Virtue, group and individual prestige
Let’s assume now that people respect other people who have or appear to have high levels of virtue. Let’s also say that Alice has Level 10 virtue and for this reason she has Level X prestige in other people’s eyes, purely based on her individual merits.
Now let’s assume that Alice teams up with a lot of other people who have Level 10 virtue and form the League of Extraordinarily Virtuous People. How high a prestige would membership in the League would convey on its members? Higher or lower than X?
I would say, higher, for two reasons. You give Alice a really close look, and you judge her virtue levels must be somewhere around Level 10. However you don’t trust your judgement very much and for that reason you discount a bit the prestige points you award to her. However, she was accepted into the League by other people who also appear to be very virtuous. This suggests your estimation was correct, and you can afford to award her more points. Every Well Proven Virtue a League member has increases the chance that the virtues of other members are not fake either or else he or she would not accept to be in the same League with them, and this increases the amount of prestige points you award to them. Second, few people know Alice up close and personally. The bigger the distance, the less they know about her, her personal fame radiates only so far. But the combined fame of the League radiates much farther. Thus more people notice their virtuousness and award prestige points to them.
In other words, if virtuous people want to maximize the prestige points they have, it is a good idea for them to form famous groups with strict entry requirements.
And suddenly Yale class rings make sense now. They get more prestige for being a member of a group who is famous for having whatever virtues it takes to graduate from Yale, than the prestige they could get for simply having those virtues.
The flip side of it, if you want to motivate people to be more virtuous, and if you think prestige assigned to virtue is a good way to do that, encourage them to form famous groups with strict entry requirements.
One funny thing is that the stricter you make the entry requirements (base minimum level of virtue), the more prestige the group will _automatically_ get. You just design the entry test, basically the cost paid, but you don’t need to design the reward, it is automatically happening! That is just handy.
Well, the whole thing is fairly obvious as long as the virtue in question is “studying your butt off”. It is done all the time. This is what the term “graduated from a prestigious university” means.
It is less obvious once the virtue in question is something like “stood up for the victims of injustice, even facing danger for it”.
Have you ever wondered why the same logic is not done there? Find a moral cause. Pick out the people who support it the most virtuously, who took the most personal danger and the least personal benefit etc. make them examples and make them form an elite club. That club will convey a lot of prestige on its members. This suggests other people will take more pains to support that cause in order to get into that club.
Yet, it is not really done. What was the last time you saw strict entry requirements for any group or club or association related to any social cause? It is usually the opposite, making entry easy, just sign up for the newsletter here, which means it does not convey much prestige.
If there is anything that matters to you, not even necessarily a moral social cause, but just anything you wish more people done, just stop for a minute and think over if such high prestige famous elite groups with strict entry requirements should be formed with regard to that.
And now I don’t understand why I don’t see badges like “Top MIRI donator” beside usernames around here. Was the idea not thought before, or is it more like I am missing something important here?
It can also be useful to form groups of people who are virtuous at _anything_, putting the black-belt into the same group as the scholar or the activist who stood up against injustice. “Excel at anything and be one of us.” This seems to be the most efficient prestige generator and thus motivator, because different people notice and reward with prestige points different kinds of virtues. If I respect mainly edge.org level scientists, if they are are willing to be in the same club as some political activist who never published science, I will find that activist curious, interesting and respectable. That is partially why I toy with the idea of knightly orders.
Please learn to write summaries.
All right, can link to a good example?
Say, http://lesswrong.com/lw/3nn/scientific_selfhelp_the_state_of_our_knowledge/
Similar idea is used in “Biela vrana” (white crow) award in Slovakia: people are nominated for “heroic and socially beneficial actions”. For example, people getting the award in 2014:
a former inspector of National Forestry Centre; revealed serious violations of the law in public procurement for more than half a million euro. The head of the inspected procurement committee became her director during the inspection; after refusing his request for modification of the inspection results she was fired, and today she is unemployed.
a pediatrician at Nitra University Hospital discovered erasing data from her patient’s health card. After notifying management, she was bullied at her job; the hospital management denied erasing of the data. Only after pressure from media, the head of pediatry was compulsorily retired and the pediatrician could return to her original department.
an author of poetry books and radio journalist. During communism he lived under constant supervision of secret service, often detained and interrogated. He continues publishing the books and magazines to these days.
Sometimes there is a good end, sometimes there is a bad end, but these people displayed virtue in face of danger.
