This may be an obvious point, but low-conscientiousness people can freeride on the high-conscientiousness ones. Which is advantageous to the former.
And as to why some (but not all) are highly conscientious, maybe it’s down to the evolutionary psychology explanation for why some, but only some, people are obsessive checkers (an example of high conscientiousness): because in a prehistoric group, it’s beneficial for one or two people to be inclined to e.g. check there are no tigers around, but there’s little further value in everyone else doing so, and lots of lost value in other uses of their time.
Also, low conscientiousness (e.g. laziness) in males is seen as unattractive by females, but as long as there are females who are unattractive for other reasons, presumably the latter will pair up with the former anyway for lack of available alternatives. So the laziness reproduces.
There’s also a signaling explanation here. Low conscientiousness is only seen as unattractive when you’re not good enough to pull it off. It’s not cool to fail out of school because you were lazy, but it’s cool to ace everything despite barely studying. So you get three groups of people,
The Actually Amazing—They are just better than everyone else and effortlessly excel. Very rare.
The Oxonian—They pretend everything comes to them naturally, but they secretly stay up late working.
The Grifter—Instead of faking the effortlessness, they fake the success.
all of whom look similar from the outside.
Tangential, but as talented people self-select into roles and social groups that match their talents, they find that they have to work harder to maintain the same level of relative success they had earlier in their lives. As such, the Actually Amazing who find it too painful to lose their status usually grow into Oxonians or Grifters.
I like this analysis a lot. BTW there’s a word for the effect of Oxonian behaviour: sprezzatura—meaning apparently nonchalant, effortless ability obtained by extensive secret practice. This was considered desirable among 16th century Italian courtiers:
“The ideal courtier was supposed to be skilled in arms and in athletic events but be equally skilled in music and dancing. However, the courtier who had sprezzatura managed to make these difficult tasks look easy – and, more to the point, not appear calculating, a not-to-be-discounted asset in a milieu commonly informed by ambition, intrigue, etc.”
As long as we’re going off on tangents, does anyone know a name for the bias where Oxonians look like they’re doing things effortlessly?
I suspect the following is a common psychological failure mode, and I want a term to refer to it:
See someone doing something amazing and making it look easy
Try to do something similar (or imagine trying to)
Realize (or assume) that it’s hard and will take a lot of work
Conclude that because it’s easy for the other person and hard for you, you must be bad at it (when actually it’s hard for the other person too, but you just don’t see the work that they put into it)
Since you’ve concluded that it’s hard and you’re bad at it, you give up
On the topic of how to make yourself attractive to women if you a low-conscientiousness man who would like to be—watch the film Bigand read a bit about transactional analysis.** Big is all about how someone who is naturally in the free child ego state (because he’s a child) functions in an audit world, and the answer is surprising well (it’s fiction, there’s a high level of verisimilitude for it’s time). Most of the work-world, most of the time, is in critical parent (especially during the current culture war era) or adapted child, and very very rarely in the good states—adult or free child. Be like Josh in the beginning of the movie (not towards the end where he sells out and gets all critical parent and then is like “oh shit, I need to go back to free child because that was way better.”)
The five ego states in transactional analysis
** This is advice coming from a Xennial, and I get them impression there may be a generation gap here, so everything may be different now. But I have a hunch this would still work. You may also need some amount of openness to experience to make this happen (if you’re reading LessWrong, you probably have that). Also assuming I’m talking to another straight male, and apologies if I’m wrong there.
If I’m right about the generational gap, let drop some other avuncular advice here:
Low-conscientiousness doesn’t sentence you fail at school or other things, it just means you have to make a heroic effort at times to be disciplined when you need to be. Don’t fight it when you need to do it, just realize you need to do it now, but that you don’t need to do it all the time.
High-conscientiousness people will have an advantage in school, for sure, because it’s all about being busy doing what you’re told to do. At some point in life when people aren’t giving them specific directions, their high-conscientiousness will stop being a super power and low-conscientiousness people will have a chance to “catch up.” Until then you need to muddle through, graduate, then find a job where it behooves you to be creative.
