9 ms·

Prestige in US Today

118 points by cinquemb 6y ago

JacKTrocinskI 6y ago
I think the biggest tragedy of prestige is that many of us use it to automatically assign certain attributes to a person, e.g. if someone is rich then they must be smart or if they have a university degree then they must be intelligent and someone that attends an Ivy league is going to be thought of as more intelligent than someone who attends any other university. I think prestige has began to overshadow too many other important traits people poses like moral values, personal history and accomplishments. It’s a shame it’s the way we seem to gage people now.
- xapata 6y ago
  "When you're rich, they think you really know." -- Fiddler on the Roof People have a hard time understanding randomness, so of course they can't distinguish luck from skill. If you ask the average person to put dots on a page randomly, they'll generally create some kind of pattern in order to cover the page thoroughly. If you show someone a random distribution of dots, they'll be convinced there's a pattern. Faces in clouds. I used to play poker semi-professionally. I wondered why the same people came, day after day, to give me money. Sure, sometimes they'd win. It's the randomness of it that confused them. They'd see skill where there was luck, and luck where there was skill.
- lodi 6y ago
  I think the problem is a lack of nuance. I think our conscious reasoning tends towards black-and-white predicate logic, but subconsciously, our feelings really do understand the fuzzier Bayesian probability underlying reality. Thinking that a university degree is 100% certified, stamped proof that someone is intelligent is naive (or perhaps an overly narrow definition of what 'intelligence' is). But so is denying that, all else being equal, a person with a degree is more likely to be more intelligent than someone without until shown otherwise. I don't know by what odds, or by how much, but you must either believe this, or believe that university has no screening or educating effect whatsoever. Likewise, there are plenty of rich people that inherited wealth, stole wealth, and so on. But for all the others, you either have to conclude that being richer is, at least weakly, correlated with being smarter, or accept that being smarter has no effect on your earning potential. And since earnings are already correlated with value provided to society, you'd have to then conclude that being smart has no value...
  - zrkrlc 6y ago
    Oh wow, I have never seen this sentiment expressed outside weird rationalist circles. This is exactly how things are in my view, plus or minus some systematic biases whose negatives only become huge in great numbers.
itronitron 6y ago
Everyone loves a good story, however not everyone has the patience for them at work. Since management consulting often involves making up and telling stories it makes sense that they would select for that in candidates.
- yhoiseth 6y ago
  Maybe this goes for law firms and investment banks as well — at least to some degree?
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Underrated comment of the week. Story forming is (a) extremely poignant in elite management, management-investor relations and corporate-cultural settings. (b) Business schools actively teach this, and it is a major part of the curriculum. Case studies by The Harvard Business Review, are basically this.
lacker 6y ago
For example, employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations. I don't think this is true, at least in the tech industry. Based on my time involved in recruiting at Google and Facebook, the elite tech employers are quite happy to hire candidates who have an unusual resume, as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place. For example, someone who worked at a low-status job for four years out of college, then worked at a hot startup for one year. Or someone with no college degree who spent time working in "low-status" tech roles but has one popular GitHub project. You have to go through the standard "tech interview" grinder, but it's very possible to succeed at that without having a high-status resume. Indeed, the great benefit of having such an onerous interview process is that it provides an opportunity for people with unimpressive resumes to stand out as an impressive candidate.
- JacKTrocinskI 6y ago
  I’m sure Harvard and Yale say the same thing when accepting applicants to their university. I think the thing to consider is how prestige gives an applicant a considerable amount of more sway in an interview process. Also, I worked with a person that moved on to working at Google after working in our project and that individual was considered to be a very poor programmer unfortunately.
- watwut 6y ago
  > as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place This could be characterized as "little patience".
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Are Google and Facebook prestigious employers? Separately, do software developers routinely interact with customers in the same way that entry level consulting firm employees do?
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I don't know what the definition of "prestigious" is, but Google and Facebook employees earn more money (gross and per hour) and have a better quality of life (at home and at work) than consulting firm employees.
EvilEy3 6y ago
So what's the point of the article? "Prestige=bad"?
- yhoiseth 6y ago
  > So a crucial question is: to what extent is it possible to move our prestige equilibrium to a different and more useful one? Where say it might be prestigious to actually do something useful for the world. Seems a worthy topic of study.
  - soniman 6y ago
    That's what money is for. You want to do something useful? Somebody will pay you. It's like he's saying "We need a system that allocates prestige to people who do useful things" and we literally have that, it's called a market.
    - yhoiseth 6y ago
      The idea here is that the market values things that are not so useful. Maybe there is some way to make the market value useful things more?
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  That people eat is a human nature, but what people eat is quite cultural. Just as it is desirable to steer the food culture to healthier diet, it seems desirable to steer the prestige culture to more useful marks of prestige, since just like food, what people find prestigious seems cultural. (e.g. teaching is prestigious in East Asia, and it may be better if other cultures also find teaching prestigious.)
- hyko 6y ago
  Prestige = low quality signal. That’s why it’s called prestige and not excellence. In theory, this provides a “moneyball” style opportunity for arbitrage, but in reality you probably won’t be able to profit from it because elitism creates a very robust moat protecting the incumbents.
sgt101 6y ago