The difference from what you propose is that someone else nominated them for the award. That is a good idea because nominating oneself could create perverse incentives (“I hope this gets really bad because that would increase my chance of winning the heroic award”) or lead to brigading (“you have to give the award to our friend, otherwise we will slander your jury as unfair”). In this situation, the awarded people are heroes, but it is not suggested that they are necessarily the greatest heroes in the country; only that they are valid examples.
EDIT: If most people who display the virtue do not receive the award, that is a feature, not a bug. It removes a possible accusation that those people displayed the virtue strategically in order to receive the award and any associated benefits (such as fame).
Graduating from Yale may have a large signaling value in the job market, but wearing a class ring, and making sure everybody knows what it’s for may come across as rude. Joining an exclusive club and telling people is just another form of bragging which doesn’t sound too virtuous. Many skills are readily demonstrated without the need for a group. The ones that aren’t are less likely to be correctly measured by the group.
One problem is that things like this tend to lead to affective death spirals. You start praising virtue X (which is a virtue because it leads to positive effect Y), then you start especially praising the extremely virtues practitioners willing to do X even when it doesn’t lead to Y.
So, like Olympics level athletics, where winning takes skills that are increasingly irrelevant to any other use of them?
Except most examples aren’t this harmless.
What you are talking about is usually called “social signaling”. It is by no means restricted to virtue and, in fact, is usually used to signal status.
That’s important because status is zero sum. You can’t just go setting up high virtue groups with strict entry requirements and expect it to affect people’s perceptions, because to make yourself notable enough you have to steal awareness from other similarly high status groups. The average person may know about the status of Yale and Harvard graduates, but does not know the status of many similar organizations with equally (or more) strong bona fides.
In order to develop such a group, you either have to be tremendously wealthy or high status (i.e. celebrity-level) like when Warren Buffett started The Giving Pledge and lent it part of his credibility, or you have to do a tremendous amount of work to establish the credibility through slower means. That work could possibly be spent more virtuously on directly virtuous acts.
Is it? I think that status is relative (in the sense that you need to specify the baseline relative to what something is high-status or low-status), but I don’t see why does it have to be zero-sum. And don’t forget that status is observer-dependent.
I don’t understand what you mean by “zero sum” here. Clearly in a group where everyone looks down on everyone else the total status is much lower than in a group where everyone respects everyone else’s opinion.
This is an excellent point, not necessarily because it is true, but because it suggests the idea of status is not sufficiently clearly defined. Personally I don’t think politeness/respect/consideration equals status, but sure as hell they have some sort of a relation and interaction.
In a very polite group, it would be very hard to express status differences, and in a very impolite group too. It seems status games develop where people have a middling level of politeness/respect…
Moreover I suspect people know this and use politeness and impoliteness for this purpose. In a boot camp when the sarge just called everybody a worthless maggot it will be hard to play at looking a like a slightly less worthless maggot than the other guy :) And the overly elaborate formal politeness of 19th century aristocrats (e.g. the novel The Count of Monte-Cristo) makes it hard, too, you can hardly express disapproval.
Winning a boxing match is insta-status amongst the fans. They are middling polite with fighters, they have a “let’s see what you can do” mood. They don’t disrespect anyone who trains hard and gives his best, neither do they sugar-coat defeat.
It raises the complexity of making a decision to donate.
Apart from that this forum doesn’t use avatar to let people concentrate on content and not on the person who says something. The forum is not supposed to be a popularity contest.
There’s Giving What We Can if you want to be a member of a “League of Extraordinarily Virtuous People”. You can also put the fact that you took the pledge in your LW profile.
You’d have to enforce strict rules of cohabitation (which detracts from the morality of the issue and so from the status gain), or accept that some of the members would be corruptible/can disagree upon the actual work (which detracts from its impact), or both...
Also, an activist should be given the benefit of the doubt regardless of his associations. It is his beliefs that you can review with more open mind if people whom you respect think them worthwhile. And beliefs are not sentient to care about status.
If you require virtue >= x for entry into the Virtuous People’s Club, this incentivizes demonstrations of virtue by people whose virtue level is approximately x, but may actually disincentivize demonstrations of virtue by people whose virtue level is substantially lower (because their performance will be compared against x).
For the club to confer a lot of prestige, x had better be substantially higher than most people’s virtue level. Now, I suggest that (1) the unusually virtuous are probably already making some attempt to optimize for virtue, and optimizing for demonstrated virtue may actually make them functionally less virtuous; and (2) the great majority of people will be some way below x, so the existence of the VPC gives them no incentive to demonstrate virtue.