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bogus comments on Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (180)
Oh, Nigel may not care about Sally's status - that much is clear enough, and I'm not disputing it. He cares a lot about his own status and the status of his nerdy associates, however. That's one reason why he likes this "bzzzzzzt, gotcha!" game so much. It's a way of saying: "Hey, this is our club; outsiders are not welcome here! Why don't you go to a sports bar, or something." Am I being uncharitable? Perhaps so, but my understanding of Nigel's POV is as plausible as yours.
Our friend Nigel may or may not play status games of his own, but my issue was with you saying
And, nope, the social person is not.
Of course, it all depends on the situation and she may be right, but, generally speaking, feeling like an outsider does NOT mean that everyone is playing devious status games against you.
Depends on whether "bzzzzzzt, gotcha!" is applied more frequently to the outsiders than to the insiders when they make the same mistake.
In other words, does "making a mistake" screen off "being an outsider"?
I'm not sure it does depend on that. Suppose your ingroup is made up predominantly of people with ginger hair and your outgroup predominantly of people with brown hair. Then if you make fun of people with brown hair, and admire people with ginger hair, you're raising the status of your ingroup relative to your outgroup even if you apply this rule consistently given hair colour.
Similarly, if your ingroup is predominantly made up of people who don't make a certain kind of mistake and your outgroup is mostly made up of people who do.
It's not clear to me that there's a good way to tease apart the two hypotheses here. And of course they could both be right: Nigel may sincerely care about the nerdy stuff but also on some level be concerned about raising the status of his fellow nerds.