on a bicycle isn't thinking about social status consciously. Instead, they get slightly pitying looks from coworkers, which make them feel slightly inferior and ashamed, which makes them not do it again
This is not how social dynamic at Pizza Hut works.
> The vast vast majority of people are not "signaling" when they do things, they are just doing things. This constant meta game mostly exists in the minds of this iamverysmart crowd
I was telling my dad that we were going to try a new restaurant. "They churn their own butter," I pointed out excitedly. And my dad--who grew up in a village in Bangladesh--is like "why would they churn their own butter? You can buy it in a store."
People convey all sorts of messages through subtle signaling. They have an image they try to cultivate, even if only unconsciously. For example, people on the west coast wear hoodies and T-shirts to signal a sort of casualness. Meanwhile, I don't wear hoodies or T-shirts because I'm worried people might mistake me for a day laborer.
I don't think most people who say they're above it all really are. Maybe they are. Or maybe they're not as self-aware of their own motivations. Or maybe they're in a cultural bubble where they can't recognize certain social currents as signaling.
That's an odd take on the butter scenario. The obvious answer to your dad's question is "because although churning your own butter is not necessary, it can make a fresher and more interesting-tasting product than mass produced butter you buy at a store". When I look for restaurants that churn their own butter, I'm not looking to show off my status as someone who can afford unnecessary labor, I am actually "just doing things"; I am just looking for interesting and tasty food with interesting and tasty butter, I'm not trying to cultivate an image of myself as a foodie or rich person or avoiding being mistaken for a day-laborer.
I don't know why you've re-framed it into a status signal. Did you really value churning your own butter as a pure status signal and not for the benefits of artisinal butter?
To that dad, making your own butter was not a cultural signal showing your dedication to getting good flavor from butter, it just meant you were poor. If you could buy butter at the store, you were rich.
As someone who grew up in a second world country, things like making your own butter or having your own chickens were just a sign of poverty, not a signal of distinct taste.
That's not a status signal, it has practical non-status value. It can be fresher and taste better. You don't need to be upper or middle class to enjoy the taste of self-made butter, anyone, including the dad, can enjoy it. I'm not trying to imply that I have a higher status because I prefer the taste of artisanal butter. Just saying that out loud sounds absurd to just about anyone. What, poor/low-status people can't taste artisanal butter cultures?
Poor people in Western countries where even the poor buy supermarket produce will sometimes comment on the poor quality of modern mass market produce. You don't need to be in a different class or playing status games to taste the difference. If I look for an artisanal food, it's because it tastes better.
Edit: probably a more direct rebuttal is that the accusation is "They have an image they try to cultivate, even if only unconsciously" which means the person intends to signal who they are. Saying something is a "sign of poverty" doesn't mean anyone is cultivating an image or playing status games. It's not a game or a message to be visibly poor.
> For example, people on the west coast wear hoodies and T-shirts to signal a sort of casualness.
Again, no, they don't. I don't want to be too categorical here, I'm sure some people do this to signal something. But the vast majority of people wearing hoodies and t-shirts are just wearing comfortable clothes because they like to.
You find it unrelatable (and most commenters on this website will too.)
People can be broadly separated into 2 categories in terms of cognitive wiring for personality psychology. "People people" and "Things* people". (Theres a lot of overlap between interest in aesthetics and interest in ideas here too, but a separate discussion) These map rather neatly onto other things like introversion and agreeableness, but parking that for a moment. Additionally, "People people" can learn about 'Things' and "Things people" can learn about 'People'.
Things people (so lets say, your bog standard software eng.) And people people (communications director) do have one thing in common, which is assuming they understand how the other thinks. What is irritating minutae to one, is the essence of importance to the other. Talking about the superiority of UTF8, Linux or Vim might come across as repulsively "iamverysmart" to "People people".
Observing social signals as signals, and the various hierachical cues that inform and are informed by them is the essense of being interested in other people. We all adhere to varying degrees of social order. To disparage the rules is perilous and risks ostracisation (in the olden days, this meant you didnt reproduce and died).
This dichotomy is responsible for a lot of the mechanics of organisational hierachies. Not everything is a math problem.
It comes across as an obsession with image-management, rather than with skill-development or something similarly practical and useful. While there's some need for taking care of one's appearance (poor personal hygiene, for example, is unpleasant for the people around you), putting this at the top of the list of things to worry about doesn't seem very healthy.
It's also a characteristic of con artists of the SBF/Holmes etc. variety. Patrick Boyle's latest video, "Why We Trust Fraudsters!" explores this in some depth:
> The vast vast majority of people are not "signaling" when they do things, they are just doing things.
I agree with you that most actors don't consciously make decisions based on how they will be perceived and instead just do things.
However, I don't think that stops other actors from, without thinking themselves, taking those actions as signals and judging others by those signals.
We as the actors being judged can choose to think through those things or not. Either way we're being judged by those "signals". And either way I'm judging others based on those signals.
> The vast vast majority of people are not "signaling" when they do things, they are just doing things.
I've read Sutherland's "Alchemy" book and that's not how I remember him framing signaling.
Long to short, while - to your point - we are not all intentionally signaling, we are as receivers of inputs are constantly looking for and translating random input into signals.
The point being, whether you like it or not, you're giving off signals. Be mindful, or not. But if you go with the latter then you might at times be doing yourself a disservice because we as humans self-generate signals.
