I think much of the suffering could be alleviated if any of these institutions were meritocratic instead of credentocratic:
Education
Recruiting
Finance
Education
I went to “good” secondary schools in my small state, but I would not consider them good. The bitrate was too slow and the other students were unmotivated to learn more than necessary. The teachers, too, were not paid at competitive rates—maybe one quarter the $200k that a good STEM graduate could make at the time—so it was rare to find a passionate and competent teacher. I did have one or two, but they should not have been the exception.
I did not actually take mathematics or science classes in secondary school; I went home and self-studied until I was old enough to enroll in college classes. As my father said, “never let schooling get in the way of your education.” This is why I am still confused what American students learn between 4th and 10th grades. I understand up to 3rd grade they are learning the three R’s[1], and the upper years take classes like calculus or chemistry, but in between...? What is there in between arithmetic and calculus? Algebra? And why is calculus spread over two years instead of one semester? These subjects only take a few months for the average student to learn, if they’re actually trying. My best guess is to translate my schooling in history and literature which is to say students learn just about nothing.
What horrifies me is that schooling has gotten worse since I left. Highschoolers are frequently illiterate—not functionally illiterate, but cannot-sound-out-these-words illiterate. I’m not terribly surprised though. I remember being confused when I was younger living within the system as it deteriorated.
“Why is our teacher asking us to add using these number blocks? Didn’t we learn addition two years ago? And why did we only do that activity once and never again?”
“Why is this allegedly sixth-grade standardized assessment asking me to show my work adding single-digit numbers? Didn’t we learn that in first grade? And what work is there to show?”
Forget meritocracy, this is not even internally consistent. This was confusing as a student, but now I recognize it’s just politics and credentocracy. The first, because incompetents in power ought to yield that power, right? Who cares if Common Core decreases the median AMC 10 score by 20%, our committee did something! for the kids! The second, because teachers and administrators get bonuses and promotions for a piece of paper saying, “test scores went up,” so they choose the tests accordingly. It’s actually worse than just that—teacher pay is pretty strictly tied to their credentials (bachelor’s or master’s degree regardless of university + years of tenure). I had an amazing competition math coach in 8th grade who could not get hired at a public school (even for pitiful wages) and ended up working for a private school. Yes, their school now wins every state math competition, but who cares about merit? Certainly not the education system.
It does not end in secondary school. Many students go on to obtain a four-year degree, then a six-year PhD, and the pinnacle of education is spending ten more years publishing towards tenure or perishing. I tried to opt out and applied to a hundred or so jobs at the end of high school, but only got one or two callbacks. It actually still astounds me how Google sent me a recruitment email in ninth grade for stumbling my way through Foobar—before they knew my age—but when I actually knew some stuff three years later and tried applying every system autorejected me. I ended up going to university and then joining a startup, but I could not even join a startup (at least, a good startup) without the education credential. Which brings us to our next issue.
Recruiting
Recruiters mostly suck at their jobs. Part of this is mass spam from lying applicants, making it hard to sift for competency, but there is no excuse for filtering out everyone without university experience. It is ridiculously easy to find a list of the USAMO participants each year, and firms with competent recruiters (like Jane Street) do and send out advertisements each year. Oh, and they also sponsor academic competitions, YouTubers, and sites like AoPS or Brilliant.org. Why? Because they can do an expected value calculation on the difference between the cost and value of certain types of recruitment. The optimal move is almost never paying low wages to nonexperts to sift through spam from lying applicants, and yet that’s what pretty much every company does. Nonexperts can’t tell the difference between Javascript or Java, so they just look for the right keywords and filter for education level. At the end of high school I couldn’t be interviewed for a median-salary job, but a few months into my first year at MIT my applications suddenly became visible. And 3–4 years after I matriculated (presumably when I was nearing graduation) there was quite an uptick in recruiters asking me to apply to their jobs.
It’s really confusing behavior. You would think the market should be efficient enough to encourage companies to spend less on recruitment. Amortized, ~5% of payroll gets paid to recruiters. The issue though is companies seem to operate under a Benetarian hiring philosophy even as they’re putting out “help needed” posters. Hiring someone bad creates visible numbers that HR doesn’t like, while there are no numbers written down when you don’t hire someone good. This problem only exists because HR numbers are separate from product growth numbers and no one audits them properly, at least once the organization becomes big enough. Startups are more amenable to “risky” hires (those without credentials that prove they are likely not super-negative EV), and you would think that as they grow those with better recruitment structures would grow faster, so the big organizations would be fine, but that requires an efficient market in that respect, which requires a free market. And the market is not free.
