Of course, the sharp division into three types of methods should not be taken too seriously; nor, and especially, does the division imply that a choice must be made. The methods often overlap and interoperate, to a degree that makes them hard to cleanly separate in practice.
Consider the simplest of the three examples in the post: a World of Warcraft raiding guild. (See my previousposts about rationality lessons from WoW for some background.)
Almost nobody will care about putting in the effort to improve, to learn to play their class/role better, unless there’s some incentive to do so. Likewise, the approbation/disapprobation of their guild mates will mean nothing unless players have some reason to care about their social status within the guild. These incentives and reasons generally are “people who perform badly aren’t invited to raids, or don’t have permanent spots on raid teams; thus they have fewer chances at acquiring loot”.
In other words, what motivation do people have to submit to correction?
Thus corrective methods rely on selective and structural methods.
Meanwhile, saying “assign raid members to roles that best fit their talents and inclinations” sounds properly humane and considerate, but the reality is that some players aren’t good enough to play any useful role in a raid (in some cases, this can be corrected; in others, not).
And, likewise, some people are bad actors. In any system of incentives and rewards, they will devote most of their energy to exploiting the system (and patching to prevent exploits often makes the system worse overall for everyone else).
Thus structural methods rely on selective and corrective methods.
At the same time, it often does no good to try to select players who are “good” in some sense that refers to the final output (raid performance per se).
For one thing, there is such a thing as “culture fit” (yes, even in WoW); someone may fit well into the system—the social environment, the raid organization scheme, etc.—that you’ve created, or fit badly, resulting in a dimension of contribution effectiveness which is not perfectly correlated with “objective” measures of raid performance that can be applied across guilds.
Similarly, because a raiding guild must, by its nature, be able to adapt to new challenges (which means both “new raid content” and “new organizational and task challenges, created by shifting membership and raid composition”), adaptability and the capacity and willingness to learn and improve is very often a more important trait for a prospective raid member than performance on “objective” metrics.
Thus selective methods rely on structural and corrective methods.
And all of these patterns surely manifest in more complex, “real-world”, scenarios.
Of course, the sharp division into three types of methods should not be taken too seriously; nor, and especially, does the division imply that a choice must be made. The methods often overlap and interoperate, to a degree that makes them hard to cleanly separate in practice.
Consider the simplest of the three examples in the post: a World of Warcraft raiding guild. (See my previous posts about rationality lessons from WoW for some background.)
Almost nobody will care about putting in the effort to improve, to learn to play their class/role better, unless there’s some incentive to do so. Likewise, the approbation/disapprobation of their guild mates will mean nothing unless players have some reason to care about their social status within the guild. These incentives and reasons generally are “people who perform badly aren’t invited to raids, or don’t have permanent spots on raid teams; thus they have fewer chances at acquiring loot”.
In other words, what motivation do people have to submit to correction?
Thus corrective methods rely on selective and structural methods.
Meanwhile, saying “assign raid members to roles that best fit their talents and inclinations” sounds properly humane and considerate, but the reality is that some players aren’t good enough to play any useful role in a raid (in some cases, this can be corrected; in others, not).
And, likewise, some people are bad actors. In any system of incentives and rewards, they will devote most of their energy to exploiting the system (and patching to prevent exploits often makes the system worse overall for everyone else).
Thus structural methods rely on selective and corrective methods.
At the same time, it often does no good to try to select players who are “good” in some sense that refers to the final output (raid performance per se).
For one thing, there is such a thing as “culture fit” (yes, even in WoW); someone may fit well into the system—the social environment, the raid organization scheme, etc.—that you’ve created, or fit badly, resulting in a dimension of contribution effectiveness which is not perfectly correlated with “objective” measures of raid performance that can be applied across guilds.
Similarly, because a raiding guild must, by its nature, be able to adapt to new challenges (which means both “new raid content” and “new organizational and task challenges, created by shifting membership and raid composition”), adaptability and the capacity and willingness to learn and improve is very often a more important trait for a prospective raid member than performance on “objective” metrics.
Thus selective methods rely on structural and corrective methods.
And all of these patterns surely manifest in more complex, “real-world”, scenarios.