As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals1,2.
I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.
Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?
Note:
1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.
2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.
You don't seem to have anywhere near enough information about me to responsibly pass that sort of judgment. I understand the epistemological status and limitations of evolutionary psychology (phrased very concisely in the first two sentences HughRistik wrote in this post).
In the spirit of trying to figure out why exactly your comment annoyed me and activated my status-posturing hardware to such a great extent, I'd say it was probably the presumptuous, subtle, passive-aggressive nature of indicting me so offhandedly in a comment not even replying to me, but to the OP of this subthread.
To avoid coming off as so condescending and turning the discussion into a status game (which this surely has become), I would recommend instead replying directly and doing so in a much more charitable, thoughtful way.
What I'm curious about is whether it'll work, be more memorable than other things I could've done quickly. I do believe it was a clear-cut case of overvaluing an unsubstantiated assertion ("highly insightful ... example of ... answering some esoteric question I've had for years"), which is a serious problem that might let all sorts of cobwebs to clutter one's mind if left unchecked... The comment was also directed to Alex_Altair.