> His is a very counter "conventional wisdom" mindset. That appeals to me.
This is basically what I see going on here, and what I mean by "the iamverysmart crowd" (which to be clear: I am a part of). We overindex on this kind of counter conventional wisdom because it's more interesting. But I think it's more often the case that the boring conventional wisdom is closer to the mark.
> It must be so tedious to live having internalized this perspective on people. The vast vast majority of people are not "signaling" when they do things, they are just doing things. This constant meta game mostly exists in the minds of this iamverysmart crowd.
I think what you are missing is that they are signaling whether they realize it or not. A signal is just a discernible phenomenon that is given meaning by observers. It doesn't have be intentional.
An example: social counter-signaling often arises naturally and unconsciously. Think about the rich person who would rather not be recognized as such, or the person who is a bit carefree because they are beyond the grind. They don't consciously adopt a 'carefree persona', they just feel more at ease because of their life situation.
Agreed. He is just placing observations of real phenomena into a model. It's a bit like with economics. Prices "signal" all sorts of things that the entity setting the prices may not well be aware of.
That example is also super geographically narrow. In a lot of Europe it'd just be normal to ride a bike to work, no matter what the social or economic status of the person. In Australia where I am people would assume you're really into cycling as a sport, or really care about the environment (thankfully infrastructure is improving so eventually hopefully it gets to the more 'just normal' level). I don't think anybody would assume somebody who cycles to work is 'poor' here in any job though!
It’s not tiring at all, it’s just becoming acutely aware of the day-to-day socio-economic realities.
Yes, a good friend of mine can afford to be a (rather poorly paid) journalist because said friend is in fact a millionaire when it comes to his inherited real-estate assets, but someone like me (my parents had to rely on subsistence agriculture until not that long ago) has to always have a decent-paying job available or else.
Again, for people on the other side of the fence is not tiring at all, we’re very much aware of it each and every day. It’s not a new thing either, reading Balzac means reading about people on each side of the has real money/has no real money fence.
A rich person being a poorly paid journalist because they want to and can afford to isn't signaling, they're just doing something they want to do and which they can afford to do. Very very few people do such things simply for the sake of appearances.
You (and me, for what it's worth) always having to have a decent-paying job available or else is also not "signaling", it just is what it is, we have to work jobs because we have to work jobs, there isn't a status meta-game to it, it's just how we afford life.
It's the mindset of looking at things like your poorly paid journalist example, and thinking "that person is signaling" rather than "that person wants to be a journalist" that I find tedious and unrelatable.
I don’t think the author writes about the “in your face” signaling, because nobody does that anymore once a certain high socio-economic status is reached (mostly by birth-related accidents), but about the “implicit”, for lack of a better term, signaling. Which most of the people the OP talks about certainly do in abundance. In other words I think the author talks mostly about that “implicit” signaling.
This "implicit signaling" sounds indistinguishable from people just doing the things they choose to do on the direct merits of those things. My whole point is that this whole meta game of signaling status is way overblown. I just don't think the vast majority of people live this way at all.
This is one of my main frustrations with the whole "signaling" discourse. It's self referential; nobody can point out that it's silly without it just being more evidence that it isn't silly. It's an emperor's new clothes situation.
Tho they worry so much about it getting stolen I think they enjoy biking overall less than they would a bike suitable for just hopping on and biking around to different places.
If someone can afford to roll up to work on a bike that expensive, they are probably not worried about it getting stolen. Specifically, they either likely have somewhere to lock it up, or can afford to replace it (and/or have it insured). Make no mistake, rocking up to work on your Factor/S-Works/Cervelo/etc is a flex, either deliberately (look at my boutique, expensive bike, peasants), or subconsciously ("oh yeah, my bike? Yeah picked it up the other day, know the guy that owns the shop").
I have many biking acquaintances with darned expensive bikes and they are singularly unwilling to just bike to the lunch place leaving it locked to a parking sign pole. Diaclaimer: Pre covid data, now we are WFH
> The vast vast majority of people are not "signaling" when they do things, they are just doing things.
Well forgetting the fact that neither of us can prove what we think about this I do believe it's a form of signaling. At least in the sense that someone who does not have status if (from my observation over the years) less likely to do things that could further confirm or lower their status.
For example growing up my mom had a 'cleaning lady'. That cleaning lady would insist that when my mom dropped her off it was not in front of her house but where her neighbors couldn't see that another woman was dropping her off (because that would imply she was cleaning houses). Likewise an employee of my father (factory/warehouse work) would always change out of their clothes and travel home in something much nicer. And not because the clothes were dirty either.
I dress in a t-shirt and dungarees everyday. When I was younger (and also in my own new business) I wore a suit. Sure times were different but for one thing now I don't need to prove anything.
The one that always bugs me is when rich, successful people tell others to follow their heart or passion. It's easy to follow your heart once you're already rich. The other one is that rich people don't think about money, which is bullshit. It's all they think about, even if they don't show it.
If you interpret it generously, those rich people may acknowledge that it takes luck to succeed. If you follow your heart you at least have enjoyed the ride if luck doesn't strike.
Following your heart can also be a great filter. If you maintain some level of compassion and integrity, you will create a product that customers want.
