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, EL₂, yet their join is in EL₂. 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 EL₂ and prove that EL₂ is not closed under certain Boolean operations. To this end, we establish the first known (and optimal) EL₂ lower bounds for certain notions generalizing P-selectivity, which may be regarded as an interesting result in its own right.