Status perceptions are tricksy things

It seems to me that a lot of people read status moves into just about every action. The way that a lot of people define it is not to define it at all - everything becomes connected with status. If you behave in just about any way at all, it will be perceived as desired or undesired, and that gets added into the status evaluation. The way some people use it, it's like they're trying to create the ultimate hasty generalization.

Considering the all-encompassing nature of status perceptions, I don't see a way to invalidate them, so I hope that anyone reading status into this discussion post is thinking "If I can't think of a way to invalidate my perceptions through testing, might my perceptions of status-seeking work exactly like the Barnum effect - I paint status seeking perceptions with such a wide brush that everybody qualifies as status-seeking by my definition?"

If you claim not to be motivated by status, you will have difficulty finding anything to say or do that escapes other's status evaluations for that reason.

There are incentives, as well, for others to read status moves into your actions. If most of the group is evaluating your status, and someone is competing with you for status, this someone has to alter the group's opinions of their own status relative to yours. Failing to evaluate your status would leave them at a disadvantage. More importantly, not believing that you're actively seeking status would put them at a further disadvantage by preventing them from trying to predict what status moves you will make next.

How should status be defined?

Pitfalls of status perceptions:

I see a lot of people making the kinds of mistakes that are described in 37 ways words can be wrong:

5 The act of labeling something with a word, disguises a challengable inductive inference you are making.

8 Your verbal definition doesn't capture more than a tiny fraction of the category's shared characteristics, but you try to reason as if it does.

11 You ask whether something "is" or "is not" a category member but can't name the question you really want answered.

12 You treat intuitively perceived hierarchical categories like the only correct way to parse the world, without realizing that other forms of statistical inference are possible even though your brain doesn't use them.

13 You talk about categories as if they are manna fallen from the Platonic Realm

23 The existence of a neat little word prevents you from seeing the details of the thing you're trying to think about.

24 You have only one word, but there are two or more different things-in-reality, so that all the facts about them get dumped into a single undifferentiated mental bucket.

I do not see a way to create and use status perceptions that doesn't qualify as a logical fallacy, bias or "way that words can be wrong". This is the reason why I say "I don't believe in status." It's not that I don't think other people are creating status perceptions. It's that I think the status perceptions they create are irrational.

How I evaluate others without status perceptions:

I think an easier question to address in public than "Do I care about my own status?" is "Do I make status evaluations of others?" and this is relevant because if you don't care about status, you theoretically shouldn't evaluate others that way, either. Here is how I evaluate people without using status:

People are systems and they're out there interacting in a system. They are not just little bundles of traits, so it makes no sense to me to lump all of these traits together into a status evaluation (committing mistakes #5, #8 and/or #24) and rank everyone in a hierarchical organization scheme (committing mistake #12). If I want a person in my life for some purpose (lover, friend, etc.) my question is not "Which options are high status?" but "What interactions do I want to have with the chosen person and which specific traits are necessary for that?" (Avoiding mistake #11).

Essentially, I create specific questions to answer, break my perceptions down into component parts and consider how the traits of the person will play out in context in terms of cause and effect. This is the only way to get the specifics of my social needs fulfilled and it helps me avoid the halo effect.

Ranking people by status looks about as useful to me as guessing the teacher's password is for answering questions about how things work.

Understanding the cause and effect is also how I go about understanding myself. Other people's perceptions of me have little to no influence on my ideas about myself because my ideas about myself are far more complex and detailed than theirs are. This is how I ended up caring so little about what others think of me.