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Yeah, the examination system may have been an elegant way for emperors to prevent consolidation of power among the gentry. But it really seems a stretch in the

Yeah, the examination system may have been an elegant way for emperors to prevent consolidation of power among the gentry. But it really seems a stretch in the interview say the exam system provided political mobility to farmers. The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. That someone like Fan Zhongyan could overcome his privileged family falling into difficult circumstances and have the opportunity to rise to heights as the result of success in exams shows a certain amount of meritocratic mobility within elites, but that's not all the same thing as the exams being about recruiting talent from commoners.

godelski 2y ago
> The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. This is a problem in general with trying to achieve meritocracy. These merit based tests only work when all things are equal. Like you're suggesting, a noble has time to dedicate to studying while a farmer must work much harder since they cannot abandon their means of putting food on the table. I don't think this means we shouldn't try to make our societies more meritocratic, but I think a lot of people miss key points like this. The assumptions underlying the idea. Especially with survivor bias and that there will always be examples of those who overcame their disadvantages. But it's critical to understand these if we're actually to progress towards are more meritocratic society than we are now. [Side note] I do often wonder why we equate recognizing an advantage as diminishing the hard work one needs even when advantaged. Especially since our stories are the hero's journey and a critical retirement from that is meeting a wizard to get a magical power. Be it in The Matrix Neo's natural talent, Luke Skywalker being born a powerful Jedi, or King Author's sword and help from Merlin, we don't see these as tainting the struggles they overcome or diminishing their efforts. But we do when it's stories about ourselves.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. —D
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > This is a problem in general with trying to achieve meritocracy. These merit based tests only work when all things are equal. This assumes that the goal is egalitarianism, and filtering by "merit" is merely a means to achieve that goal. If instead the goal is to get your tasks done as effectively as possible, it doesn't really matter whether someone's effective because of inherent ability vs education quality. People not reaching their full potential due to lack of resources does reduce how effectively your tasks get done, but is a separate issue from how to best select someone from the people who are actually available. If instead the goal is to displace problematic things like factionalism or nepotism or corruption as the mechanism for filling official positions, it's only a problem to the extent that one group (along a dimension you actually care about) can keep resources away from all other competing groups and to the extent that any such monopolized resources are actually necessary.
  - godelski 2y ago
    > This assumes that the goal is egalitarianism, and filtering by "merit" is merely a means to achieve that goal. This is a deceptively false assumption. I think it makes sense that anyone would make this assumption, because it is correct via low order approximation. The issue here is that there's an implicit assumption that this is a zero sum game that is also locked in time. The assumption being made is that by spending resources to seek out these others (let's say "farmers") that can contribute that you have to give up places for "nobles" or that this effort comes at a cost of time to progress. But neither of these are true! There is no need to have a finite and fixed set of positions (unless you have a strong belief that an increased number of workers decreases efficiency, due to some other process coupled with this one or through some self-feedback) nor does this mean we can't perform merit testing by current standards while simultaneously seeking to improve those standards. Those can be done in parallel! In fact, if you are increasing the number of workers you have, then you clearly have no problem of diminishing efforts. The question is then more about how these workers' efforts are best spent and we can't just look at the first order approximation because if we're defining a task to look at increasing our workers then we have a rate of change factor and so need to analyze at what point the investment pays off. For a more concrete example, let's use scientific progress. We'll take the reasonable assumptions that the difficulty of scientific progress increases over time (we have strong evidence of this as topics become significantly more nuanced as you dig deeper into them), as well as the reasonable assumption that one's educational level directly correlates to the likelihood of them contributing to progress. We'll also take the naive assumption that progress is random, in a Monte Carlo process; i.e. scientists stumble into progress (presumably in reality scientists are better than random, but there is clearly some randomness to the process). With this system, scientific progress advances faster by the number of scientists we have (very much like we've observed over history and even in specific fields and niches!). In such a system, it warrants allocating some "resources" to increasing the efficiency of the training and selection process. In other words: do you think the world of science would advance faster if there was 1 Einstein or 100? If you believe the latter, how many Einsteins would you be willing to allocate to achieve a total of 1000? Inherently, these are coupled, not separate issues; which is what my post was about.
neaden 2y ago
I think it's important that there is a big difference between a farmer as in someone who is out in the field doing laborer, and a farmer as in a large landowner who has a lot of other people out in the fields doing labor which historically in China, and also Europe and the US, was considered to be a kind of ideal person in many time periods. So I doubt anyone who was out doing labor in the fields could do great in the exam, but if you were a small local elite, this provided a path for your children to potentially rise up.

