I recently re-read some old Less Wrong posts on status. It struck me that none of them really capture what I mean by the word.

I have been wondering if it makes sense to operationalize status as a measure of the extent to which other individuals have a rational self-interest in cooperating with you. Specifically, if you want to know the status of an individual, you estimate the probability that an arbitrarily chosen member of the group will get higher utility from cooperating than defecting in a two-player game.

I have been thinking about writing a full post on this. Before I start writing, does anyone have any thoughts on whether this definition has been proposed before, and on whether it captures your intuition behind what “status” is? Or any ideas about which aspects of this definition you would like to see discussed in a write-up?