Actually, status (as described on that page) is something you play, moment to moment. You are giving off a signal of "don't come near me, I bite" or "don't bite me, I'm not worth the trouble" or something somewhere in between, every second that you interact in person with someone else. Unlike stupid tricks like "mirroring", giving off status signals is not something you can stop doing. What you can do, though, is become more aware of it, better able to modulate it. Socially adept people are very good at varying their status moment by moment. For many of them, it's probably not even conscious.
The main reason an actor needs to learn about status is to be able to make scenes realistic. When the characters don't have a status relationship, a scene looks wooden and fake.
BTW, playing high status is not necessarily better. People who relentlessly play high status in every situation are commonly called "assholes". (Usually behind their backs.)
It's not something you have to play. Some of the dominant behaviors such as disinterest etc. are a result of your current state - I'm preoccupied with an important problem and not interested in other people, for example. Mirroring also happens naturally under certain circumstances. There are certainly subconscious things like this that come out- but the minute you decide to "play" status and deliberately take an action because of your status game and you get caught, whoever you are playing loses absolutely all respect for you. You've also got a much higher chance for failure with the people you really need (as they will be competent). I don't care to be manipulated whatsoever and I don't care about hierarchical power structures or power games that dominate many lives. All I (and many other people) care about is advancing our goals - if I work for someone, I am going to behave differently because I am working towards their goals, not mine - but I expect all my professional interactions to be goal oriented or problem oriented.
I'm not saying that you have to consciously play status ("decide to play"). I'm saying that when you interact with someone else, you are playing a certain level of status in relation to them, whether you are aware of it or not.
Engaging in some phony behavior will, of course, make people perceive you as a phony, with all the loss of respect that that entails. Respect, of course, is a big part of status. When you don't respect someone, you tend to play higher status toward them.
Now that I'm back in college, this time assistant-teaching as well as taking grad-level classes and sneaking in time for research, I am more amazed than ever by how wasteful the academic world is. They chop up your day into many context-switches (one of the worst things a knowledge-worker can do), they focus on lectures and exams instead of mentoring and experiences that bring about learning, they require useless courses, they emphasize grades relentlessly (known to decrease learning), and they present material out of context (so it's hard to retain or apply).
I think good teaching can be done in the academic world (I have seen some), and of course it's the place to go to do scientific research. But overall, the academic world is just not very good at what it does (except arguing about minutiae and winning research grants and endowments). The basis of its strong market position is subsidies and prestige. It's ripe for competition from savvy entrepreneurs.
I also dropped out of high school. I just stopped showing up, and spent my days writing code. Way better education than classes.
About truant officers: One day, walking along the sidewalk at 10:00 a.m. or so, I saw a truant officer walking along the sidewalk, too, in the opposite direction. He spotted a different teenager, also walking along, and arrested him. I think the truant officers ignored me for two reasons: because I didn't look like a truant, and because I lived near a college campus. I didn't have a computer of my own, so I went to the college campus and wrote code there every day. I probably looked like a "precocious" college student (I was 15, and probably appeared 13).
BTW, I never saw any difficulty later in life due to dropping out of high school. I've never seen anyone look at anyone's grades on a résumé or job application, never had anyone give a damn about my lack of credentials.
Thanks to all for the many informed and detailed replies!
I am now assistant-teaching a college course in low-level computer programming. It's an excellent course: the students reprogram a children's toy robot that uses the ARM processor. http://www.amazon.com/Little-Tikes-Giggles-Remote-Control/dp... They're getting up to speed very quickly on how to get hardware to actually do stuff.
Yes, I actually left Silicon Valley to do grad school. I haven't given up the principle of "do real stuff, see real results", though. I'm looking to design a couple fairly small homework assignments consisting of optimizing some ARM code. I want the examples to be real. Now mulling over which to do...
15 years ago, I did Intel-style assembly--and loved it even with all its clumsiness. But I just dove into ARM a few weeks ago, and am loving it even more. Such sweet pleasure to code so close to such a beautiful and simple machine!
The first rule of programming is indeed "don't program". But that's not because buying off-the-shelf code makes you more productive than writing code yourself. It's because software solutions are usually worse than manual solutions.
Here's a typical example, one I just ran into today. For a course, I need to enter some data into some system that stores grades. It doesn't just store grades, though, it tries to calculate grades--by various rules and heuristics, which you are likely to misunderstand. They have written a lot of code for the import process, to, you know, take the burden off the poor teacher, by calculating the grades.
Of course, it's such a pain, and so error-prone, the much easier solution would be to just make a spreadsheet containing the grades and upload it, and have the program do nothing but display the results or whatever actually needs to be done. That would remove 95% of the code written for this thing. And make it work better.
Another one, which I ran into a few weeks ago. I needed to add a class. The professor needed to approve it. The software was so confusing, the prof couldn't figure it out (he is a world-renowned professor of computer science, BTW). After a couple weeks of this, I finally got a sheet of paper and had him sign it. I brought that sheet to the expert in operating the mysterious System, and that finally got the job done.
Some software does obviously help the university run better. Every line of code after that makes it run worse.
The main reason an actor needs to learn about status is to be able to make scenes realistic. When the characters don't have a status relationship, a scene looks wooden and fake.
BTW, playing high status is not necessarily better. People who relentlessly play high status in every situation are commonly called "assholes". (Usually behind their backs.)