Selecting vs. grooming
Content warning: meta-political, with hopefully low mind-killer factor.
Epistemic status: proposal for brain-storming.
- Representative democracies select political leaders. Monarchies and aristocracies groom political leaders for the job from childhood. (Also, to a certain extent they breed them for the job.)
- Capitalistic competition selects economic elites. Heritable landowning aristocracies groom economic elites from childhood. (Again, they also breed them.)
- A capitalist employer selects an accountant from a pool of 100 applicants. A feudal lord would groom a serf boy who has a knack for horses into the job of the adult stable man.
It seems a lot like selecting is better than grooming. After it is the modern way and hardly anyone would argue capitalism doesn’t have a higher economic output than feudalism and so on.
But… since it was such a hugely important difference through history, perhaps, it was one of the things that really defined the modern world because it determines the whole social structure of societies past and present, that I think it should deserve some investigation. There may be something more interesting lurking here than just saying selection/testing won over grooming, period.
1) Can aspects of grooming as opposed to selecting/testing be steelmanned, are there corner cases when it could be better?
2) A pre-modern, medievalish society that nevertheless used a lot of selection/testing was China—I am thinking about the famous mandarin exams. Does this seem to have had any positive effect on China compared to other similar societies? I.e. is this even like that it is a big factor in the general outcomes of 2015 West vs. 1515 West? Comparing old China with similar medievalish but not selectionist (but inheritance based) societies would be useful for isolating this factor, right?
3) Why exactly does selecting and testing work better than grooming (and breeding) ?
4) Is it possible it works better because people do the breeding (intelligent people tend to marry intelligent people etc.) and grooming (a child of doctors will have an entirely different upbringing than a child of manual laborers) on their own, thus the social system does not have to do it, it is enough / better for the social system to do the selection, to do the testing of the success of the at-home grooming?
5) Any other interesting insight or reference?
Note: this is NOT about meritocracy vs. aristocracy. It is about two different kinds of meritocracy—where you either select, test people for merit (through market competition or elections) but you don’t care much how to _build_ people who will have merit vs. an aristocratic meritocracy where you largely focus on breeding and grooming people into the kinds who will have merit, and don’t focus on selecting and testing so much.
Note 2: is this even possible this is a false dichotomy? One could argue that Western society is chock full of features for breeding and grooming people, there are dating sites for specific groups of people, there are tons of helping resources parents can draw on, kids spend 15-20 years at school and so on, so the breeding and grooming is done all right, I am just being misled here by mere names. Such as the name democracy: it is a selection process, but who wins depends on breeding and grooming. Such as market competition: those best bred and groomed have the highest chance. Is it simply so that selection is more noticable than grooming, it gets more limelight, but we actually do both? If yes, why does selection get more limelight than grooming? Why do we talk about elections more than about how to groom a child into being a politician, or why do we talk about market competition more than how to groom a child into the entrepreneur who aces competition? If modern society uses both, why is selection in the public spotlight while grooming just being something happening at home and school and not so noticeable? (To be fair, on LW, we talk more about how to test hypotheses than how to formulate them. Is this potentially related? People are just more interested in testing than building, be that hypotheses or people?)
How about selecting someone to groom? There was a line of Roman Emperors—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Anoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—remarkable in that the first four had no children and decided to select someone of ability, formally adopt him, and groom him as a successor. These are known as the Five Good Emperors and their rule is considered to be the height of the Roman Empire.
This is a subset of selection-from-above which I did not qualify in the article but obviously a different category than selection by voters or customers i.e. “below”.
A modern example of selection-from-above would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_academy where existing fellows vote on new ones and the funny part is that this is not supposed to work at all—they have no external control from customers, their main incentive is to not let too good folks in who would prove a too serious competition, so the whole thing is a lot like an entrenched, uncontrollable monopoly—and yet it works. I guess they must be really saints.
This is a confusing and difficult thing—there are problems with selection from above and below. When it happens above, one can select early and groom.
How so? I mean, imagine you’re a member of the National Academy and you get to choose between A, who is a brilliant scientist, clearly better than you are, and B, who is frankly a third-rater and definitely worse than you are. What’s the incentive to prefer B?
If you choose A then the NA looks that bit more impressive, which means that when someone reads that you’re a member of the NA they’re that bit more impressed by you. And you’re more likely to find yourself getting photographed or interviewed or whatever on an equal footing with A than you were before, which is probably good for your reputation. And A’s impressiveness may make it easier for the NA to get funding, which pays for nicer dinners and scientific outreach and other things you probably care about.
What’s the downside? That someone’s going to hear about you, call up a mental list of NA members, and think “oh, X isn’t very good compared with other members of the National Academy” and think worse of you in consequence?
I suppose you’re a bit less likely to be elected president of the body if the new member is A rather than B, but if you were ever in the running (which presumably means you’re pretty damn impressive yourself) and A would make you look bad then presumably A is impossibly eminent and it would frankly make the NA look bad not to let A in.
Maybe I don’t understand the incentive structure well enough. But it doesn’t look to me as if the members need to be saints to keep selection working reasonably well.
Is it better to be a bigger fish in a small pond or to be a member of the most dignified pond? It probably depends on how exactly the above analogy breaks down.
Perhaps the better way to cut these different conclusions is whether competition is within-group or versus other groups.
The common word for “grooming” is education. You find plenty of material on LW about education and thought about human learning.
If you look at the UK quite a lot of political figures do get groomed in Eton and go on to get a degree in Oxford or Cambridge.
In the US you have the ivy league universities. In Yale the Skull and Bones grooms further politicians to the extend that in 2004 the bonesman John Kerry lost to the bonesman George W. Bush.
