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Choose your status game wisely

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Re: Choose your status game wisely

#231

Post by jeremyjh »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #228
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>where even the wealthiest people are not allowed to move to because they don't have the right last name How is this carried out in practice?

I'm reasonably sure the author is just making this up. As a US citizen you have wide discretion on where you live, even extending to several other small nations that have signed agreements with the US. If you're renting or selling property, most of the discretion that used to be afforded to buyer's is now outlawed. But it would require someone willing to pursue a case if they felt they were not sold a home because of…

I'm pretty sure GGP did not mean they literally could not move there. They could move there and be shunned by society if that's what they are into. But why else would you want to be there except for the society?

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#232

Post by throw0101a »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #147
geoduck14 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all respect to Mormons and LDS. It is not a flavor of Christianity

I walked around with a King James Bible every time I went to church. I spent a year learning about The Old Testament in seminary, and another year learning about The New Testament. The Book of Mormon itself directly quotes the King James Bible, errors included. It absolutely is a flavor of Christianity, no matter how unappetizing you find it. The entire story in The Book of Mormon is about Jews who fled the old world…

You start getting into 'no true Scotsman' arguments at this point. Is the only "true" Christianity that which professes the Nicene Creed? Teaches the Real Presence? Other?

However, just because the Mormons are using the same words (from the same book) does not necessarily mean that they have the same theological concepts:

> This brings me to an example which does involve error of a sort sufficient to make successful reference to the true God doubtful. In the post on Geach linked to above, I cited the 2001 decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that Mormon baptisms are not valid even though they seem at first glance to make use of the correct Trinitarian formula. The reason for the decision is that the Mormon conception of God is so radically different from the Catholic one that it is doubtful that the words truly invoke the Trinity. It is not Trinitarianism per se that is the issue, though, but rather the radical anthropomorphism of the Mormon conception of God. As an article in L'Osservatore Romano summarized the problem at the time:

[…]

> The Mormon conception of deity, then, makes of God something essentially creaturely and finite, something which lacks the absolute metaphysical ultimacy that is definitive of God in Catholic theology and in classical theism more generally. Even Arianism does not do that, despite its grave Trinitarian errors. To be sure, Arianism makes of the second Person of the Trinity a creature, but it does not confuse divinity as such with something creaturely. On the contrary, because it affirms the full divinity and non-creaturely nature of the Father, it mistakenly supposes that it must deny the full divinity of the Son. It gets the notion of divinity as such right, and merely applies it in a mistaken way. Mormons, by contrast, get divinity as such fundamentally wrong. Hence their usage of “God” is arguably merely verbally similar to that of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, et al. They can plausibly be held not really to be referring to the same thing as the latter, and thus not worshipping the same God as the latter.

* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/christians-muslims-...

There's some 'inside baseball' differences on what people's practical day-to-day beliefs are, and what the actual theological underpinnings are. Most folks will not know about them.

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#233

Post by calcifer »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #228
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>where even the wealthiest people are not allowed to move to because they don't have the right last name How is this carried out in practice?

I'm reasonably sure the author is just making this up. As a US citizen you have wide discretion on where you live, even extending to several other small nations that have signed agreements with the US. If you're renting or selling property, most of the discretion that used to be afforded to buyer's is now outlawed. But it would require someone willing to pursue a case if they felt they were not sold a home because of…

Funny, this comment reads like something Commander Data would say in Star Trek. He would always respond to the letter of what was said, while completely missing the human context.

It fascinates me that someone who read the parent comment could actually think it was about the legal rights of US citizens. You might as well be claiming it was about hummus :)

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#234

Post by snowwrestler »

calcifer wrote: post #233
sidewndr46 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reasonably sure the author is just making this up. As a US citizen you have wide discretion on where you live, even extending to several other small nations that have signed agreements with the US. If you're renting or selling property, most of the discretion that used to be afforded to buyer's is now outlawed. But it would require someone willing to pursue a case if they felt they were not sold a home because of…

Funny, this comment reads like something Commander Data would say in Star Trek. He would always respond to the letter of what was said, while completely missing the human context. It fascinates me that someone who read the parent comment could actually think it was about the legal rights of US citizens. You might as well be claiming it was about hummus :)

So what is it about, then?

