  We prove that the join of two sets may actually fall into a lower level of
the extended low hierarchy than either of the sets. In particular, there exist
sets that are not in the second level of the extended low hierarchy, EL_2, yet
their join is in EL_2. That is, in terms of extended lowness, the join operator
can lower complexity. Since in a strong intuitive sense the join does not lower
complexity, our result suggests that the extended low hierarchy is unnatural as
a complexity measure. We also study the closure properties of EL_ and prove
that EL_2 is not closed under certain Boolean operations. To this end, we
establish the first known (and optimal) EL_2 lower bounds for certain notions
generalizing Selman's P-selectivity, which may be regarded as an interesting
result in its own right.
