Probability and Worth

A friend told me about a conversation he heard.

Seeing a foreigner, someone asked where he was from.

“New Zealand”

“Wow” went the response.

Just being from a particular country is something to “wow” about, my friend told me.

It’s pretty sad to think that someone can be impressed by the accident of birth in a particular land – something you have no control over.

To play devil’s advocate though – you could argue it’s statistically impressive.

Going by population alone, you’re 250 times more likely to be an Indian than a New Zealander.

So you’d expect to see Indians 250x more than New Zealanders.

And if you adjust for the fact this took place in India, it’s even more impressive.

You’d probably be 100,000x more likely to choose an Indian than a New Zealander if you picked a person at random in India. Sighting one is a rare event.

Is Rarity Value?

Does rarity, which is the fact that an event has a low probability of occurring, have anything to do with its worth?

Intuitively, it seems to.

Rarity seems to imply difficulty – the easier something is to do, the more people who’d have done it. And usually, scarcity brings value and familiarity degrades it.

Climbing a Himalayan peak is harder than climbing a small hill. Winning an international competition is usually a lot more noteworthy than winning a similar one at your school.

Perhaps the example of birth in a specific country like New Zealand isn’t a good one because there’s an important difference.

Birth in a country is not achieved but ascribed, you don’t do anything to influence it, it’s not in your hands.

But what about things that aren’t determined by fate?

If very few people have luxury cars or visit the Bahamas – does that mean these things are supposed to be impressive?

That’s usually how it seems to work.

Scarcity makes something precious because of simple economics. When supply is low, price tends to be high. That’s the effect on its monetary value – which is the price in the market.

Social value or status probably follows the same trend. When something becomes more common, it tends to become less impressive to people. It’s no longer exclusive, it’s tainted by the masses.

I remember when foreign vacations and fancy cars used to be something people gushed about; many still do, but it’s not the same anymore. Give it a couple of decades, and space travel will go through the same cycle.

Intrinsic Worth

But what about the converse? If something isn’t rare, does it mean it’s not valuable?

I don’t believe that.

There’s something to be said for intrinsic worth. The value of a thing – independent of anything else.

This value isn’t simply monetary – it’s more than the ‘price’ it fetches in the market.

It’s also not social – it doesn’t depend on what people think about it.

If a billion people wrote great books every year, it doesn’t mean that writing something good is worth any less just because a lot of people can do it or have done it.

Monetarily though, it would mean books sell for less because there’s such a glut in the market. And socially, it’d be much less impressive to be an author when every other guy calls himself one too.

This applies to any skill, business or job – even if, hypothetically, billions of people could learn to play soccer amazingly, or run huge businesses or come up with original research – why should any of these achievements lose their worth?

Eventually most things lose their rarity because more and more people succeed in doing them – partly because people get better at it, and partly because technology and the environment make it easier.

Climbing an 8000m high mountain or running a four minute mile a century ago was almost unheard of, considered the peak of human ability – today they’re not.

Rarity is therefore a diminishing quantity.

Rarity as a Signal

All these examples actually seem to weaken the argument rather than strengthen it.

Writing well, playing well, coming up with something new – all of these are rare things.

I said that If hypothetically they lose their rarity, they should retain their intrinsic worth – but the fact remains that in reality, they are rare.

There probably is a strong negative correlation between the probability of an event and its value. It’s not a perfect relationship, but you’d find them strongly correlated if you plotted a regression.

The lower the probability, the higher the value – in general.

Something rarer is more likely to be more impressive, because if it wasn’t rare, many people would have done it.

And if many people have done it, it’s perhaps easy to do.

And if it’s easy to do, then you begin to wonder what the fuss is about.

The usual ‘correlation does not imply causation‘ holds here too, but for some reason it still took me a while to see through.

I think that’s because here the causation is very strongly taken for granted. So in simple words, being rare doesn’t make something valuable, but it’s a very good signal that it’s likely to be valuable.

Exceptions

Since rarity and value aren’t perfectly related, there are exceptions – things that are common but impressive, and things that are rare but not impressive.

Skills and traits could belong in the first category. Financial literacy, physical fitness, reasoning power, proficiency in any field, punctuality – in some environments, these are almost the norm, but that doesn’t make them unimpressive.

The second category, something rare but not impressive, is more complicated.

Because rarity can be natural as well as artificial.

Something that’s naturally rare is so because it really is difficult – like creating a new product or publishing original thoughts.

Natural rareness is probably a much better indicator of worth, even if it diminishes with time.

Whereas something that’s artificially rare is because people have made it that way on purpose.

A gatekeeper creates artificiality in two ways.

One, by restricting the number of people who get through – like a publisher who accepts only one in a hundred books, or a company that hires only fifty people a year.

Two, by defining the parameters to win the game.

A test that’s not artificial – like running a marathon or solving a physics problem – shouldn’t depend on your beliefs, only your abilities. It doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative, an atheist or theist – it’s as hard or as easy regardless.

Whereas, if it’s artificial, it’s easy to game because it’s subjective – by which I mean it depends on opinions or beliefs rather than facts or abilities.

The more subjective, the worse, because it becomes easier to give the gatekeeper what he wants, like a teacher who awards more marks to those who answer conforming to his beliefs, or a recruiter who prefers candidates from his college.

The best example of this is the selection process for admissions to colleges and jobs.

You ask people to do something – answer a bunch of questions someone thought of or talk well in an interview- and restrict the number of those who get through.

You create rarity simply because you reject over 99% of people.

Therefore people assume that if you are among the few who get through, it’s because you’re special. It’s such a strong belief that if you try to deny it, it’s put down as modesty, either genuine or affected.

But it doesn’t change the fact that all you really did was answer a bunch of questions…

This is a pretty unpopular opinion because almost no one likes it.

Since these tests have a very high rejection rate, it splits people into two categories – those who clear, and those who don’t. The second category is hundreds of times as numerous as the first.

Now if you’re in the first category, this says that you haven’t really done anything special, even if people around you believe you have. And perhaps you’re not as special as people make you believe you are. So you probably wouldn’t like hearing it.

And if you’re in the second category – which is much more likely because it’s much bigger than the first – this can sound even more insulting.

Here you are trying and perhaps failing at something, and someone comes along and says that even if you succeed you shouldn’t think you’ve achieved anything great. That’s probably how it’ll be misinterpreted.

For those who don’t take it personally – what this really means is that clearing (or failing) such a test doesn’t count for anything – it’s what, if anything, you do after clearing (or failing) it that matters.

Of course, the irony of this coming from myself is inescapable. I’d lose pretty much my entire readership if people thought this way.

Although I don’t see it as self-contradictory. It’s not in my hands who reads or why. I only write, and I don’t write about what I believe doesn’t have real worth.