If you are not playing status games, your status is irrelevant and you should act accordingly.

Even when you are not playing status games, other people notice your status, and it influences how they react on you. So unless your goal is completely independent on other people, you should pay some attention to your status.

For example, let's say that my goal is to find new people to join our local rationalist group. If I appear completely low status, most people won't even listen to me. And if they will, they will most likely associate LW as "something low-status people care about", so they will avoid it. Maybe one person in thousand will look at LW anyway, overcome the association with low status, and join. Yes, it is possible... but I made it needlessly difficult. You don't get extra points for getting the same result in a more difficult way.

On the other hand, if I appear high status, people are more likely to listen to me, more likely to remember what I said (until they get home and start their computers), and more likely to overcome the initial obstacles (e.g. to read a few articles from the Sequences). Then of course, some people will stay and most of them will leave. But the results will be much better than in the first situation, because more people who "have a chance to become a rationalist" really got the information, looked at the website, and didn't give up at the first obstacle.

People are like that. You should know it, and you should include this information in your plans. Even in rebel groups, there are high-status rebels and low-status rebels, and the high-status rebels have more say about the shape of the rebellion. Even the self-image is kind of a status of oneself in one's own eyes.

The true part is that if you optimize for something else and only use status instrumentally, at some points you sacrifice some additional status for more gains in the area you care about. Which will result is less status than if you optimized for status instead.

To use my previous example, I wouldn't want to make myself (and by proxy, the rationalist community) appear so high status that people interacting with me would be too shy to join. Even the fact that I am inviting people to join is not status-maximizing. (A status-maximizing step would be to tell them they are not worthy to join.) Therefore I am not trying to maximize my status... but I need to keep it high enough to get the message through.