putanumonit.com
Primarily relevant to here through the discussion of what people claim to find attractive vs. choose, but also considers various other measures of attractiveness. I dont agree with all these analyses but think its worth posting simply for considering the topic in a lot more detail then Ive previously seen.
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I think it's simple, zero-sum and focused on the relationship between speaker and target. You bring down frank to steal his status points. Effusive praise is always going to hurt your status, assuming you had some to begin with.
The problem with your theory is that people would converge on a consensus of like-minded people and then… how do they determine status among them? They keep finding more consensus? To me the end state looks more like crabs in a bucket than harmonization. There’s straight up too much criticism that doesn’t make sense.
Even people, especially people who argue in hostile territory/against the grain affect a scornful attitude. Only in rare cases are they trolling and end up presenting their adventures to the like-minded. Their behaviour is baffling if status is a popularity contest by vote on one’s opinions.
Okay, I should be clear that I don't think this is the only dynamic happening. We don't live in a world where status is the only thing people care about and nobody cares about truth whatsoever (and if we did, your theory would be worse off because people do sometimes praise people in real life, how could you explain that?). And further, I don't mean to imply that my theory is literally the only mechanism for gaining status.
First and foremost, status is supposed to reflect someone's actual objective value to society (or at least, to the people granting them status). That is the evolutionary mechanism for why it exists, and the selfishly rational reason for why people would give it. Society benefits if it has more valuable people in it, and giving status to high value activities is a way to both incentivize people who are already high status to want to stay in your group and interact with you more, and a way to incentivize everyone else to perform high value activities in order to gain status.
Now granted, this is an emergent phenomenon which happens imperfectly and only in aggregate, there are tons of local counterexamples and exploits, like people trying to unfairly lower someone else's status to raise their own without performing genuinely valuable activities. Just like how most businesses earn money by performing genuinely valuable services to the economy, but some businesses, and some individuals within them just rentseek value from others.
That is the first-order cause of status. Competence and value, and objective facts. It is not at all random that Elon Musk has more status than your local retail cashier. And it certainly isn't due to his high social skills. All of this social stuff in either of our theories is second-order. If you insult Elon Musk by suggesting he is less intelligent than the average retail clerk, you are very unlikely to gain status unless your audience is already biased to hate Elon Musk, because any random person can see that he's highly intelligent and competent at something, otherwise he wouldn't be so rich and famous. Or if you say "he is literal demon who eats babies." If you make blatantly false insults people will laugh at you (unless they are already biased to hate him). But if you make a more plausible claim like "He should get off social media because he's a socially inept autist and go back to playing with electric cars", you're more likely to get a favorable response because at the very least it doesn't sound like you're an ignorant ideologue spouting pointless propaganda.
So maybe a more adjusted version of my theory would be: how much do people agree with you after you have spoken, not how much they already agreed with you. That is, if you think the person is a 8 and the other person previously thought they were a 6, and you logically and charismatically present a good argument for the person's objective value that changes their opinion to a 7.5, you might gain status. Again, this is not the entirety of the dynamic, you can sometimes make people respect your well thought out argument even if they ultimately disagree with you. Status is not a zero-sum game and, even if it were you could have an inflation effect where you doing more status-deserving things dillutes everyone else in existence without stealing from one particular person. In any case, your theory definitely needs to contend with the fact that people do, in reality, sometimes praise other people. And they don't necessarily lose status by doing so, especially in a so-called "circlejerk". Fanboys and fangirls aren't all constantly sacrificing tons of status with each other for no reason by gushing about their shared favorite celebrity. Clearly something else is going on, even if my theory doesn't fully explain it.
I think you neglect the way in which power factors into status considerations. People would fawn over Elon Musk or an emperor not because they believe such people to be meritocratic but because they hope to receive rewards and avoid punishments. The people at the top of power hierarchies manipulate those below them through various means in order to encourage and shape desirable consensuses. People buy into these for selfish reasons having more to do with personal fitness than group fitness. That's why people who aren't in a position to benefit from or be punished by Elon Musk (random journalists on Twitter) pile on him so relentlessly. They do it because he does not matter to them, but the opinions of their peers and employers do, so they demonstrate commitment to the group consensus in the hopes of impressing other members of the hierarchy.
Also, people often base their status evaluations on personal egotism. People who fancy themselves to be technophilic, market-oriented individuals will argue that Elon Musk deserves utmost respect, while people who fancy themselves to be more artistic and empathic rather than logical will decry him, and this is simply based on how their own qualities are reflected in Elon Musk. They use their perceptions of other peoples' status to feel good about themselves.
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Right, sure, people do care a little bit about the truth. But rarely the people who speak and take status shots at each other. Mostly the spectators, because their status is not in play at that moment.
That is still just a blatant attempt to pull him down, as per my theory. I'm no fanboy, in fact I'm short tesla, but objectively Elon Musk is way above average in social skills. Notice the common phrase "I'm no fanboy". "fanboy" is clearly low status, and I had to deny it so I could praise Musk without taking a status hit.
The default assumption should be that it's a mechanism to sort out the sexual hierarchy as with primates or walruses, and has no moral effect. The high school hierarchy doesn't seem to be about contributing to society. To an atheist, the status in a religious community bears little relationship to the common good as he understands it. Likewise, Status points in our community are almost granted for the opposite of things that would gain points in a progressive community, so what objective value to society can we both be improving through our status hierarchies ? If both our communities contain workers and tax-payers, then we have contributed to the other's economic well-being through capitalism and the wealth hierarchy, but our respective status sorting has no such positive effect.
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