IMO, you fell into the trap. At least IME, people with money are always thinking about making more money. Obviously they aren't thinking about how to pay for food, but they are thinking about what to invest in, how their investments are doing, what else can they buy with the money that will make more money.
> Successful people can afford to engage in countersignaling—doing things that signal high status because they are associated with low status. It is a form of self-handicapping, signaling that one is so well off that they can afford to engage in activities and behaviors that people typically associated with low status.
This analysis assumes that the successful person who engages in an activity is doing so because they are “signaling”, not just because they like to do the activity. When they do something to signal, it’s almost certain that the successful person’s “success” is driven by their ability to get others to copy their behavior, or put another way, they’re selling the activity or things related to it.
Edit: Examples are all over, but think of any product that a celebrity sells. (Heck, people even read HN because pg told them that smart, interesting people do it ;-) )
Seems decently researched but I don’t know why the author felt compelled to add unsubstantiated and totally unnecessary hyperbole about humans only having succeeded because of imitating the whole shebang. It doesn’t even make sense!
It makes sense to me. When an indigenous tribe has some intricate process for transforming a toxic plant into an edible food, and also has no knowledge of the chemistry, the only solution is to copy the entire process unquestioning.
We see the same behavior for hunting strategies, building strategies… social control.. religion.
That part the author only skipped over, but I think it's likely true: we are the species that does not just learn how to open boxes by imitation, we are the species that starts a cargo cult hoping for boxes to arrive.
In earlier days, we understood very little of the technology we had, even on the highest expert level. A chimpanzee that does not imitate but only watches to pick up the elements it understands would never be able to become bronze age, no matter the abundance of ore and fuel. The human on the other hand apparently has the ability to trust the unknown and try.
Imitating the whole thing is critical when you don't really understand what is important. For example, Manioc requires a seemingly arbitrary and elaborate series of steps to prepare so it's not (long-term) poisonous. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
This kind of signaling is the reason why I ended up voluntarily with no friends in my mid 30s, down from a pretty active social life in my 20s knowing hundreds of people and regularly hanging out with many dozens, mostly in the Bay Area but also in Europe, where I’m originally from.
As people get older, I noticed they just can’t stop flashing how successful they are, how they can afford this or that, and suddenly everything becomes a financial/status competition. People becoming small contract freelancers and flaunting to you how they are now “CEO and entrepreneur, what about you?”. One time, after a lucky IPO having been at the company for less than 2 years, I was told by a friend who was typically present in my weekly social life, and with whom I shared a lot of fun experiences in my 20s: “why do you work so hard rather than choosing a good pre IPO company and stay at the bottom and chill and retire in a couple years?”. No shit. That was the last straw. I voted with my feet and I am overall happier in a life of solitude.
Surely you must know people that just do-their-own-thing, rather than the fake aspirationals (often middle-class status seekers)?
I don’t think it is that difficult to tell the difference between the loving enthusiast (with say a gaming PC they built that looks like dreck using unpopular parts, with judicious use of expense), and the mere status chaser (with say a stupid expensive gaming PC with clichéd blingken lights, plus an enthusiasm for high-status parts and ranking behaviours). If engineers, find the true engineer types, rather than the wannabes?
I could imagine it is difficult in some suburbs that mostly have plastic people, but you said you are more worldly than that. There are poseurs everywhere, but there are definite patterns of behaviour that you can use to filter them out, regardless of their clique.
I'm not a misanthrope, and still enjoy the company of people. But. I used to status-jockey and be unconsciously and consciously obsessed with all of that, no matter the arena/ context/ subculture, etc. But doing a lot of inner work and unearthing what my core drives/ motives/ needs were, a lot of that status-jockeying and wanting to be in the in-group to feel this existential sense of acceptance and security started to come into focus, and a lot of old friendships became revealed as insecurity/ fear based (on both parties). And trying to introduce new paradigms to old friends became sort of the last-ditch effort to try to salvage relationships that were built on shaky foundation.
It also made me look back on when people tried to speak truth into my beliefs when I was still caught-up in wanting to be relevant and seen as high-status & outwardly respectable, and how I couldn't hear what people were saying.
I still wanna give people a chance, though, but accept them for where they communicate they are at and leave em alone if they're deep in that status-chasing game, and have no desire to explore getting out of that mess. There are still people out there who want to enjoy life and find meaning on other terms than getting validation from an anonymous audience/ jury that they believe has the power to approve or reject them.
That’s the whole point, you can’t deterministically know which company will make you rich in a couple years without a massive amount of luck (like my friend). My friend instead meant it as: “are you stupid? Why don’t you just do like me? It’s so easy and simple!”.
I clearly have a lot of startups and pre IPO companies under my belt, and he knew that.
Not all countersignals are that costly. For example, casual wear is common among devs. This signals that our skill set is valuable enough that we don't need to comply with corporate dress codes. Sometimes someone from a poor background turns up in a suit - for example, we had a QA guy who did, having converted from some previous career via a short course. Sometimes new grads come to interview in one, having been poorly informed by their parents or whatever. Continuing to wear different dress to your colleagues just makes them uncomfortable and doesn't help you, even if your skill set is not yet that valuable.
