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Sports is about the farthest thing from a meritocracy you can get. Only 25 NBA players in the history of the league have been below 5 foot 9 (175cm) [1] Profes

Sports is about the farthest thing from a meritocracy you can get. Only 25 NBA players in the history of the league have been below 5 foot 9 (175cm) [1] Professional athletes are genetic freaks first and foremost - look at the dropoff from college football players to professional players. It's not talent that determines who makes it, it's genetic ability. The absolute worst NFL team in history would decimate the best college team in history just because of the difference in size, speed, and strength of the people on the professional team. The NFL uses the standing vertical jump as a test of athletic ability because it's one of the only tests that can't be trained. No matter how much stronger or more explosive you get, your standing vertical jump pretty much stays the same. And guess what, people who make it in the NFL are the ones with the highest standing vertical jump. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shortest_players_in_National_Basketball_Association_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shortest_players_in_Na...

droopyEyelids 7y ago
The way I'm reading it, your argument assumes the mental aptitude we train into the ability to write code is not genetic. Is that your position or did I read too far into it?
eropple 7y ago
> It's not talent that determines who makes it, it's genetic ability. Sorry, I meant "meritocracy" in the way that the tech crowd does, not a, y'know, actual one. Because they rarely if ever exist in practice. It's funny, because I would hold that a good bit of what we consider "technical aptitude" is innate, if not strictly "genetic". I don't mean stuff like that old Dartmouth CS study, though. Speaking for myself, I have a level of general memory recall that, while not what you might call "eidetic memory", is very, very good. "Remember the behavior of an API I used cursorily five years ago" good. And from a pure value perspective, that I can dredge weird stuff like that up, that I can make connections between disparate stuff based almost entirely on having too much junk in the drawers of my brain, are why I deliver value in tech roles. If anything, my ability to quickly and with self-discomfiting detail remember the failures of code I've written are more valuable than the code I write today. ;) And I have had that kind of weird memory recall since I was a kid. I don't know if it's "genetic", but I didn't do anything to make it happen. Which leads me to think that if "being tall" rules one out of a meritocracy, stuff like that, or the weird permutation of brainscape that makes one better able to latch onto stuff like algebra or able to better visualize systems--all of that stuff functionally should, too. Which, to me, is yet another ding in this idea of "meritocracy". It's all a dart board.
dfrey 7y ago
I don't think you understand what a meritocracy is.
sokoloff 7y ago
In what way are those fitness-for-purpose measures not a meritocracy?
triceratops 7y ago
"Meritocracy" is being judged on ability. How that ability originated is unimportant. Why does it matter that athletes' merit has a strong basis in genetics? Top-level athletes make it to the top level by being better than their peers.
thatcat 7y ago
You can train to improve vertical jump, there are specific work outs developed for NBA players for this purpose. https://www.amazon.com/Vertical-Jump-Development-Bible/dp/1411662725 https://www.amazon.com/Vertical-Jump-Development-Bible/dp/14...
- deleted 7y ago
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droopyEyelids 7y ago

The way I'm reading it, your argument assumes the mental aptitude we train into the ability to write code is not genetic. Is that your position or did I read too far into it?

eropple 7y ago

> It's not talent that determines who makes it, it's genetic ability. Sorry, I meant "meritocracy" in the way that the tech crowd does, not a, y'know, actual one. Because they rarely if ever exist in practice. It's funny, because I would hold that a good bit of what we consider "technical aptitude" is innate, if not strictly "genetic". I don't mean stuff like that old Dartmouth CS study, though. Speaking for myself, I have a level of general memory recall that, while not what you might call "eidetic memory", is very, very good. "Remember the behavior of an API I used cursorily five years ago" good. And from a pure value perspective, that I can dredge weird stuff like that up, that I can make connections between disparate stuff based almost entirely on having too much junk in the drawers of my brain, are why I deliver value in tech roles. If anything, my ability to quickly and with self-discomfiting detail remember the failures of code I've written are more valuable than the code I write today. ;) And I have had that kind of weird memory recall since I was a kid. I don't know if it's "genetic", but I didn't do anything to make it happen. Which leads me to think that if "being tall" rules one out of a meritocracy, stuff like that, or the weird permutation of brainscape that makes one better able to latch onto stuff like algebra or able to better visualize systems--all of that stuff functionally should, too. Which, to me, is yet another ding in this idea of "meritocracy". It's all a dart board.

dfrey 7y ago

I don't think you understand what a meritocracy is.

sokoloff 7y ago

In what way are those fitness-for-purpose measures not a meritocracy?

triceratops 7y ago

"Meritocracy" is being judged on ability. How that ability originated is unimportant. Why does it matter that athletes' merit has a strong basis in genetics? Top-level athletes make it to the top level by being better than their peers.

thatcat 7y ago

You can train to improve vertical jump, there are specific work outs developed for NBA players for this purpose. https://www.amazon.com/Vertical-Jump-Development-Bible/dp/1411662725 https://www.amazon.com/Vertical-Jump-Development-Bible/dp/14...

deleted 7y ago
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