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#235

Post by tomgp »

bsenftner wrote: post #222
xenocratus wrote: post #186

> Choose money and you’ll end up working all the time. Choose beauty and you’ll always want to look better. Choose fame and you’ll constantly be seeking attention. This is straight-up paraphrasing David Foster Wallace in This Is Water, just that DFW was talking about these things as de-facto personal religions that we're usually unconscious of. So the "choose" part isn't nearly that explicit in his view. The bit in T…

So don't be an idiot and "worship", be a rational balanced human and as the OP says diversify your interests. DFW tends to exaggerate to make his points, and this is an example. Nice prose, be it describes idiots and implies to the reader that everyone are such idiots.

DFW concluded that if you don’t choose what to worship it gets chosen for you. What he’s saying is that one should be conscious and deliberate, self aware. Like much of DFW there’s a strong christian undercurrent to ‘this is water’. Far from being an argument against religion and worship the message i take is that the value of religion can be that it focuses one outward, towards community and so on.

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#236

Post by tomgp »

kansface wrote: post #57
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #32

Sometimes you see articles like this that insist that you have to play a status game of some kind etc etc. The hacker in me sees that as even more reason to look for examples of ways alleviate myself of such nonsense. If you read books like "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" you run across stories of him playing with Status games and poking fun at them. Though I'm sure one could argue Feynman had status games he play…

Somewhat ironically, refusing to acknowledge or honor conventional status games is itself a status increasing play among hackers, which invalidates the spirit of the advice if not the advice itself! This is also probably terrible advice for a different milieu.

yeah, you assert your status by being able to ignore cultural/office norms.

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#237

Post by JasonFruit »

majormajor wrote: post #91
ZYinMD wrote: post #69

It's a sad truth but for most of us, when it comes to "decide which status game to play", you're simply aiming for money no matter what you choose. Money is the overarching metric that already incorporates everything else. The "weightlifting status" or the "content creator status" mentioned in the article are just money status in disguise. Ask yourself: if you won a big lottery tomorrow, would you still keep doing wh…

"Starving artists" have long been romanticized, for one example of there being non-money games out there.

Usually after they're dead and the art community has reached an agreement that they were pretty great, though; it's not much of a status game if it doesn't bear fruit while you're around to enjoy it.

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#238

Post by mattgreenrocks »

pavas wrote: post #204
JamesBarney wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeking status is a low status activity. A high status activity it to seem like you don't care about what other people think about you. People I know who actually go by their own compass are seen as weird and don't have much status. People I know who have cultivated a person of someone who goes by their own compass do tend to have a lot of status.

I view the reliance upon the idea of status as a low-status activity. Low status or high status only emanate when you're playing the status game, but it's not a game that you necessarily need to play. And if you're not playing the game, low-status or high-status doesn't matter; they're just different colors. Nothing wrong with playing the game either.

The worst part about status is mostly how seriously people take it.

If you’re on either extreme, then, yeah, your life is different. But the nature of status is that it is statistically impossible for everyone to be high status. Thus, it is a zero sum game, and one which is usually rigged against you, and full of people who aren’t smart enough to realize this + are willing to give up more than you are. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

A small amount of self care and knowledge of oneself and how the world works is all you need to pass as mid-status.

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#239

Post by mattgreenrocks »

sneak wrote: post #99
phpnode wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is more cool? > Somebody who makes it clear they're wealthy or well connected or attractive or smart or etc... > Or somebody who is upbeat and friendly with no desire to display anything about themselves? The first one. It's the first one.

My face when I realized that a combover, power tie, fake tan, and trophy wife is really all it takes to sell a median person on it (oh, and millions of dollars).

Next question: why are you seeking being seen this way from a random person?

Re: Choose your status game wisely

#240

Post by maest »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #16

Who is more cool? Somebody who makes it clear they're wealthy or well connected or attractive or smart or etc... Or somebody who is upbeat and friendly with no desire to display anything about themselves? There's a minority of people who go by their own compass. The things that gratify status seekers don't do it for them. That's not to say they don't have needs. They need friends, stimulation, hobbies, achievements.…

> Somebody who makes it clear they're wealthy or well connected or attractive or smart or etc...

> Or somebody who is upbeat and friendly with no desire to display anything about themselves?

It's the one who can run the faster mile, if you ask the people at my running club.

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