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"Merit" is not a quantifiable characteristic. All your plan would do is give the power to the people who define "merit." It's like you're advocating for corre
by stonogo 9y ago
"Merit" is not a quantifiable characteristic. All your plan would do is give the power to the people who define "merit."
It's like you're advocating for correctpersonocracy. Put another way, literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy.
The actual word 'meritocracy' comes from a book that warned about the dangers of creating easily-gamed draconian systems that needlessly exclude people from the process of governing. I wish as many people would read the book as use the word.
- ffreire 9y agoAnd by book you are referring to "The Rise of Meritocracy"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology
- tome 9y agoUndoubtedly
- mpweiher 9y ago> "Merit" is not a quantifiable characteristic. It's not? What are SAT scores, school grades, entrance exams for the civil service, election results, income etc.? I would say that these are all ways for society to quantify merit. Did you mean perfectly accurately? > literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy. Nope. Most governments used to call themselves monarchies and would have bristled at the idea that they'd have to somehow demonstrate merit to justify their power. Their power was justified by heredity, and in fact, I'd think that if you suggested that they needed to do demonstrate their merit, you might end up short a head. > The book Yep. Have to admit I didn't read it, but I did read what the author wrote: "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit." What he objects to is the following: "It is the opposite [of good] when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." So merit-based selection: good. Ossified class system: bad. I think Trump, May and Johnson are ample evidence that we leave plenty of room for the incompetent to get a chance at the reins, even if we generally try to organize ourselves by merit. And so exactly the fact that we can't quantify merit with perfect accuracy, and have multiple domains, helps us avoid the problems Young mentions, though here as elsewhere we aren't at all perfect.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- naeemtee 9y agoYour comment just proved the other guys point. You name drop a few politicians for not having "merit" because you disagree with them.
- fineline 9y agoI haven't read it (yet) but it was described and exerted in a recent BBC podcast on voting patterns in Brexit/Trump elections: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tcvp4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tcvp4 Some interesting people interviewed and points raised.
- njarboe 9y agoI think I like a new phrase/idea I heard from Jordan Peterson recently. "Hierarchies of competency". This seems to me like a better idea of how society can arrange itself. Society needs to be able to have different people have different amounts of power in different domains, but those hierarchies don't have to be built on violence and raw power. Maybe "hierarchies of competency" could be a stable, positive way to organize at least some parts of society.
- marcus_holmes 9y agoCompetency in what? The best person to make decisions may not be the best person to talk about those decisions in front of a camera, or the best person to inspire confidence in those decisions in a nation of (by definition) less-competent people who (again by definition) would have made the decision differently.
- mpweiher 9y agoYep, any way you have of measuring competency is going to be inadequate and subject to gaming. And it may be exactly the fact that you can't measure it accurately that makes it not "harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
- njarboe 9y agoWell, for example, take the medical profession. There are of course many problems with how doctors are trained and licensed. The AMA might do well with a shake up. But in America you are not getting a license to practice without demonstrating a huge amount of skill, dedication, and competence. Your cousin who is already a doctor doesn't just get to say, "You are in". Or you just have to pay some large amount of money to the right person.
- marcus_holmes 9y agoum.. it costs a LOT of money to become a doctor in America.
- rimliu 9y agoDo you really want dumb people in the process of governing? I think we had enough already.