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This is very much not true. Just because something has zero-sum interactions within it does not mean the entirety of it is zero-sum. A lot of SMV is based on things like health and reproductive fitness, which are positive sum. As a simple counterexample, if we had a fancy pill that made everyone age at half speed after they hit 20, the SMV for almost everyone would go up. In relative terms on the dating market the relative positioning of everyone, and thus your ability to secure a mate, would stay the same. But the mate that you got would be a person that aged half as fast and would remain more healthy and attractive for you as a partner. Similarly, if a social trend went around convincing all women to chop their breasts off (and I don't mean the minority that currently does this, I mean if it became so widespread that literally all of them did it), then there would be zero-sum tradeoffs (women with naturally small breasts would gain positions on the hierarchy since they'd lose less than their peers) AND there would be huge negative sum results (all men would lose the ability to date women with breasts no matter how high their own SMV, and any children they have would be dependent on formula).
Doubling all the point values across the board makes people better off. Halving them makes people worse off. Meanwhile in a true zero-sum game like football or baseball, doubling or halving the point value of all scoring actions changes nothing, because the numbers are arbitrary and don't refer to anything except relative positions.
Your general argument still holds. Lying about SMV to other people in ways that negates their advantages over you can raise your position on the hierarchy. But this is still negative sum, in that they lose more than you gain, so it's a fundamentally selfish and anti-social thing.
Yeah, but if your view is SMV is the criterion for dating, you'll never settle because you'll be constantly haunted by "there could be someone even hotter out there I could get" and then you end up with no-one at all.
That's not how any market ever works. Nobody, except maybe people with a specific type of obsessive compulsive disorder, tries to buy something at a store but fails because they just keep going to new stores looking for better bargains and never actually purchases the thing. At some point you find one that's better than any other, you've found so far, reason that there's a very low chance there's a better one and if there was it would take too long to find, and you pick that one. SMV doesn't change this reasoning at all.
It depends on how much friction there is going to new stores, how much stock there is, and how much you personally enjoy shopping.
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I believe you are sadly mistaken.
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