freyley comments on High Status and Stupidity: Why? - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 January 2010 04:36PM

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Comment author: freyley 14 January 2010 07:43:24PM 10 points [-]

The thing I've noticed about high status people is that they're only interested in associating with other high status people. But low status people are interested in associating with high status people. So high status people seem to spend a lot of time assuming that the person who just came up to talk to them is only interested in shining in their status. So a hypothesis:

  • More time defending status than low status people need to spend
  • Energy spent identifying need to defend status prevents engaged interaction with many of the people who come up to them.

To test this hypothesis, I would argue that high status people are more intelligent when they are in either contexts where they only interact with high status people or contexts where no one knows they are high status than they are in contexts where they interact with low status people who know who they are.

I've seen this with people who have high community status -- they're more intelligent in communities that they're not usually members of.