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Once again we are presented with a false dichotomy: either embrace meritocracy wholesale or reject it entirely. Despite the authors best attempts, the truth pe

• Grimm1 6y ago
  This is a really good point and I fell for the all or nothing nature of the article hook line and sinker. Very often the correct answer is something of a middle ground and this case seems to be no different.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  > Yes, successful people usually merit their success Do we have evidence to back up that assertion? Or more generally, a firm definition of what we mean by "merit" there?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Nothing can be done about luck, but a lot can be done about striving to judge people on merit instead of birth, race, relations, etc.
• crmrc114 6y ago
  Is this obsession with oversimplification of complex topics into two choices a uniquely American problem? As an American I cant help but think our entertainment "news" cycles and narrative compression from commentators has contributed to this issue and our inability to find zen as a people. 1. Story is reported on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/etc. 2. "Now lets go to an expert to tell you what you should think." Not give you background on both sides without taking one or the other... we are going to beat you over the head with who is right and who is wrong. No middle ground.
  • stareatgoats 6y ago
    No, I think it is intrinsic to human nature. We have a need to simplify our picture of the world; if we were to see all phenomena in all their various shades our brains would explode when we try to combine or compare two or more phenomena as we do. That doesn't mean we don't acknowledge the complexity of things (in say a research setting), it's just that we can't make a point if we were to always make such concessions in normal discourse. That said, in certain political climates, such as the US presidential election season, the tendency to see things as black or white certainly gets amplified.
    • mistermann 6y ago
      > if we were to see all phenomena in all their various shades our brains would explode when we try to combine or compare two or more phenomena as we do Or you would achieve some level of enlightenment.
  • recursivedoubts 6y ago
    I do wonder if it has some basis in the manichaeism of the dominant protestant sects of american history.
  • luxuryballs 6y ago
    I actually think this has gotten worse in the past 10 years or so due to social media link sharing, because they realized, and this is purely speculation, that if you have a very sensational extreme article in one direction it will get shared by both the people who vehemently agree and the people who think it's absolutely absurd rather than a "boring" article that people are less likely to act on, especially people from both sides of a debate.
• gotoeleven 6y ago
  Rejecting meritocracy entirely as an ideal to even strive for is pure poison. How could a society possibly function if it doesn't elevate competence above incompetence and expertise above charlatanism? I think we're going to find out!
  • deepsun 6y ago
    Previously it was solved by wars, those who are more competent conquered those who are less. And once they became less meritocratic themselves were conquered by others.
    • wayneftw 6y ago
      Oh, it still happens that way. And there are more types of war than just one country going against another. There’s te culture war and the war against drugs. Some say that business is war.
  • recursivedoubts 6y ago
    I think one of the reasons smarter folks tend to fall into manichean thinking on luck vs. talent is that, as the level of success grows, luck plays a larger and larger role. So it is an emotionally powerful fact for people competing at the higher end of the success curve. The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit. Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense. Discussing luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.
    • gotoeleven 6y ago
      Success comes from merit, luck, and corruption in some proportion. In successful countries merit is a larger portion than in unsuccessful countries. When people say the entire concept of merit is %PEJORATIVE BUZZWORD% so we should stop striving for it what they are really saying is they want success to be allocated by luck and corruption and they think the corruption will benefit them.
  • 6y ago
• pixelrevision 6y ago
  “And” also helps with some of the upsides and downsides to it. Meritocracy is great as a motivation to push yourself forward and keep working towards a goal. Deciding everything is based on luck really saps from that. Merit is also used to dismiss the life circumstances of other people so being able to recognize that luck plays a part in things can greatly improve empathy.
• coliveira 6y ago
  The point made in the article is that there are different contributions to success made by personal effort (meritocracy) and by external circumstances. The problem is that people intuitively assign weights to these two parts incorrectly. Personal effort, although useful, is in fact a relatively small part of success in a complex society like ours. If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success. But external factors, like the industry you are, your family connections, the neighborhood where you live, personal characteristics that you can't change such as having special needs, your country of origin, your skin color, and other factor of blind luck, can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.