"It seems that while these firms do sell concrete consulting services to their customers, what they are mostly selling is a prestigious aura around that advice." It's actually the network: CEO A is in trouble, investor B says "you need help, get help or we will get you out". A asks B "who can help", B says "Firm C know how to help you - know the managing partner there and he fixes stuff like this all the time". This is code for "give C work or you will get sacked." B will receive information and assistance from C, possibly a job himself in the future. A will receive 12 - 36 more months of employment as CEO while she/he implements the change program proposed by C. A will get $4m -> $45m of pay for this. The change program will have a random impact, because there is no evidence that any of them are efficacious or applicable in any context - so they are randomly applied and even if they can help sometimes they don't mostly. But, if you are smart you go along with this and don't argue because you absolutely will be forced out if you do. A, B and C all have more power than you, and they all have incentives in the millions of $ to do this.
- arethuza 6y ago
  "The change program will have a random impact" The book Rip-Off: The Scandalous Inside Story of the Management Consulting Money Machine by David Craig mentions one firm of management consultants (called The Butchers - he doesn't give names of consultancies for obvious reasons) who apparently only ever make one recommendation: lay off a quarter of your staff. Regardless of what the problems of the client are or even if they have any problems. This makes the job of the management consultants easier - they know what the answer is, they just need to gather some plausible sounding data to support it (or make it up). The amazing thing is that this, from the viewpoint of an executive, will actually work for a few years - numbers will look great and the company will survive long enough for the executives to move on based on their track record of being "turn around" experts at their last company.
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    That's bold, a usual recommendation is 10%.
    - 6y ago
ackbar03 6y ago
I think there's actually another side to prestige and wealthy up-bringing. You sort of inherently act differently if you were bought up rich. Its hard to describe exactly but you tend to be more (blindly) self-confident and just behave a bit differently compared if you were brought up in a lower class family. Having worked in banking I've seen this myself (although anecdotal experience always tends to be biased in itself). Some of the more brilliant entry recruits/interns but from low income families just tend to have trouble fitting in and sometimes end up not getting a return offer. It's unfair and kind of sucks but I don't really see a solution for it either.
- cyberdrunk 6y ago
  Successful people are very often full of shit - since perception is hugely important in any human endeavor, the people who have attained success must have mastered bullshitting (incl. faking confidence) along the way. Then, like any other life skill, they pass it onto their children. I see this mechanism in my father and in myself.
  - dsign 6y ago
    You pegged it mate! I always knew I was full of shit, and often received gentle and not so gentle reminders about it. But I didn't realize how much more full of shit was my father until a few years ago. It's a hard life.
    - NotAnAccountNO 6y ago
      Well you have to be full of the exact right kind of BS, with lightly understated confidence, and mostly certainty about what your social-peers proper place in society is.
  - cmollis 6y ago
    true.. it irks me to no end to watch self-confident idiots spout endless bullshit that amount to zero value to the company (which usually means actually getting an objective accomplished). It's not actually 'what' they're saying that seems intriguing to people, but more about 'how' they're saying it, typically bordering on arrogance. To many lower-level employees, perhaps suffering from their own imposter syndrome, generally assume that there must be something to it, even if what they hear is objectively wrong or lacking any material substance. These people seem to have learned that they can act and speak in a particular way, they can attain positions of authority, without having to actually do anything. They're immediately put into command positions with staff to execute their useless (and usually selfish) agenda. This is usually confirmed by those in positions higher than them, who have attained those positions in largely the same way. Management consulting is probably the most egregious case I've seen first-hand. You know, where a bunch of 22-year olds from 'good schools' in nice suits come into your company and dictate 'strategy' at $3-4K US per day. Most of these people didn't have a clue, and readily admitted it. Yet there they were..wasting tons of money. I couldn't understand it until I realized that their very presence there was simply a function of the broad confirmation bias that existed at the highest levels of the company.
dalbasal 6y ago
Much of the ilegible logic behind institutional machinery is cultural. Whether you characterize it as prestige, pedigry or whatever... it's probably a gross oversimplification of what's going on. A corporation is a cultural institution as well as an economic institution, and the cultural side is strong when it comes to these kinds of firms. A lot of the work (or "work") that these consultancies do relates to board/investors and management's cultural machinery. Being "external, for example, is a defining characteristic. Their reports and suggestions allow management to do stuff that they're having cultural difficulties doing. In any case, I'd posit two points. Point one is that class plays a major role in these firms, from recruitment to the culture of the firm to the value of the services they provide. This is not surprising considering that their job revolves around confidence from elite individuals. Point two is that humans still respond to class. We all know it, but have a hard time with the moral implications. We excuse. We deny. We point and scream. We create grande theories, new terms and types.
- bluetomcat 6y ago
  Class-based social structures are deeply rooted in the Anglo-Saxon culture. In early modern times (1500-1700), it was a rigid system where each class was defined by a typical occupation and a level of political influence. Social stratification exists in all cultures, but the notion that class defines your occupation, social circles, cultural manners is a very "Anglophile" thing.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    As an irishman, I am deeply offended :) The British class system is undoubtedly rooted in English history, and I'm sure there are plenty of deeper roots too. That class system was/is obviously deeply impactful here. That's why nationalism, republicanism are so intertwined with anti-classism in our modern politics. But in some sense, roots are arbitrary . The cultural memes and tendencies it manifests aren't the important part. Cultures, power structures and everything else aren't uniquely english, I'm loathe to admit ;) Occupation, social circles & cultural memes are pretty central to class equivalent parts of modern culture. FWIW, the early modern period isn't generally considered anglo-saxon, at least politically or linguistically. It does does have an ethnonym connotation in all post anglos saxon periods, including the present.
samdung 6y ago
" ... they want recruits to be attractive, energetic, articulate, socially smooth, and have had elite personal connections, jobs, and extracurriculars ..." Who would not?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  i think they mean "as opposed to their other attributes"