Finance
Founders and early employees want to have money, not just stock options that they can sell for money, so they often sell that stock. To whom? Whomever has enough liquid cash on hand. This is true for small businesses too. Why not retire if a private equity firm is offering you $10m for your mom-and-pop shop? It makes sense. The only issue is some groups can borrow cash cheaper than others based on their established reputation, whether or not they will run the business more efficiently. The United States’ central bank can borrow money at ~4% interest rates, while the average homebuyer pays 6%. This means a homebuyer can only outbid the central bank if the home is 50% more valuable to them. Of course, no one is bidding on homes against the central bank, but they are bidding against Blackstone. And companies with more efficient recruiting are being auctioned off to more established equity firms, which go in and align the systems to be closer to their own.
When I learned how difficult it was for Stripe to get a banking license in the UK, I was initially confused. If they have the right policies in place, gone through the legalwork, and are good for the money, what more could the government want? They wanted an established reputation. If anyone in Silicon Valley can credential themselves as a Bank, they could borrow more money at lower rates and blow the money on poor investments[2]. People want to lend to those worthy of credit, but it takes time to build up that reputation, which is a constraint on the free market slowing down recruiter efficiency.
Schools create jobs for teachers by stretching basic education over an improbable number of years. Professional-Managerial Class apparatchiks (I justify this abstraction in the linked posts) understand their main responsibility to be creating more jobs for people like themselves, which creates runaway intermediation like we see in recruiters and HR, instead of easy active strategies like sending letters to all National Merit Semifinalists or SAT high scorers, walking into a well-run McDonald’s and trying to poach the manager, etc. Finance is heavily regulated and functions as a mechanism for preferentially allocating access to cheap credit to the sorts of people who play the game.
I think a better financial system could lead to a better recruitment system which could lead to a better education system, but I also think the problems lower down can be solved independently. Quantitative trading firms (like Jane Street) do a comparatively amazing job with recruitment, perhaps because their conflicts with each other are more frequent (-> faster evolution) and metrics more precise (-> better gradients). I imagine the current recruiting market will improve over time, and I also believe a good entrepreneur could single-handedly make large improvements. Of course, there’s always the doubt, “then why hasn’t someone yet?” but then again, very few people have the necessary training in game theory and information theory[1].
More importantly, I think the deterioration in education is mostly removed from these other systems. Yes, the credential system has pushed more people into college, yes it has led to administrators milking their districts, and yes stronger economic pressures to perform due to a calibrated recruitment market would prohibit this, but I think this mostly happened due to sabotage in academia by Marxists. They formed a clique which circlejerked papers affirming Marxism and denied funding to research on merit, or even research that tried to be precise with the effect of various Marxist policies. For example, there are zero papers studying how “No Child Left Behind” effected gifted students[2] and only a few studying its effect on race achievement gaps (though several hundred purporting to study this effect for funding sake). I think there was a political problem they needed to solve—the replication crisis of a philosophy with low birthrates—and they recognized public schools could replace familial socialization, so they targeted schooling in particular. I get that schools create bullshit jobs, which is good for the managerial class of administrators, and I definitely saw problems with that at MIT, but it was a different set of problems than the anticompetence I saw at public schools. My professors there at least knew their subject, even if they complained about stupid policies.
I just know enough to say you should be able to put value on reputation and costly signals and recognize most people only have a hazy sense of what those values are. They can say Ivy League > State School, but can they say whether it is better to interview 10 Ivy League graduates at $5000/candidate or 100 State School graduates at $500/candidate?
I think the idea that one needs “training in game theory and information theory” to try to recruit usable talent rather than trying to do what everyone else is doing, is the kind of backwardsness the current educational system instills by design. One does need some willingness to believe that everyone else might be wrong, of course, but then one can just make reasonable guesses and use trial and error. When people are trying to do things wrong on purpose, the problem is not that they lack specialized technical knowledge in means-ends reasoning, but that they’re trying to signal loyalty instead of solving the problem they’re pretending to try to solve. The difficult problem that requires theory is how not to become inappropriately arrogant in the process, by mistaking everyone else’s perversity for your brilliance.
