Hello again. Last time, we talked a little about what fairness might look like in the context of a competitive game's ratings. From that we stated two conditions that raise red flags for unfairness:
1) Small skill advantages leading to excessively large rewards;
2) Large skill advantages leading to excessively small rewards.
We then talked about someone in the position of, say, Bill Gates, where the reward seems to be massively larger than the skill difference between him and his peers would justify. That isn't to pick on Bill Gates, whom I have nothing against, nor I am suggesting any remedies for this situation quite yet; I'm just observing the situation as it first appears to us.
Today I'll give a hypothetical, very simplified example of the second condition: large skill advantages leading to very small rewards. With any number of caveats about the assumptions we're making with the labels, here are our four friends for today:
First we have Lousy Larry. Larry makes bad decisions almost all the time. He doesn't work hard, he's not motivated at all to get an education, he has little impulse control. His best hope is to find a situation where he can get into a rhythm with a low-level job well enough to get by and maybe build a little momentum or security and not screw himself over too hard. He's almost entirely dependent on luck and outside help for this.
Next, meet Mediocre Mike. Unlike Larry, Mike isn't a bum, not at all. The quality of his decisions and habits is a mediocre mix of good and bad. Two steps forward, two steps back. He can do all right at a job that doesn't ask him to lean in too hard, but sustaining much upward momentum is unlikely at best.
Then we have Good Greg. Greg makes good decisions most of the time; he's maybe in the 75th percentile for that. He works pretty hard, he stayed in school and got good grades, he doesn't crawl into the bottom of a whiskey bottle very often. He would make a fine employee or manager in most companies; he could start a business and have a reasonable chance of success. He couldn't go from a cardboard box to CEO in five years, but he's doing things mostly right.
Finally, we have Heroic Hal. Hal is the inspirational figure that appears in Reader's Digest profiles and seventh-grade reading standardized test passages. He has tons of motivation, discipline, vision, and perseverance. He's a winner. There are very few Heroic Hals out there (though many more might claim to be, but we'll get to that some other time). Even he could find himself overmatched if the circumstances were bad enough, but it would take a whole lot.
***
How these guys will fare depends an awful lot on the surrounding conditions for upward mobility; no mystery there. Let's say they're dealing with a recently introduced condition that sharply reduces the likelihood of movin' on up - it could be an economic downturn, it could be a change in government policy, whatever you like.
Such a trend would be very difficult to identify in our culture early on, I would say. The most easily visible effect would be that fewer Lousy Larrys get the sort of breaks they depend on. Larry desperately needs someone to take a chance on him, or else he would have no opportunity to prove that maybe he's not so lousy after all. And in this environment, those who could do that for Larry are much less willing to take that sort of risk. But we won't see it - indeed, Larry has always been invisible to us. He has no power and no credibility, as far as we know. He'd probably fail no matter what anyone does for him. We can always say he did this to himself and thus not feel bad about turning him away.
As the effects of the condition advance, we'll start to see more and more Mediocre Mikes in trouble next. In better times, Mike has honest work and a stable base on which to build a life if he doesn't make some catastrophic mistake. But he's pretty easy to outcompete, and a condition where upward mobility is more difficult means that competition is much increased. Worse yet, his margin for error shrinks - Mike makes some bad decisions, and now those can cost him a lot more. But how bad do we feel for Mike? We don't quite feel comfortable calling him a bum, because he's not one. But he makes enough mistakes that we can still say, well, you could have done much more. You could have worked harder, you could have kept your nose cleaner, you could have coasted less than you did. "Mediocrity" is a dirty word in our world, and we never allow it as an excuse, even though most of us are mediocre far more often than we'd ever admit. And so we can still comfortably deny what's happening, if we're the sort that feels better when we do that.
