It seems like a scale with “obviously bad” on one end, “annoying but not too bad” somewhere in the middle, and “okay but slightly worse than current group average” on the other end.
Sadly, even the last one has a potential to destroy your group in long term, if you keep adding people who are slightly below the average… thus lowering the average, and unknowingly lowering the bar for the next person slightly below the new average… and your group has less and less of the thing that the original members joined or created it for.
Kicking out the obviously bad person at least feels righteous. Kicking out the annoying one can make you feel bad. Kicking out the slightly-below-average person definitely makes you feel like an asshole.
(It is even more complicated in situations where the group members improve at something by practicing. In that case, the newbie is very likely currently worse than the group average, but you have to estimate their potential for improvement.)
Sometimes it can even make sense to reject new people who are actually less problematic than the worst current member, but still more problematic than the average. Just because your group can handle one annoying member, doesn’t mean it will be able to handle two. (Also, who knows what kind of interaction may happen between the two annoying members.)
Yeah I think one reason groups go dark-forest is that being findable tends to come with demands you make your rules legible and unidimensionally consistent (see: LessWrong attempting to moderate two users with very strong positives and very strong negatives) and that cuts you off from certain good states.
I think the post is describing a real problem (how to promote higher standards in a group that already has very high standards relative to the general population). I would like to see a different version framed around positive reinforcement. Constructive criticism is great, but it’s something we always need to improve, even the best of us.
People are capable of correctly interpreting the context of praise and taking away the right message. If Alice is a below-average fighter pilot, and her trainer praises her publicly for an above-average (for Alice) flight, her peers can correctly interpret that the praise is to recognize Alice’s personal growth, not to suggest that Alice is the ideal model of a fighter pilot. What inspires individual and collective improvement and striving is an empirical psychological question, and AFAIK a background of positive reinforcement along with specific constructive criticism is generally considered the way to go.
People are capable of correctly interpreting the context of praise and taking away the right message.
The rate of success of this is not anywhere near 100%. So for group dynamics, where members have a finite level of patience, this really doesn’t prevent Villiam’s point of every new member being ever so slightly below the level of the previous leading to evaporative cooling of the original members past a few dozen iterations.
The fundamental premise of trying to have a group at all is that you don’t exclusively care about group average quality. Otherwise, the easiest way to maximize that would be to kick out everybody except the best member.
So given that we care about group size as well as quality, kicking out or pushing away low performers is already looking bad. The natural place to start is by applying positive reinforcement for participating in the group, and only applying negative pressures, like holding up somebody as a bad example, when we’re really confident this is a huge win for overall group performance.
Edit:
The original version of my comment ended with:
“Humiliating slightly below group average performers seems frankly idiotic to me. Like, I’m not trying to accuse anybody here of being an idiot, I am just trying to express how intensely I disagree with the idea that this is a good way to build or improve the quality of groups. It’s like the leadership equivalent of bloodletting or something.”
This was motivated by a misreading of the post Raemon linked and suggested an incorrect reading of what MY Zuo was saying. While I absolutely believe my statement here is true, it’s not actually relevant to the conversation and is probably best ignored.
Im responding to Raemon’s link to the Tale of Alice Almost, which is what I thought you were referring as well. If you haven’t read it already, it emphasizes the idea that by holding up members of a group who are slightly below the group average as negative examples, then this can somehow motivate an improvement in the group. Your response made me think you were advocating doing this in order to ice out low-performing members. If that’s wrong, then sorry for making false assumptions—my comment can mainly be treated as a response to the Tale of Alice Almost.
Your comment is a response to my rejection of the claims in Alice Almost that a good way to improve group quality is to publicly humiliate below average performers.
Specifically, you say that praising the improvement of the lower performing members fails to stop Villiam’s proposal to stop evaporative cooling by kicking out or criticizing low performers.
So I read you and Villiam as rejecting the idea that a combination of nurture and constructive criticism is the most important way to promote high group performance, and that instead, kicking out or publicly making an example of low performers is the better way.
