LW - [Valence series] 4. Valence and Liking / Admiring by Steven Byrnes

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Valence series] 4. Valence & Liking / Admiring, published by Steven Byrnes on June 11, 2024 on LessWrong. 4.1 Post summary / Table of contents Part of the Valence series. (This is my second attempt to write the 4th post of my valence series. If you already read the previous attempt and are unsure whether to read this too, see footnote[1]. Also, note that this post has a bit of overlap with (and self-plagiarism from) my post Social status part 2/2: everything else, but the posts are generally quite different.) The previous three posts built a foundation about what valence is, and how valence relates to thought in general. Now we're up to our first more specific application: the application of valence to the social world. Here's an obvious question: "If my brain really assigns valence to any and every concept in my world-model, well, how about the valence that my brain assigns to the concept of some other person I know?" I think this question points to an important and interesting phenomenon that I call "liking / admiring" - I made up that term, because existing terms weren't quite right. This post will talk about what "liking / admiring" is, and some of its important everyday consequences related to social status, mirroring, deference, self-esteem, self-concepts, and more. Section 4.2 spells out a concept that I call "liking / admiring". For example, if Beth likes / admires Alice, then Beth probably is interested in Alice's opinions, and Beth probably cares what Alice thinks about her, and Beth probably is happy to be in the presence of Alice, and so on. Section 4.3 suggests that liking / admiration is a special case of valence, where it's applied to a person: if "Beth likes / admires Alice", then the concept "Alice" evokes positive valence in Beth's brain. Section 4.4 proposes that we have an innate "drive to feel liked / admired", particularly by people whom we ourselves like / admire in turn. I speculate on how such a drive might work in the brain. Section 4.5 discusses our tendency to "mirror" people whom we like / admire, in their careers, clothes, beliefs, and so on. Section 4.6 discusses our related tendency to defer to people whom we like / admire when we interact with them - i.e., to treat them like they have high social status. Section 4.7 argues that feeling liked / admired is different from having high self-esteem, but that the former can have an outsized impact on the latter. I also relate this idea to the dynamics of self-concept formulation - for example, when we split motivations into externalized ego-dystonic "urges" versus internalized ego-syntonic "desires", we often tend to do so in a way that maximizes our self-esteem and (relatedly) maximizes the extent to which we implicitly feel liked / admired. Section 4.8 is a brief conclusion. 4.2 Key concept: "liking / admiring" I'm using the term "liking / admiring" to talk about a specific thing. I'll try to explain what it is. Note that it doesn't perfectly line up with how people commonly use the English words "liking" or "admiring". 4.2.1 Intuitive (extreme) example of "liking / admiring" I'm Beth, a teenage fan-girl of famous pop singer Alice, whom I am finally meeting in person. Let's further assume that my demeanor right now is "confident enthusiasm": I am not particularly worried or afraid about the possibility that I will offend Alice, nor am I sucking up to Alice in expectation of favorable treatment (in fact, I'm never going to see her again after today). Rather, I just really like Alice! I am hanging on Alice's every word like it was straight from the mouth of God. My side of the conversation includes things like "Oh wow!", "Huh, yeah, I never thought about it that way!", and "What a great idea!". And (let us suppose) I'm saying all those things sincerely, not to impress or suck up to Alice. T...