The condition marches on; upward mobility gets harder and harder, and as we've chosen not to see it so far, having little or no empathy for whom it hurts, we've done nothing to arrest it. We need a canary in the coal mine, and Good Greg is it. Greg followed the rules. He worked hard, kept his wits about him and kept his nose clean. His only sin is not being a superstar. And now lots of Good Gregs are found in jobs and situations that used to be the province of Mediocre Mikes. (And Greg has student loan debt that Mike doesn't have…) Can we really blame Greg if he wonders what the point of playing by the rules was? Maybe he would have been Good Greg in any case, but by having Greg at a lower rung of the ladder, both he and we lose out on a large part of the contributions his work and education could have provided us. But we wish him well. Though even then some might still point to Heroic Hal and tell Greg, see, you should have been like that guy. A consistent 10-6 isn't good enough; you have to win the Super Bowl or you're a loser. That stupid, poisonous idea isn't most of us, though, and by the time Good Gregs start scuffling too much, we might start identifying the problem as a problem.
***
Back to the second of the original statements: we raise red flags when we see large differences in competence given too-small rewards. And that's what we have here. Good Greg's decisions are consistently better than Mediocre Mike's, and a world better than Lousy Larry's. But in a condition where upward mobility is too hard to come by, what we see is a blurring of the distinctions between Greg and Mike, and between Mike and Larry. This has been true in most places throughout human history, which should tell us that it is the natural progression of things: without countermeasures, we have always and will always end up with few winners and many losers, and if you're a loser in that scheme, it matters less and less whether you were pretty good but not good enough or whether you were awful. It all tastes the same after a long enough time.
This hypothetical also assumes that we're living in a meritocracy, that it is proper or ennobling to conceive of people's life outcomes as a competitive game, and that people's categories of ability are fixed, all of which are dubious claims at best - but maybe we'll get to that next time.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
Fairness, part 1
I've found myself thinking a lot about fairness lately. Most of us would agree that fairness, as we define it, is among our core values; we react viscerally to what we perceive as injustice - yes, in particular injustice done to ourselves or those we care about, but I'd like to think most of us are more broad-minded than that. Very few of us would not like to see a fairer world, and while we're here, we'd like to make the world a little fairer if we can. But there are so many definitions of "fairness", and of related ideas such as "justice", that we have a hard time coming to any sort of consensus about how to resolve complex situations fairly.
So what I'd like to do, if I find the time, is write a few entries examining fairness in different arenas and from different perspectives, to help me (and perhaps you the reader) frame some of the many questions related to the idea of fairness. We'll see what I get to; I have a lot going on these days, even as part of me feels it isn't enough. I'm sure you can relate.
I'll start in the world of games, since I know that world better than I know many others - in particular, games that are competitive and attempt to rank individual players, such as chess or Scrabble. What do we as players want from our competitive environment? We want it to reflect the relative abilities of the players, with as much fidelity as possible. That means we want small differences in ability to lead to small differences in winning percentage and rating and large differences in ability to lead to large differences in those things, roughly on a proportional scale. We want the best players to be identified as best over a sample of games large enough to feel right to us.
Chess uses what's called the Elo rating system, which assigns a numerical rating to players based on their winning percentage adjusted for the strength of their opposition. Scrabble also does this, though it sets the curve a bit differently, taking into account the variance in the quality of tile draws in the game. To illustrate, if Player A is rated 350 points higher than Player B in Scrabble, the rating formula expects player A to win about three out of four games. In chess, a 350-point difference means that the higher-rated player is expected to win about seven out of eight. Why is chess not eight out of eight, you may wonder; after all, there's no luck involved in chess. Shouldn't the superior player always win? Well, a 350-point difference in Player A's favor does not mean that Player A will always play better than Player B does. Abilities aren't static - they fluctuate. Player A might play like a 2200 player in one game, and more like a 1600 player in the next, particularly if the first game offers themes and positions that Player A is much better at solving than the second. Or maybe Player A didn't have enough caffeine or rest in game two, or has some sort of inferiority complex with certain opponents; humans are weird.
Is it inherently unfair that an inferior player might win a game? In Scrabble, you'd better get used to it. No one would deny that 350 points of rating represents a significant difference in skills. If you took a bunch of 2000-rated players - there are about 15 players in North America rated that high - and evaluated them on word knowledge, anagramming, board vision, strategic skill and ability to handle tournament pressure, every 2000 player would come out ahead of every 1650 player in every area almost all the time. But the 1650 player will win a quarter of the time, the chance of flipping two heads in two coin flips. Easy to do once or twice, but the more games in the event, the more difficult it becomes for the lower-rated player. A 1650 player, assuming the rating is accurate, wouldn't be expected to win the U.S. Nationals (31 games) given a million tries. So while on some level Scrabble is "unfair", a large enough sample restores the fairness, and if you look at who has finished in the top five of a Nationals over the years, you're not going to find anyone there who isn't at least 1850 strength or so, and in most cases the top five will be 1950 or better. But on the other hand, every year there are surprises in the top 20. (The size of the top-division field at Nationals has varied over the years, but is usually about 100.) I take both of these as good signs.
