I thought it was interesting that Winslet declined to apply the term “nepotism” to her actions… even though it’s obviously nepotism. She said she dislikes the term “nepo baby”.
It’s like when people say, “I’m not racist, but… [racist opinion]”. I guess they must feel that “racist” simply means “evil person”, and so they’re reluctant to apply the label to themselves.
It reminds me of villains in Atlas Shrugged trying to wiggle their way out of using “such words” to describe their own actions.
People’s refusal to accurately label their own actions can entrench those actions by preventing them from being corrected. Atlas Shrugged talks about pretending “that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’" And that nepotism will not be nepotism so long as you dislike the term nepo baby.
That TikTok also got me thinking about another issue:
I think directing, producing, and starring in a movie because one’s child wrote the screenplay is nepotism. But I wonder where to draw the line?
Leaving one’s wealth to one’s children is also ~nepotism (IMO). Despite that, I think that most people approve of conventional inheritance, don’t regard it as nepotism, and regard it as unfair to the adult children if one doesn’t do it.
Some celebrities have pledged to bequeath their wealth to charity instead of their children. (Comments on articles about it suggest that most people disagree with those celebrities.)
I also disagree because I think that most charities are not very effective. But I’d agree if those celebrities bequeathed their wealth to a worthy individual (like ET or a scientific genius who needed funding to solve aging).
That said, I’m not sure where to draw the line between optimally supportive parenting (a little bit like TCS) and ~nepotism (in a very broad sense of the word).
Though in the Winslet case, it’s not just her personal nepotism. Apparently a lot of Hollywood requires connections and is not open to (let alone seeking out) undiscovered greatness. I imagine most of the upper echelons of the “World…We Live In” is like that (to quote the title of this thread).
As ActiveMind pointed out, one reason for this is that “there’s a lack independent judgment”. Though, as ActiveMind also pointed out, that may be hard to solve without doing something like “revolutionizing education”.
Me too.
My first thought was that it could be overwhelming because presumably they have thousands of applicants (and thus thousands of potential debates). But then it occurred to me that they could save time by recycling arguments for why they reject certain people (i.e., use ET’s library of criticism idea).
I wonder if ET’s thousands of forums idea is relevant. If fans love a screenplay and want it to be produced, they could debate it on such a forum. Ditto if they think a certain aspiring actor/actress is great.
At first glance, I’d say no because someone’s opinion about you isn’t necessarily the same as sharing private info about you (tho it’s tricky cuz their opinion could be based on private interviews and private work).
I doubt many people would like these opinions to be public (just as many people don’t like criticism, especially if public). Maybe people could opt in to radical transparency? Perhaps an opt in system could work for salary too.
If cultural norms change enough, then I don’t think so. I doubt Olympic organizers have friends/family who feel mistreated because they’re not allowed to participate in the Olympics lol. Because Olympic sports are more objective, people intuitively see that nepotism is ludicrous. It reminds me of this from ET:
Debate ought to work more like an imaginary boxing league
Perhaps this could be partly solved by distinguishing between refuted and non-refuted evaluations. For example, if someone has a well-explained negative evaluation of me, and I’m unable to explain why they’re wrong, then it may not be unreasonable for hiring managers to want to know about that.
I agree, which is why I said it would be due to social dynamics. With different culture/social dynamics it wouldn’t have to be difficult. If thinking criticism was a gift was the cultural norm then there probably wouldn’t be much of a problem.
When the friends are totally incompetent then yes. They would be ridiculed for believing they’re entitled to the spot. But if the competition is only marginally better, then they could have an argument and feel like their friends “aren’t standing up” for them.
Austin Archer (the tiktoker) didn’t say the kids were incompetent. It’s more about even getting the opportunity to be evaluated. So she probably dislikes the term because it typically means the kids aren’t good enough for the job. But they could actually be good enough, or even the very best candidates, but it could still be nepotism because the competition aren’t playing on a level playing field.
