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points by somesortofthing 11 hours ago | 0 comments

People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.

Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.

[–] OrangeDelonge 3 hours ago

I feel (and not saying it to upset people) that this perfectly describes playing time-sink MMOs like WoW or Runescape.

[–] trashface 38 minutes ago

As someone already essentially living the simulated life, I believe the problem with MMOs is they aren't built to withstand the amount of time a person with nothing else to do can throw at them. So then they get boring, and I end up reading hacker news and making dumb comments, and asking claude inane questions, or generally trying to find other simulation-friendly way to spend my time (not interacting with people though, that is hard mode).

[–] 0x1ch 10 hours ago

To a lesser extent, myself and others already are in the 'simulation'. I go to work, go home, play some games or muck around in my lab, repeat. I don't really have aspirations or an outside presence, just focused on ignoring every manmade horror that has been shown to us over the past four years.

[–] digitalsquare 10 hours ago

The movie The Congress explores the ideas of control through society-scale simulation and the loss of one's real identity when immersed in that setting, much like what you suggest. It's a visual trip, thoroughly thought provoking, and I highly recommend it

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/

[–] creata 9 hours ago

> Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force

But why would you even want that? They like it in the simulation, and nobody really wants to deal with them outside the simulation.

[–] archimedes237 6 hours ago

Because if they check out into the simulation then the people formerly above them are now the lowest on the totem pole and maybe they dont want that.

[–] creata 1 hour ago

They've already "checked out" in reality (NEETs, etc.) but they're still "lowest on the totem pole". The people who feel superior to them seem content to do so from afar, to belittle them from the comfort of social media.

[–] articulatepang 8 hours ago

My math brain is immediately broken by your irrefutably correct induction argument!

[–] Apocryphon 11 hours ago

I don’t fully agree with your thesis, but good prospective future model version names.

[–] SpicyLemonZest 10 hours ago

Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.

[–] lurk2 9 hours ago

This was Nietzsche’s chief criticism of Christianity. It is also a good summary of Reddit morality where social rejects build an inverted status pyramid. It’s amazing how Google made a few bad decisions on Search and it led to some of the most maladjusted people on earth becoming the internet’s point of reference for what is normal.

[–] andai 6 hours ago

Wait, how does Google fit in with it?

Also, Nietzsche's Last Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

> The last man is the archetypal passive nihilist. He is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security. Therefore, the last man is unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos.

[–] zmgsabst 7 hours ago

There’s a less cynical take:

We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.

Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.

[–] SpicyLemonZest 1 hour ago

That's fair, I meant it in a more loving way than it came across. One of the great things about human culture is that we're happy to form impromptu hierarchies like that. You even have friend groups where people are happy to win an n=1 status game by being "the jeans guy", and everyone happily tells them how cool it is that they're so into selvedge denim.