Not all signalling/status behaviors are bad

Yes. If everyone who says "I'm X" is actually Y and everybody knows that and people still say that, then essentially X has come to actually mean Y, whatever its literal meaning was.

Child: But everyone's doing it.

Parent: If everyone was jumping off a bridge, you'd want to as well?

It's not just improving your skills when you're already an adult that's a status loss. Nobody faults a top 100 professional tennis player for trying to get better...

Yes, the exact rules are a bit more complex. Seems to me like it's OK to practice if you already have much better results. The good results are high-status... and whetever else the person does is colored by the halo effect. If they work diligently, we should praise them for their work. But I guess that even if they would do nothing and yet deliver superior results, we should praise them for their talent. Whatever a cool person does, it automatically becomes cool, although the same thing might become uncool if someone else would do that (and the corresponding rationalization would be: no, it's not really the same thing; you are doing it wrong).

On the other hand the image of "working hard" could be better than image of "just having luck" because it reduces envy. The envy-reducing factor could be also something else than hard work, for example "being crazy". Something that says that these people are superior to the average Joe, but for some reason Joe probably wouldn't want too much to be in their place. Or maybe this is not a counter-example to status loss... maybe it actually is a small status sacrifice designed to reduce the envy of the less successful people. Status games are complicated: if you get too much status, someone could get angry and kill you (either literally, or just work hard to ruin your carreer).

It could be interesting to find out whether top players get status loss among their peers if they practice visibly more than their peers but don't deliver better results (yet).

And by the way, laughing at people who are trying to learn something also makes good sense as a zero-sum-game strategy. By threatening status loss you eliminate a future competition. If someone is already far ahead of you, it's too late to stop them, but you can still stop people at your level from improving and leaving you behind. This sounds horrible, but it can be done unconsciously, like you really feel they don't have a chance and are only making themselves funny, so you have to give them a helpful feedback.

Also there are some exceptional situations where adult learning from zero does not cause status loss. For example when the personal computers were new, older people did not lose status for learning the basics; they actually gained status even for minimum knowledge, because they were obviously superior in their age group.. and nobody expected them to really compete against 20-years olds (trying that seriously they would become very low-status).

Generally, if something is known to be new (not necessarily new technology, but also new fashion, for example Zumba dancing in my country), then even being a beginner increases your status among people who are at zero level. Probably because the zero level is percieved as average, so by being above-zero you automatically become elite.

Yesterday I went ice skating for the first time in years (and I was never any good at it). I did very poorly. Small children zipped by me on the ice. It occurred to me that this situation could have been embarrassing, but I didn't happen to feel embarrassed. I vaguely remember consciously editing out that reaction to that sort of situation, and think it was in response to my dad reacting badly to expressions of such embarrassment when I was years younger than I am now (maybe 12-15) but still older than others who would have been in beginner-classes-of-things I could have joined.

In your example people first notice you being better (that is high status) and only then become curious about the causes. My examples were about people noticing someone practicing, or just discussing a hypothetical practice in future, with no improvement yet. That's not the same situation.

Simply said, you get -1 point for trying, +5 points for succeeding. Problem is that trying comes first, succeeding later. So there is that unpleasant phase of "already trying, not yet succeeding", which you cannot avoid (though you can keep it secret). During this phase you have low status. Only later, when the success comes, your status becomes higher than it was originally.

The high-status answer to "Where did you learn that?" is "I am just naturally good at it". Of course that works only if it is credible, which depends on the audience.

For example if I would try to get high status for my programming skills, to a totally computer-illiterate person I could say "I just naturally understand the computers; I was like this since my childhood". No details necessary. To them, any computer skills are probably magic, accessible just for special kind of people, and I just confirmed the hypothesis.

To a fellow programmer I could say: "I played with computers since I was a child; then I participated in programming competitions and won them; then I studied university, which was rather easy for me; and now I just read some tutorial on the web or google a few examples, and I get it; anyway, most of the stuff is easy if you already know a lot". I cannot pretend that one can learn programming magically without learning; but I can still move my magic more meta and pretend that it's not my programming skills per se, but my learning-programming skills which are magical. Yes, I had to learn programming, but the learning was always easy and quick -- I never failed, never got stuck, never had to ask another person for help, never doubted my success for a moment. (Which is psychologically almost as unlikely as being born with magical programming abilities, but I would expect an average programmer to believe this and to feel inferior compared to it.)

If I can take your answer literally, perhaps the word "improvising" had some bad vibe. It contains a possibility of failure, uncertainty. Also, trying is low status, but teaching institutions can have high status, so maybe people expected an answer like: "I had an internship at Google and that's where I learned that".

(Age is context-dependent. If you are 25 in a job, and you are youngest of your colleagues, they see you as a child.)

Well yes, and the latter group is just mistaken, which is what I'm pointing out.

I attribute bed-making and similar things as reducing the cognitive cost of visual processing. If you enter a clean room, it's easy to asses what few things are present. But if there is a mess, there are all those extra visual objects which must be sorted through in your visual attention circuits.

This fits with the studies that I have read (the abstracts of) pertaining to the effect of clutter on both productivity and indicators of stress.

Having said that, I think avoiding cognitive cost is something we acquired from evolution because thought was very costly in terms of calories. So it might not be valid to continue avoiding, especially when it comes to questions more important than bed-making. This is one reason we rely on cached thoughts and so forth. Does anyone remember if there was a sequence post on the caloric cost of thinking?

This strikes me as the opposite conclusion to the right one (and so I question the strength of the reasoning). See previously alluded to studies that can be paraphrased as "mess bad". While I agree that thinking on net is probably desirable I rather confidently assert that we are not best off doing so by making less effort to clear up clutter - be it mental or physical. Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess, not letting it build up more. (After all, even once the bed is all nice and neat we still have more stuff lying around to process than, well, back before we learned how to build stuff to keep lying around.)

(I downvoted the above, because I found the ratio of convincing explanation to wild theorizing too low, which is bad epistemic hygiene, especially when there are impressionable people around.)

I just balanced a -1 to 0. No idea who downvoted you, or why. I found it highly insightful, and yet another example of a random comment on Less Wrong answering some esoteric question I've had for years.