And *poof*, a whole new pile of stupid awards appears

[jducoeur]

*Sigh*. I suppose I knew that the East would eventually follow so many other Kingdoms in adding Yet Another Freaking Layer of Awards. But man, I so don't approve -- with every passing year, the award system becomes simply an enormous list of merit badges. Their Majesties are good people, and well-intentioned, but IMO this is a significant mistake, that will do more harm than good.

OTOH, I suppose it's self-correcting: we're pretty much getting to the point where nobody has any ideas what the awards mean any more, so they're becoming irrelevant. (I mean, *I* can't remember a lot of them any more, and I'm a court junkie.) More and more people, far as I can tell, are coming to regard the award system as Just Plain Stupid, which does leave room to convince them to ignore the whole idiotic morass and concentrate on the game instead.

(Yes, I know -- I've lost this particular battle, and I have better things to do than beat the dead horse. But I'm going to allow myself one good grouse first...)

Comments

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Chacun à son goût - I was in for a decade before my AoA, and more than two decades before my peerage, so any conversation about "now it takes too long to get awards" kind of slides right by me. A number of people I know got AoAs after more than fifteen years, and a number of other people I know got Laurels after about five - I am unconvinced that there aren't a lot of fluky factors in play.

I also think that conceiving of the metric as "time-to-peerage" is not particularly useful - not everyone gets to peerage, not everyone wants to get to peerage, not everyone is well-suited to getting to peerage. (I fully expected to wait a lot longer than I did, actually, and quite possibly not get there, and was totally fine with that.) Just because there is a *possible* endpoint doesn't mean it's where everyone wants or needs to go. I think a lot of the happy people that I have directly spoken to are looking at the middle, not the end, and I believe their happiness is valid and appropriate.

[jducoeur]

I am unconvinced that there aren't a lot of fluky factors in play.

Oh, there's no question that the system is *very* arbitrary and whimsical, often in unpleasant ways -- that's the way it's set up, for better and worse. But that's why I find actual statistics much more interesting than anecdote: the trend lines tell us a lot more than individual stories. And those statistics are pretty compelling: we are making the system ever-harder, setting the brass rings ever further away. (The temptation to make jokes about Doppler shift here are strong, but thoroughly OOP.)

IMO, that's incredibly *dumb* of us, as a small-s society, and it undermines the entire point of the award system, which was to encourage people. Instead, my observation is that the system tends to do more to discourage them at this point. It really needs a serious overhaul instead of these patches, and I find it deeply depressing that there is essentially no way for that to ever happen, for a variety of reasons...