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I don't believe we do minimum wages for similar reasons either. We want people to be able to live (or, at the very least, survive), and we don't want to distort

I don't believe we do minimum wages for similar reasons either. We want people to be able to live (or, at the very least, survive), and we don't want to distort the markets by subsidizing their lives when working doesn't pay enough. But that has nothing to do with removing competition, or limiting competition to some areas, i.e. "natural talent" but forbidding to put more work in than your competitors. > It's a strange moving of the goal-posts to posit that sports doesn't count due to endorsements. If you go for total comp, endorsements is part of it. If you don't, you'll just see that the average salary in highly lucrative and competitive fields will sink and the stock options, bonuses etc for the top performers will increase. In both cases, the result is the same: the top performers get substantially more than the rest. The different is only whether you're trying to hide that fact by making them nominally earn close to the same, only to then give some of them the rest of the money in a different way. > The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution. And they are also a very special case, with lots of intricacies and paranoia and not something that comes to mind when you ask people about rewarding merit and efficiency. Nobody is arguing that anything and everything must "only consist of natural laws". But to claim that something as basic as "more effort = more results" shouldn't be allowed to be real because it's too much of a natural law and has no place in civilized society sound ridiculous. It's fine if you want to argue that we shouldn't promote the top 1% of each year and murder the rest. I agree, and we don't. But to not consider the actual output of people competing for something because they might have put in different amount of hours? Should we have the Olympics add more classes where only people may compete against each other that were born on the same day and had their training supervised and limited to a reasonable amount achievable by every hobbyist for their whole life, to make sure that none of them had an "unfair advantage" by training harder or longer than the others?

bumby 6y ago
I think my original point is getting lost based on the way you are speaking about those examples. My intent is not to rail against the idea that “more work = more results”, all else being equal. My point is that this is not something that should just be expected to run its course because it’s a “natural law”, and is thus some evidence of some fundamental truth. Society places limits on how far these “natural laws” can extend. The “intricacies” of special cases are exactly what I was inferring when I stated what I felt was too simplistic of a model; namely, reducing the systemic effects to a single correlation like “more work = more results”. In the real world I think those rare situations that can be boiled down to such a simplistic relationship are the exception rather than the rule. We do add rules to many (most?) sporting events, largely out of ethics. Combat sports have weight classes, others have age restrictions, Olympians have pay restrictions etc. Whether or not your examples would be adopted is a matter of social convention about what is “fair enough”, so they seem to illustrate the point about society setting ethical boundaries. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the meritocratic goal of “more work = more results”. To get there, though, all else must be equal which is too idealized to work in the real world. So society creates ethical rules, outside of natural laws, to get closer to that level playing field. Insinuating differences influenced by institutional convention is evidence of some foundational truth is naive and potentially dangerous.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > My point is that this is not something that should just be expected to run its course because it’s a “natural law”, and is thus some evidence of some fundamental truth. What I'm missing is what alternative you see. Sure, we could turn the relationship between input and output on its head and watch what happens when whoever crosses the finish line last wins the race. But what does that achieve? > We do add rules to many (most?) sporting events, largely out of ethics. We add constraints so we can compare the abilities, and that gets too hard to be useful when we don't focus on something. If we had a new sport, not unlike a decathlon, but testing every skill imaginable, I'm sure we'd find the field much closer together, and we'd probably have quite a few surprises, but it would take forever and wouldn't really tell us anything. Constraining it with rules allows for comparison. Yes, of course, we could constrain researchers as well by how much time they were allowed to work, or which books they were allowed to read, and how often they are allowed to look something up etc, but we're not really interested in some very narrow, hyper-specific "research" skill, it's not a hobby, we want results. Ergo we look at who gets the most results, or gets them the fastest, or cracks the hardest puzzles, whatever you may use to compare researchers.
  - bumby 6y ago
    As someone more eloquently stated above, I think the measure is more a symptom than a root cause. So the alternative would require more systematic change. In many ways, academia seems broken. Areas that seem to contribute are 1) the endless push for publication regardless of quality, 2) the disingenuous recruiting of PhD candidates in light of the limited positions available, especially as tenured professors and 3) the way colleges have been run as businesses built on debt in the last few decades. These are not based in “natural law” but human convention. I think those three areas combine to create students with massive debt and limited prospects, ripe to be taken advantage of under the guise of meritocratic competition. What I’m seeing is that people may interpret success in this area as a natural outcome of what “just is” rather than the byproduct of a broken system.
cycomanic 6y ago
> > The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution. > And they are also a very special case, with lots of intricacies and paranoia and not something that comes to mind when you ask people about rewarding merit and efficiency. The elephant in the room is however, what is merit and efficiency in academia. I would argue the attempt to somehow make scientific output measurable has led to the big problems plaguing academia today, salami publishing, churning out more and more papers with less and less results, making papers purposefully difficult to reproduce, time spend on applying for funding instead of research, crazy work hours... In many ways academia is similar to the military in that short term incentives are actually counterproductive to the end goal that you try to achieve. > Nobody is arguing that anything and everything must "only consist of natural laws". But to claim that something as basic as "more effort = more results" shouldn't be allowed to be real because it's too much of a natural law and has no place in civilized society sound ridiculous. Again the difficulty being what does more results mean and is it necessarily good. That being said I don't think artificially capping work hours (how even) would alleviate the situation, work hours are a symptom not the cause.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Certainly, competition has undesired side effects, and everything you measure will become a target and be gamed. I don't believe there's an alternative available that scales and works reliably. The market-style multi-layer competition (individuals, organizations, regions, nations, continents and blocs etc) is full of problems, but it's the best thing we have.