This may be an obvious point, but low-conscientiousness people can freeride on the high-conscientiousness ones. Which is advantageous to the former.
And as to why some (but not all) are highly conscientious, maybe it’s down to the evolutionary psychology explanation for why some, but only some, people are obsessive checkers (an example of high conscientiousness): because in a prehistoric group, it’s beneficial for one or two people to be inclined to e.g. check there are no tigers around, but there’s little further value in everyone else doing so, and lots of lost value in other uses of their time.
Also, low conscientiousness (e.g. laziness) in males is seen as unattractive by females, but as long as there are females who are unattractive for other reasons, presumably the latter will pair up with the former anyway for lack of available alternatives. So the laziness reproduces.
There’s also a signaling explanation here. Low conscientiousness is only seen as unattractive when you’re not good enough to pull it off. It’s not cool to fail out of school because you were lazy, but it’s cool to ace everything despite barely studying. So you get three groups of people,
The Actually Amazing—They are just better than everyone else and effortlessly excel. Very rare.
The Oxonian—They pretend everything comes to them naturally, but they secretly stay up late working.
The Grifter—Instead of faking the effortlessness, they fake the success.
all of whom look similar from the outside.
Tangential, but as talented people self-select into roles and social groups that match their talents, they find that they have to work harder to maintain the same level of relative success they had earlier in their lives. As such, the Actually Amazing who find it too painful to lose their status usually grow into Oxonians or Grifters.
I like this analysis a lot. BTW there’s a word for the effect of Oxonian behaviour: sprezzatura—meaning apparently nonchalant, effortless ability obtained by extensive secret practice. This was considered desirable among 16th century Italian courtiers:
“The ideal courtier was supposed to be skilled in arms and in athletic events but be equally skilled in music and dancing. However, the courtier who had sprezzatura managed to make these difficult tasks look easy – and, more to the point, not appear calculating, a not-to-be-discounted asset in a milieu commonly informed by ambition, intrigue, etc.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura
In the 90s we called this frontin’. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fronting#English
As long as we’re going off on tangents, does anyone know a name for the bias where Oxonians look like they’re doing things effortlessly?
I suspect the following is a common psychological failure mode, and I want a term to refer to it:
See someone doing something amazing and making it look easy
Try to do something similar (or imagine trying to)
Realize (or assume) that it’s hard and will take a lot of work
Conclude that because it’s easy for the other person and hard for you, you must be bad at it (when actually it’s hard for the other person too, but you just don’t see the work that they put into it)
Since you’ve concluded that it’s hard and you’re bad at it, you give up
On the topic of how to make yourself attractive to women if you a low-conscientiousness man who would like to be—watch the film Big and read a bit about transactional analysis.** Big is all about how someone who is naturally in the free child ego state (because he’s a child) functions in an audit world, and the answer is surprising well (it’s fiction, there’s a high level of verisimilitude for it’s time). Most of the work-world, most of the time, is in critical parent (especially during the current culture war era) or adapted child, and very very rarely in the good states—adult or free child. Be like Josh in the beginning of the movie (not towards the end where he sells out and gets all critical parent and then is like “oh shit, I need to go back to free child because that was way better.”)
** This is advice coming from a Xennial, and I get them impression there may be a generation gap here, so everything may be different now. But I have a hunch this would still work. You may also need some amount of openness to experience to make this happen (if you’re reading LessWrong, you probably have that). Also assuming I’m talking to another straight male, and apologies if I’m wrong there.
If I’m right about the generational gap, let drop some other avuncular advice here:
Low-conscientiousness doesn’t sentence you fail at school or other things, it just means you have to make a heroic effort at times to be disciplined when you need to be. Don’t fight it when you need to do it, just realize you need to do it now, but that you don’t need to do it all the time.
High-conscientiousness people will have an advantage in school, for sure, because it’s all about being busy doing what you’re told to do. At some point in life when people aren’t giving them specific directions, their high-conscientiousness will stop being a super power and low-conscientiousness people will have a chance to “catch up.” Until then you need to muddle through, graduate, then find a job where it behooves you to be creative.
You say laziness, I say efficiently conserving energy.