6 ms·

It is definitely inequitable. However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups. This cuts directly to the heart of

by Qworg 8y ago

It is definitely inequitable. However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups. This cuts directly to the heart of the meritocracy argument (most strongly in technology, but it exists everywhere): how can you claim that everyone is judged by their merits (directly related to how hard they work and how smart they train themselves to be) when being lucky (in genetics, in birth, in support and growth, in opportunities) plays such an overwhelming role?

lend000 8y ago
Unless you're a strong believer in free will, someone who is lazy, sleazy, unintelligent, etc. (has little "merit") did not 'choose' to be born that way, or even if they say they did, they did not choose to have the nature/nurture that caused them to be the kind of person to make that 'choice.' No more than a bird chooses to eat a worm or a salmon chooses to swim upstream, anyway. We can build productive societies based on incentive structures we put around merit, such as capitalist market systems. But in reality, nothing is fair and simultaneously everything is fair. Fairness is undefinable outside of a closed system. It's just how it is. Heuristics to define merit are just forms of evolution for human society that allow more productive people to command more responsibility.
cthor 8y ago
I don't think meritocracy implies cosmic fairness. The way it's used by most hackers is to say that someone's work is judged only on its own merits, rather than the author's social status or how good they are at playing political games or anything else orthogonal to the work actually being valuable. At least, that's the ideal.
- iguy 8y ago
  Judging people on their work is partly about fair play. But it's also justified by concern for the results. A system which rewards the people doing great work will produce much more of that than a system which rewards political connections. I care quite a bit that the best cancer researchers should get hired, and the best ideas get the money -- their progress is likely to directly affect people close to me. And this is true but less obvious for almost every field... an economy where everyone was focused solely on zero-sum competitions would not grow very fast. I don't quite know what cosmic fairness means. But perhaps cosmic unfairness involves people's talents not being identical. The goal of trying to get the fastest progress against cancer does not align with the goal of trying to remedy such unfairness.
  - Qworg 8y ago
    The problem carries through time, not just at the moment you're making the decision to invest. What about the better potential cancer researcher who was left behind because their parents were poor? What about the one that decided to go learn programming because they couldn't get the exclusive internship due to lacking connections? The position that states "remedying inequity costs more than simply giving it all to the current best" is a shortsighted one.
  - Livven 8y ago
    To back up the other comment, recent studies find that students from worse secondary schools with worse grades end up outperforming students from more selective schools with better grades once in medical school. So in order to get the best doctors you can't just be all "meritocratic" by looking only at the results, i.e. grades, but have to take other factors into account. --- The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/ What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300
    - iguy 8y ago
      If our concern is with results, then we should be looking for the best predictor of results, and school type may well improve our predictions, as you say. We should aim to admit to medical school the people who'll make the best doctors at age 40, not just the people with the best scores at age 18.
tomp 8y ago
I interpret meritocracy as being judged by the outcome of your doings. If someone has IQ 10000 but spends it to dominate WoW, then... I don't see why they should be paid a lot (some other people might disagree, though). Likewise, if someone leverages their genetics, family, wealth, skills, efforts, and luck towards great outcomes (e.g. Elon Musk), then they should be rewarded, as they're meritocratically the best. To all "proponents" of "the luck argument": there are thousands of people far more lucky than Elon and Steve (born to wealthier families, smarter, better connected, etc) that didn't achieve what they have. So... luck obviously isn't the answer. Having said that, even if luck were the answer, I'd still support meritocracy, because it results in the best outcome. It's not about fairness, fundamentally - it's about creating the best society. If the only people who can do that are "the wealthy" (or whichever category you choose - most likely "the intelligent" these days), then so be it - it's best for all the rest of us if they "rule", meritocratically.
- Qworg 8y ago
  Power doesn't work like that - it accretes to those who are able to leverage it. You generate a permanent power disparity with a gloves off laissez-faire system like that. I'd worry about your definition of "best society". Is the current system an existence proof in your mind?
  - roenxi 8y ago
