many people might think that someone is a natural leader when what’s really going on is just that they’re tall and can easily put on muscle and have symmetric features and were thus raised to practice playing a role that looks leader-like. But it’s helpful to the web for people to think and talk as though the people they’ve chosen for leadership roles have various virtues that make them worthy.
FWIW, my current belief is that ‘tall’ functions as something like a Schelling point. it only slightly grants ‘leadership ability’ (in that, if you’re tall, i’m more likely to be able to SEE you in a crowd, and if you wanted to give me directions, that seems relevant; also taller means i have to look up to see your face, and this costs ME more than YOU, and so given you get natural energy savings in interactions, this is some indication of who has more resources; i expect things like this to compound).
anyway, being tall was probably a much more useful leadership ability way back when, but now it is not a super good indicator.
but given the lack of other more correlated signals that are fast to assess, tall is a natural Schelling point over short. and having Schelling points for this seems useful.
when i enter a room, i want to immediately be able to guess what people’s relative status positions are. ideally before i hear them say anything. (because, as you say, i just wanna know what my role is goddamnit!)
my sense is there’s something that bothers you about ‘tall’ ~ ‘leader’ and it doesn’t seem to bother me. so that’s where i get curious.
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from “tall” to “leader” is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.
The discussion about leadership reminded me that siderea has written an absolutely fascinating analysis (part 1, part 2) about leadership; the one problem with the analysis is that it basically requires you to have read at least the first 65 pages of Watership Down. But if you have done that, it’s an excellent analysis about how leadership (or kingship as she calls it) isn’t a really a formal position in the way that we think about it, but rather about you relate to others in the social web, and how those others relate to you in turn. That seems like a very appropriate perspective for this thread. A couple of quotes:
Adams understands that, contrary to everything our society teaches us, Kingship is not a trait of individuals, but a way of relating. Watership Down is a thorough illustration of the idea that Kingship is a relationship between an individual and a group, and between that individual and the members of that group, which in turn orders those group members’ relationships with each others, and outsiders, and the world about them, and thus shapes the very nature and functioning of the group. [...]
Hazel is looking after the well-being of the whole of the group and the individual members of the group. Hazel takes responsibility for helping Pipkin’s here, and for figuring out a solution to the groups’ flagging strength. He enlists the strength of one to help remedy the weakness of another.
Part of that “ordering and generative” thing about Kings is that they catalyze relationships among their group members. In some sense, Dandelion didn’t need Hazel to tell him to tell a story. He didn’t need Hazel’s permission. He could have realized it would have been useful and volunteered, “Hey, how about a nice story!” But he didn’t. It didn’t occur to him at all. As far as we know, it never occurs to him to consider the state of the group or what he might do to help his fellow rabbits. Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t know that Dandelion ever says or does a selfish or cruel thing; from the first page to the last, he is loyal, brave, and true. I do not mean to say that Dandelion was thoughtless or bad. Dandelion is wonderful.
But the difference between Hazel and Dandelion is that Hazel made the group’s problems his problems and addressed them, and Dandelion didn’t. And that is Kingship. The part I’m calling caring.
Something that I’m still faintly embarrassed about is that when I first read Watership Down all this was rather lost on me. I literally didn’t recognize that any of this had anything do to with what we might term leadership. I mean, not only didn’t I realize that Hazel was showing leadership in these various ways, I literally didn’t realize that Hazel was functioning as any sort of leader in any way. I conceived of the story through this part and on a bit further as “Hazel and Fiver decide to go their way and other rabbits come with them and they’re all peers”.
It completely blew by me that Hazel is making most of the decisions, that members of the group defer to his decisions and look to him for answers, that he tells or suggests things to do and the other rabbits do them, that if you were to draw a graph of who talked to whom in the story, you would see a diagram which was almost entirely an asterisk, with Hazel in the center.
I literally didn’t notice any of this dynamic. So when later on the question is put explicitly whether Hazel is Chief Rabbit for this band, it shocked me. It hadn’t occurred to me in any way that that might be so.
Because I was raised in a society that says that Kingship looks like The Threarah, not like Hazel. Because I was raised in a society which is deeply sick about authority, leadership, and Kingship.
oh, maybe you’re only bothered by people claiming a hand-wavy ‘natural leadership’ thing when in fact it’s stuff like ‘they’re tall and handsome’. i would agree that is not ideal than being more aware of this kind of thing. belief reporting seems to help suss it out?
FWIW, my current belief is that ‘tall’ functions as something like a Schelling point. it only slightly grants ‘leadership ability’ (in that, if you’re tall, i’m more likely to be able to SEE you in a crowd, and if you wanted to give me directions, that seems relevant; also taller means i have to look up to see your face, and this costs ME more than YOU, and so given you get natural energy savings in interactions, this is some indication of who has more resources; i expect things like this to compound).
anyway, being tall was probably a much more useful leadership ability way back when, but now it is not a super good indicator.
but given the lack of other more correlated signals that are fast to assess, tall is a natural Schelling point over short. and having Schelling points for this seems useful.
when i enter a room, i want to immediately be able to guess what people’s relative status positions are. ideally before i hear them say anything. (because, as you say, i just wanna know what my role is goddamnit!)
my sense is there’s something that bothers you about ‘tall’ ~ ‘leader’ and it doesn’t seem to bother me. so that’s where i get curious.
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from “tall” to “leader” is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.
The discussion about leadership reminded me that siderea has written an absolutely fascinating analysis (part 1, part 2) about leadership; the one problem with the analysis is that it basically requires you to have read at least the first 65 pages of Watership Down. But if you have done that, it’s an excellent analysis about how leadership (or kingship as she calls it) isn’t a really a formal position in the way that we think about it, but rather about you relate to others in the social web, and how those others relate to you in turn. That seems like a very appropriate perspective for this thread. A couple of quotes:
Tallness is also reasonably strong evidence of good genes and nutrition.
Who do you think is a better director of MIRI: Nate Soares, or Luke Muelhauser?
I think the height thing is a holdover from childhood: someone taller than you is older and more adult-like, so you should do what they say.
oh, maybe you’re only bothered by people claiming a hand-wavy ‘natural leadership’ thing when in fact it’s stuff like ‘they’re tall and handsome’. i would agree that is not ideal than being more aware of this kind of thing. belief reporting seems to help suss it out?