You should judge others on a curve, and probably yourself as well.
Judging others on a curve means that folks see reward for doing more than what is typical. This is just good reinforcement-learning theory, since it is easy to get both feedback on rewarded & not-rewarded actions.
I started writing this thinking that you should NOT judge yourself on a curve, in contrast. IE, you know much more about your own circumstances, and so pretending you are average throws away info. For example, if I only gave 5% of my income to charity, that would be above average for the US. But my opportunities are amazing, and so 5% would in reality show low effort.
But actually, I was just using the wrong comparison group! I shouldn’t compare myself to a big group of other people. I have a near perfect comparison group in my past self. If I did a better job this week than last week at work, that’s a great sign! If my one-rep max for benchpress has gone down over the last month, that’s a bad sign!
You should judge others on a curve, and probably yourself as well.
Judging others on a curve means that folks see reward for doing more than what is typical. This is just good reinforcement-learning theory, since it is easy to get both feedback on rewarded & not-rewarded actions.
I started writing this thinking that you should NOT judge yourself on a curve, in contrast. IE, you know much more about your own circumstances, and so pretending you are average throws away info. For example, if I only gave 5% of my income to charity, that would be above average for the US. But my opportunities are amazing, and so 5% would in reality show low effort.
But actually, I was just using the wrong comparison group! I shouldn’t compare myself to a big group of other people. I have a near perfect comparison group in my past self. If I did a better job this week than last week at work, that’s a great sign! If my one-rep max for benchpress has gone down over the last month, that’s a bad sign!
This all feels obvious in retrospect.