But selfishness is less plausible if they have no existing relation to you, aren’t a good ally candidate, and are past their prime.
But if they are good ally candidates, you are still unlikely to be viewed as selfish for trying to raise their status. I think that's the answer to your final conundrum. There's little reason to waste unselfishness on those who aren't allies when you get the same credit for promoting an ally (provided it isn't an obvious crony and especially if the alliance is ideologically rationalized).
This probably bears on the merit norm itself. You're supposed to try to align status with merit—within your coalition.
The fact that there is no competition between criticists and authors is important, as well as the fact that the criticist could care less about what authors think of him (he does not rely on them.) But I hardly think praising a beginning author is a deliberate attack on established authors, there doesn't have to be some ubercynical explanation for everything.
An art criticist praising a beginning author -- would this be an example of someone raising status of a person with lower status? Because I have seen that.
It may be a special case that the art criticist is not competing directly with the author, and that recognizing good authors is kinda part of the job description. Maybe praising the beginning author is just an indirect way to attack the established authors.
You say "we might also expect some people to ...". You then say "I hardly ever hear of this," which I take to mean you do sometimes hear of it. So far so good; the thing "we might expect" does in fact happen.
You go on to ask, "why don't more people do this?" That's a loaded question. Your language suggests that the number of people who "do this" is surprisingly low, without either
(a) making an argument for what number should be expected or
(b) citing an objective measurement of the actual number ("I hardly ever hear of this" does not count).
Given that by your own argument "this" is the least selfish of the four options, you could also have asked "why don't *fewer* people do this?" After all, people help lower-status people all the time. Every day, parents all over the world help their children mutate a little bit more from zero-status creatures to functioning adult members of society. Every day, bosses hand out raises, promotions, pats on the back. Every day, someone somewhere acknowledges a person of lower status with the words "credit where credit is due", or words to that effect. Maybe you rarely hear of these things, but they happen, and I suspect you're aware of them even if you don't often hear them bragged about.
I think it's a little disingenuous to treat "why don't more people do this" like a mystery for which no plausible explanation presents itself. It sounds to me like a needlessly rhetorical question. If you think more people should help the disadvantaged, why not just say so? But I am perfectly willing to backtrack if I've missed your point.
Okay... if I paste the text into this comment field and immediately *reload the page* and scroll back down here, the text *then* appears, with a little self-promotional link appended. See below for an example.
----
It is ok to use use status as a heuristic to estimate where merit is likely to lie, such rejecting without review papers that look bad on the surface and come from low status people. - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
I tried to copy some text from the article and paste it into this comment. Instead of that happening, the page scrolled to the top, and I scrolled down here to find my selected text had not been pasted. Is anybody else seeing this? It's incredibly annoying.
[Edit] Oh for God's sake, apparently the text I pasted *was* somehow included above what I just typed. I just deleted it.
This whole discussion seemed odd to me... I eventually figured out that what was bothering me is the concept of "our main norm is that status is supposed to track merit". I believe that the areas in which status is supposed to track merit are rather narrow, mostly limited to academia, parts of the blogosphere, and other "intellectual" areas generally. Certainly we don't expect politicians to gain status (power) by "merit", generally we expect them to rise by more or less representing their constituents' political attitudes, advancing their interests, and especially having superior political skills. Similar expectations hold in business management -- once you get a step or two above foot soldier, advancement is due to acumen at corporate politics (though you have to keep the company making money while doing that). As for various versions of "possessing money" as a status activity, nobody assumes that is done by any means other than "being really good at obtaining money". (Obtaining money is permitted because it is assumed that most ways of obtaining money have as a side-effect doing things that other people find useful.)
I think this echoes comments someone made about the conference about designing long-voyage spacecraft: It's a high-status activity among a narrow, geekly crowd. But for the larger society, it's not viewed as a high status activity at all. Designing long-voyage spacecraft is a good example of merit -- it's really valuable to society to have someone around who can do it, but it's not really valuable in the eyes of society to be the person who can do it.
Only for about the first minute of the world's existence, after that it starts to matter more and more that rewards don't line up with merit. It's like paying people to not work.
Yes... This seems to be yet another instance of someone being surprised that people aren't actually dedicated to the principles that the loudly proclaim that they are following, but are rather careful in advancing their self-interest.
