You are worried about hypothetical people that say they are happy with their current social status when they really are not.
Yes. Or when they want things that higher social status can help them achieve, which they don't realize or are in denial about.
To make an analogy again to money, there are lots of people who say that they don't care much about money, or don't like the process of making money, but who want things (e.g. possessions, getting out of debt, donating to charities, or whatever), that can most efficiently be achieved through having more money than they currently have. For instance, let's say we have someone who is in $10,000 credit card debt, who would love to donate to SIAI, but who says that he isn't very concerned with money. At face value at least, something isn't matching up.
What I encourage is for such people to (a) do some soul-searching about what their actual goals are, (b) be realistic about what means it will take to achieve those goals, and (c) attempt to avoid bias in an evaluation of the costs and benefits of those means.
I would want my example person to assess the value of paying off his debt and donating to SIAI, and what he is going to need to do to achieve those goals. Making some money is not the only way to achieve them, but it is one of the most direct ways. As a result, I would encourage an analysis of the costs and benefits of seeking more money, vs. other means for achieving his goals.
If he can find other ways to achieve his goals, then great! What I'm just skeptical of is people sitting around with goals, and rejecting viable means for achieving those goals out of a biased and uninformed assessment of those means. I am also skeptical of people abandoning goals too early and then rationalizing that they don't really want those things.
I'm worried about the truely less social being harangued to try and make them change themselves when they really don't want to.
I am not worried about people being encouraged to avoid self-deception about their goals, and avoid bias in their cost-benefit analyses of the means for those goals. I feel that people who don't need such encouragement will easily shrug it off, and the cost of misplaced advice to them will be low. Yet for people who need such encouragement, the cost of not receiving it is potentially quite high.
Of course, I want to encourage people to engage in that sort of scrutiny in ways that doesn't make them feel "harangued." Yet right now on LessWrong, my primary goal isn't to be maximally persuasive to particular people; it's to discuss the problem at a more abstract level. Once I understand the scope and prevalence of these particular sorts of problems better, and how to recognize when people might be falling prey to them, I will have a better sense of if/how I should attempt to persuade people to change their thinking.
Until you recognise there is this group and include them in your plans for social change in some fashion (even if it is only identify and leave alone), then you are just making their lives more difficult (in a well meaning fashion).
I do recognize this group:
Not everyone shares a preference for attaining status, but many people share preferences for things that status can facilitate, such as money, dates, friends, and mental health. Those who can attain those things to their satisfaction without any additional efforts spent on status, are in a great spot.
I have no objection to people deciding that there is higher marginal benefit in devoting their next unit of effort towards something other than social skills/status/influence. I just advocate that this decision be based on a minimally-biased analysis of the nature of social interaction, and of the costs and benefits of developing in those areas.
Unfortunately, people who are relatively unsocialized and inexperienced in status interaction often seem to have certain biases about how social interaction works, which are difficult to fix without more social experience (see pjeby's excellent post about the differences in perception of social interaction between "cats" and "dogs").
In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attractiveness, social skills, and social status, according to their own values. The marginal benefit of putting in a small amount of effort is pretty high for people who are initially deficient in those areas. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit, such as making small tweaks to body language and posture, wearing clothes that fit properly, doing something with one's hair, and avoiding putting oneself down or overly apologizing for things.
Normally what they talk to me is about worries about the course and bitching. This I find I have nothing to add to really or interest in. Which probably colours my social interactions.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
When you have status in a certain context, lower status people will want to affiliate with you, and they can sometimes do so in ways that are annoying. This is indeed a cost of status.
It is not just that. I get annoyed and tune out when anyone bitches and moans. Even people I like otherwise. Especially when they are trying to create ingroup outgroup divisions due to bruised egos (or at least that is how I interpret it).
...In the case of mating in particular, I will argue that many people would be better off increasing their skills in the areas of attract
One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he'd start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
Likewise, in the recent LW meetup, I noticed that I was naturally drawn to the people who most easily ended up talking about interesting things. I spent a while just listening to HughRistik's theories on the differences between men and women, for instance. There were a few occasions when I engaged in some small talk with new people, but not all of them took very long, as I failed to lead the conversation into territory where one of us would have plenty of opinions.
I have two major deficiencies in trying to mimic this behavior. One, I'm by nature more of a listener than speaker. I usually prefer to let other people talk so that I can just soak up the information being offered. Second, my native way of thought is closer to text than speech. At best, I can generate thoughts as fast as I can type. But in speech, I often have difficulty formulating my thoughts into coherent sentences fast enough and frequently hesitate.
Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.
Below is a preliminary "conversational map" I generated as an exercise. The top three subjects - the weather, the other person's background (job and education), people's hobbies - are classical small talk subjects. Below them are a bunch of subjects that I feel like I can spend at least a while talking about, and possible paths leading from one subject to another. My goal in generating the map is to create a huge web of interesting subjects, so that I can use the small talk openings to bootstrap the conversation into basically anything I happen to be interested in.
This map is still pretty small, but it can be expanded to an arbitrary degree. (This is also one of the times when I wish my netbook had a bigger screen.) I thought that I didn't have very many things that I could easily talk with people about, but once I started explicitly brainstorming for them, I realized that there were a lot of those.
My intention is to spend a while generating conversational charts like this and then spend some time fleshing out the actual transitions between subjects. The benefit from this process should be two-fold. Practice in creating transitions between subjects will make it easier to generate such transitions in real time conversations. And if I can't actually come up with anything in real time, I can fall back to the cache of transitions and subjects that I've built up.
Naturally, the process needs to be guided by what the other person shows an interest in. If they show no interest in some subject I mention, it's time to move the topic to another cluster. Many of the subjects in this chart are also pretty inflammable: there are environments where pretty much everything in the politics cluster should probably be kept off-limits, for instance. Exercise your common sense when building and using your own conversational charts.
(Thanks to Justin Shovelain for mentioning that Michael Vassar seems to have a big huge conversational web that all his discussions take place in. That notion was one of the original sources for this idea.)