The more general piece of advice here is that you should take advice from those who have just succeeded at what you want to do, not someone who did so a decade or more ago (parental career advice is usually well out of date. For example, my parents imagined that an academic career was still the easier option)
Around ten years ago, I worked for IBM as a software engineer. The dress code at work was pretty casual, so I tended to wear jeans and a t-shirt in the office. One day, I was asked to speak at an event that would be attended by a lot of our customers. I asked my mentor, "Should I dress up? Should I wear my suit for the first time in years?" His response surprised me. He said, "These customers have come here to talk to engineers. Do you want them to think we've sent a salesman to talk to them." He made it perfectly clear that I should dress like an engineer. I confess I did get rid of the t-shirt; I wore a casual shirt with my jeans that day, and the folks that I talked to went away satisfied that they had indeed spoken with an engineer.
Perhaps dressing poorly (very common) and not being in shape (bimodal distribution, there are many in very good shape and many in very bad shape, few in between) started out as a counter-signal, but today it is just sloppiness, or convenience, like it is more convenient to order fast food instead of grilling chicken.
I work in the tech industry, and although I don't usually wear a suit, I often show up in a spezzato, a pair of pants and a jacket of a different fabric/color. Nothing too flashy, but well put together. And I think that's the counter signal nowadays: show up looking good, feeling good, being what we want to be.
I've personally never understood the business world's obsession with suits.
Like, what does a deal need to be signed in a suit? What does the suit contribute to the deal? If it's to convey "professionalism", surely a cheap $300 piece of attire shouldn't be a stronger signal than whatever due diligence the two parties have done already?
A suit wouldn't be the last signal checked, but the first - back which most things were done in person. It's not the signing of the deal that needs the suit, but the introduction. And once you've been introduced in a suit, changing it later is another signal that you may prefer not to send. As well as that if you've gone to the trouble of having a suit and maintaining it, you may as well wear it all the time rather than waste time figuring out if you need to wear it that day.
I think in the same way we have expensive cars or whatever to say "I have so much money I can afford to waste $x" we have suits to say "I'm so organised I can spare some effort dressing kind of impractically, just to look a bit better for you, my client"
> This signals that our skill set is valuable enough that we don't need to comply with corporate dress codes. Sometimes someone from a poor background turns up in a suit
Wouldn’t the best advice simply be to avoid unproductive signaling and be authentic when possible?
It’s one thing to signal by wearing nice clothes to a company outing where you make an impression on the person who can materially affect your future income.
It’s another thing to consider every aspect of your life in the lens of “what would the wealthy do?”
I really have no interest in allowing others to make decisions for me, and I don’t understand the mindset
It was at the "fashionably late" example where I started wondering if this chronicler of human behavior was themselves human, since arriving late to parties has very little to do with status and much more to do with not wanting to be one of the uncomfortable first or second guests. Late arrival is an expectation at ordinary parties, not a privilege.
Depends on culture. In some culture arriving late is a privilege, since everyone will be there to observe your entrance. Seats, food, entrance will be guaranteed for you. Heck, we see it in the US with the clubbing scene.
One of the best examples of counter-signaling was Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala. She wore a black dress that covered her from head to toe, including her face. It was kind of a statement that “even my silhouette is famous”.
Her father was a very prominent lawyer (including for OJ Simpson) so she had entry into “socialite” circles through him. Her fame increased when a sex tape involving her and a singer was published, and since then she has been a TV personality.
Just looked this up. This is surprisingly similar to how Kanye (Ye?) appeared on the Lex Friedman podcast recently. Even though they are split, is Kim still taking hints or strategies they learned or developed together? I actually could barely recognize Ye in terms of silhouette, but could understand his voice on the podcast.
I also went to a Kanye concert where he was putting a diamond studded full face mask on 5+ years ago in Philly where you couldn't recognize him. Should incorporate that into context as well.
> Humans haven’t been successful because we are innovators. Rather, we are successful because we don’t think for ourselves, and save time and energy by copying others.
This is just plain incorrect.
Humanity functions in three groups: creators, mimics and teachers.
The creators are the less cautious types that strike out and build new things, attempt to invent or innovate. Their personalities and behaviors are quite often noticeably different from everyone else.
Mimics copy, copy, copy. They're probably ~95-97% of the population. Their success depends on successfully copying other models that work.
Teachers primarily exist to train mimics, to amplify knowledge out to humanity. They're mimics with bullhorns and a desire to pass on things that have worked and knowledge acquired broadly by the species (lessons learned, etc).
This works, this is successful, initiate copy mode. And off it goes. Humans are exceptionally good at that for sure. We just got a remarkable, prominent, several decade demonstration of it at a global level in so called globalization. Creators are the ones that initiate the next things to be copied, the next things that get taught from a textbook in school, and so on (to be clear, most creators suffer terribly and never achieve much of anything; theirs is a low success rate, high reward path).
I was at a small dinner party recently and one of the guests arrived in a three wheel golf cart kind of thing. His other car is an orange Lamborghini Huracan. He got a degree in poli sci or some other liberal arts thing, but played in tech sales and eventually sold a gaming company to Google and has now worked with Google for several years. The conversation turned toward advice to our kids (everyone is 45 to 55 and has kids headed to college). At one point I said something to the effect of “The standard advise is that whenever you get to a fork in the road you should probably take the harder path.”
Without missing a beat, the other guest quipped “Yeah, take a nap”.
> One form of countersignaling is excess humility. It increases status for those who are already high status, but humility decreases status for those who are not high-status.
