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Everyone Can Be High Status In Utopia — LessWrong

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In Rubber Souls, Bjartus Tomas argues that we can have cruely-free status games by creating underpeople without moral worth, perhaps because they are non-conscious, worth to serve as our permanent underclass. This removes the current problem where some poor bugger has to be at the bottom of the barrel, or the bottom quarter or half or so forth. Needless to say, I approve. But I think it's worth fleshing out a bit why this is possible, and why you won't wind up with everyone associating humans as a high status source of esteem as underpeople as a low status source. We build our sense of self-worth not from some abstract global ranking, such as percentile ranking of wealth or h-index, but through comparing ourselves to people in our social circles. So in the glorious transhumanist future where the labs somehow avoid flubbing it, Dario Amodei may be God-Emperor of the universe, but as long as he's far from your social graph, and your social graph has nary a whisper of him, then you're not

x Everyone Can Be High Status In Utopia — LessWrong World Optimization Frontpage 13 Everyone Can Be High Status In Utopia by Algon 1st Dec 2025 2 min read 5 13 In Rubber Souls , Bjartus Tomas argues that we can have cruely-free status games by creating underpeople without moral worth , perhaps because they are non-conscious, worth to serve as our permanent underclass. This removes the current problem where some poor bugger has to be at the bottom of the barrel, or the bottom quarter or half or so forth. Needless to say, I approve. But I think it's worth fleshing out a bit why this is possible,

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