The idea that education is mostly unrelated to the systems staffed almost entirely by people who’ve spent over a decade and often almost two being conditioned by the education system and saying “please may I have some more,” and to the systems that fund the education system and define and enforce its special privileges, seems so totally implausible to me that I don’t even know what to say in response, aside from this paragraph.
Marxism is not the origin of the assault on education; American Progressives were overtly attacking literacy and cognition through the educational system long before Marxism became popular in academia.
Thank you for the reference, I’ll read it tomorrow (or skim if it’s >50 pages). By “training in game theory and information theory” I meant something akin to “training in chess”, “training in math competitions”, or perhaps most similar, “training in quantitative trading”. I say this like it is a prerequisite, because I think there are certain ways of thinking you can only automatically do after beating your head against the subject for a long time. For example, writing correct proofs came naturally to me because I had already trained in chess where you constantly check for mistakes, and writing essays came naturally to me because I had already trained via coding to plan pages of text ahead of time. I think without having similar training in game theory and information theory, the cognitive load and inferential leaps may be too much to overcome through trial and error, analogous to building a rocket without Newtonian mechanics or a computer language without formal logic.
Here are some things I learned that are obviously true in hindsight, but were not something I thought I should think about in the first place:
Adversaries have no reason to divulge information, allies have no reason to conceal information (assuming you are true adversaries or allies).
Talk without imposed costs only allows coordination when all parties benefit from distinguishing signals. Otherwise it is just babble. Notice how this makes resumes mostly useless (and why the equilibrium is everyone lying about too-difficult-to-prove signals like years of experience).
A reputation’s value comes from costly signals. You can also spend reputation. For example, take an up/down dilemma[1] with a long-run (institutional) actor and a series of one-off agents that know the institution’s prior history. The long-run actor should buy reputation by playing up enough so every agent believes they will be paid more by playing up than down, while cashing in on that reputation by occasionally playing down.
That last part is where the information theory comes in. Now that I think about it, it is probably enough for the first few companies to realize they can use game/information theory in pricing recruitment and stumble their way from there. The more rigorous analysis can come later, as the market gets more competitive. I’m also curious how well this is done in the credit and insurance industries.
I think I need to clarify something more abstract here:
There’s optimization against norms as such, what Jessica Taylor called anti-normativity. Clarifying what basic normativity implies can seem to produce easy object-level wins relative to baseline, but not because it’s intrinsically difficult. (Much of the Sequences is about what it looks like to be wrong on purpose and what it would look like not to.) And until you know about antinormativity, not only is the need for clarification itself a puzzle in need of an answer, but all your object-level gains are vulnerable to expropriative ambush by an adversary you’re unaware of.
Okay, this helps me understand where you are coming from. Basically, there are antinormative conspiracies that are bad for these institutions, but less bad for themselves, so they grow in relative power and are difficult to dislodge by uncoordinated pronormative actors[1]. I would say, sure, these conspiracies exist[2], but the people within them would readily jump to the pronormative side if they can see greater benefits. It is possible for individual actors to defeat these conspiracies just by proposing better solutions to invested parties.
For example… after several minutes, I could not think of an example. I wanted to say, “clearly Linux will outcompete Windows, it’s a better and free OS,” but in reality the Microsoft conspiracy bribes schools to indoctrinate children into buying their OS when they grow up. Or maybe, “well don’t people leave cults when they realize they’re better off outside them?” but in reality the cult teaches people an inconsistent method of integrating value and sourcing information on consistent methods. So it’s actually rarer and harder than I thought, and even if a pronormative actor succeeds, why won’t their object-level gains just get expropriated by a new antinormative conspiracy?
I think it should be possible to protect against that. For example, honest education studies and assessments would calibrate the system. But what happens in reality is politically motivated studies that are dishonestly reported and passed on as good teaching standards. There isn’t really a mechanism to stop politics in research funding, even the theoretical physicists couldn’t figure it out.
How do you solve this problem? Would fiercer competition work, so parasitized institutions die out faster?
EDIT: The solution is already there in my previous comment! We can’t prevent antinormative conspiracies since they can just adopt the same policies as normative institutions until the right time to cash out. However, is it really an antinormative conspiracy if it perfectly mimics a normative institution? If you put in guard labor to audit the long-run institution’s history, you can force them to play ‘up’ enough that they are essentially a normative institution. Of course, someone has to watch the guards, but you can watch them in a circular pattern.
