[vvxzpztp] gatekeeping balance

an organization which restricts membership too much will die from lack of members.

an organization which is too lax in restricting membership will die from internal strife among members.  perhaps members leave because they don't want to be part of an organization that would have as a member someone they don't like.

it is already a tricky balancing act.  but it is actually even more difficult:

the distribution of characteristics of applicants changes over time, so membership criteria must in turn adapt to avoid the two bad outcomes above.

the distribution of characteristics of applicants may change due to truly exogenous reasons, or due to competition with other organizations competing for the same applicants.  this is game theory, because your organization's membership decisions may influence the existence and behavior of competitors.

as an alternative to changing membership criteria, an organization can also internally change to avoid the bad two outcomes above: adapt to function effectively with fewer members, or deploy mechanisms to prevent internal conflict.

many gatekeeping mechanisms such as those in courtship or employment probably attempt to measure self-qi.  however, the distribution of self-qi among applicants might change over time, so rituals and procedures for measuring and filtering by applicants' self-qi must change to match.  along with that, applicants are all the time trying to game the system, trying to fool measurements of self-qi.