In the place where raising other people's status costs the least, you see this all the time: Bloggers like Instapundit highlight bloggers with interesting insights and smaller following. Tweeters with thousands of followers encourage you to follow someone nearing 200, 500 or 1000. Individuals recommend a mechanic who hasn't been around long but did a good job on their car. However, large institutions seem to focus on the perpetuation of more of same. This suggests that relying on large governmental or civil institutions to reduce inequality or level the playing field is a flawed strategy. In this case, the most effective solution for those who would change things is to turn their energy and attention to newer, smaller institutions, rather than hoping to turn institutions whose missions have calcified into self-perpetuation into something they are not and won't again become. If we wish for more equality and for more connection between merit and status, the solution is to abandon overgrown institutions. Their time for reform has passed.
The more unanimous the vote is the more united and powerful the organization looks, In addition groupthink tends to push for more unanimous votes. All in all individual members being perceived as threats to the powers that be plays only a very minor role. Remember that the next time a politician tries to win your vote by referring to him/herself as an "outsider".
My statement above missed that the people who raise the status of the disadvantaged are usually arguing directly against certain forms of the merit principle of status. It is their political adversaries who most clearly argue for the merit principle of status.
They often point to entrepreneurs and others who are already successful to argue that these people should be celebrated/that their wealth is justified/etc. When arguing with outsiders they will stick to high status examples - and examples of people elevating those below them to levels above them to demonstrate their commitment to the merit status principle either won't really work (it will raise both of their statuses) or won't be spread widely precisely because the person making the status statement doesn't have enough status to make the message widely known.
The only time when they might be elevating someone to a status level higher than themselves is when they (or others) draw attention to a relatively unknown prodigy. But again this is a case where it is also about signaling their ability to spot and appreciate talent as opposed to purely promoting their devotion to the merit principle of status.
"So why don’t more people do this?"- Raising people's status makes them a threat. This is the same reason that school boards and city councils work really hard to make sure that any dissent is quashed, they would much rather have a 9-0 vote than a 8-1 vote, and will go out of their way to punish/shun the dissenter.
Isn't the greater good served usually by the best-case output of the work, rather than this worry about the effects of rewards to people who didn't really earn them?
But selfishness is less plausible if they have no existing relation to you, aren’t a good ally candidate, and are past their prime.
But if they are good ally candidates, you are still unlikely to be viewed as selfish for trying to raise their status. I think that's the answer to your final conundrum. There's little reason to waste unselfishness on those who aren't allies when you get the same credit for promoting an ally (provided it isn't an obvious crony and especially if the alliance is ideologically rationalized).
This probably bears on the merit norm itself. You're supposed to try to align status with merit—within your coalition.
The liberty is not possible, the principles and what we need to hold, can bring all the elements for balance and stability.
The fact that there is no competition between criticists and authors is important, as well as the fact that the criticist could care less about what authors think of him (he does not rely on them.) But I hardly think praising a beginning author is a deliberate attack on established authors, there doesn't have to be some ubercynical explanation for everything.
An art criticist praising a beginning author -- would this be an example of someone raising status of a person with lower status? Because I have seen that.
It may be a special case that the art criticist is not competing directly with the author, and that recognizing good authors is kinda part of the job description. Maybe praising the beginning author is just an indirect way to attack the established authors.
You say "we might also expect some people to ...". You then say "I hardly ever hear of this," which I take to mean you do sometimes hear of it. So far so good; the thing "we might expect" does in fact happen.
You go on to ask, "why don't more people do this?" That's a loaded question. Your language suggests that the number of people who "do this" is surprisingly low, without either
(a) making an argument for what number should be expected or
(b) citing an objective measurement of the actual number ("I hardly ever hear of this" does not count).
Given that by your own argument "this" is the least selfish of the four options, you could also have asked "why don't *fewer* people do this?" After all, people help lower-status people all the time. Every day, parents all over the world help their children mutate a little bit more from zero-status creatures to functioning adult members of society. Every day, bosses hand out raises, promotions, pats on the back. Every day, someone somewhere acknowledges a person of lower status with the words "credit where credit is due", or words to that effect. Maybe you rarely hear of these things, but they happen, and I suspect you're aware of them even if you don't often hear them bragged about.
I think it's a little disingenuous to treat "why don't more people do this" like a mystery for which no plausible explanation presents itself. It sounds to me like a needlessly rhetorical question. If you think more people should help the disadvantaged, why not just say so? But I am perfectly willing to backtrack if I've missed your point.
