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Who wants to play the status game?

thepointmag.com

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Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#71

Post by werber »

Loughla wrote: post #47
werber wrote: post #30

This feels so empty, what the article thinks is the status game just sounds like normal meeting new people stuff. Obviously there are always status indicators tied to interests, but I feel like I’m playing the make a new friend game not some philosophical keeping up with the Joneses

But that's exactly what it is. When you meet people who may be in your social sphere, inherently these people may have connections to your professional sphere. Therefore, your status indicators and signals may have an impact on both your personal and professional life. As a concrete example: I was recently passed over for a promotion, for which I am supremely qualified. The reason being, the person selected plays the…

I think that's partially true, I feel like I find the weirdos like me wherever I go and we just get on. I'm also not great at climbing the corporate ladder, but, I really don't care as long as I'm growing in what feels like a positive direction for my life as a whole.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#72

Post by lazyjones »

throwlaplace wrote: post #53
lazyjones wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nietzsche famously didn't understand one thing: women / mating strategies. The banker's purpose isn't meaningless, it's a means to an end (even if not always consciously pursued that way) and generally works very well.

people say this all the time but poor people are having kids at a much higher rate than rich people so the theory doesn't pan- if your goal was to have kids you'd stay with your high school sweetheart. and now you'll say "but the banker is trying to attract a high quality mate" to which I'll say that's circular as "quality" here is a synonynm for status. celibate or not I wouldn't discount Nietzsche; he was pretty in…

Perhaps "mating" was the wrong word - the goal is not always to have a monogamous relationship with kids, but to attract higher perceived quality and quantity of sexual partners.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#73

Post by kristianc »

willemlabu wrote: post #63

I once attended a talk by a man who was head of a creative marketing agency. He also had a side gig of being a presentation consultant. I forget his name and agency, but I don't think I could forget what he said. He would lead his company's pitches to new clients, and would turn up to the presentation wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops; tattoos all over his arms and neck, and thereby set the expectations of th…

> Setting expectations low, and then making them feel foolish for misjudging you.

It's a risky game. People tend to make their first impressions within seconds, and then spend the rest of the time looking for evidence to validate that assumption.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#74

Post by bobbydroptables »

throwlaplace wrote: post #53
lazyjones wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nietzsche famously didn't understand one thing: women / mating strategies. The banker's purpose isn't meaningless, it's a means to an end (even if not always consciously pursued that way) and generally works very well.

people say this all the time but poor people are having kids at a much higher rate than rich people so the theory doesn't pan- if your goal was to have kids you'd stay with your high school sweetheart. and now you'll say "but the banker is trying to attract a high quality mate" to which I'll say that's circular as "quality" here is a synonynm for status. celibate or not I wouldn't discount Nietzsche; he was pretty in…

>people say this all the time but poor people are having kids at a much higher rate than rich people so the theory doesn't pan- if your goal was to have kids you'd stay with your high school sweetheart.

The theory definitely pans.

You just tried to make it fail by putting the cart about 500 miles in front of the horse. Many accomplished people don't want kids at all and if they do, they usually don't want a lot of them.

If they wanted to have a bunch of kids they could.

They're not "losing" to people in third world countries by not having kids.

>I wouldn't discount Nietzsche

I wouldn't judge theories based on who made them. Judge them based on their own quality, logic and evidence.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#75

Post by kerkeslager »

> It is much easier to mock others for engaging in the Importance Game and the Leveling Game than to acknowledge one is doing it.

And it's critical to realize: mocking others for engaging in the Importance Game and the Leveling Game is just a way of engaging in the Importance Game.

This is an even stranger game than Nuclear War: it sometimes seems that the only winning move is not to play, but not to play isn't really an option.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#76

Post by justzisguyuknow »

leelin wrote: post #43

My undergrad was a super nerdy school grinding largely solo in the CS lab. Later I did an MBA program to take me completely out of my comfort zone. I gravitated to those who were chill, and perplexed anyone who tried to play the Status Game by losing on purpose. If it was the chess equivalent, I fall into Fool's Mate on move 2. Unfortunately, there ARE times when it helps to be able to quickly convey to new acquainta…

From the article:

> It is much easier to mock others for engaging in the Importance Game and the Leveling Game than to acknowledge one is doing it.

