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wedrifid comments on Selfishness Signals Status - Less Wrong
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For reasons I perhaps don't fully understand this, and threads like it are unsettling to me. Doesn't high status confer the ability (and possibly duty, in some contexts) to treat others better, to carry their pack so to speak? Further, acting high status isn't necessary at all if you actually have it (it being the underlying competence status (supposedly, ideally) signifies. I am a high status athlete (in a tiny, circumscribed world) and in social situations try to signify humility, so others won't feel bad. They can't keep up, and if made to feel so, will not want to come again. Maybe in this forum we just want to drop anyone who can't keep the pace. If I see someone acting supercilious/indifferent, signaling status on all frequencies, I will infer you have something to hide, or strong feelings of incompetence that need to be stroked. Now we can play the game of you know I know high status signallers may be compensating, but it's a silly game, because faking status, if that's what you want, is only a temporary fiction. Any close relationship will soon scrape through that whitewash. Unfortunately, (I think) poseurs do manage to get by quite well in the world, by exactly the techniques being discussed here. Maybe everybody should get a tattoo with their VO2max and IQ right on their forehead?
Keep in mind that describing something is not the same as approving or advocating. I would like it if status was used in the way that you describe. Sometimes it can be, and is, used that way. But it is a mistake to assume that status is supposed to be a measure of competence and an even greater mistake to expect it to be correlated (positively) with treating others better. It just isn't.
It's a silly game, but it is one that is played right down to the very core of our instincts. And it is right through to the core of even those 'close relationships' you mention. You can't avoid the game. Just find the parts of it you like or are of particular use to you and satisfice the rest.