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Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more mer

by hliyan 6y ago

Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."

znpy 6y ago
That's an enlightening comment, thank you.
puranjay 6y ago
Most signifiers of merit, outside of academics (I'd argue even including academics), require a certain amount of privilege. You can't volunteer or take piano lessons or play sports seriously if you have to help out around the house because you're living in a single parent household where the parent has to hold two jobs to make ends meet.
giantDinosaur 6y ago
Right - but are we talking the 'merit' of billionaires or the 'merit' of being an engineer who can pass difficult math exams? Totally different things, and conflating them is not helpful.
- hliyan 6y ago
  Take two individuals with the aptitude and the willingness to learn engineering and pass said exam. Give one person enough money to pursue an engineering degree. Burden the other one with an ailing parent. There is no conflation here.
  - AndrewDucker 6y ago
    Similarly. Take two people with the aptitude. Have them both spend a year messing about. One of them has a family who can afford to help them get back on track, the other doesn't. I'm doing really well despite falling off the rails a bit in my early 20s. If I didn't have my family to help me, I'd not be doing nearly as well.
  - giantDinosaur 6y ago
    That's not my point. My point is that the 'geometric increase' for real competence or aptitude is not the same as the compounding 'merit' of a billionaire which may well just be some monotonic increase in the value of some company within which they have a stake. Your issue is a different one, and yes, if both of them are 'good enough' perhaps they should go through a random selection process.
- ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
  Of course there are different things. But what is merit? Take the "aptitude and the willingness" in the other reply: we cannot decide to be naturally driven or passionate about something, or being quick learners and so on. We can only decide to put efforts into something. Unless our energy is depleted by issues that we cannot control, ranging from being concerned about financial difficulties, family issues, to physical and mental health, and so on.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Meritocracy really means eliminating the issues that can be eliminated. And that's much harder than it sounds because so much of this culture is based on maintaining and perpetuating privilege. To be clear - the US caste system is ridiculously rigid and self-sustaining. It has no interest at all in being more permeable to social mobility.
djrobstep 6y ago
We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more: "Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?" Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game." -- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective. Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence of elites.) A properly-tuned meritocratic measure thus looks for what a society needs in its elites to survive and thrive. (We don’t have such a function.) It may not be fair, individually. But it will he efficient, socially. Paradoxically, those elites must then recognise that their position is largely a result of luck, and thus not an opportunity to become extractive towards the rest of the populace. That latter component means not every selection mechanism should to be meritocratic. This is one philosophical basis for balancing a meritocratic private sector and public service with elected elites, whose selection is decidedly not meritocratic.
  - djrobstep 6y ago
    Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts. They are very different. Merit really means ladder-climbing - plenty of incompetent and amoral people are are good at climbing the ladder. It is the ladder itself that is the core of the problem.
barry-cotter 6y ago
> When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. > "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the extremely wealthy fail to beat an index fund over the generations because of hubris. The Rockefellers are still rich but their combined wealth as a portion of the US economy is less than the founder of their fortune’s was when he made it. None of this matters to the organizations offering patents of nobility of course. Ideally they’d be abolished, all real property expropriated and the IP released to the public domain. Anything that reduces their prestige is to the good though. Reducing the fellow feeling of the ruling class by giving them a less concentrated base of experience is to the good. https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt-merit-its-ocracy.html?m=1 https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt... > Liberal technocrats give us literally no reason at all to think their interests are aligned with the great majority of people, yet when they are attacked as a governing class they stress their credentials and competency. But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently! ... > The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others. > Things have not always been this way. > Though commentators sometimes speak of the old WASP gentry as an earlier era's national elite, they were not really so: they were the business, cultural, and political elites of one region of America. They ruled the roost in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. During the WASP heyday these states had greater economic and demographic heft than other regions in the nation, and so families with names like Roosevelt, Adams, and Lodge had an outsized influence on national politics and culture. But those families were not competing against the best and brightest of the entire nation: they were competing with each other. Texas' best and brightest did not strive to get into Harvard—they strove to get into Baylor. They were generally satisfied to be Texas elites, and if they operated on the national stage they tended to think of themselves as such.
josephg 6y ago
Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself? Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest. “Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with. For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good. Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with. Right, this is the scientific approach. You have to disprove the null hypothesis, otherwise your theory is unsubstantiated.
  - josephg 6y ago
    Great! This is getting closer to a testable hypothesis. I’m imagining “students chosen randomly from the applicant pool, and students chosen based on merit will have indistinguishable academic results”. This isn’t perfect yet but it’s closer to being testable. However, my hazy understanding from psych lectures years past is that similar experiments have already happened and the results are in. University achievement was found to be correlated with big 5 consciousness and IQ. (I can’t remember the effect sizes.) I have no idea how well the US collage admissions process selects for those traits. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I would bet money a lottery would lower the average academic achievement of collage graduates. (Edit: first result on google scholar talks about the positive correlation between GPA and consciousness: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.732 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.732 )
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tchaffee 6y ago
The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back at Fred's talk history in detail we learn that one of the conferences has a slight bias towards white men they don't even know about, and another is a committee of mostly men who agree that male speakers are just better. By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible. Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.
- hliyan 6y ago
  Correct. Meritocracy, when iterated over time with the effects of previous iterations brought forward, can have unintended and counter-intuitive consequences.
- Sacho 6y ago
  > A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible. This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it. Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together. To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
pg_1234 6y ago
Picking randomly from "good enough" relegates you to a 2nd rate contender compared to those who skim off the absolute best.
- advisedwang 6y ago
  Or, it allows you avoid just selecting the people best able to game your admissions process.
  - pg_1234 6y ago
    For all you know the "good enough" crowd were also trying to game your scores, but just sucked at it.
    - compiler-guy 6y ago
      Or gamed it enough to get into the "good enough" pool.
      - tester756 6y ago
        What's the difference between not gamed and gamed?
bassman9000 6y ago
We can't lower global warming by 3 degrees, so it's useless to lower it by 2 Mostly fair is worse than completely fair, but way better than unfair or random. If 80% is getting a fair deal, but you wanting to solve the issue for the remaining 20% results in making things worse for the 50%, you're not solving the issue.
bezmenov 6y ago
How does that explain the vast over representation of African Americans in professional basketball? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NB... It doesn’t, does it?
mwfunk 6y ago
Whenever people talk about meritocracies as being real things or potentially real things that merely require everyone to be on board to implement, I always wonder how old they are and whether or not they think they would benefit from being in a meritocracy, and to what degree they think they’ve been screwed over in the past by not being in a meritocracy. IME, they’re almost always little kids up through people working their first job and frustrated that everyone hasn’t perceived their brilliance yet. Or insecure adults frustrated at their lack of success compared to what they think they deserve. I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity. For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”
whack 6y ago
Social justice and "fairness" is rarely one of the main goals of a meritocracy. The main goal of a meritocracy is peak performance. NFL teams select the "best" quarter-backs not because it's most fair, but because it will produce the most wins. Universities grant tenure to the most productive professors, because that will enhance the University's reputation. Hospitals hire the best doctors, because they can save the most lives. A society should delegate its most important responsibilities to its smartest/most-knowledgable members, because they can best lead society through worldly challenges. Which is not to say that Social Justice isn't important. It is vital. But you don't get to it by hiring the wrong people in the wrong roles. A meritocracy excels at producing wealth - Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, better Public Schooling... these are the kind of Social Justice programs that best distribute the wealth back to society.
- vkou 6y ago
  When the benefits of a society that's lead well bubble up to a small elite, why should anyone else give a shit about how well-optimized the operations of society are? To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage. It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
  - samatman 6y ago
    In a well-functioning society, they should care because taxation of the small elite disproportionately funds the social safety net that means that, even though they mop a Wal-Mart, they'll get chemotherapy if they have cancer, and won't immediately become homeless when Wal-Mart deploys a floor-mopping robot and lays them off. We don't have that, or, we don't have all of that. But we could. And historically, simply confiscating the wealth of the elite, or just stacking their headless bodies in mass graves, doesn't do great things for the prosperity of the average citizen.
hardwaregeek 6y ago
Not to mention, what even is merit? Is it present skill? Potential for future skill? I know plenty of people who are advanced not because they're brilliant, but because they got started earlier, because they had parents who enrolled them into math camp, because they went to schools that taught a more in depth curriculum.

