Assessment of Contextual Status

Assessment of Contextual Status

Status recognition is engrained in our DNA. It’s a skill that allows us to organise society efficiently and enhance individual and collective outcomes. There have been many contexts in which status was defined, from physical strength to spiritual wisdom.

Since the enlightenment in the West, we are considered equal as humans but status are contextually distributed: we evaluate status of experts in the context of their field. In a justice court, the highest status is the judge, in a school class, the teacher, in a company the CEO, in a fitness center, the instructor.

A good system is a system that does a good job at assessing the relevance of a contextual status. If i give high status in surgery to my baker, a high status in police to religious people and a high status in finance to my 2 year old niece, things might not play well in such societal model.

Who’s in charge of Contextual Status Assessment today?

• Investors assess the status of entrepreneurs: does this person deserve the status to be in charge of this company or industry?
• Voters: does this person deserve the status of mayor, lawmaker or commander in chief?
• Clients: does this service provider, plumber, lawyer, doctor deserve the status of dealing with my pipes, lawsuit or stomach pain?
• Media: does this person deserve the status as an expert to comment on this topic
• And eventually individuals: does this person, group or brand deserve the status to do the CSA for me right now?

So what have we learned about contextual status assessment so far?

• Everyone is trying to cheat and enhance the PERCEPTION of their attributes to access higher status than what their deserve
• The Dunning-Krueger effect is misleading us quite badly
• Diversity of contextual status assessment approaches is preferable to uniformity
• Competition between contextual assessment methodologies combined with freedom of speech are healthier than dogmatic monopolistic CSA
• Decentralised liability preferable to centralised liability where everyone has to pay the price of a bad assessment
• Emotional tricks can be used to bypass assessment systems: tribalism, fear, guilt, love, sensationalism

The consequence of a bad CSA:

• Deaths: giving the presidency to the wrong people has lead to death from wars and famine
• Economic crisis: giving high status to financial institutions to gamblers and thieves has led to depressions
• Abuses if all kind
• Inefficiency, losses

While refusing to recognise status would be suicidal, having the wrong CSA systems in place can be destructive, especially in a world of abundance, exponential technological progress and sophistication.

A lot of signs are showing we have entered in a CSA crisis:

• We gave the highest status on questions like climate change to politicians, children and actors
• Wikipedia and Quora are accused of bias and unfair assessment of status
• Reality show celebrities occupy the highest status in many areas
• It is now possible to purchase status in academia
• The current president of the USA is considered a revolutionary hero by some and a nazi by others
• Even when academia is not corrupt, its legitimacy as a proof of competency is decreasing very fast
• Some crypto “experts” and ICO “advisors” can be considered genius by some and charlatans by others
• We no longer respect nor trust our religious leaders, politicians, media
• The very head of the FBI appears for some as a hired gun working against his own country

In fact, most of or current discourses, divisions and polarities are related to a problem that is much deeper than the usual political or religious tribalism. We have never been so connected and divided at the same time.

The solution is no longer to decide to whom we should allocate high contextual status, but to rebuild completely our contextual status assessment tools and methodologies.

Instead of relying on the legacy CSA paradigm, we have to start over and create a competitive environment between CSA by combining the virtues of specialism, information technologies and decentralisation.

If we desacralise our institutions and have the humility accept we were fooled by the fabricated authority of the so called “official” media, academia, political parties and culture, only then will we be ready for the Enlightenment 2.0 and deserve the abundant and exciting next stages of our civilisation.