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The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?
- growlist 8y agoTLDR: muh socialism
- sascha_sl 8y agoHey I know I don't always comment in the most insightful way, but at least I don't go down to this 4chan-level of responding. Mind elaborating how an observable confirmed phenomenon is "muh socialism"? I know HN is full of dismissive "techbros" that counter the now mainstream counterculture of actually being fuckin aware of your biases, but I'm still trying to figure out why.
- Bantros 8y agoHe's right though. Articles such as this one always push some form of forced equality under the guise of moral decency because the current system is so broken it's impossible to continue(!) Emotional blackmail to manipulate the ignorant or uninformed to their utopian worldview that's jjjust out of reach. Check the authors previous articles, all of them extremely progressive passed off as though the ideas are somehow a majority opinion. They aren't. it is deliberate and calculated demoralisation and The Guardian is one of the best at peddling it
- nickthemagicman 8y agoI don't get how this is emotional blackmail one bit. He presents a solid well reasoned point on meritocracy and inequality that's reflected by many and has quantitative evidence. I think the views on the subject that you're peddling might be a little emotionally manipulated.
- Bantros 8y ago> I don't get how this is emotional blackmail one bit. Well that's your problem, not mine. > He presents a solid well reasoned point on meritocracy and inequality that's reflected by many and has quantitative evidence. Never suggested otherwise. > I think the views on the subject that you're peddling might be a little emotionally manipulated. Classic
- finnthehuman 8y ago>I know HN is full of dismissive "techbros" that counter the now mainstream counterculture of actually being fuckin aware of your biases, but I'm still trying to figure out why. So that's what techbro means? Someone who disagrees with the popular narrative surrounding what parts of (or to what extents) the status quo is or isn't attributable to bias?
- nickthemagicman 8y agoThat's not at all what he was saying.
- finnthehuman 8y agoWanna help me out then? I'm in a different part of the country than y'all. One of things I often wonder when reading HN is what "bro" means, because it's so obviously a loaded term out there that's meant differently than any other context I've heard it.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoCompletely agree with you! People operating on pure emotion vs reason and incapable of self reflection or inquisitive research into their beliefs is a major issue in modern times.
- tomhoward 8y agoIf it seems like a troll, best to just flag and move on.
- growlist 8y agoIt's uncanny isn't it, how in Grauniad world all reasoned analysis just magically happens to come to the same conclusion which is: 'more socialism'; almost like they had the conclusion in mind at the start..
- dang 8y agoThe HN guidelines ask you to flag an egregious comment instead of replying to it and prolonging stupid flamewars, as you did here. If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- DrJaws 8y agoPlease, go back to reddit with those insightful comments.
- naveen99 8y agoNot sure if you are mocking reddit or trying to help reddit and hurt hacker news. Reddit is an important part of hacker culture and has plenty of insightful information. I thought that was a good TLdR actually. Summaries are important. Anyway back to point: article is complaining that meritocracy doesn’t remove class hierarchy, it just reorganizes their classes. Ok, so what ? People are still free to find other tribes that cross meritorious classes, like on reddit or hacker news.
- DrJaws 8y agoI was mocking reddit as HN is on a completely different level. users are educated and helpful, the debates are good and the comments are almost always better than the articles reddit this days is just mostly a modern buzzfeed
- nickthemagicman 8y agoThis is the exact response of socialism detractors and the level of thinking they operate. Cambridge Analytica made a lot of money off of people like you.
- dang 8y agoPersonal attacks aren't allowed on HN, so please don't degrade this place further by posting them. Also, responding to a troll and thus feeding a dumb flamewar is the opposite of what the site guidelines ask. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoSorry. That got me riled up. Troll successful.
- gaius 8y agoSelf-awareness leading to cognitive dissonance
- epx 8y agoThe conflict is simple: parents are stimulated to give the best upbringing possible to children - the prize is standing out the crowd - but at the same time it does not make much sense to be #1 in a wasteland.
- quickthrower2 8y agoIn addition systems are in play that make it impossible for most people in poorer circles to give their children a kick up into a higher class. Some people get lucky but on the whole people aren't moving. Anything new that redreses the balance e.g. education is ultimately for sale to the highest bidder, plus I'll add another observation that the rich don't need to spend so much time on survival, they have more time to learn the tricks of staying rich. To eloborate on the education for sale. Think of real estate prices near good high schools for example. Plus the high number of 1%ers in the top universities. I recently watched The Riot Club and thus film in an exagerated way sums it all up.
- mkingston 8y ago“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin
- badpun 8y agoIt's the only known way to organize society which incentivises people to develop and use their talents. Hence, the incredible material wealth of current Western world vs the universal poverty and misery of communist countries.
