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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Selecting vs. grooming - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a subset of selection-from-above which I did not qualify in the article but obviously a different category than selection by voters or customers i.e. "below".
A modern example of selection-from-above would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_academy where existing fellows vote on new ones and the funny part is that this is not supposed to work at all - they have no external control from customers, their main incentive is to not let too good folks in who would prove a too serious competition, so the whole thing is a lot like an entrenched, uncontrollable monopoly - and yet it works. I guess they must be really saints.
This is a confusing and difficult thing - there are problems with selection from above and below. When it happens above, one can select early and groom.
How so? I mean, imagine you're a member of the National Academy and you get to choose between A, who is a brilliant scientist, clearly better than you are, and B, who is frankly a third-rater and definitely worse than you are. What's the incentive to prefer B?
If you choose A then the NA looks that bit more impressive, which means that when someone reads that you're a member of the NA they're that bit more impressed by you. And you're more likely to find yourself getting photographed or interviewed or whatever on an equal footing with A than you were before, which is probably good for your reputation. And A's impressiveness may make it easier for the NA to get funding, which pays for nicer dinners and scientific outreach and other things you probably care about.
What's the downside? That someone's going to hear about you, call up a mental list of NA members, and think "oh, X isn't very good compared with other members of the National Academy" and think worse of you in consequence?
I suppose you're a bit less likely to be elected president of the body if the new member is A rather than B, but if you were ever in the running (which presumably means you're pretty damn impressive yourself) and A would make you look bad then presumably A is impossibly eminent and it would frankly make the NA look bad not to let A in.
Maybe I don't understand the incentive structure well enough. But it doesn't look to me as if the members need to be saints to keep selection working reasonably well.
Is it better to be a bigger fish in a small pond or to be a member of the most dignified pond? It probably depends on how exactly the above analogy breaks down.
Perhaps the better way to cut these different conclusions is whether competition is within-group or versus other groups.