16 ms·

Lost in the Meritocracy (2005)

138 points by mitmads 13y ago

drakaal 13y ago
Author doesn't seem to understand what a meritocracy is. You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank. What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.
- AlexandrB 13y ago
  I believe he's using meritocracy in an ironic sense, since on multiple occasions he notes that his only merit was being good at test-taking and displaying "aptitude".
- scarmig 13y ago
  Meritocracy, it bears repeating, was a word invented in a satire of the idea that you can do it. Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.
- rjbond3rd 13y ago
  From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize." He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack. Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).
- colemorrison 13y ago
  By that notion, America doesn't know what Democracy is, nor does China understand what Communism is. The definition isn't what's necessarily the problem - its the implementation of it. And by his account, that IS how we, as a people, tend to implement meritocracy.
ruswick 13y ago
The notion of education as a meritocracy is laughable at best. The correlation between standardized test scores, GPA, high school graduation rate and six-year college graduation rate are bound intimately to income and class. Poor people simply aren't afforded the resources to succeed, nor are they exposed to the social situations that promote ambition. Couple this the fact that the SAT, even when adjusted for economic disparity, is still skewed towards white men, and the notion that education (especially college admissions) is anything even remotely resemblant to a meritocracy is ridiculous. Granted, there is probably a modicum more of equity than there was at the time of the story, given that colleges have de-emphasized standardized tests (to an extent), and score-inflation combined with increased tendency for curriculum to converge on tested material has made scores far less meaningful. (For instance, I got a 35 on the ACT, and I'm not inordinately intelligent by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, I know not a single person who received below a 30 [save for a friend from Peru, for whom english is not a first language]. And this is just an average suburban pubic high school. I imagine that average scores at competitive private schools might be in the 33/2270 area. My hunch is that, as testing becomes more pervasive, underperforming education systems that begin using the test will shift the apex of the curve to the left, bringing even average students up the curve, but I digress.) However, this trivialization of testing has merely exacerbated inequality in admissions because it places on emphasis on things like internships (accessible only to the wealthy), hobbies/productive extracurriculars (which favors those who start young, and starting young often necessitates money and or involved parents), etc. Education has never been a meritocracy and it never will be.
- redschell 13y ago
  You would imagine wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy 2096 for 2008. Even Phillips has underachievers, though they are still pretty damn good. You have inflated expectations because you associate yourself with like-minded, equally exceptional individuals, which, in my opinion, is one of the most terribly underrated aspects of child rearing. Of course, I don't know if you were just naturally drawn to people of that level, or if it was something your parents/teachers facilitated, but I do believe in the notion that you are the company you keep. I can only imagine how much higher my standards in high school would have been if I had hung with a smarter bunch.
guylhem 13y ago
This is the best article I've read these last few weeks - about education, signalling and redemption. Many people play the education game just like this guy did, but find their salvation on the way. There are many opportunities, like when working on his summerjob he was reminded that selfbetterment was the goal, and offered to come to a meeting. Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way. If you play education for the signalling, you will get the piece of paper, but what else? Existential emptiness? Feeling of class envy? He is really envious of the pompous folk with the castle and the european car? Can't he strive for anything more??? Learn stuff you love, learn it because you think it is worth your limited time on this earth, and because you will be able to make a good use of it. Whether there is a meritocracy or not does not really matter, if you can learn and make one around yourself.
- jpdoctor 13y ago
  > Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way. I couldn't help but think that he was scamming the reader just as he scams everyone else in the story. By the end, when sitting down to actually ingest literature, it sounded like the story of redemption is something that The Atlantic would publish so he made redemption part of the story. It wasn't clear that the tiger changed his stripes at all. Of course, the fact that I made it to the end tells you: I fell for it hook, line and sinker, and I'm just as bad as the rest of the suckers in his story.
tunesmith 13y ago
Ugh. Not at the article itself - it's very well-written - but at the mentality it describes, which I get was his point. I suppose you could see it as "hacking Princeton" but also seems diametrically opposed to a hacker ethos, where you're into autodidacting for the love of the knowledge itself, without putting up with any of the pomp and bullshit that others like to layer on top of it. I've been aggressively opposite of the mentality in the article which means that I basically learn stuff while my friends talk about tv shows and watch sports - I can't really talk to any of them about stuff I learn other than wait for them to laugh when I'm done. But it seems the alternative is to leave them behind for other sets of friends and a lifestyle where I have to wear suits and learn buzz phrases - and my friends don't tease me about the stuff I learn and seem to respect it.
- cf 13y ago
  The alternative is to surround yourself with other people that love to learn. They might not love learning the same things that you do, but that enthusiasm will enrich your life. Though there is value in keeping around your mates.
lmm 13y ago
