These events probably happened in the reverse order, but imagine if humans inventing counting after herding. That is, imagine a community long ago which herded animals, and where having a better herd was a big mark of higher status. Since they could not count, these humans gossiped about who had the better herd. For example, they traded anecdotes about times when someone’s herd had seemed especially awe-inspiring or dingy. And via gossip (and its implicit coalition politics), they formed a rough consensus on who had the best herds. A consensus where the opinions of high status folks tended to count for more.
The problem is that we have had counting and now we are getting rid of it. http://www.arnoldkling.com/... (this is of course very close to what you wrote in Forager Elites) - gossip is taking over, and gossip is not truth based. Does that make you revisit your thesis that what we need is more speech?
Nobody (well I can't imagine what people) would like chess without rules either. One idea is that rules make a certain kind of challenge and propel a certain kind of drama.
Two similar kinds of situation to separate from the background of 0) when we are expressing personal preferences or opinions. The two situations to separate from that are 1) When there is some official judgement being made that affects everyone, then we (at least consent-of-the-governed types) want it to be "impartial," transparent, and "fair". 2) In sports (and I think this is a different reason than Robin's for the same distinction) there need to be clear rules that the players play under, and a clearly defined objective function (scoring). Sports fans love the game of ascribing both objective metrics and subjective qualities to players and teams, and arguing over different qualities' contributions to... winning by the rules. "Fair is fair."
And yet, in my research field (computational materials science) something like this is clearly happening, everyone I spoke with privately agrees it's a problem, and no solution is in sight.
I think the failure modes are the following: (1) the problems with a metric are often only evident ex-post (2) the success of a metric is often evaluated using the metric itself and (3) reform proposal are pre-screened by status of the proponent, evaluated of course on the same metric.
I am aware that this is not a good argument against the use of metrics, but it is a good argument for not putting all our eggs in one basket, mixing multiple metrics and possibly numeric metrics with other modes of evaluation. Off the cuff, in education one could envision a system where students are evaluated using metric A and teachers using metric B, while metric C is used to guide policy. (note that I am not familiar with the details of the SAT score system in the US). Honestly I would increase the use of metrics, but also mandate a "the map is not the territory" flashing bright red disclaimer on any document that uses them.
Well yeah, because only the best colleges needed to filter applicants, beyond the self-selection that had been a good-enough screen in the century before. As far as I know, there are still no entrance exams to get into a monastery. For parallel reasons, colleges didn't need them for most of history.
I see. In wartime you'd want to reduce the dimensions. The status of whistle-perfectionists should fall. But if the competition is just about who will have the country that leaves the most humans sincerely satisfied with their lot, increasing the dimensions might be how you win. And pushing a one-dimensional metric in peoples' faces might be counterproductive to winning, so opposition to it makes some sense.
[Edit: It's true that we don't much esteem martial skills relevant to 21st century war, compared to our esteem for vloggers with compelling makeup tutorials. That makes us vulnerable to foreign powers with warlike values. The whole world has to "go soft" together if this proliferation of esteem dimensions is going to work. But isn't that what we're seeing? You can say that wars are now basically economic, but it's no accident that the economic winners are the places most capable of understanding, anticipating and guiding the urges of customers who crave variety and niche products. Meme wars are fine if our towns are safe from real wars.]
Yes, we agree on how this feels subjectively. But if you wanted your society to win some larger contest with outsiders, you could see how this approach might be inadequate.
Yes of course it is possible to have overly simple measures that take by themselves mislead. That is the usual excuse for preventing them. But it is an excuse, as simple fixes are well known.
Seems to me SAT was first adopted by elites schools:"first administration of the SAT occurred on June 23, 1926, … administered to over 8,000 students at over 300 test centers. … Slightly over a quarter of males and females applied to Yale University and Smith College." https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I like objective, rankable metrics, but even I can work up an unease along the lines of 2.: status will not fit on a linear scale. One of the most brilliant things about humans is that we've become peaceful through letting almost everyone win some kind of a status competition, as the number of competitions can increase without bound. If I'm a nerd about Irish whistle music, I might realistically marry one of the top three whistle players in my large city, all without being too unusually magnetic. She might rank nowhere special in some simple pooled ranking of status, yet I feel like a boss and a winner for having her on my arm. If status were just one dimension, we'd be at each others' throats to climb the rungs. But we invest so much in variety precisely because we're each trying to climb diverse ladders. Such ascent may not impress global leaders or even our parents, but that's ok, as long as it impresses the people whose esteem we value.
