Status Marker Polls

In an attempt to learn more about status, I asked some polls comparing status markers. I picked 16 status markers and asked 9 poll sets, on which “are you proudest in yourself”, “count most for status in your world”, “have counted most for status over all history”, in your world count most for status among lower, middle, upper classes, over history count most for status among men and women, and “make a culture more adaptive.”

These are priorities relative to a max of 100 each, sorted by sum of priorities, followed by correlations.

Note that proud of in self and adaptive correlate 0.87, status overall in your world and in the upper class of your world correlate 0.90, and status overall in history and among men in history correlate 0.91. Thus we plausibly like to say that the markers we have are most adaptive, and we are biased to focus on the upper class of our world and on men in history. Note that men in history and upper class today correlate 0.75, both easy to criticize “up” groups.

I also asked four LLMs to rank these markers, plus one additional, in terms of all history, US today, and adaptiveness. Here are their averaged results, compared to averaged poll results:

The ranks among the four LLMs tried correlate with each other 0.86 for all history, 0.87 for US today, and 0.78 re adaptive. LLMs correlated 0.90 with polls on US today, but only 0.61 and 0.71 re history and adaptive.