Mini Posts 5 - Status, Power, and Reason

Status Traps, The Purpose of a System is what it Rewards, A Non-cynical View of Colleges and Power, Thinking Too Much is Bad for Society, The Most Important Political Dimension is Certainty

I’ve been spending the last two weeks at a kids summer camp hosted at a college campus. This has got me thinking about the nature of status, power, reason, and the role that colleges play in all this.

All these thoughts are somewhat half-baked.

Status Traps

A common pattern I’ve observed is that people find themselves stuck in careers they don’t really like because what they are doing feels high status.

The college professor who thinks their academic field contributes little to society and earns a pittance teaching it but feels they would be a failure if they did something else. The musician who doesn’t enjoy their instrument and struggles to get work. The aspiring Olympian who spends much of their life in pain and is unlikely to medal. The banker who feels bad about the morality of their work and gets too little sleep. The urban professional who suffers a low quality of life living in an expensive city and wishes they could live where they grew up.

In each of these cases, the person is in some way “high status” and they are reluctant to give up that status, even if they don’t enjoy the life that gives them that status, or feel that they aren’t contributing much to society.

I think there are several ways this can happen. One is that there are many points in life at which we make choices about what to dedicate time to (e.g. choosing a college major) and it’s tempting to do the thing people say you are good at, or that you’ve already invested time in, even if there is little societal value or long term happiness likely to come from it.

Another thing is that people often have a narrow view of what is high status based on who they interact with. If you are an athlete/professor/banker, then you mostly hang out with people who think the highest status people are athletes/professors/bankers, and dedicating your life to something else makes you seem like a failure who couldn’t cut it as an athlete/professor/banker.

So what’s the solution to this? I think most people would be happier if they paid less attention to whether what they were doing was “high status” or more attention to whether what they are doing with their lives makes the world better, both for others and for themselves. I think this would also be much better for the world.

This is of course more easily said than done.

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The Purpose of a System is what it Rewards

It’s become fashionable recently to say that the purpose of a system is what it does - the true purpose of an institution is often different from what it publicly claims, and is better determined by observing what it does. Scott Alexander wrote a thoughtful takedown of this, claiming “Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does” - often an institution is genuinely trying to do a good thing (e.g. treat patients) and the fact they do so imperfectly (e.g. some patients die) does not mean such imperfections are the goal.

I think a better framing is that the purpose of a system is what it rewards people for doing.

Meta says that their purpose is “to build the future of human connection” and used to say their mission was to “make the world more open and connected”. But Meta employees aren’t actually judged by how well they serve those high valued goals. Employees are judged on their ability to get people to spend more time staring at their screens clicking on ads (source: I worked there). So I think it’s fair to say that “get people to spend time storing at screens clicking on ads” is the purpose of Meta.

Someone I know works as a hospital doctor. Her performance isn’t judged based on patient outcomes, but on whether patients feel cared for, whether patients get diagnosed with treatable conditions, and how much the hospital can bill insurers for treating patients. So I think it’s fair to say that the purpose of that hospital is to make people feel cared for, diagnose them with things, and charge as much as they can to insurance. Some health benefits obviously get provided along the way, but since they aren’t what people are rewarded for, they aren’t the purpose.

If you work on a political campaign, your salary depends on bringing in lots of money from donors, but is mostly disconnected from whether the country improves as a result of your party’s policies. Thus I think it’s fair to say the purpose of a political party is to get people to donate money - often by making people angry and afraid.

On the other hand, when I worked at Google Search, it was genuinely true that the primary thing people were rewarded for was making search useful for users. The ads team of course has a separate purpose of making money by getting people to click on the ads they placed on the results.

Similarly, I’m pretty sure no police department rewards police officers for shooting innocent people. However I assume they do reward people for bringing down crime statistics in ways favorable to whoever is mayor, and I can imagine they may under-reward building good relationships with the community.

The purpose of a system definitely isn’t what it says it is, and it’s not fair to say all negative outcomes are intentional,, but I think it is fair to judge a system by what it rewards, and what a system rewards is often actually quite legible.

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A Non-cynical View of Colleges and Power

A lot of noise has been made about the admissions policies of elite colleges. Are they really selecting the most deserving? Do they prioritize the wealthy and well connected? Should they be selecting students by race?

I think it’s important to understand what colleges are actually for, and why they behave as they do.

Despite what colleges might claim, the purpose of a college (at least the elite ones) is not to teach students. If the purpose of elite colleges was to teach students then they would heavily reward the professors who did the best teaching, recruit professors based on teaching ability, and teach as many students as they could - but by and large they don’t do any of those things.

Instead, the purpose of an elite college is to select a group of people who will collectively go on to hold positions of power in the world, to do what is necessary to cause those people to hold positions of power, to present that power as legitimate, and to extract as much money out of those people as is practical. These are all things that colleges definitely reward employees for.

Broadly speaking, to get accepted into an elite college, you need to be either smart, rich, well connected, or useful for making the college’s power seem legitimate. To someone who expects colleges to select based on meritocracy, this might seem corrupt, but it is arguably a more useful social function than merely selecting the smartest or most deserving people. To make important things happen, you need to bring together the people with the ideas, the people with the connections, and the people with money.

