I agree that generic and vague ideas of status have an high ratio of abusability and passive distortion effects to insight—partly due to Strange Loop effects in which symbols around “status-seeking” themselves have status effects, as you describe in section III.
I also suspect that doing more of that sort of pontificating without more specifics can stop providing useful predictive power fast, but I wonder how much of this is due to the degree to which it’s wound up “in the water supply” much like how SSC has described happening to CBT. The phenomena he describes as happening to CBT with lack of efficacy, and the way context of presentation matters, feel similar to the situation with status-based explanations in a way I don’t have a good immediate description for.
(Update: after reading your contextualizing comment elsewhere I think this may be at a more skew angle to your post’s intended topic than I originally thought, though I think the comparison I bring up may still be useful.)
I agree that generic and vague ideas of status have an high ratio of abusability and passive distortion effects to insight—partly due to Strange Loop effects in which symbols around “status-seeking” themselves have status effects, as you describe in section III.
I also suspect that doing more of that sort of pontificating without more specifics can stop providing useful predictive power fast, but I wonder how much of this is due to the degree to which it’s wound up “in the water supply” much like how SSC has described happening to CBT. The phenomena he describes as happening to CBT with lack of efficacy, and the way context of presentation matters, feel similar to the situation with status-based explanations in a way I don’t have a good immediate description for.
(Update: after reading your contextualizing comment elsewhere I think this may be at a more skew angle to your post’s intended topic than I originally thought, though I think the comparison I bring up may still be useful.)