Let's say I rank in the seventieth percentile in overall objective prestige, whatever that is. Will my competitive instincts be satiated when I find a partner who is in the seventy-fourth? Will I feel unworthy and insecure through my awareness that she can more easily replace me with someone "higher"? Humans don't think like that. My sense of security comes from the thought that she's got a thing for X, and she's not likely to run into someone who's better at Xing than I am, and even if she does, he's unlikely to recognize how hot it is that she's so good at niche skill Y, which I know to value. This is how so many "ordinary" humans can feel like (and arguably be) status-winners.
I would also add something on the variety issue, especially product variety. All you say is true, but you should take into account the role of monopolistic competition in the production of differentiated products even when the variety is of small value. And relatedly, the role of marketing campaigns that leverage our inborn desire to define our identity in order to encourage demand for more differentiated products (which is how you increase profits under monopolistic competition, after all). To some degree this applies also to things that are not exactly markets but resemble them, such as the "market" for political ideas...
As usual, when I read one of your posts I am compelled to think about it for a while... I feel this is part of the story but not all.
On the "herd count" story, I propose a variant that explains a rational opposition to "easy-found official tests/measures". Imagine that, in the village that has just discovered counting, counting someone else's herd takes a lot of time. So, there is still a lot of gossiping, opposing claims about herd size, and even people buying extra feedstock just to pretend that they have a huge herd. The elders find a solution: they will count everyone's herd periodically, and release the number of animals officially for everyone to know. It works well for a while, and the official herd size is now how everyone calculates status. Then someone realizes they can sell their cows, buy a larger number of goats, and rise in status! Soon, switching to goat-herding is the only way not to be a social pariah. Some start to protest that the herd size method is bad, it's pushing people away from cow-herding which is more productive in their climate. "Do you really want to go back to the old system?" they are asked. No, not really. One guy (who still rises cows) proposes that the elders release separate numbers for each kind of animal. Of course, such a complicated policy proposal from a low-status member of the community is not even properly discussed. Resigned, he also sells his cows and buys goats. The elders pat themselves on the back: thanks to the reduction in wasteful signalling, the median herd size has doubled in few years!
I would argue that, e.g., something analogous has happened in my field of research with the increased focus on number of papers and citation counts to evaluate research quality. Initially, they were good proxies for quality, but as soon as people started optimizing for the proxy instead of the true goal, they became actively harmful. I admit that I'm too young to have worked in the earlier system, so it may well be that it was worse.
An interesting essay, but what does it have to do with the questions of this post?
https://alexdanco.com/2019/...
The problem is that we have had counting and now we are getting rid of it. http://www.arnoldkling.com/... (this is of course very close to what you wrote in Forager Elites) - gossip is taking over, and gossip is not truth based. Does that make you revisit your thesis that what we need is more speech?
Nobody (well I can't imagine what people) would like chess without rules either. One idea is that rules make a certain kind of challenge and propel a certain kind of drama.
But WHY must sports have clear fair rules? We could just let everyone run around on the field kicking balls and then gossip about who we liked best.
Two similar kinds of situation to separate from the background of 0) when we are expressing personal preferences or opinions. The two situations to separate from that are 1) When there is some official judgement being made that affects everyone, then we (at least consent-of-the-governed types) want it to be "impartial," transparent, and "fair". 2) In sports (and I think this is a different reason than Robin's for the same distinction) there need to be clear rules that the players play under, and a clearly defined objective function (scoring). Sports fans love the game of ascribing both objective metrics and subjective qualities to players and teams, and arguing over different qualities' contributions to... winning by the rules. "Fair is fair."
And yet, in my research field (computational materials science) something like this is clearly happening, everyone I spoke with privately agrees it's a problem, and no solution is in sight.
I think the failure modes are the following: (1) the problems with a metric are often only evident ex-post (2) the success of a metric is often evaluated using the metric itself and (3) reform proposal are pre-screened by status of the proponent, evaluated of course on the same metric.
I am aware that this is not a good argument against the use of metrics, but it is a good argument for not putting all our eggs in one basket, mixing multiple metrics and possibly numeric metrics with other modes of evaluation. Off the cuff, in education one could envision a system where students are evaluated using metric A and teachers using metric B, while metric C is used to guide policy. (note that I am not familiar with the details of the SAT score system in the US). Honestly I would increase the use of metrics, but also mandate a "the map is not the territory" flashing bright red disclaimer on any document that uses them.
Well yeah, because only the best colleges needed to filter applicants, beyond the self-selection that had been a good-enough screen in the century before. As far as I know, there are still no entrance exams to get into a monastery. For parallel reasons, colleges didn't need them for most of history.