I read pieces like this and wonder if the authors went to the same kind of high-end university as me. The answer seems to be that they didn't - even if it was the same name on the door, it was always for an arts degree. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that a magazine writer studied English, but I'd be really interested to hear similar criticism from a graduate of a hard science, which really did feel like a meritocracy when I went through it.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I'd imagine that's because the admissions criteria colleges use (things like the SAT), does a much better job selecting for people with the right aptitude for hard sciences, at least at the undergraduate level, than it does of selecting for people with the right aptitude for English Literature.
- redwood 13y ago
  My experience was incredibly similar to his, though I felt like the poor one in high school more than in college. I studied physics at a top public school, so sure a different beast: but the dizzying (and awesome) exploration I did, the meandering searching, endless conversing, questioning etc: very similar experience. I never read a book until after college (that is, a non-scientific book)
freshhawk 13y ago
I couldn't help but worry as I was reading that that it may have been posted here in praise of the way that these "hustlers", "doers" and "advancement hackers" had found a way to out compete those who were stuck in their stody old ways of actually learning things and successfully disrupted the ecosystem. Then I realized that it was more likely jumping on the "higher education is broken" bandwagon and missing the delicious irony that every personality attribute, except knowing aristocratic privilege, being held up for contempt in this piece is openly admired in this culture when practised in the tech business world. Maybe there is some alternate universe where this article was posted as a scathing critique of the whole "hustler/growth hacker" meme and a warning about how the same attitudes in elite higher education have completely destroyed their ability to create any value. I'd like to move there.
ims 13y ago
Okay, I was trying to stay sympathetic to this article as I read it, but it bears almost no resemblance to reality as I've known it (not a stranger to these institutions). This is less an indictment of "the system" than further evidence that systems can be gamed. Is this a shock to anyone? Our narrator seems to have coasted through a variety of moderately prestigious (an adjective meaning that other people think whatever it is must be very discerning) opportunities. He chose to squander them out of a seemingly nihilistic/angsty/meta-hipstery and extremely adolescent rage against the machine. What a pity. For him.
- lbarrow 13y ago
  The author clearly regrets the way he wasted his time in college. That's the whole point of the piece.
  - ims 13y ago
    No, I don't think so. Or if so, it was ancillary. He wasn't saying "I should have done things differently" -- instead he was trying to show how depraved, spoiled, and inadequate people are inside the ivory tower. Much as in "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, we are supposed to be shocked at how the privileged elite are venal, cruel, phony, unworthy, and get away with it too. You may or may not find that persuasive. But just as with "Less Than Zero" (a terrible, terrible book) and much of the similarly themed failure memoir genre, you get the sense that it is wildly exaggerated fabulism with a hysterical moral tone that is supposed to ensnare the reader in outrage.
- argonaut 13y ago
  His "evidence" is anecdotal. Your evidence is "anecdotal." So too will be my evidence. But the cynicism he describes mirrors a lot of what I observed and continue to observe in the majority (but not the vast majority) of students at top universities. The nihilistic focus on grades/GPA/taking easy classes. The great lack of focus on actually learning anything or absorbing different perspectives. The focus on social proof and prestige. etc. etc.
twic 13y ago
So what happened when he got to Oxford? I'm on the edge of my seat here!
- lbarrow 13y ago
  Based on the way he ends the article, and the reflectiveness with which he wrote it, I'm guessing he finally grew up.
lbarrow 13y ago
Great article -- I really identify a lot with the culture the author describes, particularly the way liberal arts students often scorn the sciences and tear down the Western canon without bothering to read it. It's a shame. As to the drug abuse and alcoholism, Bob Dylan put it really well in "Like A Rolling Stone": "You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, But you know you only used to get juiced in it." People who go through college the like the author realize, deep down, that they are not getting an education. And some of them also realize that eventually, being a fraud catches up with everyone -- even if it's only in the form of a personal revelation.
bbbhn 13y ago
"Rules of Attraction" was far more entertaining than this drivel.
sbierwagen 13y ago
Important context: Walter Kirn was born in 1962, and entered Princeton in 1979.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  I guess I wasn't reading it closely enough, because the first time I realized that was the mention of John Lennon's assassination.
- Ogre 13y ago
  It's funny, I realized when he mentioned Nassau Street that I "entered Princeton" at just about the same time he did. Only I was 9, and was only a resident of the town, not a student of the college. My memories are somewhat different than his :)
ceautery 13y ago
>>novels I'd ever cracked were Moby-Dick and Frankenstein—both sold to me by a crafty high school teacher as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren't. Oh, I wish you hadn't said that, you unclean cad! Other than that, this article was a work of art. Thanks for the link, mitmads.
reader5000 13y ago
Humans: it's status hierarchies all the way up. The main dishonesty with the piece is his portrayal of himself as the only bullshitter in the game. I bet the girl that hugged him after he lost the Rhodes thing plagiarized her personal statement (or something). In many ways his essay, rather than a deep critique of human obsession with status signalling, was just a big status signal itself, since essentially the take home point was "look how fucking good at status signalling I am".
jnxfgf456 13y ago
We need to examine Jewish Privilege and Brown Preference.
danbmil99 13y ago
Having attended college during the years the author did, I'm wondering if this is more of a timepiece than a reflection of today's reality. BTW these are the exact same years Obama went to Columbia, and was apparently a bit "drifty" (read: high and bad grades)
RockyMcNuts 13y ago
Calvin: "People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance." Hobbes:"You misspelled Weltanschauung."

