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This article is misleading they gloss over the key point that makes it such, "Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think

by Grimm1 6y ago

This article is misleading they gloss over the key point that makes it such, "Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic." Specifically the part after the comma after meritocratically. That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and selfishness the article discusses. However, a belief the world should be run meritocratically does not necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even the playing field" and make it more so. The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less clicks because frankly, no shit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
modzu 6y ago
well that's not quite fair, "Canastilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice."
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  Who says that meritocracy aims to eliminate inequality?
  - kikokikokiko 6y ago
    Exactly. By definition, if you reward competence and hard work, and punish incompetence and lazyness, you will obviously generate different outcomes for the individuals involved, and that is FAIR and efficient. The opponents of a meritocratic society are just gasping at straws.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  That half paragraph should have been the basis of the entire article and is a much more interesting discussion.
rini17 6y ago
Is it really only a belief? They support it with research further in the article, and follow with even stronger assertion: "Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour."
pdpi 6y ago
The biggest issue with the idea of a meritocracy is defining merit. One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer, overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and product/business skills.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that level. So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
  - pdpi 6y ago
    > have no business being there as I would evaluate it. That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose the people who can, beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good". For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      Oh I'm certainly aware in fact that is probably the seminal issue of the idea of merit -- it's not an objective quality. Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.
- travmatt 6y ago
  Once you’ve defined merit, there are plenty of problems in measuring merit. The ideal way to measure a teachers efficacy would be measuring their students adult outcomes relative to other teachers, but that timeframe doesn’t work in the short term.
TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
Have you read the book that promoted the word meritocracy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy This critiques meritocracy. It also coins it.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  I don't idolize meritocracy as the end all solution to our problems and if that's what came off of my statement then I should have been clearer. My biggest if not only claim is that the article is arguing something that I think is fairly obvious and therefore uninteresting and the title misleads you into thinking its making arguments against meritocracy and the implementation thereof which I do find suitably interesting. Otherwise meritocracy is a tool that should be combined with other systems but has many issues.
jfengel 6y ago
It's not just that it's not currently run meritocratically, but that naive attempts to make it meritocratic make it less meritocratic. The easiest-to-achieve meritocratic tools are the ones that benefit the people already benefitting from the current system. It's not clear that there is any way at all to make a true meritocracy, since "merit" doesn't have an objective definition. The people who make the definition will always be biased, and will usually do so to favor themselves and people like them. After all, they're meritorious enough to be in a position to make the definition, right? But even if such a thing exists in some hypothetical universe, it's not the universe we live in. The important part of the article is that it's a belief that you can get to a meritocracy piecewise that leads to errors. Doing the easy things first makes it less and less likely that you'll ever get around to noticing the people being excluded.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  I don't believe in the idea of a true meritocracy because not only does every system have different things to merit and because often we can't define what those merits should be. Though as someone stated in another comment this isn't all or nothing anyway and the concept of merit can and has been useful at various levels. That said I do believe that making things more equal inherently requires you to re-evaluate how you value people and makes you lean towards things of substance from a person (though what is of substance is still abstract and varied) and less the superficial ques we very very heavily rely on now such as wealth status, school, profession etc etc. Edit: Cleaned up the first paragraph I had rolled two separate thoughts into one run on.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    'Merit' is to be defined in context. For example in the job market one would want people to be hired on merit, i.e. based on their qualifications and skills to perform the job, not based on who they know, race, gender, etc. In the Olympic Games, merit is how one athlete compares to the others in a fair race. This is transparent and fair, and the best we can hope for.
    - 6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
The author's conclusion is also unmoored from larger context. Our society is not perfectly meritocratic--but it's certainly more meritocratic than many others. And what is the alternative to meritocracy as a guiding principle (even if we instill the understanding that our society is not perfectly meritocratic yet and we should strive to make it more so)? The alternatives to meritocracy that exist in practice are neither pleasant nor desirable. In societies that don't even strive to be meritocratic, women often are excluded based on rigid gender roles. ("Women can do anything men can do" is an assertion that is most potent in a society that at least pretends to care what you can do.) And family and other group relationships dominate, excluding even highly capable immigrants and racial and religious minorities. One of the things that I find striking is when Americans argue that privilege plays a role in success by pointing out that successful entrepreneurs are almost always from at least middle or upper middle class backgrounds. I appreciate the point they're making, but we shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable it is that the necessary privileges are so relatively mundane. That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  > That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc. Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes? It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.
fulafel 6y ago
There are also problems with meritocracy as the end goal, it's a subtype type of elitism. Measures designed to combat inequality can be at odds with meritocracy.