118 points by cinquemb 6y ago

I think the biggest tragedy of prestige is that many of us use it to automatically assign certain attributes to a person, e.g. if someone is rich then they must be smart or if they have a university degree then they must be intelligent and someone that attends an Ivy league is going to be thought of as more intelligent than someone who attends any other university. I think prestige has began to overshadow too many other important traits people poses like moral values, personal history and accomplishments. It’s a shame it’s the way we seem to gage people now.

xapata 6y ago
"When you're rich, they think you really know." -- Fiddler on the Roof People have a hard time understanding randomness, so of course they can't distinguish luck from skill. If you ask the average person to put dots on a page randomly, they'll generally create some kind of pattern in order to cover the page thoroughly. If you show someone a random distribution of dots, they'll be convinced there's a pattern. Faces in clouds. I used to play poker semi-professionally. I wondered why the same people came, day after day, to give me money. Sure, sometimes they'd win. It's the randomness of it that confused them. They'd see skill where there was luck, and luck where there was skill.
lodi 6y ago
I think the problem is a lack of nuance. I think our conscious reasoning tends towards black-and-white predicate logic, but subconsciously, our feelings really do understand the fuzzier Bayesian probability underlying reality. Thinking that a university degree is 100% certified, stamped proof that someone is intelligent is naive (or perhaps an overly narrow definition of what 'intelligence' is). But so is denying that, all else being equal, a person with a degree is more likely to be more intelligent than someone without until shown otherwise. I don't know by what odds, or by how much, but you must either believe this, or believe that university has no screening or educating effect whatsoever. Likewise, there are plenty of rich people that inherited wealth, stole wealth, and so on. But for all the others, you either have to conclude that being richer is, at least weakly, correlated with being smarter, or accept that being smarter has no effect on your earning potential. And since earnings are already correlated with value provided to society, you'd have to then conclude that being smart has no value...
- zrkrlc 6y ago
  Oh wow, I have never seen this sentiment expressed outside weird rationalist circles. This is exactly how things are in my view, plus or minus some systematic biases whose negatives only become huge in great numbers.

itronitron 6y ago

Everyone loves a good story, however not everyone has the patience for them at work. Since management consulting often involves making up and telling stories it makes sense that they would select for that in candidates.

