# Evolution did a surprising good job at aligning humans...to social status

*\[This is post is a slightly edited tangent from my dialogue with John Wentworth* [*here*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aaYZM4kLdHP3pwtfQ/on-the-lethality-of-biased-human-reward-ratings)*. I think the point is sufficiently interesting and important that I wanted to make it as a top level post, and not leave it buried in that dialog on mostly another topic.\]*

The conventional story is that natural selection failed extremely badly at aligning humans. One fact about humans that casts doubt on this story is that natural selection got the concept of "social status" into us, and it seems to have done a shockingly good job of aligning (many) humans to that concept.

Evolution somehow gave humans some kind of inductive bias (or something) such that our brains are reliably able to learn what it is to be "high status", even though the concrete markers for status are as varied as human cultures. 

And it further, it successfully hooked up the motivation and planning systems to that "status" concept. Modern humans not only take actions that play for status in their local social environment, they sometimes successfully navigate (multi-decade) career trajectories and life paths, completely foreign to the ancestral environment, in order to become prestigious by the standards of the local culture. 

And this *is* one of the major drivers of human behavior! As Robin Hanson argues, a huge portion of our activity is motivated by status-seeking and status-affiliation.  
  
This is really impressive to me. It seems like natural selection didn't do so hot at aligning humans to inclusive genetic fitness. But it did kind of shockingly well aligning humans to the goal of seeking, even maximizing, status, all things considered.[^n2kfqkkqfuh]  
  
This seems like good news about alignment. The common story that condoms prove that evolution basically failed at alignment—that as soon as we developed the technological capability to route around the evolution's "goal" of maximizing the frequency of your alleles in the next generation, to attain *only* the proxy measure of sex, we did that—*doesn't* seem to apply to our status drive.

It looks to me like "status" generalized really *well* across the distributional shift of technological civilization. Humans still recognize it and optimize for it, regardless of whether the status markers are money or technical acumen or h-factor or military success.[^qqxjyzdny6c]

This makes me way less confident about the standard "evolution failed at alignment" story.

[^n2kfqkkqfuh]: I guess that we can infer from this that having an intuitive "status" concept was much more strongly instrumental for attaining high inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment than having an intuitive concept of "inclusive genetic fitness" itself. A human-level status seeking agent with a sex drive does better by the standard of inclusive genetic fitness than a human-level agent IGF maximizer.The other hypothesis, of course, is that the "status" concept was easier to encode in an human than the "inclusive genetic fitness concept, for some reason. 

[^qqxjyzdny6c]: I'm interested if others think that this is an illusion, if it only looks like the status target generalized, because I'm drawing the target around where the arrow landed. That is, what we think of as "social status" is exactly the parts of social status in the ancestral environment that did generalize to across cultures.