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Liron comments on Selfishness Signals Status - Less Wrong
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This is not particularly accurate, or, more precisely, I'd like to see evidence that this is how people act. The president of the US, for example, cannot act strictly selfishly. Kings of old generally couldn't either - they had nobles to keep happy and so forth. While there are cases where selfishness is an option because of high status, there are many cases where people prevent themselves from being successful because they are selfish. Indeed, there are many people who are unsuccessful because they are particularly disagreeable - they'd need to be high status to get away with their behaviour, and they're not, so they don't. Thus, merely observing that someone is selfish is, in a Bayesian sense, not even necessarily evidence that they are high status.
This post is yet further evidence that one should approach any status-based explanation with extreme skepticism. Saying that "Standing up straight is low status" seems completely wrong to me. I coach collegiate public speaking competitions, and having erect posture contributes very heavily to one's presence. Standing up straight is something naturally done by confident, successful people, in my experience, and thus signals status. Likewise, slouching or trying to appear small seems like a logically low-status thing, as you are trying to prevent yourself from looking like a threat. Similarly, blowing your nose in a group of people seems like something the extremely socially awkward (or elderly) would do. Some high-status people could get away with it, but they'd be high status despite, not because of this activity.
The correct way to establish X as a high status activity would be, it seems, to show that, "If you take 1000 people who do X, Y are high status." The higher Y, the more X shows status. Obviously this is rough, but the point is you can't do it a priori; saying "X is high status" should reliably predict something about people who do X.
President of the US is not an instance of the category I was describing. Think African strongman.
You're just moving the goalposts. The problem is that there are many, many high status people who cannot or do not behave like this, and there are many low-status people who can and do behave like this.
The main problem is that "high-status" does not carve out the space you are describing. It describes someone with a lot of power. This is purely situational and may or may not coincide with high status. The only electrician in a small town can get away with saying or doing all kinds of things that other people can't. Likewise the African strongman, or the schoolteacher, or the government bureaucrat. Power is the determinant here, not status. Selfishness signals power, which may or may not signal status.
The other problem is that, once someone's status is low enough, their behaviour may be incapable of influencing it, so they may behave selfishly because they have basically nothing to lose.
At this point, I'd also throw in that you really haven't defined what you mean by "selfish" and what constitutes "getting away with it," both of which would probably help. This whole post is riddled with vagueness, and I think that vagueness helps to either mask the lack of a point, or to distract from an actual good point you have not made.