I don't do this.
Then you're probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
Being viewed as high-status only matters if those judging have value.
To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn't play the expensive status game. This seems to me like a pretty complete answer to your original question.
You might ask why they have value to her - you haven't given the details for me to answer that. At the very least you said they are a majority of all women, so they probably include some friends of hers and new potential friends, else why would she go to these events at all?
Tis then frivolous to partake in the games of party X as 'twould only yield the loss of something valued, with no valued gains.
The valued gain is first of all the willingness of party X to interact with you. If you want it, you must pay the costs. If you don't want it, you don't care to play and don't pay.
Why do you describe this as "forcing someone"? Everyone is free to choose with whom to associate. Everyone who plays the expensive games does so by choice. All the standard considerations of game theory apply.
Forcing someone to make an unnecessary value assessment of: negative value of social games vs. experience of 'special event', is cruel, as it's an unbalanced choice; one knows the first negative value, but not the second.
Why not? If one has been to similar events in the past, and missed some events, one should have a good idea of the benefits to be had on average.
I don't think the second value can be accurately calculated using Bayes' theorem
Even if this is true, I don't see why it's more so than for most other aspects of the (social) world.
Yes, it's hard to predict the opportunity value of a specific social event as opposed to on average. But consider that everyone attending the event is equally in the dark. If your friend could win (by whatever metric) by not going to social events (and not paying the cost), then she would do so, and others would notice and follow. So I predict on average people benefit individually from going to the events, even taking the cost into account.
Compare the opportunity of going to the events with me offering you the same bet on a biased coin toss every week. You pay money to bet against me, but the expected value of many bets is positive. Even though you can't calculate the outcome of the next bet and may lose it (the coin is only slightly biased).
Why do you view the social events as an obligation or someone forcing someone else to participate, rather than an opportunity?
Having said that, from rather a devil's advocate POV, I'll try to address the question from another angle.
You may be thinking: a single person defecting from the game loses, but if only many people defected together, they could establish a group where people didn't pay continuous costs and still offered each other the same opportunities. Then each of them would gain more value than from staying with the old group.
Now, if that worked and resulted in a stable and better-for-everyone outcome, people would do so more often. So why don't they? Presumably the current solution is a Nash equilibrium, but why exactly? I don't have a good single answer, but I can think of several possible factors:
Outdated adaptation execution: we are to an extent pre-wired to play the existing game and try raise the participation cost to whatever we ourselves can bear, so as to exclude lower-status people who can't pay it. This worked ancestrally because people lived in relatively small groups (much smaller than the average school, let alone the wide world) and didn't have the freedom to defect from a group and look for new associates elsewhere.
People really care and/or benefit from excluding lower status people from their groups. Your friend pays the cost and goes to the events, but some people simply cannot pay the cost (either in money or in dress-sense or in something else), so they never go to these events. There are social benefits to forming exclusive clubs (in game theoretical terms) which only require that the club be exclusive (doesn't matter on which basis). For instance, it makes use of us vs. them ingroup/outgroup dynamics to strengthen in-group ties.
If the exclusive group is based on a really worthwhile metric (in evolutionary terms), then people benefit from joining, if only because they get exclusive access to a good pool of potential mates. As another example, if it's based on money (being able to afford dresses), then it helps rich people network together, which is useful in the future when money becomes a powerful tool for rich people to help one another.
I am also not particularly fond of your asking such a loaded question, but I can't fault you for it.
I don't understand why my question was loaded. You asked why such-and-such cruel behavior existed. I asked, to clarify, why did you consider it cruel? Perhaps the behavior I have a mental image of isn't what you mean.
I wish I could better understand your reaction to my question, and others' reactions to my words in general (in the spirit of the current post). So I would appreciate it if you could explain why my question struck you as unpleasant and how I could have gone about it better. Thanks!
Then you're probably going to be low status in the eyes of the vast majority who does do this. Which is a perfectly valid choice, of course.
Actually, I find this quite useful. I've found (before I discovered the following) that those who care enough about status to write me off for not 'playing the game' are the same whom I'd rather not associate with; in a sense they self-filter themselves from my life, and I'm much happier for it.
...To your friend who bought the dresses, those judging did have value. Otherwise she wouldn't play the expensive status ga
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?