Fitness Friday
Hi there! If you’re new to the newsletter, today is Fitness Friday. On Fridays around these parts we like to talk about adaptation, evolution, and fitness. Not the sexy, abs kind of fitness- the biological, “frequency of gene transfer” kind of fitness. Though I guess you could consider the latter sexy too, considering it’s all about ~RePrOdUcTiOn~. Today, we’re going to be tying together my previous articles on the cultural microbiome, meritocratic determinants, and the Eye of Jabaari.
Meritocracy is non-recursive
Today, I propose a mechanism for the cultural hierarchical selection I discussed in The Cultural Microbiome: non-recursive determinants of success. What do I mean by non-recursive here? Well, recursivity is the process by which a process can be re-applied to its own results. In the frictionless, pure meritocracy we as a society would like to believe we’ve established, we should be able to take the successful candidates from a meritocratic filter and run them back through the exact same process in order to further refine the talent pool. You could, theoretically, keep doing this until you were left with a single über candidate.
Except that isn’t how it works in the real world. Predictive meritocratic filters are rarely re-applied. If you forced people to re-interview for they jobs they already have, it’s likely many established post-filter candidates would fail. There isn’t a lot of research out there, but I’d be willing to wager you could create some really excellent measures of calibration based on how reproducible your hiring results were when re-interviewing candidates. Since the goal of many meritocratic filters is to avoid false positives at the cost of high false-negative rates, you’d end up with a lot of randomness in who passed the re-application. A lot of this comes down to the fact that evaluative meritocratic processes are better barometers of performance than predictive ones, which as gatekeeping mechanisms are much more disqualification-happy.
There’s a problem here in that we act like these distributions recursive anyways. The filter serves to cleave the general population of applicants into “viable” and “nonviable”; in order to pass muster one must fall into the top 20% of a Pareto distribution, or the “good” 10% of Sturgeon’s law. However, after that 10-20% is through the breach, they form a new population. You can’t take the top 10-20% performers from that new population and assume that the reasons they are on top is because of a re-application of the same filtering principles that got them there in the first place. Let’s talk about The Meta.
Minimums and Metas
There’s an entirely separate set of skills that determine success among the top performers of a population. Once you reach a minimum skill level in the population, a completely orthogonal set of determinants for fitness begin to emerge.
Do politicians as a group fall into the top 10-20% of the population best suited to be representatives? Probably! Does this then mean that the top 10-20% of politicians, those holding central power, get there again as the best 10-20% of politicians at representing their constituency? Hell no! There’s an entirely different game to be played at the upper levels of any activity- in gaming we’d describe this as the formation of a “meta”- the set of strategies and counterstrategies that, assuming optimal play, form a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
In evaluative meritocracy like the Olympics, it’s easy to tell ourselves that the top 10-20% of the already-selected top 10-20% is in that position because of a re-application of the same selection process. This is an illusion created by the measurement of direct meritocratic determinants. Though the results of Usain Bolt’s performance occupy the same dimension as those of his competitors, they are merely a window into the advantages and preparatory strategies he uses to produce said results.
Earlier this week in my article about institutional blindness in meritocracy (“The Eye of Jabaari”) I brought up the concept of a minimum viability threshold. Now, that’s a lot of fancy words to illustrate a simple concept: single-instance meritocratic evaluation is only fit to place candidates into categories based on skill; it can establish who meets the minimum skill requirements for a role but not who the top candidate is. This assumes that we are evaluating for more than simply direct determinants; I’ve never encountered a job interview that tests solely for how fast you can run or type- there is always an element of subjectivity.
Said differently, there is a minimum skill threshold that must be met to find oneself in the top 10-20%. If one wants to be on top, they must cultivate talent to meet this skill minimum. However, if a member of the top 10-20% wants to step their game up and enter the top 1-2%, they face an entirely different MVT (minimum viability threshold).
Minimum viability is operative everywhere- it creates inflection points at each magnitude up the ladder of performance. In meritocracy, each inflection point of minimum 80-90% quality serves as a gate to separate admits from rejects. This creates a problem when the acceptance rate for a meritocratic filter sits below 10%- it means that the filter is effectively straddling an inflection point. The filter measures MVT for admits up to the first watermark of 90% ability, but because there is a need for selection above the waterline of 90%, the filter begins to incorporate skill-testing for the next MVT.
As a result, we have a lot of very confused sociomeritocratic processes running around. A candidate may pass a tech screen placing them in the top 80% of programmers, but fail because they don’t have the requisite EQ to make it into the top 95% of programmers who can also work in a team. The interview process is simultaneously trying to read signal for two separate MVTs which leaves candidates confused about what area they failed in. See also: high scoring academic achievers without the personality and social service requisite to get into an Ivy. What many meritocratic processes try to spin as depth or dimension are in reality just one fully measured MVT followed by one partially measured MVT.
This has relevance to more than just meritocracy and individuals: it has relevance to hierarchical culture selection.
Cultural Selection and Minimum Viability Thresholds
Now that we’ve covered MVTs and the inflection points they create, we can get back to the mechanism I got distracted from proposing at the beginning of the article. How do we determine the level at which a particular meme is culturally adapting? With MVTs, we can look at which level of a population is displaying which behaviors, beliefs, and communications.
Take Chess, for example. There are strategies that work extremely well against unseasoned players, such as the four-move checkmate below:
Amateurs regularly exposed to higher level play are never exposed to this strategy because higher level players were hardened against it long before they reached high-level play. Because this move has such a low MVT, it is quickly outperformed by more fit strategies.
Studying metas can give us a better idea of how and why certain behaviors that seem inherently valued or good are actually worthless, or vice versa. Religion is a good example of a societal strategy that is very looked-down on from the educated, western perspective. However, it’s difficult to name another organization that’s existed continuously as long as the Catholic Church, or texts circulated as widely as the Qur’an and Torah. Even among religions, we might note that the globe spanning ones skew monotheistic, and evaluate the fitness of monotheism as a meme in regards to longevity and spread of ideology.
Inflection points may indeed mark boundaries between different levels on the hierarchy of selection. It’s also possible that this could be a false association, since it’s easy to look at two things that display hierarchy and say they look the same, but I think there’s something here. Are the most popular academics the most studied, or do they meet an MVT for studiousness and then succeed on the basis of another quality, like political topicality? Do the masterpieces enshrined in our cultural canons truly outshine all other work produced, or are they works from already-known artists (MVT of popularity) that then meet an MVT for quality?
Conclusions
The determinants that place an individual into the top 10-20% of a population at a certain skill are different from the determinants that place them into the top 1-2%. Minimum viability thresholds, or MVTs dictate the inflection point at which a new set of determinant skills emerges to define the new top 10-20% for each successive population. 1 These inflection points are useful in reasoning about why those at the top of their fields find themselves there. They are a useful tool for describing the “metas” that emerge at higher levels of play in gaming, and for understanding the hierarchies of selection that EoSV attempts to capture and discuss.
If you enjoyed this article or want to talk more about the implications of cultural selection, please reach out! APXHARD and I have been having some really great conversations about the topic and there are rumblings about a synthesis of some sort, which is super exciting!
There’s interesting work to be done here regarding Berkson’s Paradox, but I’ll save that for another article.