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When you say meritocracy is a lie, are you referring to Daniel Markovits by any chance? He had a very stimulating conversation with Sam Harris in 2020 that I’ve

When you say meritocracy is a lie, are you referring to Daniel Markovits by any chance? He had a very stimulating conversation with Sam Harris in 2020 that I’ve recently re-listened to. Meritocracy fails to live up to its promise because high performing parents always help their kids by artificially boosting their competence with e.g. test prep services. So tests tend to measure preparedness for the test, rather than a more abstract measure of merit. There are a lot of other interesting points made which I am not doing justice. However, I am not quite sure what you meant in the context of the workplace. Do you mean just that in practice and even in principle it’s impossible to accurately measure merit in a company? Because that’s pretty clear to me.

michaelmrose 4y ago
Every company wants to measure merit and indeed its common to slice and dice stats along many dimensions to attempt to achieve an objective analysis of the worth of an employee. However these measures inevitably fail to capture many elements of an employee. We deal with this gross insufficiency with by adding human judgement and introduce both essential human analysis and a tendency to measure the value of interpersonal relationships instead of objective worth. Organizations at scale end up either full of shit because they don't know what they aren't able to measure or full of shit because they are mostly measuring who is esteemed by whom. I have personally never worked for an outfit that wasn't basically full of shit. The well performing did so more as a function of having a functional culture of people who were capable enough and honestly cared about doing good work not because they were great at measuring worth.
jmyeet 4y ago
Meritocracy is a form of propaganda to keep a compliant populace in general and workforce in particular. It is the idea that if you work really hard you will be rewarded. It is the basis for most people thinking they're above average. It is why so many people believe they'll be Elon Musk one day so they die on the hill opposing any effort to tax the 10 richest people in America slightly ore because, hey, that will be them some day. But what this really does is just allows someone to be exploited. This permeated every aspect of life and starts from a very young age. It's going to better schools (even from a pre-K level), having access to tutors to better your results on standardized testing, getting access to lucrative internships and jobs (eg nepo babies), having social connections, getting into good colleges and so on. And it compounds. Many fields require you to take jobs that pay nothing or minimum wage (eg a production assistant on a movie set). Having the means to do this gives you an enormous advantage for someone for whom this simply isn't an option. For example, there's a lot of disagreement about affirmative action in college admissions. This is really the wrong conversation to be having. The right one is about how ~36% of each new undergraduate class at Harvard are legacy admissions and the legacy admission rate is 20% or higher. It goes beyond wealth and privilege however. So much of the working world isn't about doing the best work or working the hardest. Instead much of it comes down to being liked and that encompasses a lot of things, not the least of which is coming from a similar background.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  It was kind of remarkable, I disagreed with your initial statement that meritocracy is “propaganda” but almost everything that followed was something that I could’ve wrote. It seems to me that de facto meritocracy largely does not exist because it can be gamed. This leads to insulting post-hoc justifications for hoarding wealth despite the fact that merit often has nothing to do with it. That ethos is absolutely propaganda. Harvard would be more honest if they just auctioned seats to the highest bidder. At least that would have transparency and efficiency that their current process lacks. I haven’t given up on the idea of meritocracy though. It’s certainly better than hereditary rule. The only solution I can see is to fix the measures of merit so that they’re harder to game.

michaelmrose 4y ago

Every company wants to measure merit and indeed its common to slice and dice stats along many dimensions to attempt to achieve an objective analysis of the worth of an employee. However these measures inevitably fail to capture many elements of an employee. We deal with this gross insufficiency with by adding human judgement and introduce both essential human analysis and a tendency to measure the value of interpersonal relationships instead of objective worth. Organizations at scale end up either full of shit because they don't know what they aren't able to measure or full of shit because they are mostly measuring who is esteemed by whom. I have personally never worked for an outfit that wasn't basically full of shit. The well performing did so more as a function of having a functional culture of people who were capable enough and honestly cared about doing good work not because they were great at measuring worth.

jmyeet 4y ago

Meritocracy is a form of propaganda to keep a compliant populace in general and workforce in particular. It is the idea that if you work really hard you will be rewarded. It is the basis for most people thinking they're above average. It is why so many people believe they'll be Elon Musk one day so they die on the hill opposing any effort to tax the 10 richest people in America slightly ore because, hey, that will be them some day. But what this really does is just allows someone to be exploited. This permeated every aspect of life and starts from a very young age. It's going to better schools (even from a pre-K level), having access to tutors to better your results on standardized testing, getting access to lucrative internships and jobs (eg nepo babies), having social connections, getting into good colleges and so on. And it compounds. Many fields require you to take jobs that pay nothing or minimum wage (eg a production assistant on a movie set). Having the means to do this gives you an enormous advantage for someone for whom this simply isn't an option. For example, there's a lot of disagreement about affirmative action in college admissions. This is really the wrong conversation to be having. The right one is about how ~36% of each new undergraduate class at Harvard are legacy admissions and the legacy admission rate is 20% or higher. It goes beyond wealth and privilege however. So much of the working world isn't about doing the best work or working the hardest. Instead much of it comes down to being liked and that encompasses a lot of things, not the least of which is coming from a similar background.

janalsncm 4y ago
It was kind of remarkable, I disagreed with your initial statement that meritocracy is “propaganda” but almost everything that followed was something that I could’ve wrote. It seems to me that de facto meritocracy largely does not exist because it can be gamed. This leads to insulting post-hoc justifications for hoarding wealth despite the fact that merit often has nothing to do with it. That ethos is absolutely propaganda. Harvard would be more honest if they just auctioned seats to the highest bidder. At least that would have transparency and efficiency that their current process lacks. I haven’t given up on the idea of meritocracy though. It’s certainly better than hereditary rule. The only solution I can see is to fix the measures of merit so that they’re harder to game.