The question is one of credibility rather than capability. In private, public, academic and voluntary sectors it’s a fairly standard assumption that if you want people to give you resources, you have to do a little dance to earn it. Yes, it’s wasteful and stupid and inefficient, but it’s generally easier to do the little dance than convince people that the little dance is a stupid system. They know that already.
It’s not arrogant to say “my time is too precious to do a little dance”, and it may even be true. The arrogance would be to expect people to give you those resources without the little dance. I doubt the folk at SIAI expect this to happen, but I do suspect they’re probably quite tired of being asked to dance.
The little dance is not wasteful and stupid and inefficient. For each individual with the ability to provide resources (be they money, manpower, or exposure), there are a thousand projects who would love to be the beneficiaries of said resources. Challenging the applicants to produce some standardised signals of competence is a vastly more efficient approach than expecting the benefactors to be able to thoroughly analyse each and every applicant’s exoteric efforts.
I agree that methods of signalling competence are, in principle, a fine mechanism for allowing those with resources to responsibly distribute them between projects.
In practise, I’ve seen far too many tall, attractive, well-spoken men from affluent background go up to other tall, attractive, well-spoken men from affluent backgrounds and get them to allocate ridiculous quantities of money and man-hours to projects on the basis of presentations which may as well be written in crayon for all the salient information they contain.
The amount this happens varies from place to place, and in the areas where I see it most there does seem to be an improving trend of competence signalling actually correlating to whatever it is the party in question needs to be competent at, but there is still way too much scope for such signalling being as applicable to the work in question as actually getting up in front of potential benefactors and doing a little dance.
Unless people wake up to the fact that people are requiring an appeal to authority as a prerequisite for important decisions, AND gain the ability to determine for themselves whether something is a good cause. I think the reason people rely on appeals to popularity, authority and the “respect” that comes with status is that they do not feel competent to judge for themselves.
If trying to save the world requires having more social status than humanly obtainable, then the world is lost, even if it was easy to save...
The question is one of credibility rather than capability. In private, public, academic and voluntary sectors it’s a fairly standard assumption that if you want people to give you resources, you have to do a little dance to earn it. Yes, it’s wasteful and stupid and inefficient, but it’s generally easier to do the little dance than convince people that the little dance is a stupid system. They know that already.
It’s not arrogant to say “my time is too precious to do a little dance”, and it may even be true. The arrogance would be to expect people to give you those resources without the little dance. I doubt the folk at SIAI expect this to happen, but I do suspect they’re probably quite tired of being asked to dance.
The little dance is not wasteful and stupid and inefficient. For each individual with the ability to provide resources (be they money, manpower, or exposure), there are a thousand projects who would love to be the beneficiaries of said resources. Challenging the applicants to produce some standardised signals of competence is a vastly more efficient approach than expecting the benefactors to be able to thoroughly analyse each and every applicant’s exoteric efforts.
I agree that methods of signalling competence are, in principle, a fine mechanism for allowing those with resources to responsibly distribute them between projects.
In practise, I’ve seen far too many tall, attractive, well-spoken men from affluent background go up to other tall, attractive, well-spoken men from affluent backgrounds and get them to allocate ridiculous quantities of money and man-hours to projects on the basis of presentations which may as well be written in crayon for all the salient information they contain.
The amount this happens varies from place to place, and in the areas where I see it most there does seem to be an improving trend of competence signalling actually correlating to whatever it is the party in question needs to be competent at, but there is still way too much scope for such signalling being as applicable to the work in question as actually getting up in front of potential benefactors and doing a little dance.
Unless people wake up to the fact that people are requiring an appeal to authority as a prerequisite for important decisions, AND gain the ability to determine for themselves whether something is a good cause. I think the reason people rely on appeals to popularity, authority and the “respect” that comes with status is that they do not feel competent to judge for themselves.