I think you should be able to support whatever your highest values are in the future beyond your life. For most people that is their children. For others it can be a cause or advancing knowledge. And you can value multiple things obviously.
Tbh, I’m in over my head, so I can’t really debate this kind of stuff atm. I still have so much more to learn.
That said…
For stuff like the 100 meter sprint, it’s hard to argue because one’s time is a relatively straightforward measurement. (Even with a photo finish, they can usually see whose chest/torso crossed the finish line first.)
I wondered about other sports though. I don’t know much about sports, but I think some are graded. I looked up figure skating:
GOE stands for Grade of Execution, and it’s essentially the quality score for each element. Judges award every element a GOE on a scale from -5 to +5 (an integer value). A 0 means the element was done adequately (no big positives or negatives). Positive GOEs (+1 to +5) mean the element was performed well or spectacularly; negative GOEs (-1 to -5) mean there were errors or it was poorly executed. GOE is the judges’ way of saying how much they liked or disliked the execution of that jump, spin, lift, etc., independent of its difficulty.
Each judge gives their own GOE for each element, and then these are averaged (after tossing out the highest and lowest scores to reduce bias). The averaging uses a “trimmed mean” method – drop the top and bottom, average the rest – to get the final GOE value for that element.
I know ~nothing about figure skating. But based on that grading method, I feel like there could be at least a tiny bit of room for bias. “[T]hey could have an argument” to use your words.
I asked Perplexity and found this:
A later investigation revealed that a judge from the French panel had been pressured to give the Russian [figure skating] team higher scores in exchange for political favors.
Anyway, as I said, I’m in over my head atm. But I mention this because if I learn more about CF (including multi-factor decision making math and binary epistemology and problems with weighted factors), I feel that it could be fun for me to think about how it might apply to stuff like sports scoring (or acting or screenplays or hiring decisions) and what it might look like to have a system where evaluations—even about marginal differences—are objective. (Ditto for evaluating meta debates about it.) Or, to use your words, what it might look like for people to be “playing on a level playing field.”
Because if everything could be evaluated as clearly as the 100 meter sprint, then nepotism would stand out like a sore thumb.
Or maybe I’m imagining that “a level playing field” is more complex (and radically different from the status quo) than it actually is.
I meant if there were supporting institutions/norms/infrastructure/whatever in place too. (Like Paths Forward, debate policies, thousands of forums, etc., etc.) I’m not sure exactly what that would look like though. But I think finding out what such a world might look like could be interesting to me.
The machinery of a merit-based society 
(And of a truth-valuing society more generally)
While watching the video, I initially wondered whether this is even bad. Conducting experiments in order to find the most profitable price point to settle on seems ok. (That said, I don’t know almost anything about what the proper way to make pricing decisions is.)
Permanently charging different prices to different people feels unfair and deceitful. (Pro-capitalists might argue that grocers that practice discriminatory pricing risk losing customers to competitors that promise uniform pricing. Though I imagine it’d be messier in reality.)
It seems wasteful/misguided that companies are devoting so much time/energy/ingenuity to figuring out how to get a few extra cents from some people (I know it adds up in aggregate) rather than devoting those resources to creating more value and making more money that way. I saw a YouTube comment by “superbi3” make a similar point:
Can you imagine if the same dedication was devoted to helping people rather than exploiting them?
I thought it was sneaky/deceitful that Instacart changed their explanation mid email exchange and were initially trying to blame Target lol. I saw a YouTube comment by “double-agent-ly” that made a similar point:
This is a great example of how businesses will lie to your face unless proven wrong.
The people doing it seem to think it’s bad. They keep lying about it instead of being proud of it. And the lying about how their pricing works seems like fraud.
If they’d just openly admit what they were doing, and some other companies said they don’t do it, and it was really easy to tell which companies do what, then that might work. But their lying screws up this mechanism; it’s hard for consumers to tell which companies are lying and which aren’t, and the courts aren’t doing a very good job of sorting this out either.
