# Status Is The Game Of The Losers' Bracket

This post is written as a series of little thoughts and vignettes, all trying to gesture at the same idea. The hope is to convey the gestalt.

* * *

Consider the game of middle management, of climbing the hierarchy at a big company. The status games, the [simulacrum 3/4 games](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels), the politics, the [moral mazes](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS), all that jazz.

Then, open up Forbes’ list of N richest people, and count how many of them got on that list by climbing the management hierarchy at a big company.

I predict that, to within reasonable approximation, the answer will be zero. Nobody gets on Forbes’ list of richest people by climbing the hierarchy at a big company. They get on that list by founding a company, inheriting, or both.

I claim there’s a generalizable pattern here. Society has some kind of competition, in this case the competition of who gets the most wealth. That game has a winners’ bracket, in this case Forbes’ list. And then it has a losers’ bracket: a bucket of people who aren’t even in the running for the winners’ bracket, but are still nominally optimizing for the same objective (making money). The generalizable pattern - I claim - is that the losers’ bracket is where simulacrum games, status games, politics, etc dominate.

In other words: status is the game of the losers’ bracket.

* * *

The standard model of countersignalling involves three levels:

*   People “at the bottom”, who are *unable* to send some signal (e.g. they can’t afford an expensive brand-name handbag)
*   People “in the middle”, who distinguish themselves from the bottom by sending the signal (e.g. they buy the handbag and carry it around)
*   People “at the top”. They are so *obviously* not “at the bottom” that they don’t even need to send the signal. They “countersignal”: they make a point of *not* sending the signal (e.g. pointedly not buying the handbag and viewing such things as lower-status), in order to distinguish themselves from the middle.

In this game, the top is much less constrained than the bottom or middle. The middle is the loser’s bracket: they’re not even in the running for the top, but they’re still trying to play the game. Their moves are forced: they have to pay for the handbag and tote the thing around. The top, on the other hand, has much more freedom: they need to *not* buy the handbag, but that leaves a huge range of things they can do instead; the whole space of things with no particular signalling associations.

Personal example: back when I was working as a data scientist at various startups, my mother would tell me to wear a suit when interviewing. And I would be like “Mom you do not get it, that would absolutely tank my chances of getting hired except at companies so bad I don’t want to work there, the only people who wear a suit for an interview in tech are the people who don’t think they can cut it on their technical skills *and the people hiring know this*”. I had the skills. I was definitely playing the winners’ bracket in that particular game. Throwing in something like a suit, the sort of signal used in the losers’ bracket, would have been a terrible move.

* * *

There's just a whole lot of stuff like the above where I see people behaving in decidedly unwholesome ways, and when wearing my default hat of considerable cynicism, I'm like "for fuck's sake will you *please stop shooting yourself in the foot like a complete fucking dumbass* and just *do the wholesome thing* which is in fact the strategy that will net you the most points here regardless of how much you care about wholesomeness in its own right".

... or another way to express the unifying theme, with less loading on exasperation, would be something like "... man, I don't think this person Gets It, like they're trying to <play simulacrum 2/3/4 game> and they think they're being clever but in fact they're just playing the wrong game altogether and don't really understand how this whole thing works or relates to their goals".

* * *

Back when applying to college, I was basically told that there’s basically two separate games going on in admissions to top tier colleges.

*   Some kids are just an obvious “yes”, their skills or track record include insane things way beyond what a high schooler normally achieves. That’s the winners’ bracket.
*   The bulk of the slots will be filled out by a lot of people who look largely similar, with only marginal differences. That’s where various semipolitical games can bump one slightly ahead of other marginal people. That’s the losers’ bracket.

* * *

Supposedly, it’s usually a lot faster and easier to get a high-up job in a corporate hierarchy by founding a startup and then “moving sideways” into the big company, than by just climbing the ladder from the bottom.

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Level 0: Naive ignorance of simulacrum levels beyond the first; “the chump”/”the mop”

Level 1: Playing the [simulacrum 2/3/4](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) game

Level 2: … y’know, the whole simulacrum 2/3/4 game is very mid. The whole thing caps out at mediocrity/[leading the parade](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LKC3XfWxPzZXK7Esd/leading-the-parade), and it largely impairs one’s ability to climb the *real* power ladder.

Note that these three levels map nicely to baseline/signal/countersignal. Often people talk about the “barber pole of fashion”, where there’s a whole bunch of sequential levels of people trying to distinguish themselves from those below. But I think in practice there’s more often just the three levels, because once one hits level 2 the whole social signalling game just isn’t the main game anymore at all. The winner’s bracket isn’t focused on signalling games, it’s focused on something more object level.

* * *

EA global is notoriously a networking event. Occasionally people ask me if I’m going to the next one, and… I try to be polite. But my internal reaction is something like “oh god no, I absolutely cannot be seen at an EA global, that would be super cringe”. EA global, like many other effective altruism branded “networking events”, is (at least in my head) the losers’ bracket of the effective altruism job market.

(Disclaimer: this is not to say that the right amount of networking is literally zero.)

* * *

The phrase “status is the game of the losers’ bracket” sneaks in some additional connotations. It’s implicitly saying “people who focus on status games are losers”.

Time to be explicit: yes, the large majority of the time, my internal reaction to people who visibly mainly focus on status games is "ah, this person is a loser". This is not kind, but it sure is true and important, and I endorse the incentive gradient created by the smackdown. Get your shit together and go play the winners’ bracket. If you truly can’t handle the winners’ bracket, pick a different game to play. Stop wasting your life in a rat race of mediocrity.

* * *

Political games can, at best, get stuff from other people. The good stuff - the real power - is the stuff which other people don’t have to offer in the first place. The stuff which nobody is currently capable of doing/making.

From [When Money Is Abundant…](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/xEFeCwk3pdYdeG2rL/p/wEebEiPpEwjYvnyqq):

> After a certain point, wealth and power cease to be the taut constraints on one’s action space. They just don’t matter that much. Sure, giant yachts are great for social status, and our lizard-brains love politics. The modern economy is happy to provide outlets for disposing of large amounts of wealth and power. But personally, I don’t care that much about giant yachts. I want a cure for aging. I want weekend trips to the moon. I want flying cars and an indestructible body and tiny genetically-engineered dragons. Money and power can’t efficiently buy that; the bottleneck is knowledge.