    I can't speak for anyone else, but when I use "best society" it is code for the following argument that gets as long and involved as there is time to explain: Human instincts and morals are really well calibrated to small-village life. I take things like the Dunbar number [1] to indicate that we are optimised for a small circle of close relationships. "Fairness" has a sister in "equality" that is very powerful force on the local scale and scales horribly, to the point where equality being scaled up is usually a warning sign of an incoming economic breakdown where everyone starves. Unfortunately, people keep trying to scale equality up because they want it in their local relationships. Talking about "permanent power disparities" touches on the same vein of thinking - we know that permanent power disparities are an inevitable feature of society. The attempts to set up societies where there are no permanent power disparities have resulted in permanent power disparities forming, and frequently going to very nasty despots. Modern western civilisation has done _extremely_ well compared to the competition by dangling systemic advantage as the reward for massively improving the industrial base and consumer access to resources. This has worked a lot better than attempts to suppress inequality under, eg, the communist systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I had a meeting with a very successful guy who is CIO at a major tech startup who was looking to acquire our company. Because we were friends for a while I said something to the effect of "I just want to make sure this doesn't look like nepotism" His response was basically, "Who cares? I love Nepotism. that means me and my friends do better and help each other out." Kind of shocked me to be honest, but after thinking about it it makes total sense. Why wouldn't you help your friends? I mean I help my friends all the time, but there seemed to be an artificial cutoff when it came to hiring and buying companies or otherwise giving them outward signs of "success." Not sure I can make a rational case against Nepotism even though it feels wrong.
- aaronblohowiak 8y ago
  If you are directing other people’s money to your family it is a disservice to those other people. If it is your own money, go nuts. Nepotism vs family business, basically.
- Qworg 8y ago
  In the societal sense, it is maladaptive - your CIO friend assumes that his friends deliver the best outcome.
  - adventured 8y ago
    That's not what the friend is assuming per the wording. The friend seems to be plainly stating they don't care if the max outcome is what is occuring or not, insofar as they all at least do better. Helping their friends out is more important than maxing out the quality of the outcome. Societally, reinforcing and protecting social trust systems may be dramatically more important than maxing out business success outcomes.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      I don’t see how that can be true. Tribally, it might be (for a small tribe in a large group). Society wide, it’s definitely bad. I don’t want a bridge built by an uncle politician who “trusts” his nephew engineer’s company. Outcomes should (and do) result in trust, not the nepotism.
perfunctory 8y ago
> However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups. This is too broad. Is it really so? I believe that we don't want to disadvantage ourselves relative to other groups. But that we want to gain advantage at somebody's else expense - not sure.
- Thriptic 8y ago
  It is absolutely so. I would much rather help a friend or group of friends do well as opposed to randoms or people I don't like. First, I like my friends and want them to be happy (and am going to be the one who hears about it when they aren't), so I have a vested interest in helping them achieve happiness and success whereas I have a weak interest in the happiness and success of randoms as we have no relationship. Second, if I can help my friends become happy and successful, they become better able to help me become happy and successful (by pooling resources, providing advice, providing introductions, creating mutually beneficial opportunities, creating happiness by spending time with me, providing trust and facilitating vulnerability, providing capital or expertise etc). This sets up a positive feedback loop and creates strong ROI for my efforts. I get net negative ROI from helping a random (assuming no relationship will develop and I expend time or funds) so it's far less likely that I will use my scarce time and resources to do it. The entire world runs on relationships, favors, and reputation.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    How do you know that's not a cultural norm you learned? Blanket pronunciations on human nature tell me more about you than anyone else.
    - Thriptic 8y ago
      I'm fully willing to admit that there may be functional cultures in the world which frown upon showing preference to friends or family at the expense of random people. I've yet to see any of them though.
      - 8y ago
mcguire 8y ago
There was an article posted here recently about the originator of the term "meritocracy". He wasn't entirely positive about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179583 From one of my comments: That's the weird part: “I.Q. + effort = merit” sounds pretty positive, right? But, "A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations." The intended result doesn't sound very appealing. Then there was this quote: "Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts,” and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again…. If they have been labeled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”" That sounds familiar. "But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring.” And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “I.Q. + effort = merit.”" And so does that.

