This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
That's because teaching experience doesn't do much to outcomes because, well, we've had that conversation plenty. The difference between a (good) lawyer with 2 years and 18 years of experience is a hell of a lot more than 10x, though.
I'm somewhat surprised (but not really - the answer is that people just don't really think much about these things) by how common it is that people just argue from incredulity that someone surely couldn't be worth that much more than someone else in terms of the job they do. Commonly with billionaires, or people who make $multimillion salaries compared to, say, entry-level employees who make less than 1/200 of that.
Because, looking at one of the most fair and transparent jobs in terms of measuring performance - professional athlete - it's pretty clear that the top players really can be that much better. Even just making it to the pro level likely places you at least in the 95th percentile, if not 99.9th, and when you zoom in in that tiny sliver of humanity, you realize that the gap between the top players and the median players is HUGE. In 2000, Pedro Martinez wasn't just the best pitcher in MLB, he was better than the 2nd best pitcher in MLB by a gap larger than the one between the 2nd best and the median MLB pitcher, according to most stats. If you look at other top-level talents like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, similar phenomena seem to occur.
Given that the gaps are this big in just that tiny top sliver, it tells me that the productivity gap between the very top and the median worker (who's probably what, in the top 30% of everyone of similar age?) is likely to be absolutely enormous. I could absolutely believe that one individual is actually a million times more valuable to a company than a junior employee in terms of value created and thus, in some cosmic sense, "earned" that salary that's a million times higher. There's no real good way of quantifying this in a rigorous and fair way, but, I'll say, I have no incredulity when it comes to this notion.
Those statistics must have been stuff like games won, right? If you have a reward function that is 1 and 0, you compare two almost identical competitors that are 1% apart in underlying performance, and you run that function for 10 years, you're see a massive reward advantage stemming from the 1% difference. Biologically I just don't see how Pedro Martinez could be 9 SDs from the median while the second best player is only 2.5 SDs from the median. Very unlikely.
Not intrinsically, I think when you study rich people you find top 1% genomes (or less, even) who are laser-focused on making money in some niche. I would say I'm skeptical about value of their niche and more focused on from each according to their ability, to each according to their reproductive value. A lot of money making niches seem to be randomly determined and not truly valuable.
No, it's not games won; in fact, for players in general of any team sport like baseball, wins tends to be considered pretty close to irrelevant for measuring individual performance. Notably, Martinez did not lead the league in wins that year, but there was no question to anyone that he was by far the best pitcher in the league. In that era, Earned Run Average (ERA - lower the better) used to be considered the best stats and Martinez had an ERA of 1.74, while the second best in the league had 3.7, with the league average being 4.9.
Since that time, more advanced stats have been developed. For those, Martinez had a Wins Above Replacement (WAR - higher the better - average of all players, not just pitchers is defined to be 0) of 11.7, versus the 2nd place's 6.2, with the league average for starting pitchers at around 2. For adjusted ERA+, which is an ERA-based score adjusted for strength of opponents and size/shape of stadiums and quality of defensive teammates and such (higher the better - average of all pitchers is defined to be 100), he had a score of 291, while second place had 133.
There's no single stat that we can point to as the true productivity of a player in any sport or of a human in any field, but, by most stats that baseball fans consider to reflect that productivity, Martinez was better than the 2nd best by a gap greater than that between the 2nd best and the average. That's where the "average" is among people in the top <1% among all humans or even among all healthy young males.
Sure, but you don't need to understand the how. No one truly understands the how. What matters is the is, and he is (or rather, was).
There's nothing intrinsic about any of this. Productivity is as productivity does. If you want to have some sort of top-down command economy where your judgment is deemed the Correct one in terms of employees in what industries are deemed Valuable enough to deserve Lots of Money, you're certainly free to want that. But, again, arguments against instantiating those wants is written in blood, often the blood of those who wanted it, and of their loved ones.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Onfield performance isn't the salient performance attribute for athletes, though. It's selling tickets/attracting eyeballs which also has its own massive disparity in ability by athlete.
If hypothetically the entire NBA roster at present were to vanish and be replaced by the next 400 or so best basketball players on earth how different would the entertainment product be? I can think of some sports where mid tier competitors produce a more compelling and competitive product than the absolute elite
Bringing in money is certainly the best actual metric in terms of actual value generated for the company, but it's also really hard to measure on a per-employee basis. My intent was to analogize a pro athletes performance in the sport against a generic employee's value creation.
That said, most times I've encountered people attempting to model how much actual value professional athletes generate, generally the conclusion is that the top players are far underpaid relative to how much money they make for the teams and leagues. Eg. I think when Conor McGregor was in his prime, he was getting paid I think less than 2x as much by the UFC as any other lightweight championship fighter (like a few hundred thousand USD per fight, for single-digit million for the year), and I read some article claiming that he was responsible for some double digit percentage of the UFC's total revenue, which seems to be on the order of multiple hundred million USD, which seems entirely plausible. I've seen similar things written about other big stars over the years, like Michael Jordan or Shohei Ohtani, and I don't know how good these models are, but to a basic fan with some basic understanding of the way these leagues operate, they all seem quite plausible.
And given the pay disparities in some professional sports which can be like 100:1 for top players versus rookies, that this disparity is smaller than their ACTUAL value would indicate that individuals really can be worth orders of magnitude more valuable in doing the same job.
If we want to get at the ACTUAL value, perhaps we could look at actual income of musicians, who usually sink or swim by their own personal direct success at making songs popular enough to get people to listen to them on streaming platforms or even buy on CD. And so there's no company setting salary to really manipulate the income. There, we know that the top performers are billionaires, and the bottom ones don't make minimum wage.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Proof?
I plead judicial notice. You can also ask any of the legal/finance posters here how biglaw works. You learn the law by doing repetitive detail-oriented shit over and over, while paying attention to the wider context of the job. Then, as you gain seniority, you've seen more and more of the strategic decisions, edge cases, long-term action-outcome links, etc. until you can start taking point on those. As you develop a track record, bigger customers will trust you with bigger things, and you can build relationships with them to keep them coming to your firm for work (you're going to need that because, even as a partner, your pay is very much tied directly to how much you earn the firm). By the time you're an elder statesman, your job is to make high-level decisions that you can only make well from atop a mountain of experience, and also to manage and mentor younger lawyers so that they can go through their work and learn the ropes without crashing into an unknown unknown and getting burned. A lot of white-collar professions work this way.
Funnily enough, law did used to have a boomer-protecting structure of the sort you decry: the firm's profits would generally be split between all partners based on lockstep seniority, with the juniors earning less and the seniors more as they go on. People were fine with that because the junior partners knew they had a job for life unless they screwed up horrifically, and expected to get that seniority in time. I have some thoughts on why this system disappeared, but that's a bit beyond the scope of your question.
[FWIW, the system is the same in all large professional services firms]
It still (mostly) exists in the UK - my father's firm had performance shares, but the dispersion between high and average-performing partners was about a factor of 1.5. Conventional wisdom is that it failed in the US because over-performing partners would quit to found boutiques. No idea why the US and UK are different.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link