Great to see a scientific reason for one of my long held opinions: “humility policing” is a social tactic, and a very efficient one if you’re high status. Don’t fall for it. Resist the humility police. Give and claim credit where credit is due.
The problem with these online “status” discussions is that they discuss status as though it’s independent of the hard work and talent that typically results in success. I’m not saying that’s always present: some people just get lucky. But most of the people you probably want to emulate aren’t “just” lucky. They’re talented and worked hard to produce exceptional work over and over again, and then maybe also had some luck.
Anyway, the point here is that I’ve been fortunate to meet a number of really talented people at various stages of their careers, and many of the most talented ones really are humble. They act that way because they don’t need to be boastful about their work in the first place, and lack of humility is a really good way to make people resent you instead of helping you, which is counterproductive when you’re good at what you do. It also signals that you aren’t confident in your work, or that you’re overconfident and not careful. Both can be red flags.
Don’t know why I’m writing this. I just wish someone had explained these things to me when I was starting out in my career.
The other day I read an interview with a local guy in his 20s that struck gold with crypto, he'd invest something like $20k, and turned it into $40M. He basically went all in on one alt-coin before the marked exploded late last year, and the coin went up 2000x.
When asked about it, he of course came up with a narrative that this wasn't just dumb luck. He had had worked hard for those $20k, and he had lost his shirt many times prior to this. But in the end, he was patting has own back and saying that it was his savviness which resulted in his newfound wealth. And if others were to follow his steps, they'd need to spend countless hours watching the charts and reading whitepapers.
He had now mostly exited from crypto, retiring from his "old life", and being a full-time investor (VC for startups).
Can you imagine if some newspaper interviewed a recent lottery winner, with the winner detailing how he'd planned it all along? But to the ignorant, it all sounds very impressive.
The nuanced take is that luck is something that can be “made” through putting oneself in situations conducive to getting lucky through exposure, networking, and repeated attempts / not giving up.
You might be able to get successful people to admit that they were in the right place at the right time, but they’ll almost always qualify that with how much effort they put in to be in that situation.
If you want to catch a MLB game ball, you have to a) attend a game, b) pay attention to every ball hit, c) practice actually catching a ball, and (for some) bring a glove. If you're particularly savvy, you can even purchase tickets for seats in an area to where balls are commonly hit, and if you're determined, you can go to lots of games.
However, you're only getting that ball if it's hit in your direction. You can attend hundreds of games and still never have one hit close enough to catch.
While missing one or more preparation steps (e.g., attending a game) may rule out the possibility of catching a game ball, for every person who does catch one, there are dozens if not hundreds of people who prepare at least as much and still never do.
That’s true, and the extent of how necessary that existing wealth and support network is depends on the kind of venture. For starting a business, absolutely. But there are other kinds of success that aren’t as entrepreneurial.
I was presenting it primarily through the lens of a mindset that is undaunted by failure and having the motivation to avoid giving up prematurely.
Successful writers and entertainers often share stories about how they were rejected dozens and dozens of times before finally getting noticed. I have friends who wanted to change careers by moving to a different industry and they must have submitted hundreds of job applications before they managed to get their junior level role.
Not just rich people, successful people in general hate to acknowledge the role luck played in their success. It's really obvious on communities devoted to becoming successful at a certain hobby or venture, like blogging, video creation, live streaming, SEO/marketing, game development, startups, etc. Those who made it big will talk about it's all skill and how their amazingly strategies and hard work paid off, whereas those who failed will be talking about its all luck based, how their timing was off and how they didn't have the connections needed to succeed.
It's called self-serving bias, and it's everywhere in society.
Yes, this is generally underestimated. The closer I've worked with this class the more it becomes apparent in quiet anecdotes that don't always make the official bios or wikis.
Most self-made billionaires came from at least millionaire families.
Generally hard working, smart guys with a lot of skill & luck, but they start at a level we can only dream that maybe our children or grandchildren can start from.
I once worked for a billionaire investor who told us how he got started investing when his father offered him the choice at 13 years old: have his birthday party at one of the most famous & expensive hotels in NYC, or take the cash value of that to invest in stocks. The dollar figure seemed to be something like the equivalent of $50k in 2020 dollars. Much like orange man who got "a small loan of $1M from his father", I am sure the $50k given to a 13 year old was not the first or the last paternal investment.
Another firm managing ~$10B there was a guy who unbelievably made it to the C-suite in his 20s. It was never clear exactly what the connection was, but he was some sort of family friend of the founder and worked for him as a teen. He was also related to a big bank CEO.
> Another firm managing ~$10B there was a guy who unbelievably made it to the C-suite in his 20s. It was never clear exactly what the connection was, but he was some sort of family friend of the founder and worked for him as a teen. He was also related to a big bank CEO.
There are plenty of 1%-ers who work hard and they ascribe their success to their hard work and intelligence. But it ignores that there are many people who work harder, are more intelligent, or both, who don't get to those heights. That is the luck aspect.
If one is on top of the heap, it is convenient to believe in meritocracy, doubly so. On the one hand, it makes the person feel they earned what they have, and second it means the poor are also getting what they deserve and so there is no need to artificially prop them up. "Those people" should have worked harder.
