I think avoiding status games is sort of like trying to reach probabilities of zero or one: Technically impossible, but you can get arbitrarily close, to the point where trying to measure the weight that status shifts are assigned within everyone’s decision making is lowered to be almost non-measurable.
I’m also not sure I would define “not playing the game” as within a group, making sure that everyone’s relative status is the same. This is simply a different status game, just with different objectives. It seems to me that what you suggest doing would simply open up a Pandora’s Box of undesirable epistemic issues. Personally, I want the people who consistently produce good ideas and articulate them well to have high status. And if they are doing it better than me, then I want them to have higher status than myself. I want higher status for myself too, naturally, but I channel that desire into practicing and maintaining as many characteristics that I believe aid the goals of the community. My goal is almost never to preserve egalitarian reputation at the expense of other goals, even among people I respect, since I fear that trying to elevate that goal to a high priority carries the risk of signal-boosting poor ideas and filtering out good ones. Maybe that’s not what you’re actually suggesting needs to be done, maybe your definition doesn’t include things like reputation, but does consider status in the sense of who gets to be socially dominant. I think what I consider my crux is that it’s less important to make sure that “mutual respect” and “consider equal in status, to whatever extent status actually means” mean the same thing, and more important that the “market” of ideas generated by open discourse maintains a reasonable distribution of reputation.
I think avoiding status games is sort of like trying to reach probabilities of zero or one: Technically impossible, but you can get arbitrarily close, to the point where trying to measure the weight that status shifts are assigned within everyone’s decision making is lowered to be almost non-measurable.
I’m also not sure I would define “not playing the game” as within a group, making sure that everyone’s relative status is the same. This is simply a different status game, just with different objectives. It seems to me that what you suggest doing would simply open up a Pandora’s Box of undesirable epistemic issues. Personally, I want the people who consistently produce good ideas and articulate them well to have high status. And if they are doing it better than me, then I want them to have higher status than myself. I want higher status for myself too, naturally, but I channel that desire into practicing and maintaining as many characteristics that I believe aid the goals of the community. My goal is almost never to preserve egalitarian reputation at the expense of other goals, even among people I respect, since I fear that trying to elevate that goal to a high priority carries the risk of signal-boosting poor ideas and filtering out good ones. Maybe that’s not what you’re actually suggesting needs to be done, maybe your definition doesn’t include things like reputation, but does consider status in the sense of who gets to be socially dominant. I think what I consider my crux is that it’s less important to make sure that “mutual respect” and “consider equal in status, to whatever extent status actually means” mean the same thing, and more important that the “market” of ideas generated by open discourse maintains a reasonable distribution of reputation.