I think Scrabble achieves the balance pretty well now, though maybe there are ways to improve it. I play about 150 tournament games a year, and my rating range over the past eight years has been somewhere between 1875 and 2025. Unless I'm atypical (don't think so), it's reasonable to assume that I'm a 1950 player. That feels fair, even when I'm busy losing a game to a 1200 player or beating 2250-rated Nigel Richards (I've done both). It's true that in chess, were I similarly skilled, I'd just about never lose to the 1200 player, but I'd just about never beat the Nigel Richards of chess, either. I'm not sure we can say that one scheme is fairer than the other - in fact, I'd say both are appropriate. If you want to reduce the luck involved in Scrabble, or increase it in chess, there are ways to do that. But again, what we want to avoid - because it feels unfair to us - is either of two situations: where small differences in ability yield excessively large advantages, or large differences in ability yield too-small advantages.
What am I on about here? Real life is a hell of a lot more complex than a game like Scrabble or chess is, and the luck factor is self-evidently MUCH larger. Bill Gates might be ten thousand times as rich as your local successful infotech entrepreneur, but he's not a hundred times as skilled, or diligent, or smart, or anything of the sort, and I'm sure he'd admit as much. He's more of all of those things, maybe, but not TEN THOUSAND TIMES more by any reasonable method of measurement. Most of the wealth difference is attributable to circumstances outside of Gates's control. (Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" makes this point, to some degree.) Which brings us to a fundamental of fairness: do we not bristle when players are rewarded or penalized for things they didn't have control over? This is not to begrudge Gates his success - I see no reason to say he shouldn't be at the top of the mountain. It's the size of the mountain that's in question. Even a fivefold advantage in skill shouldn't lead to hundredfold rewards, and when it does, shouldn't our alarm bells be going off? But in our culture such disproportionate rewards happen all the time. I'm not suggesting we should do anything draconian to fix this, but we need to recognize that it's a feature of our Monopoly world - that minor advantages in skill can snowball into massively dominant positions in a hurry, which tend to ossify over time. According to the idea of fairness we talked about above, that's not ideal; a 51-49 or even 60-40 advantage in skill shouldn't ever end up as winner take all - rather, it should be reflected as the ratio it is, or at least closer to it than our society now manages. The problem with the just world theory behind laissez-faire, ultimately, is that it's fatalistic. We end up rewarding good fortune more than we reward anything else, and to me, that's not sensible.
So what I'd like to do, if I find the time, is write a few entries examining fairness in different arenas and from different perspectives, to help me (and perhaps you the reader) frame some of the many questions related to the idea of fairness. We'll see what I get to; I have a lot going on these days, even as part of me feels it isn't enough. I'm sure you can relate.
I'll start in the world of games, since I know that world better than I know many others - in particular, games that are competitive and attempt to rank individual players, such as chess or Scrabble. What do we as players want from our competitive environment? We want it to reflect the relative abilities of the players, with as much fidelity as possible. That means we want small differences in ability to lead to small differences in winning percentage and rating and large differences in ability to lead to large differences in those things, roughly on a proportional scale. We want the best players to be identified as best over a sample of games large enough to feel right to us.
Chess uses what's called the Elo rating system, which assigns a numerical rating to players based on their winning percentage adjusted for the strength of their opposition. Scrabble also does this, though it sets the curve a bit differently, taking into account the variance in the quality of tile draws in the game. To illustrate, if Player A is rated 350 points higher than Player B in Scrabble, the rating formula expects player A to win about three out of four games. In chess, a 350-point difference means that the higher-rated player is expected to win about seven out of eight. Why is chess not eight out of eight, you may wonder; after all, there's no luck involved in chess. Shouldn't the superior player always win? Well, a 350-point difference in Player A's favor does not mean that Player A will always play better than Player B does. Abilities aren't static - they fluctuate. Player A might play like a 2200 player in one game, and more like a 1600 player in the next, particularly if the first game offers themes and positions that Player A is much better at solving than the second. Or maybe Player A didn't have enough caffeine or rest in game two, or has some sort of inferiority complex with certain opponents; humans are weird.
