Split by Personalities

The power of personality is tremendously important in the marketing of everything - from political ideology to pop music. However, this can lead to a number of problems.

Max Weber described these factors in his works on authority (1994).  His category of charismatic authority, looked at the power of personality in leadership - where support for movements or ideas, and the choices people make about these things, is governed by the personal qualities of candidates.

The issues created by 'personality' go far beyond politics. It has also caused problems within scientific communities. In certain scientific fields criticism has been levelled over the way credit is assigned for the completion of certain projects (Aaronson et al, 2008) - and research has delved into the reasons for the development of unfairly lopsided 'credit allocation' (Kleinberg & Oren, 2011).

The problem of credit, of acclaim and celebrity, is its value - both monetarily and in terms of the status gained within a community.

The risks this presents go beyond the motivations behind the actions of individuals, to the attempts of outside observers to decipher issues - whose window on the complicated ideas is often those famous in their field. The fame of these 'personalities', while it can generate attention for the field of study, can also obscure important information.

And there are always additional dangers when you engage with something because of the people involved, rather than directly with the facts - as much for them as for yourself. As author John Green (2008) put it in his novel Paper Towns:

'What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person'

Addressing issues on the basis of personality is an oversimplification. It is too simple and too easy to defer to an authority - whether that be a dogma, a canon or an authority figure.

People can never live up to that sort of scrutiny. What's more, it is unreasonable to let ideas stand or fall with people's reputations, rather than upon their own reasoned merits.

And here lies the problem of being moved by personality - it perverts reasoning and risks setting up dangerous authority figures.

The presence of strong authorities in all areas, and the importance of credit in the achievement of funding and security for those engaged in fields of intellectual study, all but assures the continuation of this problem for the present. But we must remain wary - and maintain vigilance against allowing our admiration to confuse attempts to get to the facts.

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References:
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+ Max Weber's 'Basic Concepts in Sociology'; Chp 4, Pt 4: Bases of Legitimate Order; Citadel 1994.

+ Scott Aaronson, Allan Borodin, Bernard Chazelle, Oded Goldreich, Shafi Goldwasser, Richard Karp, Michael Kearns, Christos Papadimitriou, Madhu Sudan & Salil Vadhan; 'Statement on conceptual contributions in theory'; on scottaaronson.com; 7 March 2008.

+ J.Kleinberg & S.Oren's 'Mechanisms for (Mis)Allocating Scientific Credit'; Proc. 43rd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing; 2011.

+ John Green's 'Paper Towns'; Bloomsbury, 2008.