138 points by mitmads 13y ago

Author doesn't seem to understand what a meritocracy is. You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank. What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.

AlexandrB 13y ago
I believe he's using meritocracy in an ironic sense, since on multiple occasions he notes that his only merit was being good at test-taking and displaying "aptitude".
scarmig 13y ago
Meritocracy, it bears repeating, was a word invented in a satire of the idea that you can do it. Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.
rjbond3rd 13y ago
From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize." He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack. Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).
colemorrison 13y ago
By that notion, America doesn't know what Democracy is, nor does China understand what Communism is. The definition isn't what's necessarily the problem - its the implementation of it. And by his account, that IS how we, as a people, tend to implement meritocracy.

ruswick 13y ago

The notion of education as a meritocracy is laughable at best. The correlation between standardized test scores, GPA, high school graduation rate and six-year college graduation rate are bound intimately to income and class. Poor people simply aren't afforded the resources to succeed, nor are they exposed to the social situations that promote ambition. Couple this the fact that the SAT, even when adjusted for economic disparity, is still skewed towards white men, and the notion that education (especially college admissions) is anything even remotely resemblant to a meritocracy is ridiculous. Granted, there is probably a modicum more of equity than there was at the time of the story, given that colleges have de-emphasized standardized tests (to an extent), and score-inflation combined with increased tendency for curriculum to converge on tested material has made scores far less meaningful. (For instance, I got a 35 on the ACT, and I'm not inordinately intelligent by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, I know not a single person who received below a 30 [save for a friend from Peru, for whom english is not a first language]. And this is just an average suburban pubic high school. I imagine that average scores at competitive private schools might be in the 33/2270 area. My hunch is that, as testing becomes more pervasive, underperforming education systems that begin using the test will shift the apex of the curve to the left, bringing even average students up the curve, but I digress.) However, this trivialization of testing has merely exacerbated inequality in admissions because it places on emphasis on things like internships (accessible only to the wealthy), hobbies/productive extracurriculars (which favors those who start young, and starting young often necessitates money and or involved parents), etc. Education has never been a meritocracy and it never will be.

