Who wants to play the status game?

However, acing a tough exam does show that you have high ability in some skills which can be included in "intelligence". It is perfectly reasonable to say someone is smart after they do something to prove their cognitive ability, even if they haven't proven every single possible kind of cognitive ability.

I think the miscommunication here is what people mean when they say "he is smart" or "this hotel is better than that one". I don't think people are commiting a scalar fallacy when they say these things. People are making judgements based on the many different aspects of a thing, and then using simplified speech to express their opinion.

If you are booking a vacation, you have to choose a hotel. When comparing hotels you look at all the different aspects (the bed, room size, the restaurant/bar, etc). You have to weigh all these options and then pick which hotel you would prefer to stay at. So when you make a choice and say 'hotel A is better than hotel B', you are not asserting that hotel goodness is measured in one dimension and that hotel A is objectively better. It's rather a benign statement that you would prefer to stay at hotel A.

It's not a fallacious reduction to a scalar quantity, but at some point you do have to make choices and weigh preferences.

This, of course, can go either way depending on perspective. If you put all of yourself into your main activity, you're doing it for yourself, not for someone else. Whether you're being paid by someone else isn't relevant, IMO; what if you'd do it for free, or if you could do something else more profitably (so you're paying, in opportunity cost, to do it)?

Money is far from the only, or even main motivator for most people - even for poor people, they'll often stay geographically close to their friends and family rather than migrate to a better life; it's mostly the desperate at one end, or the cosmopolitans at the other (for whom the world is small, so the geographic switch is less material), who do move.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

-- Ecclesiastes 9:10

WRT. hierarchy, I don't know what exactly Aristotle meant (I need to get off my butt and read about his work one day), but taking the expression "see human political organization as fundamentally hierarchical" - well, it kind of is. Bottom-up hierarchy is still a hierarchy.

The way I see it, people create a level of governance once their group crosses the Dunbar's number. Below it, it's easy for a group to self-police, enforcing coordination and resolving prisonner's-dilemma-like problems (tragedy of the commons, etc.). Above it, when people don't generally know everyone else in their group, you need some power delegated to a single authority to enforce coordination. And now if you take a lot of such groups, they'll have problem coordinating at an inter-group level, so another level of governance is needed - and now you have a two-level hierarchy. Repeat recursively as groups grow.

(There's also a point somewhere above Dunbar's number, where governance of a growing group becomes untenable, so that group gets effectively or explicitly split into many smaller ones. This feeds the creation of the second layer of governance, and thus the third, etc.)

WRT. the following who you respect and not who you're told to, I think a lot of problems with governance start in the second generation. When a governance is formed, the group may have chosen it out of respect, but the people born into that group after that had no say in the matter, and are just told to obey by everyone else.