Uncoordinated, because most of the time they do not even realize they are in conflict with a coordinated enemy. If they did, they could coordinate and win, which is why their opposition must be a conspiracy.
Though those within the conspiracy might not label it as such; are the MIT students that lied their way into the school (this comprises the majority of the student body) part of a conspiracy to cash out on the value of MIT’s reputation? They would say no, they’re completely unaware of being in a conspiracy, we would say if they quack like a conspiracy and act like a conspiracy, they’re part of a conspiracy.
Very pleasing to watch you work through the relevant theory much faster than I did (albeit also with more directly relevant reading materials).
Bounded cognition is relevant here. Negotiating coalitional status competes for cognitive resources with participating in shared models of external reality, so if you enforce norms well enough, it’s cheaper for people to mostly just be normative.
The English Civil War is a historical example of a pronormative revolution against an antinormative regime; I wrote about it in Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency (also linked in a footnote to the post, but I don’t expect anyone followed all the links). I think it’s an important case study; the major benefit of Calvinism seems to be having any sort of idea of the existence of a conflict between pronormative and antinormative mindsets, while endorsing the normative side.
The major disadvantage otherwise pronormative cognition has is naïvete to the existence of antinormativity, sometimes to the point of the sort of unseeing I complained about in the Lacanian section of Compradorization. Civil Law and Political Drama is my best attempt to lay out single framework that can describe both pronormative and antinormative cognition.
Yes, “No Child Left Behind” is a Marxist policy. Simply the title of the act should be sufficient to prove that. I would be surprised if Obama were a Marxist, and I’m not sure how that is relevant. If you want to learn more about my opinions regarding education, I would recommend this post. I’m a little wary of engaging more seriously with you at the moment, as it is a pretty uncontroversial to say education has been heavily influenced by Marxism, and your questions seem to be aiming towards a no true Marxism defense that will suck time out of my life rather than provide interesting or useful commentary.
I think much of the suffering could be alleviated if any of these institutions were meritocratic instead of credentocratic:
Education
Recruiting
Finance
Education
I went to “good” secondary schools in my small state, but I would not consider them good. The bitrate was too slow and the other students were unmotivated to learn more than necessary. The teachers, too, were not paid at competitive rates—maybe one quarter the $200k that a good STEM graduate could make at the time—so it was rare to find a passionate and competent teacher. I did have one or two, but they should not have been the exception.
I did not actually take mathematics or science classes in secondary school; I went home and self-studied until I was old enough to enroll in college classes. As my father said, “never let schooling get in the way of your education.” This is why I am still confused what American students learn between 4th and 10th grades. I understand up to 3rd grade they are learning the three R’s [1] , and the upper years take classes like calculus or chemistry, but in between...? What is there in between arithmetic and calculus? Algebra? And why is calculus spread over two years instead of one semester? These subjects only take a few months for the average student to learn, if they’re actually trying. My best guess is to translate my schooling in history and literature which is to say students learn just about nothing.
What horrifies me is that schooling has gotten worse since I left. Highschoolers are frequently illiterate—not functionally illiterate, but cannot-sound-out-these-words illiterate. I’m not terribly surprised though. I remember being confused when I was younger living within the system as it deteriorated.
“Why is our teacher asking us to add using these number blocks? Didn’t we learn addition two years ago? And why did we only do that activity once and never again?”
“Why is this allegedly sixth-grade standardized assessment asking me to show my work adding single-digit numbers? Didn’t we learn that in first grade? And what work is there to show?”
Forget meritocracy, this is not even internally consistent. This was confusing as a student, but now I recognize it’s just politics and credentocracy. The first, because incompetents in power ought to yield that power, right? Who cares if Common Core decreases the median AMC 10 score by 20%, our committee did something! for the kids! The second, because teachers and administrators get bonuses and promotions for a piece of paper saying, “test scores went up,” so they choose the tests accordingly. It’s actually worse than just that—teacher pay is pretty strictly tied to their credentials (bachelor’s or master’s degree regardless of university + years of tenure). I had an amazing competition math coach in 8th grade who could not get hired at a public school (even for pitiful wages) and ended up working for a private school. Yes, their school now wins every state math competition, but who cares about merit? Certainly not the education system.