  • recursivedoubts 6y ago
    > can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society. This is false in two ways: - Luck is not sufficient. - Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is. A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part. If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.
    • Miner49er 6y ago
      Are you taking into account the luck of genetics and what income level you're born into? As someone born into a middle class family in a certain area, with certain genetics, I have been able to easily obtain middle class, with very little effort. If it's this easy for everyone why isn't everyone middle class? I don't feel like I've worked any harder then people who are worse off then me. If anything, I think I work far less hard.
      • recursivedoubts 6y ago
        I am not prepared to discuss or generalize from your specific situation. I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks. Broadly, in the upper class environments I have been in, luck and connections appear to play a larger role in major success. If you feel guilty about your relatively easy success, I do think that focusing on both gratitude and charity is an effective moral approach.
• mgleason_3 6y ago
  2 sentence Summary: 1) “Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic.“ 2) “Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.” Wait, what? The first “the world should be run” is one hell of a thing. But how did the author get to the rest? So, not only should the world be run, but it can be run and in such a controlled manner that and all luck is squeezed out of it and most people believe this. Reminds me of my teanage self thinking about the world after a progressive teacher introduced the subject in class - the reasoning is so simplistic and pedantic. But here it is, published in the Princeton press!?!
  • mistermann 6y ago
    > But how did the author get to the rest? I would say: - a recursively iterative process of compressing billions of dimensions down into a very small number (typically < 5), using mostly predictive heuristics (a highly sophisticated but often incredibly inaccurate process which is typically invisible to the one doing it, and usually observers as well) - aggregation
• Kednicma 6y ago
  Let me sharpen the dilemma: Are some people better than others, or not?
  • recursivedoubts 6y ago
    Unfortunately that makes the dilemma less clear, although more emotionally powerful. Good rhetoric, bad dialectic.
    • Kednicma 6y ago
      Hey, if you can't handle the bull, then don't be a bullfighter. The answer's pretty dirt simple, although you don't like it: Humans are broadly just one single race, one single species, with roughly the same cognitive abilities as each other. We've been this way for thousands of years, possibly tens of thousands. The major developments in human history since then have been technological and cultural. Edit: Could you show us more? In particular, could you show how my reasoning is faulty? I know how Socrates would handle my dilemma, for example. Look, the fact is that meritocratic beliefs eventually boil down to eugenics and race realism at some point. Eventually we start saying that individuals can have their merit measured, and we move to a totally utilitarian society ala Gattaca. I don't particularly care whether you want this, but it's ridiculous to do; it would bring about the ruin of our gene pool. Because I think that this is a bad outcome, sure, I'm motivated to use reason to examine it. But also, it's only because of reason that I'm able to tell that the outcome will be bad! Don't get upset at reason just because it shows you what you didn't want to know. You seem to know "the truth". Want to share?
      • recursivedoubts 6y ago
        Ad hominems are not useful dialectically either. Your emotionalism is leading you away from the truth, which will lead to bad reasoning and, therefore, bad outcomes. Edit: "Look, the fact is that meritocratic beliefs eventually boil down to eugenics and race realism at some point." This is one place, among many, where your reasoning is faulty. This may be a limiting case of meritocracy (I am not committing to that, but I can see the argument). But I am not arguing for pure meritocracy. Rather I am arguing for giving both luck and merit proportional consideration, and varying that proportion over success curves. This is more complex than the manichean viewpoint you are arguing, but I believe it conforms with reality more closely. I oppose both eugenics as well as racial reasoning (race is such a broad genetic category as to be meaningless in most discussions) on both logical and religious grounds.
• dsnr 6y ago
  The real question in this article is not whether luck or merit determines the success of an individual. The actual purpose of the article is to covertly present a “debate” without proposing anything in place, because we all know that the alternative to meritocracy can only be the ideology of the radical left, which the author seems to embrace (by looking at his other articles). The author argues that other programmers, as skillful as Bill Gates, don’t ever become as rich. This is a false argument, as equality of opportunity can’t and doesn’t guarantee equality of outcome. By making this argument, the author doesn’t take into account the multitude of other factors that contribute to a person’s success. Nobody says that merit is the only factor in predicting the success of the individual. Also, the author argues that meritocracy inevitably leads to more discrimination. This is a completely unfounded conclusion, as we know that meritocracy goes hand in hand with capitalist societies such as the USA. And I think it’s fair to say that discrimination has declined in the last century, and not increased, as the author falsely claims. I find it ironic that the article that claims meritocracy is bad, is hosted on the website of a university.
