Gatekeepers and Fertile Ground

Some guy wanted to make Adobe houses and he spent a year or two checking out properties. He would go to a property and get a sample of the soil on the property and fly with a briefcase full of soil samples to an expert to look at his soil samples. 

He made multiple trips and initially just got told "Nope. This is not it." When the expert said "Yes, that's the kind of soil you need to make Adobe houses" he bought the land that sample was from and went into business.

If the expert had said "yes" earlier merely to please him, his business would have failed. He needed an honest assessment of the soil quality. Was this "fertile soil" for making adobe houses?

If someone is something like an engineer or materials scientist giving their professional opinion on soils or "Will this dam hold water?", some people genuinely want to know what they really think. Not always. You certainly hear about dam projects that failed and the backstory includes blowing off the dire warnings of all the experts in question.

But generally speaking, people doing more "sciency" jobs seem to get more respect for their professional opinion than people in jobs that get described as art rather than science. 

The king's stamp doesn't make the gold good. People tend to have more respect for that when it involves gravity and safety and lives are clearly on the line, enough so that videos that cover the incidents where they ignored the engineer and the dam failed and people died tend to talk a lot about political corruption and they are very openly critical of "They just ignored the warnings of the experts. This was avoidable."

Then you get into something a little more nebulous and more social and experts in those areas get enormous flak from the entire world about the whole thing.

Some little bitch who worked for Anna Wintour wrote The Devil Wears Prada and the character loosely inspired by Wintour is some awful bitch. Someone did a documentary called The September Issue probably looking to capture the genuine thing on film and ultimately shifted the focus of the film away from Wintour and onto other things because Wintour is nothing like Miranda Priestly.

Do people shake in their boots when Anna Wintour asks a question? Absolutely. But not because she's trying to hand them their head on a platter for sadistic funsies.

She's just doing her job. She's trying to assess them and because she's knowledgeable, "giving her blessing" is something people want and her disapproval is something people fear.

If she likes it, they're in the money. If she doesn't, doors will slam shut based on her word.

She's in some sense doing the exact same thing as the soils scientist assessing if the soil samples were the right kind of soil for making adobe houses but other people don't see it that way.

The author of The Devil Wears Prada clearly has no idea what Anna Wintour actually does or why people freak out if she frowns.

A clip I saw from The September Issue suggests to me that Wintour is extremely polite and tries hard to not upset people, but she can't do her job without getting the truth from them and they don't know what she's looking for and don't understand how this works. They have bad mental models about this whole thing.

Most parents on planet Earth raise their children with either a shame model or a guilt model. They try to emotionally manipulate kids into behaving the way they want and then they grow up, go into fashion and now Anna Wintour has to deal with their childhood baggage from their incompetent, abusive mother making them terrified of a female authority figure frowning at them.

And then she gets dragged like she did something wrong and gets maligned by people imagining she's cruel and hateful. 

Medicine gets described as more art than science. When some physician had a track record of referring patients for testing for some STD earlier than usual and being consistently right but couldn't tell anyone how he knew, they put two physicians in the room with him to try to see what he saw.

This led to the identification of a new, subtle symptom, the eye flutter, that appears earlier than other symptoms.

Experts can't always tell you what they are seeing. They frequently "go with their gut" and no one puts two experts in the room with them to figure out what they see.

Someone like Anna Wintour has no peers and other people who have some hope of having something resembling her depth of knowledge about fashion and publishing and marketing and whatever else is critical to her job are all other fashion editors and they are her competitors. 

They don't grab coffee and make casual chit chat and talk about stuff that might lead to one of them having an epiphany akin to "AHA! You're RIGHT! It's the EYE FLUTTER they all have in common!"

It's inherently hard to talk about or prove "artsy" stuff in a rigorous fashion. If you study soils, the soils don't decide to behave differently because you are watching and they know it. But if you study people and highly social stuff, like fashion, it's a moving target and people behave differently under study conditions than under real world conditions.

They've done pilot programs for UBI and concluded "It doesn't lead to people quitting their jobs in droves! Fears that this might be the outcome are unfounded!"

Yeah, people don't quit their job knowing your pilot program is temporary and they cannot count on this money continuing indefinitely. That says nothing meaningful about what they would do if you actually promised them free money for life.

Planet Earth pressures people Anna Wintour and tries to get them to give a thing their blessing knowing if they like it, others will think it's valuable and invest money in it or buy it.

But the king's stamp doesn't make the gold good. Their opinion is valuable because they know gold when they see it.

When you insist they declare something gold so you can make a fortune, it means a bunch of people will get burned when they buy Fool's Gold for far too much money.

It will not likely lead to long-term success of the person selling Fool's Gold. People will figure it out.

It will destroy the value position of Anna Wintour whose opinion will no longer be useful for determining what's gold and what's not. She's only powerful as long as her gatekeeping role adds value for all of society and she doesn't allow people to pressure her into misusing her position to enrich a few assholes who want to make a quick buck.

So what people like Anna Wintour do is serve as something like a soils scientist telling you "That's the right kind of soil from which you can build an adobe house that doesn't fall down." 

And never mind you are trying to build a house of style, not adobe, and you are some IDIOT who imagines clothing is a matter of taste and there's no accounting for taste and it's all a matter of opinion and for no real underlying reason or value position, if certain gatekeepers are personally fond of you, your career is in the bag.

That's not how that works. Gatekeepers are gatekeepers because their opinion is a value sorting mechanism for fields more mysterious and nebulous than "What kind of soil is good for adobe houses?"

If they don't perform that function, the world stops caring what they think. And then getting their blessing is completely worthless because no one cares anymore what they say about anything.

They judge something like "This is fertile ground for X business." And then if they are venture capitalists, they try to tell you "But you also need to weed and water and use pesticide." 

Because it's a complex process and fertile ground alone isn't sufficient to guarantee success, people wildly misinterpret the whole thing and imagine that these people are something like a form of free advertising for your project. 

So rather than wanting their honest feedback about what's working and what's not, they want to pressure such people into saying only nice things about them and this is extremely problematic for the gatekeeper being treated personally badly and also actively damaging to the value of the function they really perform.

Footnote 

The way to bet is Miranda Priestly is a self insert. It's the author of The Devil Wears Prada telling you a whole lot about what an awful person she is and her fantasy of how wonderful it would be to have the kind of power Anna Wintour has and then use it to be petty and hurtful because that seems fun to her.

It's not a good faith attempt to document what Anna Wintour is really like by any stretch of the imagination. And it's not a book that really captures how the fashion industry works.