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In a hierarchy, signaling respect for the hierarchy is very important. That is another similarity between academia and government, which I have discussed before. That is, part of the process of getting ahead in academia is showing respect for the academic hierarchy.
I think this offers a potential insight into the signaling role of education. It does not just signal intelligence or conscientiousness, which could be signaled more cheaply in other ways. It signals respect for hierarchy. Thus, large organizations will tend to value educational credentials, while small organizations may not need to do so.
There is no cheap alternative to educational credentials if you want to signal respect for hierarchy. … Any attempt to evade the educational credential system inherently signals a lack of respect for hierarchy!
This sounds to me pretty close to my emphasis on school as training kids to accept industry-era levels of overt ranking and dominance, with Bryan Caplan’s emphasis on doing the usual things to avoid seeming weird, since folks that are weird in some ways also tend to be weird in other ways. I’m not convinced folks care that much about your overall respect for hierarchy, but they do care that you go along with their local system, and defer to superiors.
Kling On School
What distinguishes humanity from all other species is the group mind. Our minds are linked to each other through our actions and especially our words. The internet, books, DVDs, and post-it notes serve as memory for the group mind. The group mind can build cities, cars with bluetooth, and billion transistor chips, all tasks gigantically beyond individual minds and therefore not accomplished by any other species.
The human species has domesticated other animals, and also domesticated itself. Indeed, this may still be going on. Rates of violent crime within societies have dropped drastically in the last few 100 years. This could be due to the improved technology of living together, but it seems likely to me that we continue to domesticate ourselves. Do sociopaths have as many children as their more domesticated cousins? It seems the more violent, less controlled, less capable of living well in such densities as characterize the group mind get pretty marginalized.
So yes, of course the group mind needs people who can function as part of the group mind. Not surprisingly, this involves a great subtlety of interaction socially, and a great ability to work on a task that has not been internally motivated within your own individual mind.
Considering that the non-group mind version of humans is essentially the chimpanzee or bonobo, I'd hardly speak poorly of the innovations that have allowed us to have a group mind. The self-domestication that has bred a tremendous control over our violent impulses into us and into the people we interact with every day. It also seems clear from the increasing rate of knowledge creation and innovation in our society that the group mind renders us incapable of creativity or invention.
So Kling saw one version of some of the moving pieces that allow a group of humans to extend their influence over hundreds of millions of other humans across multiple continents. Understanding those moving pieces will be very valuable, not so we can destroy them, but rather so we can abstract from what we see the essentials of creating the group mind, and continue to increase the intelligence and effectiveness of the group mind by properly training humans to function in it.
Well it seems to be a question of hierarchy vs authority.
What I understand from what you're saying is that people demand an automatic deferral to hierarchy.
A dry hierarchy forms the structure of an organisation, or 'their local system'. But authority is the respect that an individual earns rather than automatically commands.