yhoiseth 6y ago
Maybe this goes for law firms and investment banks as well — at least to some degree?
dalbasal 6y ago
Underrated comment of the week. Story forming is (a) extremely poignant in elite management, management-investor relations and corporate-cultural settings. (b) Business schools actively teach this, and it is a major part of the curriculum. Case studies by The Harvard Business Review, are basically this.

lacker 6y ago

For example, employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations. I don't think this is true, at least in the tech industry. Based on my time involved in recruiting at Google and Facebook, the elite tech employers are quite happy to hire candidates who have an unusual resume, as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place. For example, someone who worked at a low-status job for four years out of college, then worked at a hot startup for one year. Or someone with no college degree who spent time working in "low-status" tech roles but has one popular GitHub project. You have to go through the standard "tech interview" grinder, but it's very possible to succeed at that without having a high-status resume. Indeed, the great benefit of having such an onerous interview process is that it provides an opportunity for people with unimpressive resumes to stand out as an impressive candidate.

JacKTrocinskI 6y ago
I’m sure Harvard and Yale say the same thing when accepting applicants to their university. I think the thing to consider is how prestige gives an applicant a considerable amount of more sway in an interview process. Also, I worked with a person that moved on to working at Google after working in our project and that individual was considered to be a very poor programmer unfortunately.
watwut 6y ago
> as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place This could be characterized as "little patience".
sbierwagen 6y ago
Are Google and Facebook prestigious employers? Separately, do software developers routinely interact with customers in the same way that entry level consulting firm employees do?
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I don't know what the definition of "prestigious" is, but Google and Facebook employees earn more money (gross and per hour) and have a better quality of life (at home and at work) than consulting firm employees.

EvilEy3 6y ago

So what's the point of the article? "Prestige=bad"?

yhoiseth 6y ago
> So a crucial question is: to what extent is it possible to move our prestige equilibrium to a different and more useful one? Where say it might be prestigious to actually do something useful for the world. Seems a worthy topic of study.
- soniman 6y ago
  That's what money is for. You want to do something useful? Somebody will pay you. It's like he's saying "We need a system that allocates prestige to people who do useful things" and we literally have that, it's called a market.
  - yhoiseth 6y ago
    The idea here is that the market values things that are not so useful. Maybe there is some way to make the market value useful things more?
sanxiyn 6y ago
That people eat is a human nature, but what people eat is quite cultural. Just as it is desirable to steer the food culture to healthier diet, it seems desirable to steer the prestige culture to more useful marks of prestige, since just like food, what people find prestigious seems cultural. (e.g. teaching is prestigious in East Asia, and it may be better if other cultures also find teaching prestigious.)
hyko 6y ago
Prestige = low quality signal. That’s why it’s called prestige and not excellence. In theory, this provides a “moneyball” style opportunity for arbitrage, but in reality you probably won’t be able to profit from it because elitism creates a very robust moat protecting the incumbents.

sgt101 6y ago

"It seems that while these firms do sell concrete consulting services to their customers, what they are mostly selling is a prestigious aura around that advice." It's actually the network: CEO A is in trouble, investor B says "you need help, get help or we will get you out". A asks B "who can help", B says "Firm C know how to help you - know the managing partner there and he fixes stuff like this all the time". This is code for "give C work or you will get sacked." B will receive information and assistance from C, possibly a job himself in the future. A will receive 12 - 36 more months of employment as CEO while she/he implements the change program proposed by C. A will get $4m -> $45m of pay for this. The change program will have a random impact, because there is no evidence that any of them are efficacious or applicable in any context - so they are randomly applied and even if they can help sometimes they don't mostly. But, if you are smart you go along with this and don't argue because you absolutely will be forced out if you do. A, B and C all have more power than you, and they all have incentives in the millions of $ to do this.

arethuza 6y ago
"The change program will have a random impact" The book Rip-Off: The Scandalous Inside Story of the Management Consulting Money Machine by David Craig mentions one firm of management consultants (called The Butchers - he doesn't give names of consultancies for obvious reasons) who apparently only ever make one recommendation: lay off a quarter of your staff. Regardless of what the problems of the client are or even if they have any problems. This makes the job of the management consultants easier - they know what the answer is, they just need to gather some plausible sounding data to support it (or make it up). The amazing thing is that this, from the viewpoint of an executive, will actually work for a few years - numbers will look great and the company will survive long enough for the executives to move on based on their track record of being "turn around" experts at their last company.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  That's bold, a usual recommendation is 10%.
  - 6y ago

ackbar03 6y ago

I think there's actually another side to prestige and wealthy up-bringing. You sort of inherently act differently if you were bought up rich. Its hard to describe exactly but you tend to be more (blindly) self-confident and just behave a bit differently compared if you were brought up in a lower class family. Having worked in banking I've seen this myself (although anecdotal experience always tends to be biased in itself). Some of the more brilliant entry recruits/interns but from low income families just tend to have trouble fitting in and sometimes end up not getting a return offer. It's unfair and kind of sucks but I don't really see a solution for it either.

