Lol thank you Wedrifid, that was refreshing, and you were pretty good.

I disagree with you, but you're welcome to continue the disagreement with me. (:

Just because other people use those as signals that a person is in a particular place in a hierarchy does not mean that:

A. I believe in social hierarchies or that social hierarchies even exist. (I see them as an illusion).

B. The specific reason I am attracted to these qualities is due to an attraction to people in a certain position in the social hierarchy.

The reasons I want someone who is able to defeat me in a debate are:

1. It gets extremely tedious to disagree with people who can't. I end up teaching them things endlessly in order to get us to a point of agreement, while learning too little.

2. I might get careless if nobody knocks me down for a long time. It's not good for me.

3. It is rather uncomfortable and awkward in a relationship or even a friendship if one person is always right and the other always loses debates. That feels wrong.

"Fluff, no." vs "You have your own preferences and other people see your preference as fluff."

If I said I had a million dollars, but really, I was a million dollars in debt, would that be an empty claim? Yes. If a person is spending beyond their means in order to signal that they have money, they're being dishonest. So that's fluff.

If social hierarchies don't actually exist, and a person signals that they're in one, is that real, or is it a fantasy? if they don't exist, it's fluff.

"This seems tautologically likely."

Okay, this was an embarrassing failure to use clear wording on my part. Although you're not actually disagreeing with me, you got me good, lol.

That was fun. Feel free to disagree with me from now on.