• braindongle 6y ago
  Hear here! I'm reminded of Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents", wherein he expands his ideas about psychopathology to civilization as a whole. Tellingly, psychologists call what what you describe "splitting"[0], and, increasingly, that's what society is doing in the United States. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
• grasshopperpurp 6y ago
  The main problem with the way most people look at meritocracy occurs on the fringes. Billionaires deserve that much more because they earned it; if they didn't, it'd mean the system is broken, corrupt, or both. The destitute deserve it, because they earned it; if they didn't "". Irl some people deserve more than others, but the gap is made up and silly, and everyone is better off when everyone is taken care of. You don't want people who have nothing to lose, but notions of meritocracy make people think it's unfair to take care of everyone.
• JamesBarney 6y ago
  The author pulls a switcharoo. He starts off arguing that the world believes in meritocracy and then proves this belief is false by demonstrating the world is not perfectly meritocratic. But I imagine very few of the people he refers to who believe in a meritocratic world believe it is perfectly meritocratic. He then makes a weak argument based on some psychology 301 research that a belief in meritocracy can be harmful. I'm somewhat convinced. But the problem is meritocratic structures are very useful, and if we dismantle meritocratic belief I doubt meritocratic structures would be far behind. And I'd rather live in a world where we at least strive for a meritocracy and fail then one where we give up.
• jhanschoo 6y ago
  It is important to distinguish between meritocracy, and the ideology of meritocracy. The article fails to make this distinction when it says in int conclusion > Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. when the evidence presented attacks the ideology of it, but not meritocracy itself. The former refers to * Putting people with merit into positions of responsibility, or * Rewarding people who have merit. The ideology includes 2nd-order and nth-order effects like: * believing that people who are rewarded have merit (including that one had merited the success/failure one has) * believing that proxies for measuring merit are accurate * believing that our present implementation of meritocratic principles is both widespread and fair In my opinion, ideally, we should retain the first principle of trying to give responsibility to people of merit, but abolish the ideological notions that meritocracy is successfully being practiced to good moral effect. And because merit and capability itself is so greatly affected by chance, and so too its measurement, we should strive to reduce how much we reward those seemingly with merit vs. those without.
  • _DIFIGIANO_ 6y ago
    The issue is one of a philosophical kind. Just aknowledge that there is a vast gap between acting in self-interest and acting in a philantrophic way. The big game is played in the minds - this ideal or idea of meritocracy is a way to rule. It is a plain sophistic ideology (sophists were those greek philosophers whom argued that everything in the outside was a projection of what you have on the inside, for expl. the medieval cosmic view is based on this). On the other hand we have philosophers which believe the outside is what determines us as beeings and thus it's worth being analized and understood. Archimedes for example was one that promoted this way of thinking. However, we can all be certain that it's neither just the one nor the other way of making sense of our reality that is absolutely 'right'. It's most likely a mix of both (or more, love maybe apart) - but by 'believing' that every action has always to be in your very own self interest this may gets you rich but everybody else gets poorer in the process. I'm going to be honest, this is stuff the ruling class knows and has known for millenials (may even before the greeks wrote it down). They would not be granted such privileges if they didn't act in a philantrophic way (expl. Gates foundation). People would turn on them in a revolution that would harm anyone more than it would help a single soul. Thusfor the ruling class - through university and religion - gives us this self centered (sophistic) believe shemes so we would controll (ourselfs) one another. And no, I'm actually not talking about rich people when I talk of the ruling class. What I mean by that are big rulers of land. Bcs. you can have as much money as you want - if you live on a certain soil you will have to obey the ruler in one way or another.