Short Crabs
Short Crabs
Pt 2 of my article on conformity vs. individualism
Last time, we talked about the structures and systems that lock-in anti-individualism early on. Today, I want to talk about the inherent reasons why we exhibit conforming behavior in the first place.
Idiosyncrasy credit
Idiosyncratic credit is the “conformity bank”. We give individuals leeway to act outside of our cultural norms based on how much they have previously conformed. That all works well when there’s established community and individuals can recognize one another. As we saw last time, hazing is a clear example of idiosyncratic credit. Be hazed now, get special privilege later.
Modern society, however, isn’t organized into small pods of individuals that know each other, it’s largely anonymous. Groups are forced to evaluate upstarts in the absence of context. Admissions and hiring processes are best effort attempts to systematize the sizing up of new individuals, ostensibly on merit. What about organizations and groups that don’t have to maintain the outward face of impartiality because their members are anonymous? They don’t get to play the idiosyncrasy credit game.
Anonymity and Fuzzy Boundaries
Thought experiment: I’m a user in /r/philosophy. I have a limited amount of time, and prefer generally to consume content that I consider high quality. However, I, personally, am a sneering hipster and refuse to engage with things that are popular. As a result, I only read and engage with the brand new content in /new. How do I tell what high quality content is without having to spend valuable time reading it?
There’s already quite a strict quality filter imposed on posts to /r/philosophy by the admins. They require all posts develop and defend a “substantive philosophical thesis.” As a result, posts you see on /new have largely already passed through an initial filter and been gut-checked by an Admin to say “this at least looks correct on the surface.” Once that filter is passed, it’s the wild west, and users decide. This is relevant because, as we saw in Part 1, subjectivity has more weight in each successive layer of filtering.
In reading /new, it quickly becomes apparent that the rallying cry of users on the board (and academics the world over) is “this isn’t philosophy” or “this isn’t philosophical”. Looking at these comments before reading, I might avoid the post out of hand on this judgement. Over time, I might start noticing a pattern in these judgements, say that articles that abuse the term “it follows that” or have poor grammar and spelling are more likely to be disqualified. I may then, when encountering an uncategorized piece of work, assume it is of low quality or un-belonging out of hand if I see spelling mistakes. Upon making and sharing one of these judgements, I may feel happy that I’m being a good member of my self-identified group by defending its boundaries from ne'er-do-wells.
Though the group itself is fuzzy, members are quick to label others as belonging to the out-group. This conveniently implies those casting judgement belong to the in-group. Disqualification behavior such as this isn’t new to the internet- you may even be familiar with a famous fallacy that comes from the same principal, “No true scotsman,” which conveniently happens to stem from fuzzy in-group out-group identity!
This is another interesting application of the “barrel of crabs” mentality. Since anonymous groups cannot punish nonconformity from the basis of identity, they must instead find other measures, such as disqualification.
Why in categorizing are we so quick to push things onto the other side of the fence, rather than accepting a nuanced approach of “well, maybe philosophy isn’t that well defined?” Judith Butler has a great essay on this very topic in Undoing Gender; entitled “Can the ‘Other’ Philosophy Speak?"
The reason the boundaries are defended so viciously is that they are both fuzzy and unguarded. In anonymous communities, no filtering mechanism sits as a wall dictating in-group and out-group membership. For that reason, anyone can claim that they are a member of the group. It is only through still poorly understood mechanisms of stereotype development that anonymous groups reach consensus on identity.
Let’s return to our thought experiment: does disqualifying work make our philosophy hipster happy because they are enforcing rigor, or because they are protecting the group? Do they see a difference?
Stereotyping Behavior as a Marker of Unobservable Qualities
The interaction that inspired me to to write this article was a comment on my first clumsy foray into online philosophy:
… the fact that the author puts emoticons in a so- called 'thesis', should be already quite telling in the amount of effort that apparently went into this.
This comment, for all its shortsightedness, contains a lot of interesting thought:
Why are emojis negatively associated with effort in this person’s mind?
For that matter, how are affectation and effort associated at all?
What is the importance of authorial effort to individuals reviewing content anonymously?
Though a dangerous assumption, I’m going to wager that this argument is one against merit. There’s an inherent assertion in it that effort makes things valuable and worth consuming, therefore low effort work isn’t worth consuming, or doesn’t have the merit of being considered for its other qualities (as we saw in Part 1, only after a minimum threshold of viability is met do filters begin to consider the subjective).
This commenter, however, has reversed their logic: they are using subjective early features to disqualify the content from every being entered into the merit contest. The Forward Filtering Mechanisms we discussed in Part 1 similarly used to use immediately apparent criteria in substitute for evaluation of merit. Eventually we thought the better of this as a society and they were forced by changing social attitudes to adopt the guise of impartiality.
This starts to get into the use of stereotypes as an easy way to categorize the world, reducing cognitive load as we perform tasks like sorting through mountains of anonymous applicants and content, attempting to determine merit. This user is broadcasting their personally held belief that emojis and effort are negatively correlated- this is an illusory correlation. There’s no research suggesting that a text having emojis indicates a lack of rigor. It is true, however, that you don’t see many rigorous texts that include emojis.
In biology, a spandrel is a trait that appears not because it was selected for, but because it is a follow-on effect of a trait that was selected for. The word itself borrowed from gothic architecture, where it refers to the empty space in between an arch and a frame that exists for no reason other than the shape of the arch.
Because of the ornate appearance of many spandrels in gothic architecture, one might think that arches were used to create the space in which to host such beautiful images. This would be putting the cart before the horse in the same way as our commenter and the unfairly stereotyping filters of days past.
We likely will never move on from stereotyping as a society as it’s too useful of a cognitive tool. I’m not going to get on roller coasters that have the appearance of being ill-maintained. The roller coaster itself might be extremely well serviced, but as an individual I’m not willing to take the risk that the same level of effort that went into keeping it clean went into keeping it serviced.
This is a way in which I’m using immediately visible traits, such as behavior, to shorthand decisions about merit. There is obviously need to think about ways to check what’s a spandrel/illusory correlations, and what outward traits may actually be predictive markers.
Next Time: Professionalism
These past two articles have been building up to a discussion I’ve been anticipating for a while: why does being serious mean being humorless?
As always, subscribe, tell all your friends, build a small shrine in my honor in your closet, maybe steal some of my hair for it. Until next time!