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Belief in meritocracy is yet another version of the just-world fallacy. If you belief in a just world, you need to fight off any counter evidence. This leads au
by blastbeat 8y ago
Belief in meritocracy is yet another version of the just-world fallacy. If you belief in a just world, you need to fight off any counter evidence. This leads automatically to discrimination. Same thing with merits and success. To not acknowledge happenstance and luck is a huge red flag for me.
- sharemywin 8y agoAlso, it assumes one right answer. That everything can be converted to a number and combined into a rank-able scale. There's different perspectives and trade offs.
- perl4ever 8y agoWhen people say things like that, what I hear is that "the scale on which things are ranked should be opaque and only understood by the elect, i.e. the people I prefer", not that there is an alternative to ranking things to choose between tradeoffs.
- sebastos 8y agoWhy does it assume that? It assumes that when _you_ make up a scale, the people that deserve to be at the top of it tend to be there. There's no reason for it to imply there's one universal scale of good people versus bad people. For instance, if you want to understand why some people make more money than others (a trait that _is_ well-ordered, and can be put into a list), then somebody who believes in meritocracy would say that the people who make the most money earned it. If you want to understand why different people hold different positions in a company, then the meritocrist would say that between all the people who wanted each position, the person who was best for it tends to be the one that gets it. Each of those scales may be more or less sympathetic to an explanation by way of meritocracy. But anyone who wants to make that argument doesn't have to construct an a priori global list of goodness for all people to give you an answer.
- sharemywin 8y agoThat's the thing nobody deserves anything. How do you prove one scale is better than another? GDP - arbitrary. GINI index - arbitrary. Violent submission? I guess at the end of the day there's your answer.
- perl4ever 8y agoI think talking about "the just world fallacy" is a tiresome straw man. It's one side of a false dichotomy, and not something that people should debate any more than "nature vs. nurture".
- blastbeat 8y agoCan you explain this any more?
- perl4ever 8y agoI'm not sure I want to, because I vaguely remember being downvoted for similar comments in the past. But what I am referring to with "nature vs. nurture" is that you can't separate them. Take away the physical basis of a person, all the DNA, and there would be no person. Put a newborn in a box, i.e. no nurture, a person would also not develop. So you can't assign a fraction to either one. Similarly, there is no separating randomness from selection/merit, in my opinion, because the latter acts on the former and both pervade everyone's life. That is what I mean by a false dichotomy. It's not just that life involves both randomness and selection, but that they are not opposed things.
- blastbeat 8y ago> That is what I mean by a false dichotomy. It's not just that life involves both randomness and selection, but that they are not opposed things. Ok but I don't see why the just world fallacy is a false dichotomy. It is precisely a fallacy, because people don't acknowledge randomness and selection.
- perl4ever 8y agoThe way a society organizes by merit is through the selection and ranking of qualities that arise randomly. So it doesn't make any sense to me to say the world is just rather than unjust, or vice versa. Thus, I reject the dichotomy, as applied to the world. Something specific could be just or unjust, of course.