There's some wisdom in this post but it kinda sidesteps for me one of the biggest problems I see with status seeking, which is at some point it seems to -- or at least can -- increasingly involve randomness, corruption, or increasingly unsubstantiable goals. It's like a variant of Goodhart's Law or Campbell's law, but involving randomness and invalidity in addition to corruption, and where those laws also become more important the further you go up the metric dimension.
Even putting aside the issues of value, in the sense of "should I value status in this area", there's this other issue: if you have a metric that's, say, correlated .2 or .3 with some underlying attribute, then almost by statistical definition as you start splitting hairs more and more you're splitting up more and more noise. As you chase status further and further, you're dealing with that more and more.
Maybe this is the same thing as his analogy about instability in hierarchies at some level. But if so I'm not sure the implications are followed as far as they could be.
Even putting aside the issues of value, in the sense of "should I value status in this area", there's this other issue: if you have a metric that's, say, correlated .2 or .3 with some underlying attribute, then almost by statistical definition as you start splitting hairs more and more you're splitting up more and more noise. As you chase status further and further, you're dealing with that more and more.
Maybe this is the same thing as his analogy about instability in hierarchies at some level. But if so I'm not sure the implications are followed as far as they could be.