Working hard implies the labor theory of value, which is that all work is interchangeable. While that might have been closer to the truth during the first industrial revolution, the variability in the value of labor has never been higher than today.
It's comforting to think that those that have achieved the best outcomes in life have simply sacrificed time spent on other things, and spent more time on work. There might be some truth in that, but often they have had better opportunities, due to both circumstance and luck, that they also have made better use of than average.
In the late 80's, heading into the early 90's I was working in manufacturing. Paid poorly, but man! I love that work. Had a great time, worked with people who had real skills and built up a set of my own too.
Saw the outsource waves coming hard. They were big and they were going to gut manufacturing. We all talked about it.
Few of us really did anything about it. I was one of the ones who did.
I started networking. Got out there, started having lunches with people, attending various groups, all sorts of stuff.
Fast forward today: I'm running a startup with a partner doing work with metal additive technologies after a 25 year run in CAD / PLM. Back to manufacturing as an reshoring wave is headed our way. For many doing the work the pay is still not great, but more opportunities are out there now than there have been for a long time.
My peers from that time period are mostly doing the same work, for almost the same pay ( and if that doesn't speak to some troublesome economic policy, I do not know what does ), or are employed in other fields.
A few of us moved up and into another class basically.
Lucky? Hell yes!
But, had I not done the networking, I know absolutely I would not be in the position I am in today.
In a basic sense, this all works a bit like a lottery or raffle. Consider each interaction with others a ticket.
The game is going to reward X number of tickets. And Y tickets may be rewarded due to unplanned opportunity happening as a result of a group of people realizing something is an opportunity that they would not have realized apart or in a different context.
There are Z tickets total, let's say.
People who are active in this way, talking with others, helping others out, seeking help, and doing projects, whatever they can do, get a lot more tickets than most people do.
And because of that they seem more lucky because more of them find opportunity than the baseline people not so active do.
Now, I have one other thing to say and that is about the "do what you love and money will follow" many people say is really only applicable to well off people who are somehow enabled to do what they love because their basic needs are covered somehow, or put another way, they are just not needy which frees them up to explore what they love.
The truth is many of us can do what we love and money will follow, but it's hard work!!
What I did was work my job and put 20 percent of my free time into "hobbies" that were skill builders toward "what I love" and that activity coupled with the networking and helping others is what got me a lot of those raffle tickets to better opportunities!!
I spent a ton of time doing electronics and programming on my own. A lot of it was retro computer based because I love retro computing. That 8 bit era is so damn much fun! I still love it. But, I also used it as a vehicle to build skills I would need later on, and it all worked out. Working on bigger systems helped too. I didn't put all my time into 8 bitters. I had SGI unix systems purchased off ebay, a couple pretty good Linux machines assembled from parts I got many different ways. And I setup an electronics lab made of second hand gear, some things I made myself, and a few gifts from people or trades I got helping others out too.
When opportunity presented itself I knew enough to be able to go for it and knew enough people to get help too.
Don't get me wrong. I've been lucky. Others I know will own their own luck too. ( in comfortable conversation )
But, I also maximized my chances. The cost was a bit less free play time than my peers had, but really it was also time I really enjoyed because it was invested in things I love to do and that really interest me. Mostly, I didn't catch as many movies and as many parties. No joke!
But, I had many more interesting lunches meeting great people doing all sorts of stuff!!
I am nor sure that was a cost as much as it was just living differently.
To sum up:
Sometimes a person gets noticed, or a co-worker can lend a hand up. This happens sometimes, but not too often.
More often a person gets noticed when they are active among other people. This happens more often.
Getting noticed is "that person deserves an opportunity", or "I know a guy who can get this done", or, "Did you see her project? It lines right up...."
Helping others often results in those others wanting to help us in return! Not always, but pretty often.
Doing stuff results in skills, stories one can tell, reasons to talk with others, and a general increase in competency and capability.
All that type of activity is what does tend to very seriously increase one's chance of a "luck" event happening!
They are also what can very seriously improve one's ability to take advantage of a "luck" event, which is what I call an opportunity, generally speaking.
All of what I just said is what one can do when having means, available capital isn't on the table. Wasn't for me. I came from poverty.
And there is no shame in poverty. It sucks. Way too many of us are there and it's not OK. There is a policy discussion to have one day soon. And we should have already had that discussion. Like I said, we should have it one day soon.
The shame, if there is any at all, boils down to those of us able to help others out not doing it. And in like kind, those of us needing help, some opportunity, not doing things to increase our chances of seeing opportunity and being able to act on it in a meaningful way.
*Labor theory of value*
I think you are right about work not being interchangeable. It's not been that way in my experience. Some work is. Other work isn't, and people and their basic nature vary widely too.
This does imply just working hard isn't enough. I don't agree with that at all!
What you do matters. And "working hard" means doing more of the kinds of things needed to improve luck more of the time in my view.
I bet there's a selection thing going on there. Most people, not being rich, aren't around rich people -- and so the rich people they "see" are exactly the type to not acknowledge luck, Trump perhaps being an extreme here.
“You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it’s called bad luck.”
By framing the problem like this you are making the assumption the variables are independent which is very much not the case. Your work can influence your luck, and even how much effect said luck has.
That hasn't really been my experience, but ymmv. But it's also why we should fight so much against centralization in the economy even if it brings efficiency gains. Ideally you'd want to have as large of a table as possible.
