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Will_Newsome comments on Social status hacks from The Improv Wiki - Less Wrong Discussion
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(There seems to be a sort of assumption 'round these parts that high status is better than low status and that dominance is better than submission. I think that this should not be unquestioningly assumed. There are many goals that can usually be more easily achieved by someone in a lower status position, e.g. discovering truth or learning from people. There are many exceptions, but high status tends to make people prideful, petty, unreflective, stupid, unwilling to change, unwilling to compromise, incautious, overconfident, &c. The benefits of material wealth, better mating options, better ally options, &c., are not obviously worth the costs; sometimes there are ways to get those things without risk. One would be wise to worry about slippery slopes and goal distortion.)
I have to concur and further emphasize that the most impressive people aren't those that rigidly lock themselves into the high status mode in every transaction. Sure, being limited to only high status moves is better (for most people in circumstances we are familiar with) than being limited to only low status moves but being able to use either as the situation arises is far more useful. And I don't just mean being able to submit to the more powerful, for all that is useful.
Are you of the opinion that people on this site, in their daily lives, are erring on the side of implementing too many high status moves? Or that the people you met in SF while at the mega-camp were doing this stuff too much (Michael Vassar and Eliezer aside)? I agree that the optimum isn't either extreme, I think the nudging should be towards high status behavior.
And does anything in the original post endorse the high status behaviors over the low status ones?
No.
On average no. Some possible exceptions.
Yes.
To precisely the extent that my reply to Will suggests that it does. (Um, no?)
(This and the grandparent strike me as quite important and counter a very deep unstated assumption in most every discussion of status I've seen on LW. I think that this is top level post material!)
I see what you're doing there — trying to trick everyone else into ceding the high-status ground. Very tricky ;).
Am I the only one who, seeing that comment, talking about status and tricks, immediately misread the name as "Tyrion Lannister"?
This feels like a cheap shot at "successful" people - a social urge to insist that someone can't "have it all". I distinctly recall a post by Eliezer at some point that he hung out with rich, intelligent, successful individuals and they did in fact manage to have fun and enjoyable lives as well - despite a common media portrayal that such lives are intrinsically "hollow."
I'd also say you're conflating "status within an interaction" and "social standing". I haven't seen anything that suggests that being well respected and looked up to by your peer group is particularly damaging, whereas being CEO of a Fortune 500 company does seem to mess one's judgment up rather badly. I routinely enjoy quite a few perks of high-status presentation, despite being relatively middle-class in actual social standing. My boss and co-workers value my opinion, and I have a lot of freedom because people trust me to act responsibly. At the same time, since I don't have a lot of formal standing, there's not a ton of attention on me, and there's not a huge amount of pressure to avoid failure.