Many people seem at first glance to be primarily interested in ideas, but if you look closely you will start to see little clues that they are more interested in social status than it seemed.
For example, they attend more than you would expect to boring well-funded topics, relative to fascinating orphan topics, to bad arguments by well-known people, relative to good arguments by obscure people, and to attention for their insights, relative to generating theirs or reading others'.
The more successful a group, the more of them that tend to be such "fine feathered friends."
To me, this is the main downside of associating with the successful.