bumby 6y ago

I think my original point is getting lost based on the way you are speaking about those examples. My intent is not to rail against the idea that “more work = more results”, all else being equal. My point is that this is not something that should just be expected to run its course because it’s a “natural law”, and is thus some evidence of some fundamental truth. Society places limits on how far these “natural laws” can extend. The “intricacies” of special cases are exactly what I was inferring when I stated what I felt was too simplistic of a model; namely, reducing the systemic effects to a single correlation like “more work = more results”. In the real world I think those rare situations that can be boiled down to such a simplistic relationship are the exception rather than the rule. We do add rules to many (most?) sporting events, largely out of ethics. Combat sports have weight classes, others have age restrictions, Olympians have pay restrictions etc. Whether or not your examples would be adopted is a matter of social convention about what is “fair enough”, so they seem to illustrate the point about society setting ethical boundaries. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the meritocratic goal of “more work = more results”. To get there, though, all else must be equal which is too idealized to work in the real world. So society creates ethical rules, outside of natural laws, to get closer to that level playing field. Insinuating differences influenced by institutional convention is evidence of some foundational truth is naive and potentially dangerous.

luckylion 6y ago
> My point is that this is not something that should just be expected to run its course because it’s a “natural law”, and is thus some evidence of some fundamental truth. What I'm missing is what alternative you see. Sure, we could turn the relationship between input and output on its head and watch what happens when whoever crosses the finish line last wins the race. But what does that achieve? > We do add rules to many (most?) sporting events, largely out of ethics. We add constraints so we can compare the abilities, and that gets too hard to be useful when we don't focus on something. If we had a new sport, not unlike a decathlon, but testing every skill imaginable, I'm sure we'd find the field much closer together, and we'd probably have quite a few surprises, but it would take forever and wouldn't really tell us anything. Constraining it with rules allows for comparison. Yes, of course, we could constrain researchers as well by how much time they were allowed to work, or which books they were allowed to read, and how often they are allowed to look something up etc, but we're not really interested in some very narrow, hyper-specific "research" skill, it's not a hobby, we want results. Ergo we look at who gets the most results, or gets them the fastest, or cracks the hardest puzzles, whatever you may use to compare researchers.
- bumby 6y ago
  As someone more eloquently stated above, I think the measure is more a symptom than a root cause. So the alternative would require more systematic change. In many ways, academia seems broken. Areas that seem to contribute are 1) the endless push for publication regardless of quality, 2) the disingenuous recruiting of PhD candidates in light of the limited positions available, especially as tenured professors and 3) the way colleges have been run as businesses built on debt in the last few decades. These are not based in “natural law” but human convention. I think those three areas combine to create students with massive debt and limited prospects, ripe to be taken advantage of under the guise of meritocratic competition. What I’m seeing is that people may interpret success in this area as a natural outcome of what “just is” rather than the byproduct of a broken system.

cycomanic 6y ago

> > The military is an institution that sometimes put numerous limits on one's professional career regardless of contribution. > And they are also a very special case, with lots of intricacies and paranoia and not something that comes to mind when you ask people about rewarding merit and efficiency. The elephant in the room is however, what is merit and efficiency in academia. I would argue the attempt to somehow make scientific output measurable has led to the big problems plaguing academia today, salami publishing, churning out more and more papers with less and less results, making papers purposefully difficult to reproduce, time spend on applying for funding instead of research, crazy work hours... In many ways academia is similar to the military in that short term incentives are actually counterproductive to the end goal that you try to achieve. > Nobody is arguing that anything and everything must "only consist of natural laws". But to claim that something as basic as "more effort = more results" shouldn't be allowed to be real because it's too much of a natural law and has no place in civilized society sound ridiculous. Again the difficulty being what does more results mean and is it necessarily good. That being said I don't think artificially capping work hours (how even) would alleviate the situation, work hours are a symptom not the cause.

luckylion 6y ago
Certainly, competition has undesired side effects, and everything you measure will become a target and be gamed. I don't believe there's an alternative available that scales and works reliably. The market-style multi-layer competition (individuals, organizations, regions, nations, continents and blocs etc) is full of problems, but it's the best thing we have.