[Link] Status Anxiety

There is nowhere where I've witnessed (and felt) more status anxiety than in Lesswrong.

Really? I think status anxiety is probably everywhere and I have no reason to expect that LWers are more status anxious than most people. Are you sure you aren't just noticing that people talk about status more on LW that in other places? I notice way more status anxiety among, say, high school kids. They just don't have a language for talking about it.

There is nowhere where I've witnessed (and felt) more status anxiety than in Lesswrong

If that were true, one of the first replies would have been a status-lowering response of the form "you can't be going out much".

You may be confusing status anxiety and awareness of the peculiarly confusing nature of status, which can be a source of anxiety, but is (I suspect) different from what de Botton calls status anxiety.

As for "status addiction", that strikes me as a phrase of the same type as "water addiction" - denotationally correct, in the sense that no one seems able to give it up for any length of time, but connotationally objectionable, as it implies that we should be able to give it up, when it's not clear that anyone could.

Maybe a more generous comparison would be "money addiction". Status, I have argued, is a type of currency - something you regularly acquire and spend. If you're canny enough, you can come out of these transactions with a "profit", more than you started from. Everybody in modern western societies desires money, because it's needed to do practically anything. Status works more or less the same way, and is in fact somewhat tradable with money.

As Qiaochu_Yuan noted, it is easy to mistake more status anxiety verbalization for more status anxiety. As for the book Status Anxiety, it seems useful in that it discusses the status issues explicitly, but is sort of pop-psych in terms of offering untested solutions.

There is nowhere where I've witnessed (and felt) more status anxiety expressed and talked about than in Lesswrong

I'd think that people on Lesswrong have relatively little status anxiety, and talk about it because it didn't come naturally as they were growing up, but now see the use and power of it. Most people automatically fight for status, while we are relative pacifists, and didn't even notice the bullets whizzing by our ears for most of our lives.

Robin Hanson has a scathing review of Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety. I don't necessarily agree with all the parts of the review, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Can anyone link me to a good summary of the book's substantive content? The video is excessively long and slow.