Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour. One of the things that high-status people have to deal with is that they basically create the rules by their behaviour and actions. That leads to a certain disregard for what is written on-paper because they can write different things on it if they want to.

I'd imagine the RS people actually probably tended more towards the former in the early days. There was more of an aristocratic bent and the more vigorous a scientific body is the less respect it has for established rules - more than one of the good scientists from back when were also legit heretics (I've been reading the wiki page for Newton, for example - or the grave robbing doctors).

> Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour.

Interesting. You mean it’s high-status to disregard rules that don’t have formal consequences?

I guess I’m a bit confused, in that we clearly used to have a society that operated much more on rules without formal consequences. E.g. here in Sweden our law books are absolutely filled with them. Obviously there must have been high-status people that took them seriously in the past, otherwise we wouldn’t have been a well functioning society.