Status And Social-Skill Bias

The following table gives medians of 3 LLM estimates re % relative importance for short term success in 5 areas of life of these 4 factors:

• (A) status: looks, $, fame, family, connections, credentials, charisma, wit, etc.

• (B) social skills: at flattering, befriending, projecting power, making people feel heard, etc.;

• (C) drive: energy, stamina, persistence, effort

• (D) judgement: good choices re topic of your leadership, eg ideas, arguments, slogans, designs, plans, group strategies.

The last two rows show % poll responses re which of these folks would like to matter more, or less, for success. As you can see, we strongly agree that we most want judgement, and least want status, to matter, and in-between we more prefer drive over social skills. As politics and culture are where judgement now matters least, these are the areas we should most want to reform.

Status matters so much for success in our world now because in we so often just trust high status folks to run stuff, without much accountability re concrete performance metrics. So what we should want instead are institutions that better reward good judgment. Using mechanisms like those I’ve tried to design for academia, governance, medicine, law, and many other areas.

But alas we don’t have such mechanisms at the meta-level, the level at which we decide which new institutions to consider. At that level status and social skills dominate. And surprise, surprise, people rich in those features have not looked very favorably on institutions that would deemphasize those features. But if someday in the future we instead use a judgment-rewarding mechanism like futarchy to make such choices, maybe then we’d see a lot more consideration of other judgement rewarding institutions in other areas of life. One ring to rule them all.