If that’s not what you’re saying then let me know what specifically you are advocating—I think that one of the hard parts of this thread is the implicit references to previous comments and linked posts, without any direct quotes. That’s my fault in part, because I’m writing a lot of these comments on my phone, which makes quoting difficult.
Back on my laptop, so I can quote conveniently. First, I went back and read the Tale of Alice Almost more carefully, and found I had misinterpreted it. So I will go back and edit my original comment that you were responding to.
Second, Villiam’s point is that “ok but slightly worse than current group average” behavior has “potential to destroy your group” if you “keep adding people who are slightly below the average… thus lowering the average,” lowering the bar indefinitely.
Villiam is referencing a mathematical truth that may or may not be empirically relevant in real group behavior. For example of a situation where it would not apply, consider a university that effectively educates its students. Every year, it onboards a new group of freshman who are below-University-average in terms of scholastic ability, and graduates its highest-performers.
Of course, we know why the quality of students at the university doesn’t necessarily degrade: the population of high schoolers it recruits from each year may have relatively static quality, and the university and students both try to improve the scholastic performance of the incoming class with each year so that the quality of the senior class remains static, or even improves, over time.
In my view, a combination of private constructive criticism and public praise works very well to motivate and inform students when they are learning. Furthermore, an environment that promotes learning and psychological wellbeing is attractive to most people, and I expect that it provides benefits in terms of selecting for high-performing recruits. I had mistakenly read sarahconstantin’s post as advocating for public humiliation of slightly-below-average performers in order to ice them out or motivate people to work harder, which is not what she was calling for. This is why I wrote my orginal comment in response to Raemon.
You seem to be pointing out that if we praise people (in the context of my original comment, praise slightly-below-average performers for personal improvement), then some people will incorrectly interpret us as praising these slightly-below-average people as being “good enough.”
I think there is a way to steelman your claim—perhaps if a sensei systematically praises the personal-best performance of a below-group-average student, then other students will interpret the sensei as having low standards, and start bringing less-committed and less-capable friends to intro sessions, resulting in a gradual degredation of the overall quality of the students in the dojo.
But I think this is an empirical claim, not a mathematical truth. I think that an environment where participants receive praise for personal-best performance results in accelerated improvement. At first, this merely counteracts any negative side effects with recruitment. Over time, it actually flips the dynamic. The high-praise environment attains higher average performance due to accelerated improvement, and this makes it more appealing to even higher-performing recruits both because high-praise is more appealing than low-praise and because they can work with higher-skill peers. Eventually, it becomes too costly to onboard more people, and so people have to compete to get in. This may allow the group to enforce higher standards for admission, so another beneficial selection force kicks in.
This model predicts that high-praise environments tend to have higher quality than low-praise environments, and that shifting to a high-praise style will result in improved group performance over time.
You seem to think that Villiam’s point “follows” from the fact that not everybody will correctly understand that praising personal-best performance doesn’t mean holding that person’s work up as exemplary. I don’t know how strongly you mean “follows,” but I hope this essay will clarify the overall view I’m trying to get across here.
I’m not sure that “group average” is always the metric we want to improve. My intuition is that we want to think of most groups as markets, and supply and demand for various types of interaction with particular people varies from day to day. Adding more people to the market, even if they’re below average, can easily create surplus to the benefit of all and be desirable.
Obviously even in real markets it’s not always beneficial to have more entrants, I think mainly because of coordination costs as the market grows. So in my model, adding extra members to the group is typically good as long as they can pay for their own coordination costs in terms of the value they provide to the group.
It seems like a scale with “obviously bad” on one end, “annoying but not too bad” somewhere in the middle, and “okay but slightly worse than current group average” on the other end.
Sadly, even the last one has a potential to destroy your group in long term, if you keep adding people who are slightly below the average… thus lowering the average, and unknowingly lowering the bar for the next person slightly below the new average… and your group has less and less of the thing that the original members joined or created it for.