Imagine Walmart had big signs up in every store that said “We charge different customers different prices based on algorithms and tons of data we have about you. Shop here to enter the low price lottery: we might give you low prices! Avoid some of our competitors that charge everyone the same price so you can’t get extra low prices there.”
And imagine Target had signs up saying “We charge everyone the same price instead of buying data from shady stalker mobile apps and then charging extra to people for not being desperately poor. We think that’s more fair and ethical.”
In that world, where both stores were totally open about what they were doing and were proud of it and didn’t lie at all, I think customers really would care and choose – and a lot would leave Walmart for Target. (Store names were made up arbitrarily for illustration purposes. It’s not my intention to call Target ethical in real life.) I think that capitalist solution you mentioned – basically customers voting with their dollars about what pricing policies they like – would be pretty effective if not for inadequately policed fraud.
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That’s a good point. They were super shifty about it in their emails.
That’s a good point. I initially (without really thinking about it, just intuitively) felt like the lying in those emails technically didn’t count as fraud because it wasn’t a specific product per se that they were misrepresenting. But now you mention it, I guess misrepresenting how their pricing works is fraud.
I suppose that’d be one of the big benefits of living in a world in which fraud was well-policed. It’d make it easier for companies that choose to be better to differentiate themselves and attract customers.
Yeah, in a scenario like the one you described, I agree. Your explanation made it really clear to me why “it’d be messier in [our current] reality.” I didn’t really understand why that would be the case before. I liked your explanation a lot and it really clarified things for me, so thank you for that.
Though people can be mistaken about whether what they’re doing is bad.
Her Second Career from The Early Ayn Rand is about a movie star trying to start out fresh again in Hollywood without any connections. Here’s a quote from a genius playwright in the story:
There’s no one in this business with an honest idea of what’s good and what’s bad. And there’s no one who’s not scared green of having such an idea for himself. They’re all sitting around waiting for someone to tell them. Begging someone to tell them. Anyone, just so they won’t have to take the awful responsibility of judging and valuing on their own. So merit doesn’t exist here. What does exist is someone’s ballyhoo which all the others are only too glad to follow. And the ballyhoo starts with less discrimination and from less respectable sources than the betting at a racetrack. Only this is more of a gamble, because at a track all the horses are at least given a chance to run.”
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I just saw this video by Jason K Pargin and I really liked it. It seems related to secondhandedness.
I transcribed it. This is my favourite part. The quote marks around ‘human nature’ are in his subtitles so I included them.
This is not political, this is a “human nature” thing. Most people are not satisfied to simply have the option to live their life the way they want, they also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice they made. And if over time they see that their own personal preference has become less popular and even worse, is now seen as being basic or unsophisticated, they will perceive the mere existence of those other options as a criticism of them even if they’ve never heard anybody voice that criticism.
It makes me think about how wanting to be normal, to fit it, to be accepted by others, can be at cross purposes with being an independent thinker.
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yeah this comes up all the time in video games. many ppl don’t like an “extra hard mode” existing that they aren’t good enough for. there are tons of games with like 4-5 difficulty settings that are all too easy for me. lots of ppl want to beat the hardest one that exists and will complain if it’s too hard for them.
They initially chose the popular option because they wanted to feel normal, but when the option stops being popular they now feel bad about being basic. But were they not always basic?
I think it’s true that people perceive it this way. So there’s some recency and tribal bias about what is considered basic. The niche sub-cultures usually look down upon the popular options as basic and unsophisticated, but when they get popular themselves they don’t apply the same standards to themselves.
There are people in those niche sub-cultures who were there because it was niche, so they’ll leave and call it basic now.
The sub-culture also usually gets watered down to please more people, so it loses a lot of what made the sub-culture great. That would be a rational reason to leave and call their past sub-culture basic now.
There are also people who want to be popular, but anticipate a niche culture becoming popular and join early to get clout for being a long time member. I think this is rare. It’s risky from the perspective of the person who would do it. They wouldn’t themselves as basic once the sub-culture is popular.