redschell 13y ago
You would imagine wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy 2096 for 2008. Even Phillips has underachievers, though they are still pretty damn good. You have inflated expectations because you associate yourself with like-minded, equally exceptional individuals, which, in my opinion, is one of the most terribly underrated aspects of child rearing. Of course, I don't know if you were just naturally drawn to people of that level, or if it was something your parents/teachers facilitated, but I do believe in the notion that you are the company you keep. I can only imagine how much higher my standards in high school would have been if I had hung with a smarter bunch.

guylhem 13y ago

This is the best article I've read these last few weeks - about education, signalling and redemption. Many people play the education game just like this guy did, but find their salvation on the way. There are many opportunities, like when working on his summerjob he was reminded that selfbetterment was the goal, and offered to come to a meeting. Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way. If you play education for the signalling, you will get the piece of paper, but what else? Existential emptiness? Feeling of class envy? He is really envious of the pompous folk with the castle and the european car? Can't he strive for anything more??? Learn stuff you love, learn it because you think it is worth your limited time on this earth, and because you will be able to make a good use of it. Whether there is a meritocracy or not does not really matter, if you can learn and make one around yourself.

jpdoctor 13y ago
> Along the read, I was worried he might miss it - yet he did find the purpose on the way. I couldn't help but think that he was scamming the reader just as he scams everyone else in the story. By the end, when sitting down to actually ingest literature, it sounded like the story of redemption is something that The Atlantic would publish so he made redemption part of the story. It wasn't clear that the tiger changed his stripes at all. Of course, the fact that I made it to the end tells you: I fell for it hook, line and sinker, and I'm just as bad as the rest of the suckers in his story.

tunesmith 13y ago

Ugh. Not at the article itself - it's very well-written - but at the mentality it describes, which I get was his point. I suppose you could see it as "hacking Princeton" but also seems diametrically opposed to a hacker ethos, where you're into autodidacting for the love of the knowledge itself, without putting up with any of the pomp and bullshit that others like to layer on top of it. I've been aggressively opposite of the mentality in the article which means that I basically learn stuff while my friends talk about tv shows and watch sports - I can't really talk to any of them about stuff I learn other than wait for them to laugh when I'm done. But it seems the alternative is to leave them behind for other sets of friends and a lifestyle where I have to wear suits and learn buzz phrases - and my friends don't tease me about the stuff I learn and seem to respect it.

cf 13y ago
The alternative is to surround yourself with other people that love to learn. They might not love learning the same things that you do, but that enthusiasm will enrich your life. Though there is value in keeping around your mates.

lmm 13y ago

I read pieces like this and wonder if the authors went to the same kind of high-end university as me. The answer seems to be that they didn't - even if it was the same name on the door, it was always for an arts degree. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that a magazine writer studied English, but I'd be really interested to hear similar criticism from a graduate of a hard science, which really did feel like a meritocracy when I went through it.

rayiner 13y ago
I'd imagine that's because the admissions criteria colleges use (things like the SAT), does a much better job selecting for people with the right aptitude for hard sciences, at least at the undergraduate level, than it does of selecting for people with the right aptitude for English Literature.
redwood 13y ago
My experience was incredibly similar to his, though I felt like the poor one in high school more than in college. I studied physics at a top public school, so sure a different beast: but the dizzying (and awesome) exploration I did, the meandering searching, endless conversing, questioning etc: very similar experience. I never read a book until after college (that is, a non-scientific book)

freshhawk 13y ago

I couldn't help but worry as I was reading that that it may have been posted here in praise of the way that these "hustlers", "doers" and "advancement hackers" had found a way to out compete those who were stuck in their stody old ways of actually learning things and successfully disrupted the ecosystem. Then I realized that it was more likely jumping on the "higher education is broken" bandwagon and missing the delicious irony that every personality attribute, except knowing aristocratic privilege, being held up for contempt in this piece is openly admired in this culture when practised in the tech business world. Maybe there is some alternate universe where this article was posted as a scathing critique of the whole "hustler/growth hacker" meme and a warning about how the same attitudes in elite higher education have completely destroyed their ability to create any value. I'd like to move there.