Many rich people do acknowledge it, because another way to say it is odds or opportunities. And you can absolutely increase the likelihood of getting "lucky" through work.
Maybe the real takeaway from his story is to bet big in a new market
to get rich. And if you lose it all, earn more and do it again. It would have happened in the early days of the internet just the same.
Yes, it's incredibly risky but at least it has a better chance than playing the lottery. Like Nassim Taleb says, bet on things with a limited downside and unlimited upside. And if you don't try, nothing will happen.
I mean, lets get Taleb exactly right here: He basically says don't invest "moderately," -- like putting your large amounts of money in stocks, even index funds, is a bad idea.
Invest in both extremes, barbell style. Put MOST of it in something bulletproof (he goes with Treasury Bonds) and then the rest as big bets on long shots.
Really depends on you goals and also current financial security. I would rather receive 50.000$ than a 10% chance at 500.000$. But a richer person would probably choose the latter.
It also helped that his father was a congressman and stock trader who brought Buffet around his finance friends throughout his youth and helped him start buying stocks as a young teenager.
Theoretically yes. Even putting it all on black in Vegas could work.
But it doesn't mean you should do it. Any investment is inherently a gamble, some are riskier than others and some have a too small payoff for the risk.
Granted that based on probability alone he just got lucky but from the details of the story it's not possible to be certain of that.
If he can offer a narrative about why and how he knew such a move would have such a result and the narrative fits with reality, then how is he not correct? Yes you can get both lucky and tragically unlucky when it comes to investments, but that doesnt mean there's no such thing as a rational investment with a high payoff. It's not impossible that's what he did, people do it, it does happen.
Yes, in any cohort of investors, by nature some random sample or going to outperform in any given year. In fact, statistically the concept of "hot hands" will rear its head because.. some subset of the outperformers will actually outperform over multiple years.
It may be skill, it may be luck, or it may be both.
But consider that this outperformance & hot-hand phenomenon can be replicated even in purely random games like coin flipping.
So sometimes taking the "winners" and trying to craft narratives of why they succeeded and what you should do to replicate them is a silly game.
I get what you mean and I agree to an extent, but to give an absurd example, if you knew of a company that had a patent on cold fusion, and you had watched it actually work yourself and deployed it at scale in a project successfully, investing in such a venture and having an outsized return would have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with probability.
For sure!
The point is that simply replication the behavior of winners is not any guarantee of winning.
Replicating SOME of the behaviors of SOME winners, upon careful study of what in their process actually allows them to differentiate themselves from others is the key, and is usually a process that requires a lot more work.
The work here was that they had some sort of investment process that required time & effort evaluating projects & their prospects over long time horizons. These sorts of processes require entire investment teams and are not the sort of thing that make it into their Fortune magazine blurb or pithy twitter posts.
The process cannot be summarized in a paragraph blurb, and even if you were to read a 300 page book you may not have the man-hours, technical skills or knowledge to replicate it.
> Can you imagine if some newspaper interviewed a recent lottery winner [...] But to the ignorant, it all sounds very impressive
the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect described by Crichton comes to mind here.
It is quite potent when media talk about crypto and usually involves evident logical fallacies that are not dissimilar to Orwellian double-speak.
Like the idea that cash is freedom so crypto supporters also support no cash limits, even though you can't buy crypto with cash and crypto cannot be converted directly to cash and people who won the crypto lottery keep their money in a good old bank when a good old investment manager handles them to buy good old banking products using good old FIAT money taxed by the good old government, because "freedom propaganda" is the best tool to sell a fraud to the ignorant.
Bitcoin Local offers the opportunity to meet a seller at a physical location. Same with Local Monero. If you're planning to exchange $10M, you'll probably need a couple of bag-carriers, and perhaps some muscle as well.
You can also trade for non-physical "cash", e.g. local bank transfer via escrow. As far as I'm concerned, that's a cash exchange.
I think local traders are expected to execute some level of KYC. In my experience (under £1K, online) that's a photo of me, holding my driving licence and a piece of paper syaing "I'm buying X from Y". I've never tried a physical cash trade in person.
Credit cards create credits (a liability). Debit cards create debits (a nearly immediate transfer from your account). Seems accurate enough to me although I can see how debt and debit could be confused.
When your account is credited, that means you gain money. That's the definition of "credit."
So yes, you are creating credits for the credit card company, against you. What you are gaining is debt/liability. Which why it's weird for it to be "your" credit card.
If I have a Chuck E. Cheese game token card, that doesn't mean I owe Chuck E. Cheese tokens.
It takes a certain combination of work/knowledge/luck to profit from anything in life.
Seems reductionist to equate buying low and selling at peak to buying a lottery ticket. But so it does to claim hard work has been the main reason why financial investors profit
>It takes a certain combination of work/knowledge/luck to profit from anything in life.
Plenty of people 'profiting' on the wealth of their parents, grandparents, etc. when they themselves have never worked a day in their life and don't have much knowledge of anything.
Inherited wealth is an obvious contradiction to the meritocracy that so many people believe we live within today.
If my response seemed to support the idea of meritocracy as a fact it was unintended. Obviously I missed "inheritance" or family-estate from the triad.
An extreme example of affording to countersignal were the "smarter" british cavalry regiments, which purposefully set their mess dues significantly higher than the pay, thus keeping out the riffraff.