I don’t have clear examples of this stuff. So anyone tell me whether you think it’s accurate or not.
The existence of alternatives being interpreted as criticism is interesting. Why do people interpret it that way? What if it actually is a criticism in a way?
If you were doing one thing a certain way your whole life, but then you see a new alternative, isn’t it rational to evaluate it? You might evaluate that you have invested a lot in your current ways and exploring new options isn’t likely to be profitable. But that’s an evaluation too. If you evade making a proper evaluation then that’s a criticism of you.
But that doesn’t have to be bad. A new criticism? Great, you found an opportunity to improve! But that’s not what people think. They don’t care that much about improving.
Why don’t they care that much about improving? Probably because they’re not confident they’ll be able to improve. Attempts at improvement often end in failure. They don’t trust their judgments much. They haven’t built up a solid foundation of proper knowledge which they can use to easily build upon.
Being an independent thinker requires that you have confidence in your reason. I think it has long been known that the belief in the efficacy of reason is important to have the confidence to be an independent thinker. When the dominant philosophy of society believes reason is impotent they’ll turn to an authority for answers. That’s true, but most people don’t have sophisticated or even specific views on philosophy. They do absorb a lot through media and other institutions like the church, but it’s not the full picture. Elliot explains another reason people don’t trust their judgments and aren’t independent thinkers, which is that people stop reaching for proper knowledge because of their parenting. See also Rational Confidence and Standards for Knowledge
I’m not sure they initially chose the option because they wanted to feel normal. It could have been a preference from among more limited options in the past, all of which could’ve been like normal or acceptable. In the coffee example, in the past it might’ve just been like black or white, and with or without sugar, all of which may be considered normal. Maybe they didn’t think of their own variations, like adding honey or vanilla etc, because they didn’t want to seem abnormal? idk.
Sometimes people do change their preferences in order to avoid liking things that are popular. There are some people that will stop listening to bands for example when they get more popular, they like the stuff they like to be niche or somethiing. It’s still secondhanded though because it correlates to whether it’s popular or not, it’s just a negative correlation.
Yeah (I didn’t read ahead, just have been writing comments as they occur to me).
Yeah agree.
Yeah, a way people can do this is lie that they’ve been a long time member. There is a cliche with music fans of liking bands when they weren’t popular and preferring their early stuff, in like a snobbish way to impress others.
It sounds reasonable to me!
Yeah if you really liked something first-handedly you wouldn’t feel pressured by the popularity of alternatives to it. I think you’d probably appreciate the growing alternatives open to you, even if you still didn’t prefer any of them. Because that growth might eventually make something you prefer better.
I think it would be rational to evaluate it yeah and someone who wasn’t secondhanded about their preferences wouldn’t hesitate to do that I think.
I guess the presence of alternatives can be a criticism in more neutral, CF sense. But I wonder if Pargin means criticism in a negative, insulting sense, like I think most people mean it? I think most people think of criticism as something like an expression of disapproval of them.
Yeah a new alternative is a potential an improvement and I think the firsthanded person knows that.
Yeah, good point. I think both my and your situations have happened though.
Yes I can remember people bragging about being a fan of an artist when they were unknown.
Could this actually be rational though? Like would Austen Heller be justifiably proud to recognize Roark’s talent early and help him get popular later?
I would guess Pargin used the normal sense the way most people do. I guess it’s that they feel every criticism is a moral condemnation? Or maybe it’s just that they don’t want to make the effort to change but feel pressured to?
I think yes. Also, I think I should’ve said that some music fans probably like to falsely claim that they’ve been a fan for longer and that they prefer their earlier stuff, because the context we were talking about was getting clout from being a long time member. People can lie about that.
I totally think it says a lot about Heller that he saw how good Roark was so early, and that it would be something to be proud of. I’m forgetting exactly how that came about, actually. I’m going to need to reread the book soon.