My suggestion would be "lower my opinion of X."
I also suggest that you stay aware of this in conversations about social status, in general. Disagreements about whether people in groups actually have a status in the first place cause a lot of confusion, especially because (as in this case) it's not always clear at first that a disagreement even exists, and many other things hinge on this.
Incidentally, would you also say the same things about words like "popularity" or "privilege"? That is, would you say that talking about person X as more popular than person Y is an imprecise shorthand, and that it's wrong to talk about my estimate of X's popularity, because X doesn't actually have popularity?
My suggestion would be "lower my opinion of X."
Yeah, but then I wouldn't be invoking the concept of 'status'. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don't lower someone's status, so that's why I ended up using the term. But of course X's ('actual') status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others' 'opinion of X'. So it's only in that 'weak' sense that I meant my remark that X 'doesn't actually have a status'; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the var...
There's been a recent heavily upvoted and profusely commented post about things people want to learn. It's close to having so many comments in a single day that it should probably have a part 2.
However, the subject seems to inspire thoughts about what *other* people ought to know, and while that's got a good bit of overlap, it's emotionally rather different.
So, what do you think other people ought to know? Any theories about why they haven't learned it already? Any experience with getting someone else to learn something when it started out as your project rather than theirs, especially if the other person was an adult?