cyberdrunk 6y ago
Successful people are very often full of shit - since perception is hugely important in any human endeavor, the people who have attained success must have mastered bullshitting (incl. faking confidence) along the way. Then, like any other life skill, they pass it onto their children. I see this mechanism in my father and in myself.
- dsign 6y ago
  You pegged it mate! I always knew I was full of shit, and often received gentle and not so gentle reminders about it. But I didn't realize how much more full of shit was my father until a few years ago. It's a hard life.
  - NotAnAccountNO 6y ago
    Well you have to be full of the exact right kind of BS, with lightly understated confidence, and mostly certainty about what your social-peers proper place in society is.
- cmollis 6y ago
  true.. it irks me to no end to watch self-confident idiots spout endless bullshit that amount to zero value to the company (which usually means actually getting an objective accomplished). It's not actually 'what' they're saying that seems intriguing to people, but more about 'how' they're saying it, typically bordering on arrogance. To many lower-level employees, perhaps suffering from their own imposter syndrome, generally assume that there must be something to it, even if what they hear is objectively wrong or lacking any material substance. These people seem to have learned that they can act and speak in a particular way, they can attain positions of authority, without having to actually do anything. They're immediately put into command positions with staff to execute their useless (and usually selfish) agenda. This is usually confirmed by those in positions higher than them, who have attained those positions in largely the same way. Management consulting is probably the most egregious case I've seen first-hand. You know, where a bunch of 22-year olds from 'good schools' in nice suits come into your company and dictate 'strategy' at $3-4K US per day. Most of these people didn't have a clue, and readily admitted it. Yet there they were..wasting tons of money. I couldn't understand it until I realized that their very presence there was simply a function of the broad confirmation bias that existed at the highest levels of the company.

dalbasal 6y ago

Much of the ilegible logic behind institutional machinery is cultural. Whether you characterize it as prestige, pedigry or whatever... it's probably a gross oversimplification of what's going on. A corporation is a cultural institution as well as an economic institution, and the cultural side is strong when it comes to these kinds of firms. A lot of the work (or "work") that these consultancies do relates to board/investors and management's cultural machinery. Being "external, for example, is a defining characteristic. Their reports and suggestions allow management to do stuff that they're having cultural difficulties doing. In any case, I'd posit two points. Point one is that class plays a major role in these firms, from recruitment to the culture of the firm to the value of the services they provide. This is not surprising considering that their job revolves around confidence from elite individuals. Point two is that humans still respond to class. We all know it, but have a hard time with the moral implications. We excuse. We deny. We point and scream. We create grande theories, new terms and types.

bluetomcat 6y ago
Class-based social structures are deeply rooted in the Anglo-Saxon culture. In early modern times (1500-1700), it was a rigid system where each class was defined by a typical occupation and a level of political influence. Social stratification exists in all cultures, but the notion that class defines your occupation, social circles, cultural manners is a very "Anglophile" thing.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  As an irishman, I am deeply offended :) The British class system is undoubtedly rooted in English history, and I'm sure there are plenty of deeper roots too. That class system was/is obviously deeply impactful here. That's why nationalism, republicanism are so intertwined with anti-classism in our modern politics. But in some sense, roots are arbitrary . The cultural memes and tendencies it manifests aren't the important part. Cultures, power structures and everything else aren't uniquely english, I'm loathe to admit ;) Occupation, social circles & cultural memes are pretty central to class equivalent parts of modern culture. FWIW, the early modern period isn't generally considered anglo-saxon, at least politically or linguistically. It does does have an ethnonym connotation in all post anglos saxon periods, including the present.

samdung 6y ago

" ... they want recruits to be attractive, energetic, articulate, socially smooth, and have had elite personal connections, jobs, and extracurriculars ..." Who would not?

cblconfederate 6y ago
i think they mean "as opposed to their other attributes"