by hliyan 6y ago

znpy 6y ago

That's an enlightening comment, thank you.

puranjay 6y ago

Most signifiers of merit, outside of academics (I'd argue even including academics), require a certain amount of privilege. You can't volunteer or take piano lessons or play sports seriously if you have to help out around the house because you're living in a single parent household where the parent has to hold two jobs to make ends meet.

giantDinosaur 6y ago

Right - but are we talking the 'merit' of billionaires or the 'merit' of being an engineer who can pass difficult math exams? Totally different things, and conflating them is not helpful.

hliyan 6y ago
Take two individuals with the aptitude and the willingness to learn engineering and pass said exam. Give one person enough money to pursue an engineering degree. Burden the other one with an ailing parent. There is no conflation here.
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  Similarly. Take two people with the aptitude. Have them both spend a year messing about. One of them has a family who can afford to help them get back on track, the other doesn't. I'm doing really well despite falling off the rails a bit in my early 20s. If I didn't have my family to help me, I'd not be doing nearly as well.
- giantDinosaur 6y ago
  That's not my point. My point is that the 'geometric increase' for real competence or aptitude is not the same as the compounding 'merit' of a billionaire which may well just be some monotonic increase in the value of some company within which they have a stake. Your issue is a different one, and yes, if both of them are 'good enough' perhaps they should go through a random selection process.
ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
Of course there are different things. But what is merit? Take the "aptitude and the willingness" in the other reply: we cannot decide to be naturally driven or passionate about something, or being quick learners and so on. We can only decide to put efforts into something. Unless our energy is depleted by issues that we cannot control, ranging from being concerned about financial difficulties, family issues, to physical and mental health, and so on.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Meritocracy really means eliminating the issues that can be eliminated. And that's much harder than it sounds because so much of this culture is based on maintaining and perpetuating privilege. To be clear - the US caste system is ridiculously rigid and self-sustaining. It has no interest at all in being more permeable to social mobility.

djrobstep 6y ago

We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more: "Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?" Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game." -- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective. Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence of elites.) A properly-tuned meritocratic measure thus looks for what a society needs in its elites to survive and thrive. (We don’t have such a function.) It may not be fair, individually. But it will he efficient, socially. Paradoxically, those elites must then recognise that their position is largely a result of luck, and thus not an opportunity to become extractive towards the rest of the populace. That latter component means not every selection mechanism should to be meritocratic. This is one philosophical basis for balancing a meritocratic private sector and public service with elected elites, whose selection is decidedly not meritocratic.
- djrobstep 6y ago
  Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts. They are very different. Merit really means ladder-climbing - plenty of incompetent and amoral people are are good at climbing the ladder. It is the ladder itself that is the core of the problem.

barry-cotter 6y ago

> When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. > "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the extremely wealthy fail to beat an index fund over the generations because of hubris. The Rockefellers are still rich but their combined wealth as a portion of the US economy is less than the founder of their fortune’s was when he made it. None of this matters to the organizations offering patents of nobility of course. Ideally they’d be abolished, all real property expropriated and the IP released to the public domain. Anything that reduces their prestige is to the good though. Reducing the fellow feeling of the ruling class by giving them a less concentrated base of experience is to the good. https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt-merit-its-ocracy.html?m=1 https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt... > Liberal technocrats give us literally no reason at all to think their interests are aligned with the great majority of people, yet when they are attacked as a governing class they stress their credentials and competency. But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently! ... > The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others. > Things have not always been this way. > Though commentators sometimes speak of the old WASP gentry as an earlier era's national elite, they were not really so: they were the business, cultural, and political elites of one region of America. They ruled the roost in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. During the WASP heyday these states had greater economic and demographic heft than other regions in the nation, and so families with names like Roosevelt, Adams, and Lodge had an outsized influence on national politics and culture. But those families were not competing against the best and brightest of the entire nation: they were competing with each other. Texas' best and brightest did not strive to get into Harvard—they strove to get into Baylor. They were generally satisfied to be Texas elites, and if they operated on the national stage they tended to think of themselves as such.

josephg 6y ago

Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself? Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest. “Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?