Is it inherently unfair that an inferior player might win a game? In Scrabble, you'd better get used to it. No one would deny that 350 points of rating represents a significant difference in skills. If you took a bunch of 2000-rated players - there are about 15 players in North America rated that high - and evaluated them on word knowledge, anagramming, board vision, strategic skill and ability to handle tournament pressure, every 2000 player would come out ahead of every 1650 player in every area almost all the time. But the 1650 player will win a quarter of the time, the chance of flipping two heads in two coin flips. Easy to do once or twice, but the more games in the event, the more difficult it becomes for the lower-rated player. A 1650 player, assuming the rating is accurate, wouldn't be expected to win the U.S. Nationals (31 games) given a million tries. So while on some level Scrabble is "unfair", a large enough sample restores the fairness, and if you look at who has finished in the top five of a Nationals over the years, you're not going to find anyone there who isn't at least 1850 strength or so, and in most cases the top five will be 1950 or better. But on the other hand, every year there are surprises in the top 20. (The size of the top-division field at Nationals has varied over the years, but is usually about 100.) I take both of these as good signs.
I think Scrabble achieves the balance pretty well now, though maybe there are ways to improve it. I play about 150 tournament games a year, and my rating range over the past eight years has been somewhere between 1875 and 2025. Unless I'm atypical (don't think so), it's reasonable to assume that I'm a 1950 player. That feels fair, even when I'm busy losing a game to a 1200 player or beating 2250-rated Nigel Richards (I've done both). It's true that in chess, were I similarly skilled, I'd just about never lose to the 1200 player, but I'd just about never beat the Nigel Richards of chess, either. I'm not sure we can say that one scheme is fairer than the other - in fact, I'd say both are appropriate. If you want to reduce the luck involved in Scrabble, or increase it in chess, there are ways to do that. But again, what we want to avoid - because it feels unfair to us - is either of two situations: where small differences in ability yield excessively large advantages, or large differences in ability yield too-small advantages.
What am I on about here? Real life is a hell of a lot more complex than a game like Scrabble or chess is, and the luck factor is self-evidently MUCH larger. Bill Gates might be ten thousand times as rich as your local successful infotech entrepreneur, but he's not a hundred times as skilled, or diligent, or smart, or anything of the sort, and I'm sure he'd admit as much. He's more of all of those things, maybe, but not TEN THOUSAND TIMES more by any reasonable method of measurement. Most of the wealth difference is attributable to circumstances outside of Gates's control. (Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" makes this point, to some degree.) Which brings us to a fundamental of fairness: do we not bristle when players are rewarded or penalized for things they didn't have control over? This is not to begrudge Gates his success - I see no reason to say he shouldn't be at the top of the mountain. It's the size of the mountain that's in question. Even a fivefold advantage in skill shouldn't lead to hundredfold rewards, and when it does, shouldn't our alarm bells be going off? But in our culture such disproportionate rewards happen all the time. I'm not suggesting we should do anything draconian to fix this, but we need to recognize that it's a feature of our Monopoly world - that minor advantages in skill can snowball into massively dominant positions in a hurry, which tend to ossify over time. According to the idea of fairness we talked about above, that's not ideal; a 51-49 or even 60-40 advantage in skill shouldn't ever end up as winner take all - rather, it should be reflected as the ratio it is, or at least closer to it than our society now manages. The problem with the just world theory behind laissez-faire, ultimately, is that it's fatalistic. We end up rewarding good fortune more than we reward anything else, and to me, that's not sensible.
Friday, February 7, 2014
My take on "Other People's Views"
(Wow, been forever since I've written here…)
Just read this column in the New York Times, by David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/opinion/brooks-other-peoples-views.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0
Brooks presents four situations and asks to what degree we should consider the views of others in making our decision. He later gives his own advice on these situations; let's see whether I agree with him.