It does not end in secondary school. Many students go on to obtain a four-year degree, then a six-year PhD, and the pinnacle of education is spending ten more years publishing towards tenure or perishing. I tried to opt out and applied to a hundred or so jobs at the end of high school, but only got one or two callbacks. It actually still astounds me how Google sent me a recruitment email in ninth grade for stumbling my way through Foobar—before they knew my age—but when I actually knew some stuff three years later and tried applying every system autorejected me. I ended up going to university and then joining a startup, but I could not even join a startup (at least, a good startup) without the education credential. Which brings us to our next issue.
Recruiting
Recruiters mostly suck at their jobs. Part of this is mass spam from lying applicants, making it hard to sift for competency, but there is no excuse for filtering out everyone without university experience. It is ridiculously easy to find a list of the USAMO participants each year, and firms with competent recruiters (like Jane Street) do and send out advertisements each year. Oh, and they also sponsor academic competitions, YouTubers, and sites like AoPS or Brilliant.org. Why? Because they can do an expected value calculation on the difference between the cost and value of certain types of recruitment. The optimal move is almost never paying low wages to nonexperts to sift through spam from lying applicants, and yet that’s what pretty much every company does. Nonexperts can’t tell the difference between Javascript or Java, so they just look for the right keywords and filter for education level. At the end of high school I couldn’t be interviewed for a median-salary job, but a few months into my first year at MIT my applications suddenly became visible. And 3–4 years after I matriculated (presumably when I was nearing graduation) there was quite an uptick in recruiters asking me to apply to their jobs.
It’s really confusing behavior. You would think the market should be efficient enough to encourage companies to spend less on recruitment. Amortized, ~5% of payroll gets paid to recruiters. The issue though is companies seem to operate under a Benetarian hiring philosophy even as they’re putting out “help needed” posters. Hiring someone bad creates visible numbers that HR doesn’t like, while there are no numbers written down when you don’t hire someone good. This problem only exists because HR numbers are separate from product growth numbers and no one audits them properly, at least once the organization becomes big enough. Startups are more amenable to “risky” hires (those without credentials that prove they are likely not super-negative EV), and you would think that as they grow those with better recruitment structures would grow faster, so the big organizations would be fine, but that requires an efficient market in that respect, which requires a free market. And the market is not free.
Finance
Founders and early employees want to have money, not just stock options that they can sell for money, so they often sell that stock. To whom? Whomever has enough liquid cash on hand. This is true for small businesses too. Why not retire if a private equity firm is offering you $10m for your mom-and-pop shop? It makes sense. The only issue is some groups can borrow cash cheaper than others based on their established reputation, whether or not they will run the business more efficiently. The United States’ central bank can borrow money at ~4% interest rates, while the average homebuyer pays 6%. This means a homebuyer can only outbid the central bank if the home is 50% more valuable to them. Of course, no one is bidding on homes against the central bank, but they are bidding against Blackstone. And companies with more efficient recruiting are being auctioned off to more established equity firms, which go in and align the systems to be closer to their own.
When I learned how difficult it was for Stripe to get a banking license in the UK, I was initially confused. If they have the right policies in place, gone through the legalwork, and are good for the money, what more could the government want? They wanted an established reputation. If anyone in Silicon Valley can credential themselves as a Bank, they could borrow more money at lower rates and blow the money on poor investments [2] . People want to lend to those worthy of credit, but it takes time to build up that reputation, which is a constraint on the free market slowing down recruiter efficiency.
Reading, ’riting, ’rithmatic
Like Silicon Valley Bank did.
There is a central policy of creating patronage jobs. I wrote about the causes of this in The Debtors’ Revolt, what it looks like in practice in Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics, and historical precedent for patronage in What is a republic? A Roman aristocratic perspective.
Schools create jobs for teachers by stretching basic education over an improbable number of years. Professional-Managerial Class apparatchiks (I justify this abstraction in the linked posts) understand their main responsibility to be creating more jobs for people like themselves, which creates runaway intermediation like we see in recruiters and HR, instead of easy active strategies like sending letters to all National Merit Semifinalists or SAT high scorers, walking into a well-run McDonald’s and trying to poach the manager, etc. Finance is heavily regulated and functions as a mechanism for preferentially allocating access to cheap credit to the sorts of people who play the game.
I think a better financial system could lead to a better recruitment system which could lead to a better education system, but I also think the problems lower down can be solved independently. Quantitative trading firms (like Jane Street) do a comparatively amazing job with recruitment, perhaps because their conflicts with each other are more frequent (-> faster evolution) and metrics more precise (-> better gradients). I imagine the current recruiting market will improve over time, and I also believe a good entrepreneur could single-handedly make large improvements. Of course, there’s always the doubt, “then why hasn’t someone yet?” but then again, very few people have the necessary training in game theory and information theory [1] .
