Promoted to curated: This post is great and indeed probably the best reference on a mechanistic understanding of status that I can think of. Most concretely, the post tied the following threads together for me, which previously felt related but with the relation not being very clear to me:
Improv-style scenes and associated “playing high/low status”
Helen’s “Making yourself big or small”
Ask culture & guess culture
Combat vs. nurture
I also particularly appreciated the idea of ask and guess culture being two limit points as a result of arms-race dynamics in a status tug-of-war, and find that explanation pretty compelling.
On the meta level:
The intro of this post really sells the rest of the post short, and I think I would pretty strongly recommend moving it to the end, or maybe just cutting it completely. I bounced off of this post like 3 times because it lead with all this metadata about what it was trying to do, and what the different sections are about, all without any payoff.
If I was considering a more in-depth edit, I would replace the first section with a concrete specific story, or some concrete application of the theory in this post, that shows the reader a nugget of understanding, and then go into the meta-level about what this post is trying to do (or maybe just not go into that at all), or move that into an appendix. Section 1.3 feels like the first meaty section of the post, and if I could move that up to the top, I would definitely do it.
I’ll hold off on curating this post for a few hours if you do want to make some edits like this, which I think would help a lot with people being more likely to read it in their email inbox and/or to click through to the whole post. But it’s still a great post otherwise and it also seems good to send it out as is.
Promoted to curated: This post is great and indeed probably the best reference on a mechanistic understanding of status that I can think of. Most concretely, the post tied the following threads together for me, which previously felt related but with the relation not being very clear to me:
Improv-style scenes and associated “playing high/low status”
Helen’s “Making yourself big or small”
Ask culture & guess culture
Combat vs. nurture
I also particularly appreciated the idea of ask and guess culture being two limit points as a result of arms-race dynamics in a status tug-of-war, and find that explanation pretty compelling.
On the meta level:
The intro of this post really sells the rest of the post short, and I think I would pretty strongly recommend moving it to the end, or maybe just cutting it completely. I bounced off of this post like 3 times because it lead with all this metadata about what it was trying to do, and what the different sections are about, all without any payoff.
If I was considering a more in-depth edit, I would replace the first section with a concrete specific story, or some concrete application of the theory in this post, that shows the reader a nugget of understanding, and then go into the meta-level about what this post is trying to do (or maybe just not go into that at all), or move that into an appendix. Section 1.3 feels like the first meaty section of the post, and if I could move that up to the top, I would definitely do it.
I’ll hold off on curating this post for a few hours if you do want to make some edits like this, which I think would help a lot with people being more likely to read it in their email inbox and/or to click through to the whole post. But it’s still a great post otherwise and it also seems good to send it out as is.
Thanks for the suggestions; I rewrote the intro, and what you call “Section 1.3” is the new “Section 1.2″.