by Qworg 8y ago

lend000 8y ago

Unless you're a strong believer in free will, someone who is lazy, sleazy, unintelligent, etc. (has little "merit") did not 'choose' to be born that way, or even if they say they did, they did not choose to have the nature/nurture that caused them to be the kind of person to make that 'choice.' No more than a bird chooses to eat a worm or a salmon chooses to swim upstream, anyway. We can build productive societies based on incentive structures we put around merit, such as capitalist market systems. But in reality, nothing is fair and simultaneously everything is fair. Fairness is undefinable outside of a closed system. It's just how it is. Heuristics to define merit are just forms of evolution for human society that allow more productive people to command more responsibility.

cthor 8y ago

I don't think meritocracy implies cosmic fairness. The way it's used by most hackers is to say that someone's work is judged only on its own merits, rather than the author's social status or how good they are at playing political games or anything else orthogonal to the work actually being valuable. At least, that's the ideal.

iguy 8y ago
Judging people on their work is partly about fair play. But it's also justified by concern for the results. A system which rewards the people doing great work will produce much more of that than a system which rewards political connections. I care quite a bit that the best cancer researchers should get hired, and the best ideas get the money -- their progress is likely to directly affect people close to me. And this is true but less obvious for almost every field... an economy where everyone was focused solely on zero-sum competitions would not grow very fast. I don't quite know what cosmic fairness means. But perhaps cosmic unfairness involves people's talents not being identical. The goal of trying to get the fastest progress against cancer does not align with the goal of trying to remedy such unfairness.
- Qworg 8y ago
  The problem carries through time, not just at the moment you're making the decision to invest. What about the better potential cancer researcher who was left behind because their parents were poor? What about the one that decided to go learn programming because they couldn't get the exclusive internship due to lacking connections? The position that states "remedying inequity costs more than simply giving it all to the current best" is a shortsighted one.
- Livven 8y ago
  To back up the other comment, recent studies find that students from worse secondary schools with worse grades end up outperforming students from more selective schools with better grades once in medical school. So in order to get the best doctors you can't just be all "meritocratic" by looking only at the results, i.e. grades, but have to take other factors into account. --- The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/ What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300
  - iguy 8y ago
    If our concern is with results, then we should be looking for the best predictor of results, and school type may well improve our predictions, as you say. We should aim to admit to medical school the people who'll make the best doctors at age 40, not just the people with the best scores at age 18.

tomp 8y ago

I interpret meritocracy as being judged by the outcome of your doings. If someone has IQ 10000 but spends it to dominate WoW, then... I don't see why they should be paid a lot (some other people might disagree, though). Likewise, if someone leverages their genetics, family, wealth, skills, efforts, and luck towards great outcomes (e.g. Elon Musk), then they should be rewarded, as they're meritocratically the best. To all "proponents" of "the luck argument": there are thousands of people far more lucky than Elon and Steve (born to wealthier families, smarter, better connected, etc) that didn't achieve what they have. So... luck obviously isn't the answer. Having said that, even if luck were the answer, I'd still support meritocracy, because it results in the best outcome. It's not about fairness, fundamentally - it's about creating the best society. If the only people who can do that are "the wealthy" (or whichever category you choose - most likely "the intelligent" these days), then so be it - it's best for all the rest of us if they "rule", meritocratically.

