[Retric]

Interesting, but it’s missing the human factor. People that gather credentials have incentives to make them more important.

You can look at how quickly the MBA took off as a product of many things. But a huge factor is MBA programs convincing people taking them to higher other MBA’s.

Or how lawyers have made it illegal for people without the right credentials from practicing law.

[cinquemb]

> missing the human factor.

because reasons addresses this, each individual reason given is not really that important to understand what can come from it over time.

> Or how lawyers have made it illegal for people without the right credentials from practicing law.

This might be true now, and for when it comes to representing others that are not yourself, but this does not have to remain true.

[Retric]

By human factor I mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias

If you get X degree you overestimate it’s importance and want to build a team of others with X degree. Thus the bias moves the equilibrium point. Further when asked you end up promoting the credentials to others considering getting them.

[cinquemb]

Yes, I get that. What I am saying is that one will ultimately have to face whatever downsides will be from engaging in what Hanson would call "Prestige-Based Discretion" if one actually cares about X and not just the signals of X https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based...:

"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research.

This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress.

Of course if we don’t really care about research progress, or students learning, or medical effectiveness, etc., if what we mainly care about is just affiliating with the most impressive folks, well then all this isn’t much of a problem. But if we do care about these things, then unthinkingly presuming that the most prestigious people are the best to tell us how to do things, that can go very very wrong."

[Retric]

Sure it’s a horrible waste of resources, but saying it’s bad has little to do with why it’s spread.