If you created a college that was only for smart people, then the smartest people wouldn’t want to go there, because they want to form connections with the well connected people and the rich people. More importantly, if we didn’t have mechanisms for the smart people, the rich people, and the well connected people to find each other, it would be much harder for society to get things done. And of course, if colleges didn’t introduce the smart people to the rich people and the well connected people, it would just mean that the world was controlled by the rich people and the well connected people, with it being even harder for smart people to enter the ruling class.

However colleges also need to appear legitimate. If it seems that colleges are merely giving power to the rich and well connected then the rest of the country will see that power is being illegitimate, and express interest in limiting their ability to grant power. Similarly, if colleges selected only the smartest kids without paying attention to race, then they would produce a mostly Asian elite that would be resisted by the rest of the country.

This leads to the challenge that the colleges find themselves in. It’s not clear what the right solution is, but it’s at least useful to be aware of the nature of the problem.

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Thinking Too Much is Bad for Society

While the primary goal of a college may be to curate the ruling class, they also have the side effect of giving us a ruling class that has spent most of their formative years cut off from the real world, living in educational institutions (k-12 school, college, grad school) that teach them to think in a certain way. It’s not just that colleges themselves shield people from the real world, but that the desire to get into college forces kids to spend their pre-college years cut off from the real world so they have enough time to study.

During these years of school and college, students are taught how to think. They learn to use math, to write persuasive essays, to extract knowledge from books, to write code. However, by keeping students in an artificial world of thought, they deprive students of the ability to learn through experience how the messy world actually works.

In the real world, most things that work in theory fail in practice. In the real world, your model usually fails to account for something important. In the real world progress comes from incremental improvements not perfect grand theories. In the real world the new ideas often turn out to be worse than the old ones, and history rarely follows a straight line. In the real world the task you’ve been given is often impossible or at best poorly specified. In the real world your data is usually wrong. In the real world, you’ll often do the right thing and still fail. In the real world the most persuasive arguments are often the most harmful. In the real world, it’s important to try out lots of things in the knowledge that most things you try won’t work.

I think it’s fair to say that our current colleges (and the educational stages that lead up to them) are producing people who aren’t good at dealing with the real world. We see this in declining mental health. We see it in the struggles new college grads face when they hit the workplace and struggle to deal with a world totally unlike what they have trained for. We see it in our politics, where everyone puts too much effort into trying to force their strongly-held beliefs on the whole country all at once, and far too little effort into trying out lots of little things to see what works.

It’s definitely possible for a country to have too little education, but it’s possible that right now we have too much. Or at least, we need an education system that allows people to learn the theory of how the world works without preventing them from also learning the practice. If I had a theory of how best to do this, that theory would probably be wrong, but I think we should try stuff out.

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The Most Important Political Dimension is Certainty

People love to create political compasses. The most famous one has left vs right on one dimension, and authoritarian vs libertarian on the other. Another popular one has political vs social liberal/conservative. Broadly speaking, the goal seems to be to come up with a set of dimensions that puts your beliefs next to the people everyone is supposed to like, and your rivals close to taboo figures like Hitler. There is a whole subreddit for this.

I don’t think left vs right is a particularly useful political dimension. Exactly what ideas fall into which group changes over time, and can be different in different countries. It’s more useful to see left and right as evolving political coalitions than stable coherent theories. Similarly, I don’t think libertarian vs authoritarian is as clear cut as it seems, since in practice giving less power to governments often gives more power to corporations, or whoever else might be waiting in the wings.

I think by far the most important political dimension is certainty. How certain are you that your own theories about how to run the country will have good results? How willing are you to accept that the other side might be right and you might be wrong? How willing are you to defer to (and maintain) neutral democratic institutions like elections and courts that won’t always take your side?

Your degree of certainty in your beliefs is totally separate from what those beliefs are. I used to run a political debate club in San Francisco. We had people from the left and right, and by and large they got on great, because the club cultivated a spirit of humility. When there was disagreement, the solution wasn’t to shout the other person down, but to ask for data, to suggest experiments, to explore nuance. Two people with very different beliefs will get on great if they have low certainty, but two people with near-identical beliefs can be utterly vicious to each other if they are certain they are right.

Both liberalism and conservatism are rooted in uncertainty. Liberalism tells us that we don’t know the best way to run a society, so we should try things out and see what works. Conservatism tells us we don’t know the best way to run a society, so we should try new things out carefully before making sweeping changes. Liberalism and Conservatism are very much compatible with each other.

I hate terms like Moderate and Centrist and think they are ultimately harmful to the discourse. I’m not a “moderate” or “centrist” in the sense that I think the truth is somewhere in the middle between the political extremes. Some of my beliefs about how we should run the world are things that some people might consider fairly radical. However I believe strongly that reason is a terrible source of truth, that many of the ideas I’m most attached to will turn out to be wrong, and progress comes from trying stuff out.

I think it’s unfortunate that we don’t currently have a well-recognized label for someone who believes in being uncertain about their beliefs. Labels are important, and it’s hard to form a coalition without a banner to rally behind.