More importantly, I think the deterioration in education is mostly removed from these other systems. Yes, the credential system has pushed more people into college, yes it has led to administrators milking their districts, and yes stronger economic pressures to perform due to a calibrated recruitment market would prohibit this, but I think this mostly happened due to sabotage in academia by Marxists. They formed a clique which circlejerked papers affirming Marxism and denied funding to research on merit, or even research that tried to be precise with the effect of various Marxist policies. For example, there are zero papers studying how “No Child Left Behind” effected gifted students [2] and only a few studying its effect on race achievement gaps (though several hundred purporting to study this effect for funding sake). I think there was a political problem they needed to solve—the replication crisis of a philosophy with low birthrates—and they recognized public schools could replace familial socialization, so they targeted schooling in particular. I get that schools create bullshit jobs, which is good for the managerial class of administrators, and I definitely saw problems with that at MIT, but it was a different set of problems than the anticompetence I saw at public schools. My professors there at least knew their subject, even if they complained about stupid policies.
I just know enough to say you should be able to put value on reputation and costly signals and recognize most people only have a hazy sense of what those values are. They can say Ivy League > State School, but can they say whether it is better to interview 10 Ivy League graduates at $5000/candidate or 100 State School graduates at $500/candidate?
There are a few that purport or attempt to study this, but they all use metrics that cannot pick up on effects among the top 5% of students.
I think the idea that one needs “training in game theory and information theory” to try to recruit usable talent rather than trying to do what everyone else is doing, is the kind of backwardsness the current educational system instills by design. One does need some willingness to believe that everyone else might be wrong, of course, but then one can just make reasonable guesses and use trial and error. When people are trying to do things wrong on purpose, the problem is not that they lack specialized technical knowledge in means-ends reasoning, but that they’re trying to signal loyalty instead of solving the problem they’re pretending to try to solve. The difficult problem that requires theory is how not to become inappropriately arrogant in the process, by mistaking everyone else’s perversity for your brilliance.
The idea that education is mostly unrelated to the systems staffed almost entirely by people who’ve spent over a decade and often almost two being conditioned by the education system and saying “please may I have some more,” and to the systems that fund the education system and define and enforce its special privileges, seems so totally implausible to me that I don’t even know what to say in response, aside from this paragraph.
Marxism is not the origin of the assault on education; American Progressives were overtly attacking literacy and cognition through the educational system long before Marxism became popular in academia.
Thank you for the reference, I’ll read it tomorrow (or skim if it’s >50 pages). By “training in game theory and information theory” I meant something akin to “training in chess”, “training in math competitions”, or perhaps most similar, “training in quantitative trading”. I say this like it is a prerequisite, because I think there are certain ways of thinking you can only automatically do after beating your head against the subject for a long time. For example, writing correct proofs came naturally to me because I had already trained in chess where you constantly check for mistakes, and writing essays came naturally to me because I had already trained via coding to plan pages of text ahead of time. I think without having similar training in game theory and information theory, the cognitive load and inferential leaps may be too much to overcome through trial and error, analogous to building a rocket without Newtonian mechanics or a computer language without formal logic.
Here are some things I learned that are obviously true in hindsight, but were not something I thought I should think about in the first place:
Adversaries have no reason to divulge information, allies have no reason to conceal information (assuming you are true adversaries or allies).
Talk without imposed costs only allows coordination when all parties benefit from distinguishing signals. Otherwise it is just babble. Notice how this makes resumes mostly useless (and why the equilibrium is everyone lying about too-difficult-to-prove signals like years of experience).
A reputation’s value comes from costly signals. You can also spend reputation. For example, take an up/down dilemma [1] with a long-run (institutional) actor and a series of one-off agents that know the institution’s prior history. The long-run actor should buy reputation by playing up enough so every agent believes they will be paid more by playing up than down, while cashing in on that reputation by occasionally playing down.
That last part is where the information theory comes in. Now that I think about it, it is probably enough for the first few companies to realize they can use game/information theory in pricing recruitment and stumble their way from there. The more rigorous analysis can come later, as the market gets more competitive. I’m also curious how well this is done in the credit and insurance industries.
