Status is one of those cases where it’s easy to mix up concepts that’re related by levels of indirection. A person’s status is (A) the amount of power and accomplishment they have, (B) other peoples’ perception of A, (C) their own perception of A and B, and (D) the signals they give off based on C. When people talk about status, they’re referring to some subset of A,B,C,D. Except that B, C, and D are all based in psychology, which means that they can be severed from their nominal definitions by implementation details. But the relations between the definitions mean that usually, statements involving one also involve the others.
They’re executing adaptations that’re supposed to make them compete over status (as others’ perception), but they hit a corner case which flips the sign of the link between status (as others’ perception) and status (as actual worth). This makes the conversation funny, and also makes all the participants very low status in the eyes of an outside observer, to whom the flipped sign does not apply.
Status is one of those cases where it’s easy to mix up concepts that’re related by levels of indirection. A person’s status is (A) the amount of power and accomplishment they have, (B) other peoples’ perception of A, (C) their own perception of A and B, and (D) the signals they give off based on C. When people talk about status, they’re referring to some subset of A,B,C,D. Except that B, C, and D are all based in psychology, which means that they can be severed from their nominal definitions by implementation details. But the relations between the definitions mean that usually, statements involving one also involve the others.
How do you interpret Mrs X’s complaint in light of the above theory?
They’re executing adaptations that’re supposed to make them compete over status (as others’ perception), but they hit a corner case which flips the sign of the link between status (as others’ perception) and status (as actual worth). This makes the conversation funny, and also makes all the participants very low status in the eyes of an outside observer, to whom the flipped sign does not apply.