Two Kinds of Judgement
Paul Graham distinguishes two types of judgment: one where accurate evaluation is the goal (exams, court cases), and another where judgment is merely a means to select a set (college admissions, hiring, dating). The latter is not about you personally. Recognizing this helps depersonalize rejection and encourages proactive behavior rather than passive acceptance.
There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't.
人们评判你的方式有两种。有时，正确评判你是最终目的。但还有第二种更常见的类型——评判并非目的。我们倾向于把所有的评判都当作第一种。如果能意识到哪些是、哪些不是，我们可能会更快乐。
The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there's usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you've been misjudged, you can protest that you've been treated unfairly. Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements are.
第一种评判类型，即评判你是最终目的，包括法庭判决、课堂成绩和大多数竞赛。这类评判当然可能出错，但由于目标是正确评判你，通常会有某种申诉渠道。如果你觉得被错判，可以抗议受到不公平对待。几乎对儿童的所有评判都属于这种类型，因此我们从小便习惯认为所有评判都是如此。
But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you. Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team. Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a game with no positions, and that you have to select 20 players. There will be a few stars who clearly should make the team, and many players who clearly shouldn't. The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the borderline cases. Suppose you screw up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him not to make the team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best. You've still picked a good team. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best. Probably the difference between them will be less than the measurement error. The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. But your goal here wasn't to provide a service estimating people's ability. It was to pick a team, and if the difference between the 20th and 21st best players is less than the measurement error, you've still done that optimally. It's a false analogy even to use the word unfair to describe this kind of misjudgement. It's not aimed at producing a correct estimate of any given individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set.
但事实上，还有第二种更广泛的评判类型，其中评判你只是达成其他目的的手段。这些包括大学录取、招聘和投资决策，当然还有约会中的评判。这类评判并非真正关于你。设想你是在为国家队选拔球员。为简化起见，假设这项运动没有位置之分，你需要选出20名球员。会有少数明星明显该入选，许多球员明显不该入选。你的评判唯一产生差异的地方是在边缘案例。假设你搞砸了，低估了第20名球员，导致他未能入选，而他的位置被第21名取代。你仍然选出了一支好球队。如果球员的能力呈通常分布，第21名球员只比第20名略差。两者之间的差异可能小于测量误差。第20名球员可能觉得被错判了。但你的目标不是提供能力评估服务，而是挑选一支球队。如果第20名和第21名之间的差异小于测量误差，你依然最优地完成了任务。用“不公平”来形容这种错判甚至是一种错误的类比。它的目的不是对任何特定个体给出正确估计，而是选出一个基本最优的集合。
One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.
让我们误入歧途的一点是，选择者似乎处于权力地位。这让他看起来像法官。如果你把评判你的人看作顾客而非法官，公平的期待就消失了。一本好小说的作者不会抱怨读者不公平，因为他们更喜欢封面火辣的畅销书。愚蠢，也许，但不公平。
Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. In fact most aren't. This is a rare case where being less self-centered will make people more confident. Once you realize how little most people judging you care about judging you accurately—once you realize that because of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. And curiously enough, taking rejection less personally may help you to get rejected less often. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge you correctly, you can afford to be passive. But the more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome. One good place to apply this principle is in college applications. Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual child's mix of inferiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in that they assume that admissions committees must be all-seeing; self-centeredness in that they assume admissions committees care enough about them to dig down into their application and figure out whether they're good or not. These combine to make applicants passive in applying and hurt when they're rejected. If college applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes are, they'd make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome less personally.
我们早期的训练和以自我为中心共同作用，让我们相信每次对我们的评判都是关于我们的。事实上，大多数并非如此。这是一个罕见的例子：少些自我中心反而会让人更自信。一旦你意识到大多数评判你的人并不在乎准确评判你——一旦你意识到，由于大多数申请人池符合正态分布，恰恰在评判影响最大的边缘案例中，准确评判最不重要——你就不会那么个人化地对待拒绝。而奇怪的是，不那么个人化地对待拒绝可能帮助你减少被拒绝的次数。如果你认为评判你的人会努力正确评判你，你可以采取被动的态度。但你越意识到大多数评判深受随机、无关因素的影响——大多数评判你的人更像一个善变的买书者，而不是明智敏锐的法官——你就越意识到你可以做些事情来影响结果。一个应用这个原则的好地方是大学申请。大多数申请大学的高中生带着典型的儿童式的自卑和以自我中心：自卑在于他们假设招生委员会全知全能；自我中心在于他们假设招生委员会足够关心他们，会深入挖掘他们的申请并判断他们是否优秀。这些因素结合起来，使申请者被动申请，并在被拒时受伤。如果大学申请者意识到大多数选拔过程是多么快速和非个人化，他们会更努力地推销自己，并且不那么个人化地看待结果。