The halo effect tends to arise when self-confidence is lacking.
A lack of self-confidence often appears in the early stages of a social or market transition. It is an instinctive, System 1 style judgment that tries to secure stability in rapidly changing situations.
It is one way of looking outside oneself for something that can provide relative certainty in an unfamiliar domain. But as the saying goes, putting internal problems onto external things only creates a short-term solution that ends with a new problem.
Just as IBM and HP came before Apple, and Google or Apple before OpenAI, many societies, organizations, and individuals respond to transitional periods by collecting people who ranked highly under the metrics of the previous era, then quickly benchmarking the culture and outputs familiar to them in order to move faster toward competitive advantage.
At some point, situations begin to appear that seem obvious in the news or in market conditions, not yet directly visible to the eye, but still somewhat predictable. Yet in practice, organizations and individuals often feel there is little they can actually do. It ends up resembling a situation like Ford before the engine, when instead of building engines or redesigning the process, many groups simply hire more coachmen, raise more horses, and pile more hay in the warehouse because it feels more rational and measurable.
But is that really the best decision? If you cannot build the engine yet, would it not be better to start thinking from zero about related areas such as tires, seats, horns, lighting, gas stations, traffic signals, or asphalt?
Perhaps the cause of this phenomenon is becoming absorbed only in what, not why. And perhaps the cause of that absorption lies less in individual weakness than in the fierce, or perhaps simply inertial, competitive mindset of a given society or organization.
In ruthless competition, efficiency comes first. Cheat sheets, seven principles, and endless formulaic answers turn questions without answers into questions with narrow approved answers. Then a league of its own begins, complete with recognition and reward inside a temporary ecosystem built during the opening phase of transition.
At that point, the halo effect moves beyond individual bias toward a past halo and becomes a stage of both individual and group bias.
And bias eventually gathers similar people around similar values, leading them to produce similar outcomes that feel efficient, rational, and mutually affirming.
I happened to think of this again while reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, then The Project About Thinking, and then recalling Moneyball one more time.
That is all.
At present, the fragility of responses to global issues, and the entropy around fixed specs, is already reaching its limit.
Megastructure theorist KC Houseman, played by John Bradley, had a deep interest in space and especially in the moon. He was not actually a doctor. He simply worked part-time cleaning professors' offices at a university and picked up information about the moon as a hobby. One day he realized something was different from usual and was deeply shocked. The moon's orbit had changed.
KC Houseman keeps insisting that "the moon was made artificially," but nobody listens. Then Harper eventually comes to know Houseman and things begin to shift. The story lingers because it resembles how weak signals are often ignored until systems are already moving too late to respond.
Just a thought, that is all.
