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.
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.