Dissecting the Popularity Contest

In the last article, I wrote about the job market looking more like a popularity contest than a meritocracy. But, I left these terms only defined implicitly. I think it would be enlightening to examine them more closely.

The intuitive notion of popularity is that it is a measure of how well one is “liked” by others. A popularity contest therefore discovers the “likedness” of its participants. This seems simple enough. Popularity contest being practiced over meritocracy would just mean people hire who they holistically like the most, instead of who is best at the job.

This pretty cleanly leads to the notion of people having “liking functions.” How much they like someone is some function of that person’s properties, plus a random component. If liking functions equaled merit, then popularity contests would be equivalent to meritocracy.

So we have to ask, what are the actual components of the liking functions? For one, we can see that in wealthy tech and finance spheres, race is a predictor of liking score. Popularity contest is therefore a generalization of discourse on racial discrimination. For example, it would seem that Asians and Indians are disproportionately well liked over white Americans. I would argue that Slavs are also disproportionately favored over white Americans and Western European men, but to a lesser extent than Indians and Chinese are.

This could be causal, or it could be incidental. If it’s causal, it’s direct racial discrimination. If it’s incidental, it’s because these races tend to have better liking scores independent of merit. For example, if the liking score values ability to signal over true merit, and Chinese people are extremely focused on signaling, then they will have liking scores that are higher than their merit, and it will look like racial discrimination against white Americans, who have as much or more merit as Chinese immigrants, but who signal less.

It’s probably a mix of both. Wealthy liberals openly discriminate against white people to some extent, but often in favor of blacks and not Chinese or Slavs. However, Chinese and Slavs are good at maximizing popularity signals, but not at having strictly superior merit to white Americans. This is where the term '“piano-American” comes from. It refers to how they train from childhood to look more “popular” or “cool” by Harvard standards, so they can get in and study engineering. Obviously, the piano has nothing to do with their merit except at a music academy, but it works, so they maximize it, since they lack the hesitance to blow their time playing status games that Western whites have.

Why popularity contests and not meritocracy? Probably the collapse of selection pressures, at all levels of selection. Not just genetic, but cultural and institutional. When competition is weak, people can select for bull-shit “nice to haves” over raw merit. Over long enough time periods under low selection, dumb hiring managers can rise who are popular but who couldn’t even properly measure merit if their life were on the line. This is when they come to believe their their popularity function is merit.

This is likely why popularity contests seem to emerge in large empires at their peak. This is when outside competition is at its minimum. It’s also why schools are known for their terrible popularity contests, both within and between. Within schools, there is no selection whatsoever. It’s pure communism. The dumbest high school students get to remain as students with the worst grades as long as everybody else. Between schools, there is very little competition. The government completely funds most schools, and even largely funds Harvard et al. At a minimum, elite universities have the most selection pressure, but it is relatively small and the consequences of their actions lag.

In other words, I hypothesize the popularity contests emerge when civilizations are in decline. This goes well with Turchin’s “meta-ethnic frontier” theory, which states that inter-population competition is what produces great civilizations, which then rot from the lack of competitive pressure. Popularity contests everywhere are what that looks like from the inside.