First off, a meta-answer: Asking “what are non-obvious x” is potentially less useful at capturing less-obvious examples of x than asking for as many distinct examples as possible. I think it is likely that of those who have some [less obvious observations] manywill assume they are more obvious than they are for others.
So, all the examples I can think of, most of which I think are obvious:
Financial skills/credit score
Level of effort spent to save insignificant amounts of money (and the significance threshold is often OOM higher for wealthy vs poor)
“Sophisticated” vocabulary and hobbies (what counts as sophisticated probably varies a lot between different subcultures, and it’s easy to assume something is sophisticated that others do not. I’m not listing examples lest I out myself further :) )
Presence of Anti-work sentiment, Anti-capitalist sentiment, Anti-wealth sentiment. (It’s a lot easier to buy into a narrative like “all rich people are evil conniving bastards” if you have never gotten to know anybody wealthy and all your friends/family/coworkers are using the abstract idea of “the evil capitalists” as a convenient target upon which to place blame for all bad things)
IQ (e.g. general level of intelligence/problem solving/pattern recognition/critical thinking, not necessarily tested IQ)
Level of interest in Obviously Bad Deals e.g. lottery, gambling (with perhaps a distinction between skill-based and not, the person counting cards in blackjack is not getting an obviously bad deal if playing with people less skilled. The suckers playing with them, on the other hand...)
Who your friends are/who you spend time around
What you talk about/think about (needs specificity but I hope someone else will be able to give better examples than me)
What media you consume (Obviously LW is high status adjusts monocle and checks pocket-watch in a condescending manner)
Of the media you consume, how much is read/listened to vs watched?
Level of risk aversion (I’m curious about which ways this applies, because I can see plausible reasons why levels of risk aversion for different things might be either high-class or low-class depending on the details. I have not seen any research about this and I’m entirely speculating from lived experience)
Level of institutional/systemic knowledge, e.g. knowing there’s actually nothing stopping you from attending university classes you aren’t enrolled in.
General level of busyness (Is it high-class that you can afford lots of free time, or high class to always have another Important Meeting to attend? Or both? It’s interesting how context-dependent a lot of these things are.)
Level of agreeableness
I’m now questioning how many of these are generally considered high-class and how many of them I associate with high-class but are more just nerd-culture things that don’t entirely generalize.
All of these were off the top of my head in ~20 minutes, quality not guaranteed. I resisted the temptation to have an LLM generate example ideas, I assume if you wanted LLM answers you would have already gotten them yourself.
First off, a meta-answer: Asking “what are non-obvious x” is potentially less useful at capturing less-obvious examples of x than asking for as many distinct examples as possible. I think it is likely that of those who have some [less obvious observations] many will assume they are more obvious than they are for others.
In my case, I have a built-in bias to assume that any piece of knowledge I obtained without apparent effort must also be obvious to most other people.
So, all the examples I can think of, most of which I think are obvious:
Financial skills/credit score
Level of effort spent to save insignificant amounts of money (and the significance threshold is often OOM higher for wealthy vs poor)
“Sophisticated” vocabulary and hobbies (what counts as sophisticated probably varies a lot between different subcultures, and it’s easy to assume something is sophisticated that others do not. I’m not listing examples lest I out myself further :) )
Presence of Anti-work sentiment, Anti-capitalist sentiment, Anti-wealth sentiment. (It’s a lot easier to buy into a narrative like “all rich people are evil conniving bastards” if you have never gotten to know anybody wealthy and all your friends/family/coworkers are using the abstract idea of “the evil capitalists” as a convenient target upon which to place blame for all bad things)
IQ (e.g. general level of intelligence/problem solving/pattern recognition/critical thinking, not necessarily tested IQ)
Level of interest in Obviously Bad Deals e.g. lottery, gambling (with perhaps a distinction between skill-based and not, the person counting cards in blackjack is not getting an obviously bad deal if playing with people less skilled. The suckers playing with them, on the other hand...)
Who your friends are/who you spend time around
What you talk about/think about (needs specificity but I hope someone else will be able to give better examples than me)
What media you consume (Obviously LW is high status adjusts monocle and checks pocket-watch in a condescending manner)
Of the media you consume, how much is read/listened to vs watched?
Level of risk aversion (I’m curious about which ways this applies, because I can see plausible reasons why levels of risk aversion for different things might be either high-class or low-class depending on the details. I have not seen any research about this and I’m entirely speculating from lived experience)
Level of institutional/systemic knowledge, e.g. knowing there’s actually nothing stopping you from attending university classes you aren’t enrolled in.
General level of busyness (Is it high-class that you can afford lots of free time, or high class to always have another Important Meeting to attend? Or both? It’s interesting how context-dependent a lot of these things are.)
Level of agreeableness
I’m now questioning how many of these are generally considered high-class and how many of them I associate with high-class but are more just nerd-culture things that don’t entirely generalize.
All of these were off the top of my head in ~20 minutes, quality not guaranteed.
I resisted the temptation to have an LLM generate example ideas, I assume if you wanted LLM answers you would have already gotten them yourself.