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ygert comments on What if "status" IS a terminal value for most people? - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is said often, but it just needs to be said again: Be careful with the amateur evolutionary psychology Just So Stories. They sound nice, but unless you are someone who deeply knows current evolutionary psychology research, you are basically making stuff up. Maybe guided making stuff up, but it is still a mistake to think that a stories like that explains much. The proof of its weakness is that it does not rule out anything much, as it is possible to invent a plausible sounding EvPsyc story to explain just about anything, true or false.
That said, in this particular case, you are not saying anything too radical, and I do not really object to the content of your post. But in general, this is a failure mode to be aware of, and to look out for and avoid doing.
You're right of course, but it couldn't be helped. The premise of the main post under discussion is "human intelligence evolved so that we could outwit one another, and therefore status seeking is a terminal value for most humans". There are so many evo-psych leaps in that sentence that I couldn't figure out how to even approach the topic without making a few leaps of my own. Maybe that was the wrong way to go about it, but I would like to think that lesswrongers implicitly understand these caveats whenever evo-psych is discussed.
Admittedly, my real justification for not believing that status seeking is a terminal value has got nothing to do with evolution. It's just that I know many people who behave in ways that would imply that status is not a high priority for them. Despite evolution not providing any positive evidence for my belief, I can see that my belief at the very least doesn't clash with my model of how evolution works, so I just put the two together to illustrate this lack-of-clashing.
I suppose that this would border on what people here term "dark arts", had I done this self consciously, since there was a discrepancy between the evidence which justified my belief and the arguments which I used to justified the claim.
The point I was trying to make (and should have stated more succinctly) is that the idea that intelligence arouse as part of runaway arms-race selection does not necessarily imply that humans must be very status seeking. Generating an alternative narrative to counter the proposed narrative was perhaps not the best method of getting that point across.