When you make human (collective) judgment the essential criterion for group membership (or for anything else), the result is that the objective-criteria-in-practice can be much more complicated than they could be otherwise (complicated as in “difficult to compactly specify beforehand”, and also as in “difficult to precisely/losslessly characterize afterward”).
Now, we are all familiar with the myriad ways in which this fact may be used for evil, or can have unfortunate results even with the best of intentions; and much has been written about this. But it is rather less frequently acknowledged that this dynamic may also be used for good; which is unfortunate, because it seems to me that this is a tool which no community-builder’s toolbox ought to be without.
To relate this back to the parent comment, consider a criterion of group membership roughly along these lines:
“One should not be made a member who, if admitted, is likely to question, and attempt to change, the group’s norms.”
Now, this is (at least in principle) entirely orthogonal to whether someone understands a group’s norms, whether someone has contributed to the group, etc. Someone may meet those criteria, and yet fail to meet this one. One can imagine many similar criteria!
Note that this criterion, and many others like it, have this quality: that speaking them aloud, creating public knowledge of them, can result in loss of status for the group. The group is therefore better off if this criterion is not publicized; this is superior both to the case where the criterion is present and known publicly, and to the case where it’s absent. But having hidden membership criteria in addition to publicly known ones is also deleterious (for various reasons, most of them obvious); and so the best case seems to be the one where all criteria are hidden. But being publicly known to have specified-but-secret membership criteria is also dangerous for status (and other) reasons, so the solution (discovered independently, with some regularity, by innumerable groups in human history) is to hide all objective membership criteria behind the veil of subjective collective judgment. (And this, too, has its problems; no one one said community-building would be easy…)
Addendum to my comment:
When you make human (collective) judgment the essential criterion for group membership (or for anything else), the result is that the objective-criteria-in-practice can be much more complicated than they could be otherwise (complicated as in “difficult to compactly specify beforehand”, and also as in “difficult to precisely/losslessly characterize afterward”).
Now, we are all familiar with the myriad ways in which this fact may be used for evil, or can have unfortunate results even with the best of intentions; and much has been written about this. But it is rather less frequently acknowledged that this dynamic may also be used for good; which is unfortunate, because it seems to me that this is a tool which no community-builder’s toolbox ought to be without.
To relate this back to the parent comment, consider a criterion of group membership roughly along these lines:
“One should not be made a member who, if admitted, is likely to question, and attempt to change, the group’s norms.”
Now, this is (at least in principle) entirely orthogonal to whether someone understands a group’s norms, whether someone has contributed to the group, etc. Someone may meet those criteria, and yet fail to meet this one. One can imagine many similar criteria!
Note that this criterion, and many others like it, have this quality: that speaking them aloud, creating public knowledge of them, can result in loss of status for the group. The group is therefore better off if this criterion is not publicized; this is superior both to the case where the criterion is present and known publicly, and to the case where it’s absent. But having hidden membership criteria in addition to publicly known ones is also deleterious (for various reasons, most of them obvious); and so the best case seems to be the one where all criteria are hidden. But being publicly known to have specified-but-secret membership criteria is also dangerous for status (and other) reasons, so the solution (discovered independently, with some regularity, by innumerable groups in human history) is to hide all objective membership criteria behind the veil of subjective collective judgment. (And this, too, has its problems; no one one said community-building would be easy…)