How do you explain that some people are not sensitive to social status?
There is this man and his brother is a monk. So he tells this monk "if you please the king, you don't have to live on rice and water anymore", where the monk replies: "if you learn to live on rice and water, you don't need to please the king".
1. That person is in some way sad regardless of what they profess, or
2. They have their own subgroup where they rate status according to the status rankings of the subgroup. This can include rejecting the status hierarchy of the mainstream, but this itself is a status play
With the internet this sub group can now be entirely online. But there does not exist such a thing as someone entirely insensitive to social status.
If you posit there is, can you name an example of such a person?
And i, myself, would probably also qualify.
Because "do not care" is internal and can only really be judged indirectly. Saying "I do not care" is one of those things where it can both genuinely be said or where it is a countersignal.
The claim is NOT however "does this person care about the esteem of their coworkers" or "does this person care to be seen". Status can be had in other ways.
For example, you work, you write on Hacker news, you have 3,000+ karma - no easy feat.
One way of measuring status would be whether you were pleased or disappointed by someone's reaction to something you did. Either in person or virtually. Whether for work, a hobby, or for fun. This truly is not an experience you have?
Lobsters also have a sex drive, but not everything is sexual.
I would agree with weaker claims such as "many people care less about status" or "many people ignore loss of status to pursue other goals".
I'm procrastinating because my dayjob is boring. Isn't this what all people on HN do?
Edit: Implication, do you write for social status? You even have a bio and use your actual name.
> One way of measuring status would be whether you were pleased or disappointed by someone's reaction to something you did.
I laugh when i deliver some good burn. But that's not gaining social status, its just being mean.
I'm on the spectrum and growing up I worked with special needs kids with my mother as she ran a non-profit focused on specials needs community. Let me tell you, some people are simply not cognizant of social status and there's a whole swath of people who are passingly aware but find it irrelevant to their life. Solitary creatures that go their own way exist in all kinds of highly social species.
This thread feels akin to threads you occasionally see where a bunch of selfish people insist altruistic acts _cannot_ exist. Their insistent claims against the possibility of altruistic acts only reveal their internal state, they aren't high quality arguments, just assumptive assertions by people who can't imagine alternate mental states.
Some people just want to spend their lonely numbered days free.
But the claim that some people are literally immune to status strikes me as implausible. It would imply, for example, that people on the spectrum are literally unbothered by being mocked, insulted, berated, laughed at, rejected, abandoned and so on.
Is that truly what you're claiming?
I took this broad definition of status from Improv. This is the actual status one would be sensitive to or not on a biochemical level, because it addresses our feelings and actions as they exist, rather than what our title or formal status says.
"Keith Johnstone understands status as something one does, independent of the social status one has. Social status represents one's rank in a social order. At the upper end are secular and spiritual leaders (kings, priests), at the bottom end, dependents and outcasts. Social rank is approximately demonstrated through offices, titles, awards, and status symbols. Johnstone's "status", on the other hand, comes from the behavior of the characters in a specific encounter. He stresses that there is no neutral status; rather, some sort of difference is always present. A good actor is always conscious of the relative status of the portrayed characters and can playfully vary it."
https://improwiki.com/en/wiki/improv/status#:~:text=In%20imp....
> How do you explain that some people are not sensitive to social status?
You're interpretation of that question:
> The original claim was that some people are "not sensitive to status" and have no biochemical changes from it.
As a 3rd party observer I don't have confidence that the original question and your interpretation of it are equivalent, perhaps OP could provide clarity.
>In the brain, serotonin seems to be deeply related to social status. This is Jordan Peterson's bit about lobsters - it's so ubiquitous that even lobsters share the same mechanism. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01378-2 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.94.11.5939
OP says: social status is baked into us at a biochemical level another commentor: How do you explain why some people are insentive to status
You cited the 2nd commentor. I was linking that top comment to show you that both comments are linked in terms of framing the subject.
For me its the discord that gives me pleasure. Disagreeing and teasing. To the extent that dang reprimanded me for flaming. Also I'm a nobody and i do not consider that a problem. So i'm largely selfish, not motivated by the status others attribute to me.
We write on HN for different reasons. They assumed that their reason is something universal. Just a tiny mistake.
I would be surprised to learn anyone is truly immune from status in this sense.
"Keith Johnstone understands status as something one does, independent of the social status one has. Social status represents one's rank in a social order. At the upper end are secular and spiritual leaders (kings, priests), at the bottom end, dependents and outcasts. Social rank is approximately demonstrated through offices, titles, awards, and status symbols. Johnstone's "status", on the other hand, comes from the behavior of the characters in a specific encounter. He stresses that there is no neutral status; rather, some sort of difference is always present. A good actor is always conscious of the relative status of the portrayed characters and can playfully vary it."
https://improwiki.com/en/wiki/improv/status#:~:text=In%20imp....
They might be getting their share of social status validation on groups/subgroups outside work. They can also think that by saying they don't care, this makes them above the rest - which is a social validation
Maybe the social status chasers were the odd ones all along. They would surely hate that thought.
And I've seem groups where 'not-conforming to the norm' was seem as being superior, so people would say they don't care about social status, but as a way to feel superior and connect to those people that also say they don't care about social status. Positioning themselves as not being a 'normie'
It might be that they truly don't care, but on the other hand, for someone that don't care, they put too much importance on not-caring which is... odd.
Find a study or do a study that detects (and defines) variations in sensitivity to social status, and if they have detected some people that are completely immune, examine those people for differences from the people that are not. But as it is, it sounds like "but how can you explain that Jesus rose from the dead?"