- mkingston 8y agoI agree. I shared the quote because I found it concise, insightful and relevant. I do wonder, though, whether meritocracy has gotten away with itself somewhat. It has enormous utility. But in its current incarnation doesn't seem to respect the dignity of those it disempowers. I think the point of the quote, and the article, is that those of us it's empowered ought to bear that in mind.
- j9461701 8y ago>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce steel in their back yards was overall much less productive than a few massive steel plants with dedicated professionals and experts on staff would've been. Instead meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world, so that those who have more have earned it and those who have less earned that too. It is an impossible ideal, obviously, but the point is to strive for it always even knowing we can never reach it. >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. The problem with this hypothetical society isn't that the most meritorious have more wealth, but rather that they have all the wealth. Although those with the most merit do deserve a bigger slice of the pie (IMO anyway), they obviously don't deserve all the pie. One of the benefits of meritocracy is the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that isn't true if the top percent eats all the benefits of their own capital investments. >The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth. It's not a confusion, it's just how humans are wired. "Moron" originally had no negative connotation, but over time it gained a profound one. Similarly "plebeian" wasn't originally an insult, but now it is. Heck the ultimate evil force in most stories, the "villain", derives his name from the latin term for a low status farm hand (villanus) Anything associated strongly with the "least efficient" rung of society will inevitably become tainted in this fashion, as human beings are inherently status-oriented creatures looking for some way to put down others and elevate ourselves. It's an unfortunate part of our nature as a species.
- empath75 8y agoA pure meritocracy would result in children starving to death because what are they contributing really?
- 8y ago
- sergefaguet 8y agoAll this discussion automatically assumes that inequality is bad and equality is good. This is a subjective opinion. One that does not get nearly enough questioning nowadays. I would argue that what is good is the presence of happiness and absence of suffering for conscious minds. Less famine, less disease, less war. And that it is not at all certain that equality helps these objectives. Inequality can be described as one of the major drivers and consequences of progress that has in fact lifted all boats. And if the best way for society to progress is to be extremely unequal and dictatorial (e.g. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore in modern time; an AI-driven superdictatorship in the future; the Medici family launching the Renaissance in Florence in the distant past) then equality, democracy etc. should go away. The best thinking on this subject recently came from Yuval Harari. Humans are biochemical machines that process information according to the laws of physics. So – what possible reason is there for us to value these biochemical machines all earning the same number of points on some abstract metric? And what happens when we build better machines? Or clone one person a trillion times? The idea that equality to another human matters as much (or more) than technological progress, biological immortality, understanding the universe etc. is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego. That cannot bear the idea that another monkey has more bananas or female monkeys. fuck equality.
- roel_v 8y agoRe your last paragraph, well yeah, it sucks, but it's what we have to live/work with. So while it would be nice to live in a parallel universe where it doesn't matter ('it' = inequality), the current reality is that it does.
- notacoward 8y agoWhen you ignore degrees of in/equality, you're basically setting up a false dichotomy. Exact equality might be unhealthy, but so is the drastic inequality of the old aristocracy or (more arguably) the new one. As with many things, the extremes are stagnant end states, but they have their own sort of gravity (think "attractors" in chaos theory). Life is found in between. > The idea that equality to another human matters as much ... is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego. Well, sorry, but it's not going away. Study after study has shown that relative affluence, not absolute affluence or any other factor, is one of the strongest predictors of happiness. In other words, relative privation is a predictor of unhappiness. It might not be suffering but, nonetheless, if you want to offer a superficial and unacknowledged restatement of utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number") then you have to consider what actually makes people who are not you happy or unhappy.
- roel_v 8y agoThis article somewhat seems to assume that 'everyone is good at something' (although at the end it veers towards 'it doesn't matter if someone is good at anything', so it's a bit unclear at that). But anyway it seems that people only think that to make themselves feel good, as logic dictates otherwise. Say there are 10 traits in which one can be good (some of such traits are enumerated in the article, but let's say for the sake of the argument there are 10). They are more or less independently assigned; and if they're correlated at all, that correlation is positive (being good looking and athletic, for example). Then it follows there will always be people who are above average on more than 5 traits, and there will be people where it's the other way around. There will be people who are great at everything, and some who suck at everything. Yet I don't see that addressed in pieces like this. What is the counter argument from this school of thought?
- sharemywin 8y agoThat their is a lot of traits that can't really be measured. There are other traits that a good for some purpose but are a hindrance to another. Many that aren't innate. A lot of tasks that only require proficiency. And then how do you value each trait against another. Then, there's the whole topic of values. And what values are important to your organization.
- imustbeevil 8y agoBut that doesn't address the point. If we take two people, and one person is better at everything we can measure, the conclusion cannot logically be that the person who is worse at everything "must be good at something we aren't measuring". There's absolutely no data to support that conclusion, because the conclusion is literally based upon the idea that there is missing data. That's bad logic.
- bassman9000 8y agoOnce we're all finally equal no one will be special.