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JGWeissman comments on The strongest status signals - Less Wrong
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Do you agree that this weak evidence still allows for a large difference in status between interacting parties?
That seems to be required in order for the situation to work; going to a concert, everyone present has acknowledged the high status of the rock star. This is what makes the attention so valuable.
So what? The fan now feels they have slightly more status than before and therefore feel happier.
So, you should abandon or more tightly qualify this claim:
Maybe I need to clarify that the "activity" should be a high involvement one. Like an argument, long conversation, dancing, working together, etc. Because these activities are high involvement, each participant in the activity has good evidence they're approximately the same status level as the others.
So, what about the interaction between a professor and an undergrad, or a boss and an employee, a judge and a defendant?
High involvement is not a sufficient discriminator.
First off, in those interactions the lower status person still has a substantial amount of power over the higher status person - just less. And if you pay attention to those interactions you'll notice the higher status person is much less reactive.
Your original claim is that "engaging in an activity with others" prevents "any signals that reliably indicate they’re much higher status the other".
As we considered examples, you have modified this claim to require that the activity require "high involvement", and now that there is an exception if the higher status individual is "much less reactive". It seems to me that these exceptions do not come from an actual understanding of status interactions, but from over fitting the data of the counterexamples I provide.
So I could point out further that in office hours, a professor is reactive to the undergraduate student, or that a supervisor will respond with approval or disapproval based on the performance of a low-level employee, and wonder what characterization of these scenarios will you dress up as an excuse for your theory. But I suspect, if we really looked at all possible counterexamples, we would end up with something like "people cannot reliably signal high status when they cannot reliably signal higher status".
Or, you could reject your strong claim, and replace it with a weaker claim that engagement with a person does signal some status for them, in proportion to the level of engagement, but this is one of many factors, and can be dominated by other signals of status.
I realized that I may be begging the question by stipulating that the activity has to have high-involvement. Because by definition, both parties are more reactive in a high-involvement interaction, and therefore, both parties are approximately the same status level.
My main point is that reactivity provides the strongest evidence in determining respective status levels. The degree of engagement in an activity between people is a good measure of reactivity and therefore a good measure of relative status levels. I am saying that any other reference class of status signaling (like chosen topics of conversation), will be less accurate in determining status levels. The most relevant attribute of behavior is the degree of reactivity.
No matter how initially involved participants in an activity are, the status levels can change as their degree reactivity changes. For instance, if an employee starts to act less reactive than the boss while working together, it's evidence the employee has higher status i.e. more power over the boss.