I see. In wartime you'd want to reduce the dimensions. The status of whistle-perfectionists should fall. But if the competition is just about who will have the country that leaves the most humans sincerely satisfied with their lot, increasing the dimensions might be how you win. And pushing a one-dimensional metric in peoples' faces might be counterproductive to winning, so opposition to it makes some sense.
[Edit: It's true that we don't much esteem martial skills relevant to 21st century war, compared to our esteem for vloggers with compelling makeup tutorials. That makes us vulnerable to foreign powers with warlike values. The whole world has to "go soft" together if this proliferation of esteem dimensions is going to work. But isn't that what we're seeing? You can say that wars are now basically economic, but it's no accident that the economic winners are the places most capable of understanding, anticipating and guiding the urges of customers who crave variety and niche products. Meme wars are fine if our towns are safe from real wars.]
Yes, we agree on how this feels subjectively. But if you wanted your society to win some larger contest with outsiders, you could see how this approach might be inadequate.
Yes of course as I said in the post firms want to differentiate their products. The surprise is that customers are so gullible about such attempts.
Yes of course it is possible to have overly simple measures that take by themselves mislead. That is the usual excuse for preventing them. But it is an excuse, as simple fixes are well known.
Seems to me SAT was first adopted by elites schools:"first administration of the SAT occurred on June 23, 1926, … administered to over 8,000 students at over 300 test centers. … Slightly over a quarter of males and females applied to Yale University and Smith College." https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
I like objective, rankable metrics, but even I can work up an unease along the lines of 2.: status will not fit on a linear scale. One of the most brilliant things about humans is that we've become peaceful through letting almost everyone win some kind of a status competition, as the number of competitions can increase without bound. If I'm a nerd about Irish whistle music, I might realistically marry one of the top three whistle players in my large city, all without being too unusually magnetic. She might rank nowhere special in some simple pooled ranking of status, yet I feel like a boss and a winner for having her on my arm. If status were just one dimension, we'd be at each others' throats to climb the rungs. But we invest so much in variety precisely because we're each trying to climb diverse ladders. Such ascent may not impress global leaders or even our parents, but that's ok, as long as it impresses the people whose esteem we value.
Let's say I rank in the seventieth percentile in overall objective prestige, whatever that is. Will my competitive instincts be satiated when I find a partner who is in the seventy-fourth? Will I feel unworthy and insecure through my awareness that she can more easily replace me with someone "higher"? Humans don't think like that. My sense of security comes from the thought that she's got a thing for X, and she's not likely to run into someone who's better at Xing than I am, and even if she does, he's unlikely to recognize how hot it is that she's so good at niche skill Y, which I know to value. This is how so many "ordinary" humans can feel like (and arguably be) status-winners.
I would also add something on the variety issue, especially product variety. All you say is true, but you should take into account the role of monopolistic competition in the production of differentiated products even when the variety is of small value. And relatedly, the role of marketing campaigns that leverage our inborn desire to define our identity in order to encourage demand for more differentiated products (which is how you increase profits under monopolistic competition, after all). To some degree this applies also to things that are not exactly markets but resemble them, such as the "market" for political ideas...
(sorry for the double post)
As usual, when I read one of your posts I am compelled to think about it for a while... I feel this is part of the story but not all.
On the "herd count" story, I propose a variant that explains a rational opposition to "easy-found official tests/measures". Imagine that, in the village that has just discovered counting, counting someone else's herd takes a lot of time. So, there is still a lot of gossiping, opposing claims about herd size, and even people buying extra feedstock just to pretend that they have a huge herd. The elders find a solution: they will count everyone's herd periodically, and release the number of animals officially for everyone to know. It works well for a while, and the official herd size is now how everyone calculates status. Then someone realizes they can sell their cows, buy a larger number of goats, and rise in status! Soon, switching to goat-herding is the only way not to be a social pariah. Some start to protest that the herd size method is bad, it's pushing people away from cow-herding which is more productive in their climate. "Do you really want to go back to the old system?" they are asked. No, not really. One guy (who still rises cows) proposes that the elders release separate numbers for each kind of animal. Of course, such a complicated policy proposal from a low-status member of the community is not even properly discussed. Resigned, he also sells his cows and buys goats. The elders pat themselves on the back: thanks to the reduction in wasteful signalling, the median herd size has doubled in few years!
I would argue that, e.g., something analogous has happened in my field of research with the increased focus on number of papers and citation counts to evaluate research quality. Initially, they were good proxies for quality, but as soon as people started optimizing for the proxy instead of the true goal, they became actively harmful. I admit that I'm too young to have worked in the earlier system, so it may well be that it was worse.