There definitely are organizations/people/circles that are better in some aspects (be it hardworking, or rational, or knowledgeable, or savvy) than others.

I think this is harder to see if you grew up in a nice area, with educated upper-middle class parents, and followed the traditional college->office jobs path. Or conversely, it’s hard to see if you didn’t grow up in that kind of life but were never appreciably immersed in it. We have a social contract that strongly discourages punching down so I’m trying to be delicate here… but if you spend a significant amount of time with poorer people you find that negative personality traits (to the point of being pathological and actively harmful) are much more common outside of relatively “elite” circles than within.

Any sort of institution that is “picky”, including most good jobs, naturally selects against moderate-severely negative personality traits. If someone shirks all responsibility or work they’re unlikely to have a meaningful career unless a family member swings them a sinecure. If someone is overly confrontational or aggressive they’ll get fired from their jobs. If someone is unable to take blame or accept feedback they’ll never develop appreciable skills. By all means I’m not saying well-off/famous/affluent/accomplished people are all virtuous or good people, simply that those who do so on their own merit typically as a group lack major personality flaws, which actually may resemble something of an “inner-ring” to those who grew up/live outside those circles where those traits are more common.

I think we pretty much agree!

For context, I grew up in a "ring" that was quite inner in a global sense but quite middling or even outer in a local sense.

I've been in several inner rings since, and they were disappointing. Not in the sense of the people inside of them being hostile (maybe some were, but these were chaotic and short-lived), but more... anti-social, but not in a way that they're self-conscious of? IDK if this makes sense.

I've found picky institutions select for people who crave selection from picky institutions and getting their own. This means the people are generally hardworking and savvy, but not necessarily conscientious. I agree they lack "major personality flaws" but, I know this is trite, they tend to lack personality (goals, identity, culture, hobbies, deep & meaningful relationships) altogether. Every interaction is a transaction.

I'm open to the idea that my sample's unrepresentative. But I guess at this stage in my life/career of meeting people, I've decided it might be more long-term productive to follow the advice in the end of the essay, and build what I'm looking for instead.

I guess my conclusion is that there's diminishing returns to going inner? At a certain point, you have more to gain by building your own "inner". This is probably extra true if you were blessed to be born relatively-inner? I think this may be one interpretation of the essay, and it rhymes with my experience so far.

Trait's may be interrupted as attribute sliders, but people aren't judged that way. They are judged by the summation of their traits, and often they posses traits that counterbalance each other. I know plenty of people who shirk work, but they also have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, so they might not work very hard but they are still useful to a group. I know people who take no blame and don't accept feedback, but still manage to develop key skills that get them promoted (ability to deflect blame does seem correlated with long term corporate success).

Smaller organizations seem to expose negative traits quicker, but as long as you find your herd, you can be perfectly mediocre and still have an upper middle class life.

Now if someone has all those traits, life may really suck for them. I also know people who fall under that umbrella.

> For me, personally, it was quite depressing & disillusioning to recognize that there is no "inner ring" where the people populating it are magically "better" (more rational, of stronger character, whatever) than the people outside, and that in fact "innerness" is more often inversely correlated with those qualities.

Not in my experience, real decision makers do behave somewhat better, on average, then the median person, if you tally up all their virtues and vices.

It's not a very steep improvement, but it is noticeable.

Of course the median person will likely never meet more then a few, so even a somewhat lower fraction of bad apples can easily cause a similarly negative perception.

I think it's less the decision-maker and more the ring that's built around the decision-maker.

It's also true in my experience that decision-makers are often pretty solid. Decision-making is its own craft, many CEO/VP-type people take that craft very seriously.

But, unless the person in question has spent a significant amount of time and effort in forming their own "society", the "default" rings that accrete around these people are pretty awful.

Agreed that the bad apples are more frequently sampled in the media, and it distorts perception of the overall population. But I do think it's the default state of human nature for great power to (eventually) attract great grift and lose its raison d'être – you see it all over history.

The 'ring that's built around the decision-maker' is still, on average, better than the median person.

But it generally is very unevenly distributed in any single, concrete, individual, so that it may appear to be worse depending on perspective.

e.g. A bonafide super-genius with a lot of unfortunate personality traits. Such that they can't really be considered that great, just somewhat above average.