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This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to inva
by vinceguidry 8y ago
This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome.
These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube describe these political methods.
Randomness seems to have fallen out of favor ever since, I think it might have died with the Romans.
But imagine Harvard actually making public policy that they're just going to randomly select the the top applicants. They still won't be able to shape the demographics the way they want. Ensuring that they get to define the concept of a diverse student body is so important for them that they're fighting tooth and nail to preserve it.
I stated the last time this came up that this was an existential issue for Harvard and the whole concept of the Ivy League. But now I see it as a public policy and individual rights issue. Should Harvard have the right to shape their student body demographically? And if not, what does that make Harvard? What distinguishes the Ivy League from other universities? Obviously Harvard is of the opinion that this is a bet-the-company moment for them.
- majos 8y agoInterestingly enough, randomness may be poised to make a comeback in decision-making as more decisions get made by algorithms. Many proposed "fair" learning algorithms require randomness, and IIRC the American legal attitude to fairness-through-randomness is not well-specified.
- vinceguidry 8y agoMy intuitive grasp of the issue is that the game eventually resolves down to virtual randomness as candidacy features become indistinguishable. The military phrase at hand is 'damning with faint praise'. One word in one performance report can put you out to pasture. Literally everybody knows this so anything even the slightest bit off glares at you like a giant grinning rictus on a 40 foot movie screen. "who did he piss off to get 'excellent' instead of 'superlative'?" In an environment where literally everyone involved is so sensitive to noticeable features, transparency becomes opaqueness and all decisions are based on the whims of the oligarchy. When all the whims are satisfied, that's where the process becomes indistinguishable from random. There's no criteria left with which to make a decision, let's just pay lip service to merit while just picking names out of a hat to keep them all honest. Everywhere else where this dynamic manifests, selection processes are not even half as public as those of the top educational facilities in the world's most powerful country. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, after demographic shaping wishes are satisfied, Harvard's selection criteria for the remaining candidates can't be meaningfully distinguished from random.
- johngalt 8y agoYou are talking about a fairly elite team here. Tossing in a few average/random people via sortition would only be a humiliating waste of time. Could you imagine a few random people in an NFL game?
- vinceguidry 8y agoWell, they call up Minor League players to Major League games all the time, the farm system is a fascinating window into that kind of world if you should ever want to dive into it. But now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, the gap between inner circle will and the number of candidates has a better solution than mere randomness. Corruption. Decisions on who gets accepted get farmed out to subordinates and allies.
- denzil_correa 8y agoThe concept you refer to is called "Sortition" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- vinceguidry 8y agoThanks for that! I didn't even consider juries.