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atucker comments on Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn't be proportional to your awesomeness - Less Wrong Discussion
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I entirely agree with this point, but suspect that actually following this advice would make people uncomfortable.
Since different occupations/goals have some amount of status associated with them (nonprofits, skilled trades, professions) many people seem to take statements about what you're working on to be status claims in addition to their denotational content.
As a result, working on something "outside of your league" will often sound to a person like you're claiming more status than they would necessarily give you.
Beware using status as a universal explanation.
How could you demonstrate that status is adequate or inadequate as an explanation, in this case? Or any case?
Beware of universal explanations everywhere!
Fair, but at least some component of this working in practice seems to be a status issue. Once we're talking about awesomeness and importance, and the representativeness of a person's awesomeness and the importance of what they're working on, and how different people evaluate importance and awesomeness, it seems decently likely that status will come into play.
Are you sure? How can you easily tell that something is out of someones league? I can imagine that if you talk to someone at a party it is more impressive to say that you work in rocket surgery than it is to say that you work as a carpenter. Even though you might be lousy at the first and great at the second.
Good point, I did summarize a bit fast.
There's two issues at hand, one asserting that you're doing something that's high status within your community, and asserting that your community's goals are more important (and higher status) than the goals of the listener's community.
If there's a large inferential distance in justifying your claims of importance, but the importance is clear, then it's difficult to distinguish you from say, cranks and conspiracy theorists.
(The dialogues are fairly unrealistic, but trying to gesture at the pattern)
A within culture issue:
Between cultures:
It depends on which (sub)culture the people at the party are in.
That is Terrible!!!
I never thought of that. But yes, it does sound very much like that is the case. What can we do? I mean, sincerely, how can we get people to work on what matters for them even if they don't think they have the status for it?