1) Let’s say you’re turning 40 and you realize you want to leave accounting and become a hip-hop artist. People will say you’re having a pathetic midlife crisis, but should you do it anyway?
Brooks: First, the hip-hop artist question. Here it might be best to defer to public opinion. People tend to make poor decisions at moments of life transition, so at these moments, lean in the direction of respecting to the wisdom of the crowd. Have a midlife crisis, but in less stereotypical form.
Me: I think Brooks' analysis is far too superficial. "People tend to make poor decisions at moments of life transition": citation needed, for starters, but even if we grant the truth of that, it's such vague advice as to be unfollowable - should someone turning 40 stop taking risks in every facet of life until the transitional moment is safely in the rearview mirror? Surely we wouldn't say that. Turning 40 makes you look around and wonder; it doesn't make you incompetent. And it's different for everyone. The key thing we don't know here is what reason someone might have for making this decision. We don't know whether he's been honing his craft for 10 years, has researched the market and has decided it's time to give it a try, or whether he's on a manic episode and just thought of this idea a few weeks ago. I do agree with the notion that if you suspect a lot of wise people would question a major decision of yours, you might want to double and triple check it. There's an implication here that being a hip-hop artist is somehow beneath a 40-year-old, and I don't care for that at all. Yes, hip-hop is a young man's game, but there's nothing less dignified about being a hip-hop artist true to his craft than being an accountant true to his. Would Brooks have answered the question differently if the accountant wanted to become a country singer? I hope not. It's not easy for a 40-year-old to hit it big as a new artist in country, either.
2) Let’s say you’re on the phone in a crowded place and you want to tell your buddy a dirty joke, which may offend the people around you. Should you tell it?
Brooks: Then, the question of the dirty joke. This is a question of manners. Here, too, it’s probably a good idea to give priority to other people’s views. The manners and mores of a community are a shared possession. When you violate social norms, you are not only being rude to people around you, but you are making it more likely that others will violate the norms in the future. You are tearing the social fabric.
Me: Mostly agree. We need to know how dirty the joke is, how likely the people nearby are to overhear, and how sensitive they are. A little dirty is probably no big deal, but yeah, don't be that guy. "Tearing the social fabric" is a bit melodramatic, but you are fraying it, so cut that shit out.
3) Let’s say you have religious or political beliefs that make you unpopular. Should you hide or change them?
Brooks: Then the question of the unpopular belief. In this case, it is clearly wrong to sacrifice some of your conviction for immediate popularity. Basically you are trading in something deep for something shallow. Most of our core beliefs originated with some great figure from the distant past. These ideas, creeds or faiths were then nurtured by generations of other people, who are also now mostly dead. They created a transcendent tradition, which we embrace and hope in turn to pass along to generations as yet unborn. No sensible person would ever be happy betraying the approval of the admired dead just to win some passing approval in the here and now.
Me: Hmm. Some religious or political beliefs make one unpopular because they're either poorly thought out or mean-spirited. Brooks employs some high-flown rhetoric here…problem is, while many of the ideas embedded in creeds and faiths of old remain useful today, some of them do not, even to the point of being hurtful. One shouldn't get safe harbor for indefensible beliefs just because they're deeply held or have a tradition or culture attached to them. Brooks seems to be talking here about only one kind of religious or political stance that could be unpopular - the traditionalist in a room full of people with less traditional views. What about the reverse? My religious and political opinions (I'm not very traditional) would make me unpopular in certain rooms, but I come by those opinions just as honestly as the traditionalists he's talking about have. Would Brooks stick up for me here, too? But I'd agree with him in the sense that we should be true to ourselves and not give up deeply considered opinions for shallow reasons.
4) Let’s say you are deeply in love with a person your friends dislike. Should you dump that person?
Brooks: Finally, the question of the unpopular fiancé. This is tricky because it depends on what kind of feedback other people are offering. If they are talking about your boyfriend’s status (he’s too ugly; he’s got a bad job) then outside opinion doesn’t matter. But they may be observing something about the internal nature of your relationship that you are too blinded by passion to see. Maybe they can discern that he hurts you in this way or that. In this case, outside advice is not about approval; it’s about wisdom at a time when your emotions are clouding your judgment.
