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Comment by shrewduser | Hacker News Reader

so what's the point of this article? that merit is good but maybe we don't always measure it well?

because honestly: duh.

Look at tech companies vs say law firms, one will employ you even if you've never been to university they only care what you can do, the other considers merit to be being a straight shooter from a young age getting into a prestigious university then grad program etc etc.

meritocracy is an ideal, it's something hard to achieve but something to continually strive for.

also this author does not clearly present an argument.

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Alternatively, a top company will hire someone straight out of undergrad with a CS degree from a top engineering school, but they won't hire the guy who created Homebrew because he doesn't have the algo for reversing a binary search tree memorized.

The problem with meritocracy is that it implicitly depends upon a heuristic, and heuristics can always be gamed or inadvertently biased, no matter the industry.

I think this was part of what the author was trying to say, but I agree with you, it's a poorly written and wishy-washy op-ed.

It funny what "merit" consists of from different perspectives. For google, merit may be to invert a binary tree. But most of the products by those googlers ain't that great. As from my perspective, I think homebrew is something that deserves more credit(merit) than most of google's products.

The guy identified a problem and architectured a good solution for that problem. That already shows he has solid software development foundations, doesn't it? Even though he doesn't have a fancy degree.

They didn't implemented meritocracy then. They just compared the value of papers.

Max could have lost to someone who has spent all their life as a social activist and has degree in humanism, womyns studies and various other bullshit with friends at Google. That's the point of what meritocracy is trying got avoid.

They didn't compare papers at all, they compared proficiency at a well-defined and concrete task with an objective standard, and he was worse than a recent CS grad. But who decides a task is or is not a measure of merit?

And really, who decides a career social activist with good soft skills who can save the company 50 million in lawsuits and bad press has less merit than the engineer who may work for years on a project that ultimately gets canceled?

Let's say we strive for a meritocracy. What happens when merit is hard to distinguish from privilege? If we're in the leading minority, it's all too easy to ignore the effects of privilege.

That's not to say merit doesn't exist, it does, but meritocracy doesn't really value merit, it favours a certain specific type of success, and implies that lacking that type of success is because of a lack of merit. It's a subtle difference, but understanding this difference helps in seeing the downsides.

that seems like you're just saying true merit is hard to determine or measure, which is stated in the original comment.

This might be to do with the ways humans consciously and unconsciously use proxies for complex things like merit.

you don't seem to be arguing against a meritocracy, you just seem to be saying that 'it's hard.'

as for your statement that "meritocracy doesn't really value merit" you'll have to explain that one.

> "as for your statement that "meritocracy doesn't really value merit" you'll have to explain that one."

I explained it before, but hopefully I'll do a better job this time...

How do you measure merit? You cannot measure merit without measuring success.

Success can be achieved by more than just merit alone, privilege is another key factor in success, yet there are no mechanisms to distinguish between success based on merit and success based on privilege. In most cases it'll be a mixture of the two anyway, it's hard to find successful people who were born into completely hostile circumstances, or find successful people who had every possible external advantage but didn't have some ability to convert this into success.

In short, meritocracies measure success, they don't measure merit, as merit cannot be measured directly, it can only be inferred by success, and success has multiple contributing factors, of which merit is only one.

Furthermore, meritocracies tend to favour certain types of success. For example, in school, the abilities of an academically gifted kid are more likely to be recognised compared to a kid that's good at telling jokes, even though they're both valuable traits.

Saying that a society measures success is a tautology.

In a meritocracy, success is correlated with "merit" (whatever that means).

It stands to reason any ruling class allowed to define the mechanism of handing over power to the next generation will do it via inheritance, hardly any different than primogeniture.

It's contrary to Lockean political legitimacy which requires the consent of the governed. And it's also contrary to Paine's Rights of Man which expressly argues against aristocracy and hereditary government, which self-evidently a meritocracy would create because there's nothing to prevent it and every incentive to pass down such power only to ones progeny as the next generation of ruling class.

It's not a tautology. I've tried to explain this twice now, hopefully third time lucky...

Let's start with two questions, if you can answer these it should help us understand why we're not seeing eye to eye:

1. How do you measure merit in a meritocracy?

2. Considering the answer to question 1, is it possible for someone to rise to the top of a meritocracy with an average level of 'merit'?

Well, what success means changes from one society to another, as it's always getting whatever society values.

The entire point of meritocracy comes from the postulate that "merit" is some universal concept and that we should adjust our society so success is reached by merit. And then, and just then, we should contemplate those questions, for practical purposes.

It's indeed a much more complex idea than most people shouting "meritocracy" around entertain, but it's a meaningless idea. Our society has been less meritocratic on the past, and it's possible to make it more so in the future.

> "It's indeed a much more complex idea than most people shouting "meritocracy" around entertain, but it's a meaningless idea."

I agree, it's meaningless to follow a meritocracy if we can't explain what we mean by merit (even if it's different in every case, we should still be able to define it in a specific case).

You've missed it completely. While there's value in individual merit, recognition and reward of accomplishment, it's terribly flawed to try to run a nation on such a principle because it's merely a variation on aristocracy. In a meritocracy there is no voting, there is no democracy, and there is not even really representation. The people in power decide the metric by which their replacements are chosen.

Is meritocracy ideal? Is a purely meritocracy society the one that maximizes happiness for the greatest number of people?

In the short term it may or may not be. However, such society is almost by definition more likely to be fit, in the evolutionary sense, i.e., more likely to survive and perpetuate itself. Society surviving means that its benefits will be enjoyed by future generations.

I would argue yes. unless you can explain how rewarding people without merit over people with merit somehow leads to net happiness.

What qualifies as rewarding people? Do food, clothing, housing, medical care, and education qualify as rewards?

Assuming we discover a perfect way to measure merit, what do we do with people who lack merit? What alternatives do you offer them over crime or suicide?

It's being done in Australia with aborigines. They're given large chunks of land, free income from the government or mining rights, and left to fend for themselves. They don't need to give value to other people, they can simply live, which is quite cheap without luxuries like electricity and permanent housing.

Because of the diminishing returns on incentives. It seems like the optimal solution is to reward those with merit just enough to keep then producing at maximum capacity while directing all surplus beyond that to raising up the median person.

What problem exactly are you trying to solve? and is that problem caused by meritocracy or something else?

The more accurately merit is measured, the more stable people's positions in society are likely to be. Which kinda sucks for people at the bottom.

I'd be concerned about problems from having a sharper divide between "employable" and "not employable", and instead of people who struggle to find/keep a job you'd have (slightly fewer) people who can't get jobs at all. That seems likely to cause more social problems.

OK maybe you need to read The Rise of Meritocracy before you advocate for society run by one? You might also try out Brave New World while you're at it.

Who/Whom? Ie, who decides what is merit and for whom will these standards be imposed? The public? experts? the people currently in power?

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