godelski 2y ago

> The exams required an absurd amount of dedicated study. This is a problem in general with trying to achieve meritocracy. These merit based tests only work when all things are equal. Like you're suggesting, a noble has time to dedicate to studying while a farmer must work much harder since they cannot abandon their means of putting food on the table. I don't think this means we shouldn't try to make our societies more meritocratic, but I think a lot of people miss key points like this. The assumptions underlying the idea. Especially with survivor bias and that there will always be examples of those who overcame their disadvantages. But it's critical to understand these if we're actually to progress towards are more meritocratic society than we are now. [Side note] I do often wonder why we equate recognizing an advantage as diminishing the hard work one needs even when advantaged. Especially since our stories are the hero's journey and a critical retirement from that is meeting a wizard to get a magical power. Be it in The Matrix Neo's natural talent, Luke Skywalker being born a powerful Jedi, or King Author's sword and help from Merlin, we don't see these as tainting the struggles they overcome or diminishing their efforts. But we do when it's stories about ourselves.

082349872349872 2y ago
> You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. —D
tbrownaw 2y ago
> This is a problem in general with trying to achieve meritocracy. These merit based tests only work when all things are equal. This assumes that the goal is egalitarianism, and filtering by "merit" is merely a means to achieve that goal. If instead the goal is to get your tasks done as effectively as possible, it doesn't really matter whether someone's effective because of inherent ability vs education quality. People not reaching their full potential due to lack of resources does reduce how effectively your tasks get done, but is a separate issue from how to best select someone from the people who are actually available. If instead the goal is to displace problematic things like factionalism or nepotism or corruption as the mechanism for filling official positions, it's only a problem to the extent that one group (along a dimension you actually care about) can keep resources away from all other competing groups and to the extent that any such monopolized resources are actually necessary.
- godelski 2y ago
  > This assumes that the goal is egalitarianism, and filtering by "merit" is merely a means to achieve that goal. This is a deceptively false assumption. I think it makes sense that anyone would make this assumption, because it is correct via low order approximation. The issue here is that there's an implicit assumption that this is a zero sum game that is also locked in time. The assumption being made is that by spending resources to seek out these others (let's say "farmers") that can contribute that you have to give up places for "nobles" or that this effort comes at a cost of time to progress. But neither of these are true! There is no need to have a finite and fixed set of positions (unless you have a strong belief that an increased number of workers decreases efficiency, due to some other process coupled with this one or through some self-feedback) nor does this mean we can't perform merit testing by current standards while simultaneously seeking to improve those standards. Those can be done in parallel! In fact, if you are increasing the number of workers you have, then you clearly have no problem of diminishing efforts. The question is then more about how these workers' efforts are best spent and we can't just look at the first order approximation because if we're defining a task to look at increasing our workers then we have a rate of change factor and so need to analyze at what point the investment pays off. For a more concrete example, let's use scientific progress. We'll take the reasonable assumptions that the difficulty of scientific progress increases over time (we have strong evidence of this as topics become significantly more nuanced as you dig deeper into them), as well as the reasonable assumption that one's educational level directly correlates to the likelihood of them contributing to progress. We'll also take the naive assumption that progress is random, in a Monte Carlo process; i.e. scientists stumble into progress (presumably in reality scientists are better than random, but there is clearly some randomness to the process). With this system, scientific progress advances faster by the number of scientists we have (very much like we've observed over history and even in specific fields and niches!). In such a system, it warrants allocating some "resources" to increasing the efficiency of the training and selection process. In other words: do you think the world of science would advance faster if there was 1 Einstein or 100? If you believe the latter, how many Einsteins would you be willing to allocate to achieve a total of 1000? Inherently, these are coupled, not separate issues; which is what my post was about.

neaden 2y ago

I think it's important that there is a big difference between a farmer as in someone who is out in the field doing laborer, and a farmer as in a large landowner who has a lot of other people out in the fields doing labor which historically in China, and also Europe and the US, was considered to be a kind of ideal person in many time periods. So I doubt anyone who was out doing labor in the fields could do great in the exam, but if you were a small local elite, this provided a path for your children to potentially rise up.