Me: Can't imagine anyone else's answer to this would be very different. Few things are worse than seeing a friend or loved one unable to walk away from someone who's mistreating them, and it happens all too often. It's a sickness. But as long as the person you're in love with is respecting you and treating you right, yeah, other people's penny-ante observations shouldn't matter in the least.
Just read this column in the New York Times, by David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/opinion/brooks-other-peoples-views.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0
Brooks presents four situations and asks to what degree we should consider the views of others in making our decision. He later gives his own advice on these situations; let's see whether I agree with him.
1) Let’s say you’re turning 40 and you realize you want to leave accounting and become a hip-hop artist. People will say you’re having a pathetic midlife crisis, but should you do it anyway?
Brooks: First, the hip-hop artist question. Here it might be best to defer to public opinion. People tend to make poor decisions at moments of life transition, so at these moments, lean in the direction of respecting to the wisdom of the crowd. Have a midlife crisis, but in less stereotypical form.
Me: I think Brooks' analysis is far too superficial. "People tend to make poor decisions at moments of life transition": citation needed, for starters, but even if we grant the truth of that, it's such vague advice as to be unfollowable - should someone turning 40 stop taking risks in every facet of life until the transitional moment is safely in the rearview mirror? Surely we wouldn't say that. Turning 40 makes you look around and wonder; it doesn't make you incompetent. And it's different for everyone. The key thing we don't know here is what reason someone might have for making this decision. We don't know whether he's been honing his craft for 10 years, has researched the market and has decided it's time to give it a try, or whether he's on a manic episode and just thought of this idea a few weeks ago. I do agree with the notion that if you suspect a lot of wise people would question a major decision of yours, you might want to double and triple check it. There's an implication here that being a hip-hop artist is somehow beneath a 40-year-old, and I don't care for that at all. Yes, hip-hop is a young man's game, but there's nothing less dignified about being a hip-hop artist true to his craft than being an accountant true to his. Would Brooks have answered the question differently if the accountant wanted to become a country singer? I hope not. It's not easy for a 40-year-old to hit it big as a new artist in country, either.
2) Let’s say you’re on the phone in a crowded place and you want to tell your buddy a dirty joke, which may offend the people around you. Should you tell it?
Brooks: Then, the question of the dirty joke. This is a question of manners. Here, too, it’s probably a good idea to give priority to other people’s views. The manners and mores of a community are a shared possession. When you violate social norms, you are not only being rude to people around you, but you are making it more likely that others will violate the norms in the future. You are tearing the social fabric.
Me: Mostly agree. We need to know how dirty the joke is, how likely the people nearby are to overhear, and how sensitive they are. A little dirty is probably no big deal, but yeah, don't be that guy. "Tearing the social fabric" is a bit melodramatic, but you are fraying it, so cut that shit out.
3) Let’s say you have religious or political beliefs that make you unpopular. Should you hide or change them?
Brooks: Then the question of the unpopular belief. In this case, it is clearly wrong to sacrifice some of your conviction for immediate popularity. Basically you are trading in something deep for something shallow. Most of our core beliefs originated with some great figure from the distant past. These ideas, creeds or faiths were then nurtured by generations of other people, who are also now mostly dead. They created a transcendent tradition, which we embrace and hope in turn to pass along to generations as yet unborn. No sensible person would ever be happy betraying the approval of the admired dead just to win some passing approval in the here and now.
4) Let’s say you are deeply in love with a person your friends dislike. Should you dump that person?
Brooks: Finally, the question of the unpopular fiancé. This is tricky because it depends on what kind of feedback other people are offering. If they are talking about your boyfriend’s status (he’s too ugly; he’s got a bad job) then outside opinion doesn’t matter. But they may be observing something about the internal nature of your relationship that you are too blinded by passion to see. Maybe they can discern that he hurts you in this way or that. In this case, outside advice is not about approval; it’s about wisdom at a time when your emotions are clouding your judgment.
Me: Can't imagine anyone else's answer to this would be very different. Few things are worse than seeing a friend or loved one unable to walk away from someone who's mistreating them, and it happens all too often. It's a sickness. But as long as the person you're in love with is respecting you and treating you right, yeah, other people's penny-ante observations shouldn't matter in the least.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)