Kicking out the obviously bad person at least feels righteous. Kicking out the annoying one can make you feel bad. Kicking out the slightly-below-average person definitely makes you feel like an asshole.
(It is even more complicated in situations where the group members improve at something by practicing. In that case, the newbie is very likely currently worse than the group average, but you have to estimate their potential for improvement.)
Sometimes it can even make sense to reject new people who are actually less problematic than the worst current member, but still more problematic than the average. Just because your group can handle one annoying member, doesn’t mean it will be able to handle two. (Also, who knows what kind of interaction may happen between the two annoying members.)
Yeah I think one reason groups go dark-forest is that being findable tends to come with demands you make your rules legible and unidimensionally consistent (see: LessWrong attempting to moderate two users with very strong positives and very strong negatives) and that cuts you off from certain good states.
See also: The Tale of Alice Almost: Strategies for Dealing With Pretty Good People
I think the post is describing a real problem (how to promote higher standards in a group that already has very high standards relative to the general population). I would like to see a different version framed around positive reinforcement. Constructive criticism is great, but it’s something we always need to improve, even the best of us.
People are capable of correctly interpreting the context of praise and taking away the right message. If Alice is a below-average fighter pilot, and her trainer praises her publicly for an above-average (for Alice) flight, her peers can correctly interpret that the praise is to recognize Alice’s personal growth, not to suggest that Alice is the ideal model of a fighter pilot. What inspires individual and collective improvement and striving is an empirical psychological question, and AFAIK a background of positive reinforcement along with specific constructive criticism is generally considered the way to go.
The rate of success of this is not anywhere near 100%. So for group dynamics, where members have a finite level of patience, this really doesn’t prevent Villiam’s point of every new member being ever so slightly below the level of the previous leading to evaporative cooling of the original members past a few dozen iterations.
The fundamental premise of trying to have a group at all is that you don’t exclusively care about group average quality. Otherwise, the easiest way to maximize that would be to kick out everybody except the best member.
So given that we care about group size as well as quality, kicking out or pushing away low performers is already looking bad. The natural place to start is by applying positive reinforcement for participating in the group, and only applying negative pressures, like holding up somebody as a bad example, when we’re really confident this is a huge win for overall group performance.
Edit:
The original version of my comment ended with:
“Humiliating slightly below group average performers seems frankly idiotic to me. Like, I’m not trying to accuse anybody here of being an idiot, I am just trying to express how intensely I disagree with the idea that this is a good way to build or improve the quality of groups. It’s like the leadership equivalent of bloodletting or something.”
This was motivated by a misreading of the post Raemon linked and suggested an incorrect reading of what MY Zuo was saying. While I absolutely believe my statement here is true, it’s not actually relevant to the conversation and is probably best ignored.
What are you talking about?
I’m referring to Villiam’s point that a common scenario is that the original members leave once the group average quality declines below a threshold.
Im responding to Raemon’s link to the Tale of Alice Almost, which is what I thought you were referring as well. If you haven’t read it already, it emphasizes the idea that by holding up members of a group who are slightly below the group average as negative examples, then this can somehow motivate an improvement in the group. Your response made me think you were advocating doing this in order to ice out low-performing members. If that’s wrong, then sorry for making false assumptions—my comment can mainly be treated as a response to the Tale of Alice Almost.
Is there some part of my original comment that you do not understand?
Your comment is a response to my rejection of the claims in Alice Almost that a good way to improve group quality is to publicly humiliate below average performers.
Specifically, you say that praising the improvement of the lower performing members fails to stop Villiam’s proposal to stop evaporative cooling by kicking out or criticizing low performers.
So I read you and Villiam as rejecting the idea that a combination of nurture and constructive criticism is the most important way to promote high group performance, and that instead, kicking out or publicly making an example of low performers is the better way.
If that’s not what you’re saying then let me know what specifically you are advocating—I think that one of the hard parts of this thread is the implicit references to previous comments and linked posts, without any direct quotes. That’s my fault in part, because I’m writing a lot of these comments on my phone, which makes quoting difficult.