by Grimm1 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

modzu 6y ago

well that's not quite fair, "Canastilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice."

travisoneill1 6y ago
Who says that meritocracy aims to eliminate inequality?
- kikokikokiko 6y ago
  Exactly. By definition, if you reward competence and hard work, and punish incompetence and lazyness, you will obviously generate different outcomes for the individuals involved, and that is FAIR and efficient. The opponents of a meritocratic society are just gasping at straws.
Grimm1 6y ago
That half paragraph should have been the basis of the entire article and is a much more interesting discussion.

rini17 6y ago

Is it really only a belief? They support it with research further in the article, and follow with even stronger assertion: "Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour."

pdpi 6y ago

The biggest issue with the idea of a meritocracy is defining merit. One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer, overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and product/business skills.

Grimm1 6y ago
Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that level. So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
- pdpi 6y ago
  > have no business being there as I would evaluate it. That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose the people who can, beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good". For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Oh I'm certainly aware in fact that is probably the seminal issue of the idea of merit -- it's not an objective quality. Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.
travmatt 6y ago
Once you’ve defined merit, there are plenty of problems in measuring merit. The ideal way to measure a teachers efficacy would be measuring their students adult outcomes relative to other teachers, but that timeframe doesn’t work in the short term.

TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago

Have you read the book that promoted the word meritocracy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy This critiques meritocracy. It also coins it.

Grimm1 6y ago
I don't idolize meritocracy as the end all solution to our problems and if that's what came off of my statement then I should have been clearer. My biggest if not only claim is that the article is arguing something that I think is fairly obvious and therefore uninteresting and the title misleads you into thinking its making arguments against meritocracy and the implementation thereof which I do find suitably interesting. Otherwise meritocracy is a tool that should be combined with other systems but has many issues.

jfengel 6y ago

It's not just that it's not currently run meritocratically, but that naive attempts to make it meritocratic make it less meritocratic. The easiest-to-achieve meritocratic tools are the ones that benefit the people already benefitting from the current system. It's not clear that there is any way at all to make a true meritocracy, since "merit" doesn't have an objective definition. The people who make the definition will always be biased, and will usually do so to favor themselves and people like them. After all, they're meritorious enough to be in a position to make the definition, right? But even if such a thing exists in some hypothetical universe, it's not the universe we live in. The important part of the article is that it's a belief that you can get to a meritocracy piecewise that leads to errors. Doing the easy things first makes it less and less likely that you'll ever get around to noticing the people being excluded.

Grimm1 6y ago
I don't believe in the idea of a true meritocracy because not only does every system have different things to merit and because often we can't define what those merits should be. Though as someone stated in another comment this isn't all or nothing anyway and the concept of merit can and has been useful at various levels. That said I do believe that making things more equal inherently requires you to re-evaluate how you value people and makes you lean towards things of substance from a person (though what is of substance is still abstract and varied) and less the superficial ques we very very heavily rely on now such as wealth status, school, profession etc etc. Edit: Cleaned up the first paragraph I had rolled two separate thoughts into one run on.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  'Merit' is to be defined in context. For example in the job market one would want people to be hired on merit, i.e. based on their qualifications and skills to perform the job, not based on who they know, race, gender, etc. In the Olympic Games, merit is how one athlete compares to the others in a fair race. This is transparent and fair, and the best we can hope for.
  - 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago

The author's conclusion is also unmoored from larger context. Our society is not perfectly meritocratic--but it's certainly more meritocratic than many others. And what is the alternative to meritocracy as a guiding principle (even if we instill the understanding that our society is not perfectly meritocratic yet and we should strive to make it more so)? The alternatives to meritocracy that exist in practice are neither pleasant nor desirable. In societies that don't even strive to be meritocratic, women often are excluded based on rigid gender roles. ("Women can do anything men can do" is an assertion that is most potent in a society that at least pretends to care what you can do.) And family and other group relationships dominate, excluding even highly capable immigrants and racial and religious minorities. One of the things that I find striking is when Americans argue that privilege plays a role in success by pointing out that successful entrepreneurs are almost always from at least middle or upper middle class backgrounds. I appreciate the point they're making, but we shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable it is that the necessary privileges are so relatively mundane. That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.

jonathankoren 6y ago
> That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc. Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes? It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.

fulafel 6y ago

There are also problems with meritocracy as the end goal, it's a subtype type of elitism. Measures designed to combat inequality can be at odds with meritocracy.