In the spirit of Morendil’s question: what other professions should be shunning useful but low-status tools (particularly checklists) for the same reason as doctors, according to the status model? I don’t know enough about (a) lawyers, (b) politicians, (c) businesspeople, (d) salespeople, or (e) other high status professions to judge either what your model would predict or what they do.
It’s worth noting that engineering is (moderately-)high-status but involves risk of personal cost in case of error, making the fact that it shows widespread adherence to restrictive professional standards explicable under the status theory.
Now that’s an interesting question! Off the top of my head, some occupations where I’d expect that status considerations interfere with the adoption of effective procedures would be:
Judges—ultra-high status, near-zero discipline for incompetence.
Teaching, at all levels—unrealistically high status (assuming you subscribe to the cynical theories about education being mostly a wasteful signaling effort), fairly weak control for competence, lacking even clear benchmarks of success.
Research in dubious areas—similarly, high status coupled with weak incentives for producing sound work instead of junk science.
For example, there are research areas where statistical methods are used to reach “scientific” conclusions by researchers with august academic titles who are however completely stumped by the finer points of statistical inference. In some such areas, hiring a math B.A. to perform a list of routine checks for gross errors in statistics and logic would probably prevent the publication of more junk science than their entire peer review system. Yet I think status considerations would probably conspire against such a solution in many instances.
I disagree somewhat that judges face near-zero discipline for incompetence. Except for judges on the highest court in a jurisdiction, most judges frequently face the prospect that the opinions they author may be reversed. It is true that frequent reversals will almost never lead to the sanction of the judge losing his or her job (due to lifetime appointments or ineffectiveness of elections at removing incumbent judges except for the most serious and publicized faults). But the resulting hit to status for frequent reversals can be quite serious; and because judges are so high status, as you note, they tend to be very concerned with maintaining that status. The handful of judges I’ve known personally have been quite concerned with their reversal rate and they particularly don’t want to be reversed in a way that is embarrassing to them because it suggests laziness, incompetence, poor reasoning, cutting corners, or the like. (On the other hand, reversal for disagreements that can be characterized as “political” is probably not seen as quite so status-lowering.) At any rate, the law does provide checklist-like procedures or guidelines in many instances, and most judges do follow them, at least in part because failure to do so could lead to reversal.
Expanding on your example of judges- this fits in with general problems for people in the legal professions. For example, there have now been for many years pretty decent understanding about problems with the standard line-up system for criminal suspects. There are also easy fixes for those problems. Yet very few places have implemented them. Similarly, there have been serious problems with police and judges acting against people who try to videotape their interactions with police. Discussing this in too much detail may however run into the standard mind-killing subject.
In the spirit of Morendil’s question: what other professions should be shunning useful but low-status tools (particularly checklists) for the same reason as doctors, according to the status model? I don’t know enough about (a) lawyers, (b) politicians, (c) businesspeople, (d) salespeople, or (e) other high status professions to judge either what your model would predict or what they do.
It’s worth noting that engineering is (moderately-)high-status but involves risk of personal cost in case of error, making the fact that it shows widespread adherence to restrictive professional standards explicable under the status theory.
Now that’s an interesting question! Off the top of my head, some occupations where I’d expect that status considerations interfere with the adoption of effective procedures would be:
Judges—ultra-high status, near-zero discipline for incompetence.
Teaching, at all levels—unrealistically high status (assuming you subscribe to the cynical theories about education being mostly a wasteful signaling effort), fairly weak control for competence, lacking even clear benchmarks of success.
Research in dubious areas—similarly, high status coupled with weak incentives for producing sound work instead of junk science.
For example, there are research areas where statistical methods are used to reach “scientific” conclusions by researchers with august academic titles who are however completely stumped by the finer points of statistical inference. In some such areas, hiring a math B.A. to perform a list of routine checks for gross errors in statistics and logic would probably prevent the publication of more junk science than their entire peer review system. Yet I think status considerations would probably conspire against such a solution in many instances.
I disagree somewhat that judges face near-zero discipline for incompetence. Except for judges on the highest court in a jurisdiction, most judges frequently face the prospect that the opinions they author may be reversed. It is true that frequent reversals will almost never lead to the sanction of the judge losing his or her job (due to lifetime appointments or ineffectiveness of elections at removing incumbent judges except for the most serious and publicized faults). But the resulting hit to status for frequent reversals can be quite serious; and because judges are so high status, as you note, they tend to be very concerned with maintaining that status. The handful of judges I’ve known personally have been quite concerned with their reversal rate and they particularly don’t want to be reversed in a way that is embarrassing to them because it suggests laziness, incompetence, poor reasoning, cutting corners, or the like. (On the other hand, reversal for disagreements that can be characterized as “political” is probably not seen as quite so status-lowering.) At any rate, the law does provide checklist-like procedures or guidelines in many instances, and most judges do follow them, at least in part because failure to do so could lead to reversal.
Expanding on your example of judges- this fits in with general problems for people in the legal professions. For example, there have now been for many years pretty decent understanding about problems with the standard line-up system for criminal suspects. There are also easy fixes for those problems. Yet very few places have implemented them. Similarly, there have been serious problems with police and judges acting against people who try to videotape their interactions with police. Discussing this in too much detail may however run into the standard mind-killing subject.