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It's fair and fine to critique the implementations of "meritocracy" that we see in the world, and also to critique the inflationary aspects of how it's usually

It's fair and fine to critique the implementations of "meritocracy" that we see in the world, and also to critique the inflationary aspects of how it's usually articulated (e.g., person X is good at taking calculated financial risks that result in lots of money, therefore that person is "good" and should possess political power and authority). But the sort of rhetoric presented here risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you attack also the noble parts of the meritocratic ideal -- impartial, universalist fairness -- what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? (Which, historically, is the norm for human societies?) Far better to reconstruct meritocracy, or replace it with a new iteration, that 1) provides genuine, unfettered opportunity to all individuals at all stages of life (so, for instance, one can obtain education, however defined, at any age) and 2) grants only domain-specific authority, without making false generalizations about aptitude (e.g. someone who's good at X isn't sloppily regarded as having some sort of a priori genius that also makes them good at Y and Z).

Miner49er 6y ago
> what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it with "the way things are". But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?
- HuShifang 6y ago
  > But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges? I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.) I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so any undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" -- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.) It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.

Miner49er 6y ago

> what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it with "the way things are". But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?

HuShifang 6y ago
> But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges? I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.) I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so any undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" -- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.) It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.