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pnrjulius comments on Two More Things to Unlearn from School - Less Wrong
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So, the once standard explanation of bullying was "they have low self-esteem, and do it to feel better about themselves." This is not an explanation that plays well with actual bullies. The better explanation is "their self-esteem is higher than it should be, and they need to use violence to make up the gap." If I think I'm level 6, but really I'm level 4, it makes sense to say my self esteem is high (too high), and whenever someone criticizes me I'll blow up because to me it looks like they're trying to reduce my status from level 6 to 4 (even if they just wanted to fix my spelling this one time and don't know who I am).
People with low self esteem (you're level 4, but think you're level 2) aren't likely to be violent because they don't have anything to protect / uphold by that violence. If you criticize them, you're reinforcing their low-status view, not contradicting it.
I think of self-esteem as a thermometer. It's a measure of something (Your value as a person? More narrowly, your deserved social status?) A thermometer should be high when it's hot out, and low when it's cold.
So should someone who is a famous scientist or entrepreneur have high self-esteem? Definitely. If they don't, they're doing something wrong.
But for the same reasons, a 14-year-old who is an idiot and bullies other kids should not be very proud of himself, and should instead be trying to change himself into something worth being proud of.
What do you mean by "deserved" social status? Status is decided by those that grant it. And if people decide to grant status to Joe because Joe coerces them to, Joe's status is granted by his peers and thus deserved. That is, self-esteem is your vision of the esteem others give you.
Now, is Joe someone you or I would like to be around? No. But that doesn't mean he has low self-esteem, or that he isn't proud of himself.
Along slightly different lines, look at self-esteem as self-description. If I describe myself as "good-looking," and someone points out that my ears are grotesquely large, that will conflict with my self-description. If I describe myself as "bad-looking," the same comment with reinforce my self-description. If I describe myself as "assertive" and someone cuts in front of me, in order to maintain that description I need to rebuke them. If I describe myself as "submissive," then when someone cuts in front of me I might sigh, but if I do more it'll conflict with the self-description.
Typically, when converting self-description to self-esteem, one would say that good-looking is higher than bad-looking, and assertive is higher than submissive. A bully halts criticism and commands respect- the features of being held in high esteem- but obtains that esteem through violence and domination. At each instant, when someone is deciding how to respond to praise or an insult, they don't have time to run a calculation of which response will work better for them: they consult their self-esteem and see if what's happening matches what they expect to happen.