gridlockd 6y ago
Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with. For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good. Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with. Right, this is the scientific approach. You have to disprove the null hypothesis, otherwise your theory is unsubstantiated.
- josephg 6y ago
  Great! This is getting closer to a testable hypothesis. I’m imagining “students chosen randomly from the applicant pool, and students chosen based on merit will have indistinguishable academic results”. This isn’t perfect yet but it’s closer to being testable. However, my hazy understanding from psych lectures years past is that similar experiments have already happened and the results are in. University achievement was found to be correlated with big 5 consciousness and IQ. (I can’t remember the effect sizes.) I have no idea how well the US collage admissions process selects for those traits. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I would bet money a lottery would lower the average academic achievement of collage graduates. (Edit: first result on google scholar talks about the positive correlation between GPA and consciousness: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.732 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.732 )

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tchaffee 6y ago

The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back at Fred's talk history in detail we learn that one of the conferences has a slight bias towards white men they don't even know about, and another is a committee of mostly men who agree that male speakers are just better. By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible. Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.

hliyan 6y ago
Correct. Meritocracy, when iterated over time with the effects of previous iterations brought forward, can have unintended and counter-intuitive consequences.
Sacho 6y ago
> A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible. This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it. Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together. To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.

pg_1234 6y ago

Picking randomly from "good enough" relegates you to a 2nd rate contender compared to those who skim off the absolute best.

advisedwang 6y ago
Or, it allows you avoid just selecting the people best able to game your admissions process.
- pg_1234 6y ago
  For all you know the "good enough" crowd were also trying to game your scores, but just sucked at it.
  - compiler-guy 6y ago
    Or gamed it enough to get into the "good enough" pool.
    - tester756 6y ago
      What's the difference between not gamed and gamed?

bassman9000 6y ago

We can't lower global warming by 3 degrees, so it's useless to lower it by 2 Mostly fair is worse than completely fair, but way better than unfair or random. If 80% is getting a fair deal, but you wanting to solve the issue for the remaining 20% results in making things worse for the 50%, you're not solving the issue.

bezmenov 6y ago

How does that explain the vast over representation of African Americans in professional basketball? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NB... It doesn’t, does it?

mwfunk 6y ago

Whenever people talk about meritocracies as being real things or potentially real things that merely require everyone to be on board to implement, I always wonder how old they are and whether or not they think they would benefit from being in a meritocracy, and to what degree they think they’ve been screwed over in the past by not being in a meritocracy. IME, they’re almost always little kids up through people working their first job and frustrated that everyone hasn’t perceived their brilliance yet. Or insecure adults frustrated at their lack of success compared to what they think they deserve. I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity. For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”

whack 6y ago

Social justice and "fairness" is rarely one of the main goals of a meritocracy. The main goal of a meritocracy is peak performance. NFL teams select the "best" quarter-backs not because it's most fair, but because it will produce the most wins. Universities grant tenure to the most productive professors, because that will enhance the University's reputation. Hospitals hire the best doctors, because they can save the most lives. A society should delegate its most important responsibilities to its smartest/most-knowledgable members, because they can best lead society through worldly challenges. Which is not to say that Social Justice isn't important. It is vital. But you don't get to it by hiring the wrong people in the wrong roles. A meritocracy excels at producing wealth - Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, better Public Schooling... these are the kind of Social Justice programs that best distribute the wealth back to society.

vkou 6y ago
When the benefits of a society that's lead well bubble up to a small elite, why should anyone else give a shit about how well-optimized the operations of society are? To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage. It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
- samatman 6y ago
  In a well-functioning society, they should care because taxation of the small elite disproportionately funds the social safety net that means that, even though they mop a Wal-Mart, they'll get chemotherapy if they have cancer, and won't immediately become homeless when Wal-Mart deploys a floor-mopping robot and lays them off. We don't have that, or, we don't have all of that. But we could. And historically, simply confiscating the wealth of the elite, or just stacking their headless bodies in mass graves, doesn't do great things for the prosperity of the average citizen.

hardwaregeek 6y ago

Not to mention, what even is merit? Is it present skill? Potential for future skill? I know plenty of people who are advanced not because they're brilliant, but because they got started earlier, because they had parents who enrolled them into math camp, because they went to schools that taught a more in depth curriculum.