Another problem with advice is that even if it’s not just about about signalling, it may be wrong. People’s ability to predict is pretty limited.
Seth Roberts does a very interesting analysis of why professors just try to get students to duplicate what the professor would do, rather than cultivating the student’s particular qualities.
Roberts displays his usual mix of lucidity and senselessness in that post, which would take some effort to disentangle with full accuracy.
Regardless of that, though, there is a more important point here. Namely, professors will typically advise students to duplicate some ostensible aspects of what they have done—the ones that make for a good status-signaling story—not the truly important things that enabled them to succeed under the existing system. The latter sort of information is the truly valuable one, which you can get only with an extraordinary power of insight or (maybe) if you happen to be among the close friends and family of someone who possesses it.
As for bad advice that’s not due to signalling, I think that’s actually rare among smart and accomplished people, and it usually comes in a form that’s easy to see through. When people give advice about something where they have no accomplishment to show, it will look like bullshit to anyone with any intelligence. Even people who give consciously malicious bad advice are usually not very hard to detect.
I think some examples of the kinds of advice you’re talking about would help your comments. I don’t have a solid sense of the advice you’re thinking of. They don’t have to have real examples.
Look at it this way: a professor is, by definition, someone who has managed to achieve a specific high-status position under the present bureaucratic system for awarding academic titles and selecting people for academic jobs. If someone like that gives you career advice, there are many ways how it may end up being awful signaling nonsense despite the good intentions of the advice-giver. For example:
Education in your area may well be a zero-sum signaling game, which however nobody engaged in it will admit. The professor will speak with the implicit assumption that by pursuing the same path as him, you’re enhancing your real market value—whereas in reality, you’re wasting time and effort on signaling in ways that were effective back in his generation, but have been superseded by more advanced developments in signaling since then.
The professor’s advice will not at all reflect the real way he managed to fight his way through the system. He’ll give you an idealized version that sounds like the road to success means obeying all the official respectable norms and satisfying all officially advertised standards by the letter. Yet, of course, the real story would be very different.
(groans) Look, I agree that it worked well the firsttwo times, but I would rather that “Zack M. Davis provides an artistic rendering of Vladimir M.’s comment” not become a running joke; these things have a tendency to become old and not-funny very quickly.
(That having been said, I expect a dollar at the Berkeley meetup on the twenty-first.)
Another problem with advice is that even if it’s not just about about signalling, it may be wrong. People’s ability to predict is pretty limited.
Seth Roberts does a very interesting analysis of why professors just try to get students to duplicate what the professor would do, rather than cultivating the student’s particular qualities.
Roberts displays his usual mix of lucidity and senselessness in that post, which would take some effort to disentangle with full accuracy.
Regardless of that, though, there is a more important point here. Namely, professors will typically advise students to duplicate some ostensible aspects of what they have done—the ones that make for a good status-signaling story—not the truly important things that enabled them to succeed under the existing system. The latter sort of information is the truly valuable one, which you can get only with an extraordinary power of insight or (maybe) if you happen to be among the close friends and family of someone who possesses it.
As for bad advice that’s not due to signalling, I think that’s actually rare among smart and accomplished people, and it usually comes in a form that’s easy to see through. When people give advice about something where they have no accomplishment to show, it will look like bullshit to anyone with any intelligence. Even people who give consciously malicious bad advice are usually not very hard to detect.
I think some examples of the kinds of advice you’re talking about would help your comments. I don’t have a solid sense of the advice you’re thinking of. They don’t have to have real examples.
Look at it this way: a professor is, by definition, someone who has managed to achieve a specific high-status position under the present bureaucratic system for awarding academic titles and selecting people for academic jobs. If someone like that gives you career advice, there are many ways how it may end up being awful signaling nonsense despite the good intentions of the advice-giver. For example:
Education in your area may well be a zero-sum signaling game, which however nobody engaged in it will admit. The professor will speak with the implicit assumption that by pursuing the same path as him, you’re enhancing your real market value—whereas in reality, you’re wasting time and effort on signaling in ways that were effective back in his generation, but have been superseded by more advanced developments in signaling since then.
The professor’s advice will not at all reflect the real way he managed to fight his way through the system. He’ll give you an idealized version that sounds like the road to success means obeying all the official respectable norms and satisfying all officially advertised standards by the letter. Yet, of course, the real story would be very different.
Thank you :)
I would pay $0.99 to hear Zack_M_Davis sing the first sentence in the parent.
(groans) Look, I agree that it worked well the first two times, but I would rather that “Zack M. Davis provides an artistic rendering of Vladimir M.’s comment” not become a running joke; these things have a tendency to become old and not-funny very quickly.
(That having been said, I expect a dollar at the Berkeley meetup on the twenty-first.)
:D