5 ms·
Well I don't want to suggest this is the whole answer, but game theory in economics and evolution tend to say that signalling has to be expensive in order to be
by lordnacho 6y ago
Well I don't want to suggest this is the whole answer, but game theory in economics and evolution tend to say that signalling has to be expensive in order to be honest.
So peacock's feathers and money-back guarantees are the type of thing that people often quote as signalling fitness.
The point of Glassdoor or any other review site it to make signalling cheap and reliable, so it's trying to square a circle.
Word-of-mouth still has the your-rep-on-the-line quality if the person is somewhat close to you, and the decision is something important. Your buddy will say bad things about you if you recommend a crappy employee to them. A random stranger might not hear from you again, and knows that when you tell them this person is the best thing since sliced bread.
In general, "How expensive is it for them to say this?" is a useful heuristic that you should pay attention to. It can give interesting results in several life situations:
- School counselling. Once you're out the door of your school, the career counsellor is not gonna hear much from you. They say they care, and it sounds like they do (genuinely, I had one who was like the school mom), but at the end of the day they both don't know anything about careers other than "teacher" and they aren't affected by you not being able to find a job with your degree of choice. It does affect them that you get into a top uni, everyone wants credit for the Ivy League kids.
- Every internet review but non-famous people. See the other comments.
- Salespeople can be divided into relationship and transactional. If they guy is on the phone with you every day, his advice needs to not be crap. This can make it pretty defensive and useless. OTOH if he vanished once the sale is done, that's useless another way.
- If someone says something that harms their own interests, that's honest. Of course be sure you understand their interest.
- Life advice. Often if there's a great psychological cost, there's a story worth listening to. Painful things like why someone got divorced, especially if they paint themselves in a negative light, can often be trusted, or are at least worthwhile to listen to. Coming of age stories where something crappy happened because the narrator did something stupid, similar. Lottery winning stories of various sorts are often not, you can tell when the inevitable "I fought the odds" part arrives that it falls flat.
- rocha 6y agoNassim Taleb wrote a whole book (Skin in the Game) under a similar premise: “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
- anonymousiam 6y agoSounds like an interesting book. I will check it out. I am wondering if in it, he addresses voting rights? Please don't mistake my retelling of history for bias when I say that before 150 years ago, voting in the United States was limited to white male property owners. The race and sex restrictions are not relevant to my point, but restricting voting to property owners was a prime example of ensuring "skin in the game".
- sdenton4 6y agoWell, those who live under a modern government have skin in the game in the sense of paying taxes and relying on infrastructure, services, and regulation that make day to day civilization a thing.
- anonymousiam 6y agoTrue, but property owners pay property tax, which is a big part of where city revenue comes from. Allowing renters to vote on how the money is spent creates the same issue described in the grandparent post.
- sellyme 6y agoMoney is fungible. Renters have skin in the game, because they paid tax (and because they live in the general society that those tax dollars are being used on). That they paid no property tax is not relevant, because it ceases to become "property tax" as soon as it's paid, and just enters a larger general pool. People may have differing levels of skin in the game, but it's no more sensible to say that property tax should only be spent on things property owners want than it is to say that property tax paid by people named Dave should only be spent on things that The Council of The Daves want it to be spent on.
- humanrebar 6y agoIt's relevant for the same reason that it's relevant who pays a hospital bill. The person actually making the payment will be sensitive in ways that a pure beneficiary will not be.
- zarkov99 6y agoThat was well put. Nasseem Talib wrote a whole book about skin in the game and how it is essential for believability.
- SirYandi 6y agoSome amazing advice I have to say.
- baron_harkonnen 6y agoBut I’m not sure it passes its own rules for advice worth listening to, which does create a bit of a paradox
- yawz 6y ago1) It's his personal opinion 2) He doesn't have anything to gain from it
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoThis is why I often append "reddit" to google searches. I find that opinions/help on Reddit is often far more useful because it's not motivated by personal gain.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThere's a distinction between experiential or reputational advice, and theoretical advice, even where both are empirically based, largely having to do with verification costs. For an experience, where direct validation is expensive, it's necessary to replicate the experience in order to achieve direct validation. An alternative is to collect multiple assessments --- to check references, or sample public opinions. Reading additional reviews on a given online site (Glassdoor, Amazon, Yelp, RottenTomatoes, etc.) is appealing for ease of access, but is subject to various problems, whether unreliable reviews, curation (negative or positive), rater kickbacks or extortion, etc. Essentially these are examples of the censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and monopoly dynamic I highlighted recently: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470) A preferred mode is to bypass any intermediary and directly sample those with relevant experience. Where such experiences are thin, this is difficult. For broader experiences, forms of statistical sampling are powerfully useful, and, contrary to widespread popular opinion given random sampling "large number" estimates can be achieved with sample sizes of as low as 30, and reliable small-sample estimates well below this. Sample bias matters far more than sample size. For advice on theory, validation can be performed through experiment or by checking with trusted authorities. Note that 'trusted authorities" != "appeal to authority". That is, trust is based on both expertise and reliability, rather than position or office. That's easiest when specific references are given,[1] but even here, @lordnacho has provided both keywords and reasonably cogent arguments supporting their views. Their comment is a great example of why the vetting problem is so hard and enduring, though.[2] ________________________________ Notes: 1. There are reasons I frequently cite or footnote my own contributions on numerous sites. 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetting
- cranium 6y agoIt's too bad that giving critical feedback in your own name (to show skin in the game) is going to burn you in other jobs. Few want an employee that can bite the feeding hand. Interestingly, I tend to trust more some anonymous answer on Quora because the person won't get any upvotes to display on their profile so (hopefully) their only incentive was sharing their story.