Player A gets paid most for down/up responses and a little for up/up, while Player B gets paid most for up/up and a little for down/down.
I think I need to clarify something more abstract here:
There’s optimization against norms as such, what Jessica Taylor called anti-normativity. Clarifying what basic normativity implies can seem to produce easy object-level wins relative to baseline, but not because it’s intrinsically difficult. (Much of the Sequences is about what it looks like to be wrong on purpose and what it would look like not to.) And until you know about antinormativity, not only is the need for clarification itself a puzzle in need of an answer, but all your object-level gains are vulnerable to expropriative ambush by an adversary you’re unaware of.
Okay, this helps me understand where you are coming from. Basically, there are antinormative conspiracies that are bad for these institutions, but less bad for themselves, so they grow in relative power and are difficult to dislodge by uncoordinated pronormative actors [1] . I would say, sure, these conspiracies exist [2] , but the people within them would readily jump to the pronormative side if they can see greater benefits. It is possible for individual actors to defeat these conspiracies just by proposing better solutions to invested parties.
For example… after several minutes, I could not think of an example. I wanted to say, “clearly Linux will outcompete Windows, it’s a better and free OS,” but in reality the Microsoft conspiracy bribes schools to indoctrinate children into buying their OS when they grow up. Or maybe, “well don’t people leave cults when they realize they’re better off outside them?” but in reality the cult teaches people an inconsistent method of integrating value and sourcing information on consistent methods. So it’s actually rarer and harder than I thought, and even if a pronormative actor succeeds, why won’t their object-level gains just get expropriated by a new antinormative conspiracy?
I think it should be possible to protect against that. For example, honest education studies and assessments would calibrate the system. But what happens in reality is politically motivated studies that are dishonestly reported and passed on as good teaching standards. There isn’t really a mechanism to stop politics in research funding, even the theoretical physicists couldn’t figure it out.
How do you solve this problem? Would fiercer competition work, so parasitized institutions die out faster?
EDIT: The solution is already there in my previous comment! We can’t prevent antinormative conspiracies since they can just adopt the same policies as normative institutions until the right time to cash out. However, is it really an antinormative conspiracy if it perfectly mimics a normative institution? If you put in guard labor to audit the long-run institution’s history, you can force them to play ‘up’ enough that they are essentially a normative institution. Of course, someone has to watch the guards, but you can watch them in a circular pattern.
Uncoordinated, because most of the time they do not even realize they are in conflict with a coordinated enemy. If they did, they could coordinate and win, which is why their opposition must be a conspiracy.
Though those within the conspiracy might not label it as such; are the MIT students that lied their way into the school (this comprises the majority of the student body) part of a conspiracy to cash out on the value of MIT’s reputation? They would say no, they’re completely unaware of being in a conspiracy, we would say if they quack like a conspiracy and act like a conspiracy, they’re part of a conspiracy.
Very pleasing to watch you work through the relevant theory much faster than I did (albeit also with more directly relevant reading materials).
Bounded cognition is relevant here. Negotiating coalitional status competes for cognitive resources with participating in shared models of external reality, so if you enforce norms well enough, it’s cheaper for people to mostly just be normative.
The English Civil War is a historical example of a pronormative revolution against an antinormative regime; I wrote about it in Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency (also linked in a footnote to the post, but I don’t expect anyone followed all the links). I think it’s an important case study; the major benefit of Calvinism seems to be having any sort of idea of the existence of a conflict between pronormative and antinormative mindsets, while endorsing the normative side.
The major disadvantage otherwise pronormative cognition has is naïvete to the existence of antinormativity, sometimes to the point of the sort of unseeing I complained about in the Lacanian section of Compradorization. Civil Law and Political Drama is my best attempt to lay out single framework that can describe both pronormative and antinormative cognition.
What exactly do you mean by “Marxist policies”? Do you consider “No Child Left Behind” to be a Marxist policy, or Obama to be a Marxist?
Yes, “No Child Left Behind” is a Marxist policy. Simply the title of the act should be sufficient to prove that. I would be surprised if Obama were a Marxist, and I’m not sure how that is relevant. If you want to learn more about my opinions regarding education, I would recommend this post. I’m a little wary of engaging more seriously with you at the moment, as it is a pretty uncontroversial to say education has been heavily influenced by Marxism, and your questions seem to be aiming towards a no true Marxism defense that will suck time out of my life rather than provide interesting or useful commentary.