This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.

Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They're called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn't seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don't think you'd be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.

If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.

This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.

Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.

It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.

Though since we do know that there are people who don't properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.

That being said, I do agree that "they care about status, but don't want to admit it / but don't realize it" is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger's considerably increases my credence their claim, though.

Data point: I have Asperger's Syndrome. While I haven't seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it's at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.

I'm as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it's as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.

If that counts as a "serious neurological condition," then we may not disagree at all.

Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people's actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don't know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?

I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot's claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.

What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status?

While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.

Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status?

I don't believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.

Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior?

I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I'm aware it's impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.

How does it relate to the concept of 'unknown knows'?

My sack of neurons isn't very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.

Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.