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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

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.

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.