If you think that playing 'to lose' is somehow opting out then you're fooling yourself. The point us that we are always playing.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#77

Post by friendlybus »

hashkb wrote: post #58
friendlybus wrote: post #39

The article contradicts itself. It calls for an end to status games and at the same time holds up the class system as an easy out for determine status because the class takes care of it for you. That is still a status game. The class system does not substitute individual status relations for an institutional approach, it just ignores them. I lived and worked in London for 5 years and used to an individualistic perspe…

The article explores the issue but doesn't take a strong position. Your attack on it isn't coherent. What point are you trying to make? Seems like you've got a grudge against... society?

The article takes a strong position.

The article devalues finite status games based on victimhood or individual merit. It goes on to suggest hierarchy as a direct counterpoint and goes on to articulates the virtues of a class based system. It claims as it's final conclusion left with the reader that there is a conflict between needing to value someone's life in terms of worth at the bottom of society and at the top. Something only a hierarchy can solve or would even attempt to order the world that way.

A hierarchy can solve this because it is a unified system of receivership centered on a common purpose. At every level it is the same purpose executed better or worse, differing on the properties of the person involved. A hierarchy supports the concept of a 'best', an 'elite' rather than merit and hides all counter-veiling evidence under a shroud of embarrassment.

The UK has implemented a hierarchical class system. I am articulating what happens when you live in a class system. A lot of things people don't talk about. Some people want to live in the shade of a great tree, and I'm okay with that. I don't.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#78

Post by asdfman123 »

I get the sense that the conflict the author describes is a problem in American culture, because most of us want to believe in a classless society, yet at the same time, class is everywhere.

I feel in many cultures it's far more explicit and tolerated. You know who your "betters" are. In America, you'd never acknowledge that.

I'm not saying that a rigid social hierarchy would be better -- but our approach to society is to try to downplay social hierarchies, while in some sense they're inescapable.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#79

Post by RookyNumbas »

CalRobert wrote: post #45
zxcmx wrote: post #9

Thank goodness for status ambiguity. It's possible to be rich, yet a terrific bore; a talented golfer who is a mean drunk; a world class programmer who can't weld for beans; or a respected judge who nonetheless commits a faux pas at a society event. We can all be switching statuses all the time and (to an extent) we get to choose which ones, if any, matter to us. I think this makes life immensely more rich and tolera…

"we get to choose which ones, if any, matter to us." Definitely! It can be amusing (and awkward) when the game is played by people who have wildly different things they value. Someone (politely, of course) reveals they're a wealthy executive and you react by looking on them with pity because they have to sell their time to others to work on dumb things that don't matter while you get to be footloose and backpack arou…

Right. There isn't one game, there are infinitely many, and different people will have success at different games.

But there is also the meta-game: The game of being able to win the highest variety and largest amount of different games. I think this meta-game is closest to what we think of as status.

Re: Who wants to play the status game?

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

stared wrote: post #38
jonathanstrange wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the general solution of economists is to assume that every person has their own ordering. This doesn't work for Spectrum Arguments by Larry Temkin, though. A typical argument goes like this: Suppose alternative A gives you an extremely high level of well-being for a month. B brings a little bit less well-being than A for two months. C a little bit less well-being for four months, and so forth. In pairwise compa…

Once you go to multidimensional vector spaces, you don't need order. For example, the classic rock-paper-scissors can be modeled with 3 points in 2d. This has fundamental implications, as many activities do have this cyclical parts (see also such decomposition for vector fields, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_decomposition ). Vide Reinforcement Learning for StarCraft 2: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Alph…

Unfortunately time is one-dimensional, which creates a demand for ordering (I wouldn't be surprised if all demand for order actually came from that fact). I may not need ordering in 3D space, up until the moment I need to grab a few things - then I have to decide on an order, because grabbing is sequential.
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