[SEQ RERUN] Competent Elites
Today’s post, Competent Elites was originally published on 27 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
People in higher levels of business, science, etc, often really are there because they’re significantly more competent than everyone else.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Level Above Mine, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Hmmm. EY extrapolates how wonderful the power elite are from his impressions of a group of the power elite self selected to come listen to him.
How many biases can we find in this sample?
EY’s bias for people who chose to spend time listening to him. EY’s bias toward people interested in the topic. The power elite interested in the topic. The power elite who make time for such events. Then there’s all the biases introduced from who actually chose to interact more with EY, and who EY chose to interact with.
I’m sure there are a lot more.
He also may be wholly mistaking signaling and charisma for internal reality. One of the things that helps you to rise to the top is projecting competence and happiness, whether or not you have them.
Now I’d expect to get real correlation between happiness and competence and becoming CEO. My estimate is that he is correct over all, more correct for his particular audience, but likely over estimating the effect for both.
I think that the characteristic “Appears formidable” provides a very great benefit to entering the realm of the elite.
One person (from the middle east) made the comment to me that this is the difference between America and some other places that she had experience with: in America, competence is needed in order to rise to the top. In some other places, this is less clear: people will often be able to get good positions based on family connections and similar things.
This idea surprised me at the time, for similar reasons to those mentioned in the article. We (at least, those who consider themselves ‘intellectual’) aren’t primed by society to say “the system works”… rather, we are trained to find problems with it.
I think this is somewhat true, as corruption and lack of transparency, in my opinion would ensure that instead of competency , connections and different social skills such as deception would play a more important role.
One point where I’ll agree with him are the power elites in quantum physics.
It was always a joy to read Jaynes. All the talk about Everett got me reading his dissertation. What a joy. I moved onto reading Bell. Again, just a fantastic mind who made sense, and could express that sense.