In France you have Sciences Po.
Those institutions all have power but they the information about how their power works isn’t as public as the information about the voting system.
I tend to see education as acquiring book-knowledge i.e. the categorization and description of things, and most often in a parroty way. Well, I guess it says something about my schools. (I still get worked up in a not good way when I remember my music education was about learning category trees like aerophones consist brass, woodphones etc. instead of learning to enjoy or play music.) But this is why I tend to consider parenting about equally important in grooming as education is, as parents tend to show kids how to do things, not just how to describe or categorize things.
Yes, I know the truly good schools of the world are far more doing focused, they have more projects than verbal exams, all sorts of debating societies and clubs, and so on, but still, if you want to be a leader, which is not really a skill that could be summed in a few books, it must be really invaluable to have a parent who is.
Story: my dad used to be an entrepreneur, not big, but still when I accompanied him on days off from school we met all kinds of fairly powerful people, like a town mayor’s top ranking aides or sometimes bigger entrepreneurs and CEOs and generally these kinds of “suit” types. So I really early learned these people are just people too and was not afraid of them. And I was surprised to learn later that most of my friends were afraid of people who wear suits and radiate authority. I kept telling them this is just some fat guy with a difficult job and he is probably far more interested in his hemorrhoids than playing god with littler people but they were still scared, because they never knew them in person, they never had the chance of e.g. their parents taking them as kids on a skiing tour with a CEO type and his kids. So this lack of fear of high ranking people later on proved to be an immense help on job interviews.
So this is really the non-educational kind of grooming.
It might be true that a lot of schools fail to do more than transfering book knowledge but that’s not inherent to the word education.
Ivy league universities do many to teach the lesson that high status people are just people.
I think there’s an important distinction here this doesn’t address though.
Both selection and grooming feature education, but in cases of grooming, a person is being educated for a specific role which they’re intended to fill. In cases of selection, the person is acquiring qualifications which will promote them as a candidate for a variety of different positions. Within a system of selection, some people may receive significantly better or more prestigious educations, and this gives them preferential candidacy for higher level positions, but it’s not the same as grooming, where a person is selected for the position they’re meant to fill before they’re educated for it.
Here are two posts going into detail about the economic history of China. (HT: Michael Anissimov)
Thx!
The Olympics should be a good test. Do countries which select Olympic candidates damn-near from birth (China, as one example), and train (groom) them through their young lives to compete, do better than countries which do not?
This seems a bit hard to isolate from confounding variables though.For example, China might breed and groom basketball players for elite competition (my understanding is they do have some kind of athlete breeding system going on,) but not have access to as high level of basketball coaches and trainers as a country like the United States where basketball is more entrenched in the culture, and it would be hard to measure the impact of these influences separately.
Assuming it does,
Several factors may come into play and selecting may not be the only thing that is different between our current society and say a medieval society. Quantitatively, how much of a part does this one play in our current economic success?
That being said, we also have a pretty large pool of people to select from nowadays (stemming from for instance, our total population being larger, leading to more outliers in capability/skills, and from better communication, transportation, etc. which allows to search for appropriate candidates wide and far.).
Also, maybe our ability to select has grown faster and better than our ability to groom/breed (and this was at least in part coincidental and not actively pursued—see above about population size), while our capacity to groom/breed may have stagnated. The quality and efficiency of education may be better than what it used to be back then for groomed elites—though I don’t know if it is for sure (what science knows and what can be taught would appear to be better now than then though) . Our ability to “breed” doesn’t seem to have improved much (eugenism is a dead idea). I’d actually expect that eugenism and genetic engineering could fill an arbitrarily large part of that gap if it was actively pursued (which it may yet be, the debate about CRISPR-Cas is still hot, and places like China may well push forward with such ideas).
A capitalist employer grooms a management trainee for a future role, while a feudal lord selects a mercenary from those applying for the job.
My vote is for “false dichotomy.” There has been a rise in selection (because the world is freer and more connected) but there is still plenty of grooming too. Note that even in your stable boy example, there was selection.
The first thing to come to mind is that selecting is simply much cheaper than grooming. If a company can get employees of roughly the same quality level without having to pay for an expensive grooming process over many years, they’re going to do that. There’s also less risk with selecting, because a groomed candidate can always decide to up and leave for another company (or die, or join a cult, or a have an epiphany and decide to live a simple life in the wilderness of Alaska, or whatever), and then the company is out all that grooming money. I feel as though groomed employees would have to be substantially better than selected ones to make up for these disadvantages.
The tests became very gameable—people memorized the prefabricated answers and parroted them back on test day.
Testing selects for people who actually want to do those jobs. There’s always the rebellious prince who would rather ride his horse/jet/yacht all day than attend committee meetings. Also, there’s always the unexpected death/coup/abdication that ends up giving the throne to the third cousin nobody expected would rule.
There is something to be said for the old cynical saying that actually wanting to have power is the No. 1 reason to be not trusted with it, and ideal rulers should be very, very reluctant to rule. Of course I want to be treated by a doctor who really wants to be a doctor and did not just inherit the job, but I am not really sure I really want to be ruled by someone who just loves to rule people. Not that I take modern monarchism seriously—I tend to mainly toy with the idea of sortitionism i.e. selecting rulers by random lot, because having people who are at least not worse than the average would be an improvement.
Asimov wrote a tale about a society where every national election was decided by the single vote of one randomly selected citizen. I’d flee such a country were it to exist.
I fear you may overestimate “the average”.
(I also like the idea of sortition, but I would use it as a way of selecting some of the members of an otherwise somewhat-meritocratic body.)