ims 13y ago

Okay, I was trying to stay sympathetic to this article as I read it, but it bears almost no resemblance to reality as I've known it (not a stranger to these institutions). This is less an indictment of "the system" than further evidence that systems can be gamed. Is this a shock to anyone? Our narrator seems to have coasted through a variety of moderately prestigious (an adjective meaning that other people think whatever it is must be very discerning) opportunities. He chose to squander them out of a seemingly nihilistic/angsty/meta-hipstery and extremely adolescent rage against the machine. What a pity. For him.

lbarrow 13y ago
The author clearly regrets the way he wasted his time in college. That's the whole point of the piece.
- ims 13y ago
  No, I don't think so. Or if so, it was ancillary. He wasn't saying "I should have done things differently" -- instead he was trying to show how depraved, spoiled, and inadequate people are inside the ivory tower. Much as in "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, we are supposed to be shocked at how the privileged elite are venal, cruel, phony, unworthy, and get away with it too. You may or may not find that persuasive. But just as with "Less Than Zero" (a terrible, terrible book) and much of the similarly themed failure memoir genre, you get the sense that it is wildly exaggerated fabulism with a hysterical moral tone that is supposed to ensnare the reader in outrage.
argonaut 13y ago
His "evidence" is anecdotal. Your evidence is "anecdotal." So too will be my evidence. But the cynicism he describes mirrors a lot of what I observed and continue to observe in the majority (but not the vast majority) of students at top universities. The nihilistic focus on grades/GPA/taking easy classes. The great lack of focus on actually learning anything or absorbing different perspectives. The focus on social proof and prestige. etc. etc.

twic 13y ago

So what happened when he got to Oxford? I'm on the edge of my seat here!

lbarrow 13y ago
Based on the way he ends the article, and the reflectiveness with which he wrote it, I'm guessing he finally grew up.

lbarrow 13y ago

Great article -- I really identify a lot with the culture the author describes, particularly the way liberal arts students often scorn the sciences and tear down the Western canon without bothering to read it. It's a shame. As to the drug abuse and alcoholism, Bob Dylan put it really well in "Like A Rolling Stone": "You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, But you know you only used to get juiced in it." People who go through college the like the author realize, deep down, that they are not getting an education. And some of them also realize that eventually, being a fraud catches up with everyone -- even if it's only in the form of a personal revelation.

bbbhn 13y ago

"Rules of Attraction" was far more entertaining than this drivel.

sbierwagen 13y ago

Important context: Walter Kirn was born in 1962, and entered Princeton in 1979.

twoodfin 13y ago
I guess I wasn't reading it closely enough, because the first time I realized that was the mention of John Lennon's assassination.
Ogre 13y ago
It's funny, I realized when he mentioned Nassau Street that I "entered Princeton" at just about the same time he did. Only I was 9, and was only a resident of the town, not a student of the college. My memories are somewhat different than his :)

ceautery 13y ago

>>novels I'd ever cracked were Moby-Dick and Frankenstein—both sold to me by a crafty high school teacher as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren't. Oh, I wish you hadn't said that, you unclean cad! Other than that, this article was a work of art. Thanks for the link, mitmads.

reader5000 13y ago

Humans: it's status hierarchies all the way up. The main dishonesty with the piece is his portrayal of himself as the only bullshitter in the game. I bet the girl that hugged him after he lost the Rhodes thing plagiarized her personal statement (or something). In many ways his essay, rather than a deep critique of human obsession with status signalling, was just a big status signal itself, since essentially the take home point was "look how fucking good at status signalling I am".

jnxfgf456 13y ago

We need to examine Jewish Privilege and Brown Preference.

danbmil99 13y ago

Having attended college during the years the author did, I'm wondering if this is more of a timepiece than a reflection of today's reality. BTW these are the exact same years Obama went to Columbia, and was apparently a bit "drifty" (read: high and bad grades)

RockyMcNuts 13y ago

Calvin: "People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance." Hobbes:"You misspelled Weltanschauung."