Maybe I'd been overthinking it? I had been considering "I have a high-paying job" as signalling, and "My pay doesn't really cover the essentials, but I do it for our country, don't you know" as counter-.
Edit: and otoh I would consider "Boss is in shorts, t-shirt and sandals" as just plain signalling, because I grew up in a world (my favourite anecdote was working with a Hawai'ian VC who would classify meetings as "socks" or "no socks") where in any given business situation, those who have the gold dress down and those who pitch for it dress up.
I think we agree about the phenomena, it's just that the word "signaling" has a false lucidity -- it has an everyday meaning and a related technical meaning that's easy to overlook. The technical meaning is about an equilibrium in a game where "talk is cheap", so that your message would be discounted by observers unless some cost (not necessarily in money) is tied to it.
With countersignaling there's an extra level to the game where your message has the form "I have this quality over and above merely affording the first-level cost" -- now the cost you're paying is the risk of being taken for riff-raff. Those with more of that quality, whatever it is, have to be better at pulling that gambit off, for it to work as a countersignal.
You are under thinking it. Signalling is showing you have something high status (money, nice clothes, etc), countersignalling is refusing to show something to prove you don't need to.
Interesting. I'm not sure I'd call that counter-signalling though. But it is similar to a lot of other practices that have the effect of erecting barriers to participation by working classes, but give the appearance of self-less-ness. For example, in many US states, legislators receive little or no pay and must be available for sessions of the legislature for weeks at a time.
Wonder how many people who are treating all this seriously and talking in the comments about cars and watches as status symbols on another day would be shrieking about "woke virtue signalling".
I’m not sure it’s a deliberate form of counter signaling, but… I see a lot of people emulate the antisocial or neurotic traits of the highly successful based on the faulty premise that these are causal for their success.
Will doing heroin make you a rock star?
Might it be that Steve Jobs and Elon Musk succeeded not because of but in spite of some of their antisocial traits? Maybe you should emulate their work ethic and skills instead.
Elon Musk was reading books all the time when he was young...of course it will lead to even less social skills than what he would have had as he was growing up.
The ape experiment seems like it's been misinterpreted badly - including by the linked video. The kids are told they are "playing a game" whereas the apes are trying to pull the treat from the box. The children aren't being outsmarted by the apes, they are doing a different thing. Many toys and children's games involve arbitrary and pointless actions. The kids have been taught to do something, are told to do something, and then do it.
If you told the children their goal was to remove the gummy bear from the box with as few actions as possible they too would skip messing with the mechanism on top. The apes are playing one game (get the treat) and the kids are playing another (manipulate this box the way I show you). Comparing their actions and drawing conclusions is silly. It's like saying someone playing chess is missing a lot of moves that a checkers player made.
I agree with the overall argument of the article, but some of it is confusing in the point it's trying to make:
> In these studies, chimps are behaving more rationally than humans. There is no wasted motion to obtain the reward.
> Humans haven’t been successful because we are innovators. Rather, we are successful because we don’t think for ourselves, and save time and energy by copying others.
> In contrast, children will copy every single action, including the unnecessary ones.
Isn't the chimpanzee the one saving time/energy in this case since it's not engaging in superfluous activities and only doing what it's necessary for its goal? I was expecting the article to state that the point of human superfluous activity is that it allows for a greater range of experimentation (a superfluous activity might lead to an adjacent innovative/novel solution for a new goal that was outside of the original scope).
I do like this type of reminder, it's a good and clearly communicated message. It's interesting to me because at some level what the author is communicating is metrics 101 - when comparing performance across products/features/content/etc, normalize the timeline to time since launch. This is a simple principle and one that I apply often to work specific settings, but can easily forget to apply in social settings like the author describes. There's a lot of value to applying a semantic layer to your life, which is obvious but challenging due to influence of emotions and the lack of clear goals.
I wonder how kids educated in the Montessori fashion would behave during the box experiment. Is this telling us about children or the educational system?
>"...Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
>Hard work increases the likelihood of luck finding you, and hard work also prepares you for when it does.
You can't reliably produce luck, even by imitating people that are "lucky"; all you can do is increase the likelihood that you might capitalize on luck.
This is true in a very deep sense, and this human desire (let's even call it compulsion) to imitate others can be used to base an entire anthropology on, as René Girard did quite masterfully. For anyone interested, I strongly recommend reading "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning".
Every moment spent contriving and derisking a plan to virtue signal to born followers is better spent talking to leaders and figuring out which calculated risks to take.
This tidbit reminds me of a similar anecdote (that my experience aligns with) re: the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style. They probably still own a $70k Volvo (or now Tesla) anyway :-). In these scenarios I think it's because the $2k watch or $70k car is too easily attained by lower classes that they are no longer considered signals by the upper classes. However blowing $500k renovating a perfectly livable home, or $10k on an appliance you could spend as little as $1k on.. is not.
Another countersignal that the article points in the direction of is level of professional vs casual attire in the workplace. My friends and I are far enough in our careers that personally I've worn sneakers to work for the last 10 years, no business slacks, and sporadically tuck in my collared shirt. The last round of job searching doing zoom interviews, I wore my hoodie for half the calls. If I had done this while job searching out of college, during my internship, or at my first job.. I would not be where I am today.