I’m really unsure how you read that into my comment.
I’ll spell it out step by step and let’s see where the confusion is:
Only one sentence out of many was quoted.
This usually indicates on LW the replier wants to address a specific portion, for some reason or another.
If I wanted to address all your claims I probably would have quoted the whole comment or left it unquoted, following the usual practice on LW.
Your one sentence was:
My view is:
People are capable of correct interpretation some fraction of the time.
Some fraction of that fraction will result in them ‘taking away the right message’.
These ratios are unknown but cumulatively will be well under 100% in any real life scenario I can think of.
Therefore, Villiam’s point follows.
And so on.
Back on my laptop, so I can quote conveniently. First, I went back and read the Tale of Alice Almost more carefully, and found I had misinterpreted it. So I will go back and edit my original comment that you were responding to.
Second, Villiam’s point is that “ok but slightly worse than current group average” behavior has “potential to destroy your group” if you “keep adding people who are slightly below the average… thus lowering the average,” lowering the bar indefinitely.
Villiam is referencing a mathematical truth that may or may not be empirically relevant in real group behavior. For example of a situation where it would not apply, consider a university that effectively educates its students. Every year, it onboards a new group of freshman who are below-University-average in terms of scholastic ability, and graduates its highest-performers.
Of course, we know why the quality of students at the university doesn’t necessarily degrade: the population of high schoolers it recruits from each year may have relatively static quality, and the university and students both try to improve the scholastic performance of the incoming class with each year so that the quality of the senior class remains static, or even improves, over time.
In my view, a combination of private constructive criticism and public praise works very well to motivate and inform students when they are learning. Furthermore, an environment that promotes learning and psychological wellbeing is attractive to most people, and I expect that it provides benefits in terms of selecting for high-performing recruits. I had mistakenly read sarahconstantin’s post as advocating for public humiliation of slightly-below-average performers in order to ice them out or motivate people to work harder, which is not what she was calling for. This is why I wrote my orginal comment in response to Raemon.
You seem to be pointing out that if we praise people (in the context of my original comment, praise slightly-below-average performers for personal improvement), then some people will incorrectly interpret us as praising these slightly-below-average people as being “good enough.”
I think there is a way to steelman your claim—perhaps if a sensei systematically praises the personal-best performance of a below-group-average student, then other students will interpret the sensei as having low standards, and start bringing less-committed and less-capable friends to intro sessions, resulting in a gradual degredation of the overall quality of the students in the dojo.
But I think this is an empirical claim, not a mathematical truth. I think that an environment where participants receive praise for personal-best performance results in accelerated improvement. At first, this merely counteracts any negative side effects with recruitment. Over time, it actually flips the dynamic. The high-praise environment attains higher average performance due to accelerated improvement, and this makes it more appealing to even higher-performing recruits both because high-praise is more appealing than low-praise and because they can work with higher-skill peers. Eventually, it becomes too costly to onboard more people, and so people have to compete to get in. This may allow the group to enforce higher standards for admission, so another beneficial selection force kicks in.
This model predicts that high-praise environments tend to have higher quality than low-praise environments, and that shifting to a high-praise style will result in improved group performance over time.
You seem to think that Villiam’s point “follows” from the fact that not everybody will correctly understand that praising personal-best performance doesn’t mean holding that person’s work up as exemplary. I don’t know how strongly you mean “follows,” but I hope this essay will clarify the overall view I’m trying to get across here.
I’d been a bit confused at your earlier reaction to the post, this makes more sense to me.
I’m not sure that “group average” is always the metric we want to improve. My intuition is that we want to think of most groups as markets, and supply and demand for various types of interaction with particular people varies from day to day. Adding more people to the market, even if they’re below average, can easily create surplus to the benefit of all and be desirable.
Obviously even in real markets it’s not always beneficial to have more entrants, I think mainly because of coordination costs as the market grows. So in my model, adding extra members to the group is typically good as long as they can pay for their own coordination costs in terms of the value they provide to the group.