Qworg 8y ago
Power doesn't work like that - it accretes to those who are able to leverage it. You generate a permanent power disparity with a gloves off laissez-faire system like that. I'd worry about your definition of "best society". Is the current system an existence proof in your mind?
- roenxi 8y ago
  I can't speak for anyone else, but when I use "best society" it is code for the following argument that gets as long and involved as there is time to explain: Human instincts and morals are really well calibrated to small-village life. I take things like the Dunbar number [1] to indicate that we are optimised for a small circle of close relationships. "Fairness" has a sister in "equality" that is very powerful force on the local scale and scales horribly, to the point where equality being scaled up is usually a warning sign of an incoming economic breakdown where everyone starves. Unfortunately, people keep trying to scale equality up because they want it in their local relationships. Talking about "permanent power disparities" touches on the same vein of thinking - we know that permanent power disparities are an inevitable feature of society. The attempts to set up societies where there are no permanent power disparities have resulted in permanent power disparities forming, and frequently going to very nasty despots. Modern western civilisation has done _extremely_ well compared to the competition by dangling systemic advantage as the reward for massively improving the industrial base and consumer access to resources. This has worked a lot better than attempts to suppress inequality under, eg, the communist systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

I had a meeting with a very successful guy who is CIO at a major tech startup who was looking to acquire our company. Because we were friends for a while I said something to the effect of "I just want to make sure this doesn't look like nepotism" His response was basically, "Who cares? I love Nepotism. that means me and my friends do better and help each other out." Kind of shocked me to be honest, but after thinking about it it makes total sense. Why wouldn't you help your friends? I mean I help my friends all the time, but there seemed to be an artificial cutoff when it came to hiring and buying companies or otherwise giving them outward signs of "success." Not sure I can make a rational case against Nepotism even though it feels wrong.

aaronblohowiak 8y ago
If you are directing other people’s money to your family it is a disservice to those other people. If it is your own money, go nuts. Nepotism vs family business, basically.
Qworg 8y ago
In the societal sense, it is maladaptive - your CIO friend assumes that his friends deliver the best outcome.
- adventured 8y ago
  That's not what the friend is assuming per the wording. The friend seems to be plainly stating they don't care if the max outcome is what is occuring or not, insofar as they all at least do better. Helping their friends out is more important than maxing out the quality of the outcome. Societally, reinforcing and protecting social trust systems may be dramatically more important than maxing out business success outcomes.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    I don’t see how that can be true. Tribally, it might be (for a small tribe in a large group). Society wide, it’s definitely bad. I don’t want a bridge built by an uncle politician who “trusts” his nephew engineer’s company. Outcomes should (and do) result in trust, not the nepotism.

perfunctory 8y ago

> However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups. This is too broad. Is it really so? I believe that we don't want to disadvantage ourselves relative to other groups. But that we want to gain advantage at somebody's else expense - not sure.

Thriptic 8y ago
It is absolutely so. I would much rather help a friend or group of friends do well as opposed to randoms or people I don't like. First, I like my friends and want them to be happy (and am going to be the one who hears about it when they aren't), so I have a vested interest in helping them achieve happiness and success whereas I have a weak interest in the happiness and success of randoms as we have no relationship. Second, if I can help my friends become happy and successful, they become better able to help me become happy and successful (by pooling resources, providing advice, providing introductions, creating mutually beneficial opportunities, creating happiness by spending time with me, providing trust and facilitating vulnerability, providing capital or expertise etc). This sets up a positive feedback loop and creates strong ROI for my efforts. I get net negative ROI from helping a random (assuming no relationship will develop and I expend time or funds) so it's far less likely that I will use my scarce time and resources to do it. The entire world runs on relationships, favors, and reputation.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  How do you know that's not a cultural norm you learned? Blanket pronunciations on human nature tell me more about you than anyone else.
  - Thriptic 8y ago
    I'm fully willing to admit that there may be functional cultures in the world which frown upon showing preference to friends or family at the expense of random people. I've yet to see any of them though.
    - 8y ago

mcguire 8y ago

There was an article posted here recently about the originator of the term "meritocracy". He wasn't entirely positive about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179583 From one of my comments: That's the weird part: “I.Q. + effort = merit” sounds pretty positive, right? But, "A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations." The intended result doesn't sound very appealing. Then there was this quote: "Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts,” and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again…. If they have been labeled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”" That sounds familiar. "But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring.” And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “I.Q. + effort = merit.”" And so does that.