Okay... if I paste the text into this comment field and immediately *reload the page* and scroll back down here, the text *then* appears, with a little self-promotional link appended. See below for an example.
----
It is ok to use use status as a heuristic to estimate where merit is likely to lie, such rejecting without review papers that look bad on the surface and come from low status people. - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
I tried to copy some text from the article and paste it into this comment. Instead of that happening, the page scrolled to the top, and I scrolled down here to find my selected text had not been pasted. Is anybody else seeing this? It's incredibly annoying.
[Edit] Oh for God's sake, apparently the text I pasted *was* somehow included above what I just typed. I just deleted it.
This whole discussion seemed odd to me... I eventually figured out that what was bothering me is the concept of "our main norm is that status is supposed to track merit". I believe that the areas in which status is supposed to track merit are rather narrow, mostly limited to academia, parts of the blogosphere, and other "intellectual" areas generally. Certainly we don't expect politicians to gain status (power) by "merit", generally we expect them to rise by more or less representing their constituents' political attitudes, advancing their interests, and especially having superior political skills. Similar expectations hold in business management -- once you get a step or two above foot soldier, advancement is due to acumen at corporate politics (though you have to keep the company making money while doing that). As for various versions of "possessing money" as a status activity, nobody assumes that is done by any means other than "being really good at obtaining money". (Obtaining money is permitted because it is assumed that most ways of obtaining money have as a side-effect doing things that other people find useful.)
I think this echoes comments someone made about the conference about designing long-voyage spacecraft: It's a high-status activity among a narrow, geekly crowd. But for the larger society, it's not viewed as a high status activity at all. Designing long-voyage spacecraft is a good example of merit -- it's really valuable to society to have someone around who can do it, but it's not really valuable in the eyes of society to be the person who can do it.
our main norm is that status is supposed to track merit - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...our main norm is that status is supposed to track merit - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...our main norm is that status is supposed to track merit - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
Only for about the first minute of the world's existence, after that it starts to matter more and more that rewards don't line up with merit. It's like paying people to not work.
Yes... This seems to be yet another instance of someone being surprised that people aren't actually dedicated to the principles that the loudly proclaim that they are following, but are rather careful in advancing their self-interest.
In the place where raising other people's status costs the least, you see this all the time: Bloggers like Instapundit highlight bloggers with interesting insights and smaller following. Tweeters with thousands of followers encourage you to follow someone nearing 200, 500 or 1000. Individuals recommend a mechanic who hasn't been around long but did a good job on their car. However, large institutions seem to focus on the perpetuation of more of same. This suggests that relying on large governmental or civil institutions to reduce inequality or level the playing field is a flawed strategy. In this case, the most effective solution for those who would change things is to turn their energy and attention to newer, smaller institutions, rather than hoping to turn institutions whose missions have calcified into self-perpetuation into something they are not and won't again become. If we wish for more equality and for more connection between merit and status, the solution is to abandon overgrown institutions. Their time for reform has passed.
The more unanimous the vote is the more united and powerful the organization looks, In addition groupthink tends to push for more unanimous votes. All in all individual members being perceived as threats to the powers that be plays only a very minor role. Remember that the next time a politician tries to win your vote by referring to him/herself as an "outsider".
My statement above missed that the people who raise the status of the disadvantaged are usually arguing directly against certain forms of the merit principle of status. It is their political adversaries who most clearly argue for the merit principle of status.
They often point to entrepreneurs and others who are already successful to argue that these people should be celebrated/that their wealth is justified/etc. When arguing with outsiders they will stick to high status examples - and examples of people elevating those below them to levels above them to demonstrate their commitment to the merit status principle either won't really work (it will raise both of their statuses) or won't be spread widely precisely because the person making the status statement doesn't have enough status to make the message widely known.
The only time when they might be elevating someone to a status level higher than themselves is when they (or others) draw attention to a relatively unknown prodigy. But again this is a case where it is also about signaling their ability to spot and appreciate talent as opposed to purely promoting their devotion to the merit principle of status.
The person being advanced can also become a threat to advancer later, e.g., Obama and Alice Palmer.
"So why don’t more people do this?"- Raising people's status makes them a threat. This is the same reason that school boards and city councils work really hard to make sure that any dissent is quashed, they would much rather have a 9-0 vote than a 8-1 vote, and will go out of their way to punish/shun the dissenter.
Isn't the greater good served usually by the best-case output of the work, rather than this worry about the effects of rewards to people who didn't really earn them?