Why Meritocracy Doesn't Work | Hacker News Reader

Why Meritocracy Doesn't Work

grasshopperherder.com

39 pointsTristanKromer24 comments

> In case you’re not familiar, a meritocracy is a political system where power is allocated to those with the most ability. In the case of Silicon Valley, this equates to “the best ideas win and the best people get promoted.”

IMHO the problem is that no-one, not even this article, actually defines what 'merit' means — so people fill it with their own (likely biased) opinions. Even in the above quote, 'best' is only defined after the fact — it's literally just the ones that survived (the article does mention this later on).

The meaning of 'merit' will probably be different for different companies, groups, etc. Hence it feels difficult to talk about any kind of 'meritocracy' without clarifying that meaning first. I suspect that would become it's own debate.

Edit: The interactive site called Parable of the Polygons would seem relevant to some of the points this article makes. http://ncase.me/polygons/

That's a good point. It could be the author of the manifesto thought merit was pure coding ability and others might define it as the ability to work well in a team to achieve a collective goal.

i've never heard meritocracy being associated with ability, to be honest. I've always heard meritocracy associated with accomplishment. I'm not attempting to validate or invalidate this argument. Just pointing it out.

When grading based on a metric, it's helpful to know what that metric actually is.

Furthermore, how do you even define grades or metrics for "pure coding ability" or "works well in teams"?

Both have massive subjective components, don't they?

Isn't "works well in teams" really "works well on my team"? Trying to pretend like it's an objective measure of "works well in the platonic ideal of teams" doesn't actually make it an objective measurement.

Same with "pure" in "pure coding ability": adding an objective seeming word like "pure" doesn't excuse that there is no such thing as a platonic ideal of coding ability to measure against. There's "codes well in this problem domain", there's "codes well in this environment", there's "has the baseline experience to code well quickly now", there's "has the learning ability to get up to speed quickly", etc... Where's the objective measurements?

A lot of "meritocracy" talk is built on sandcastles of wish-it-were-objective-metrics without any sort of in depth analysis to how objective the metrics can possibly be, much less actually are in pragmatic, impure reality.

I think a meritocracy can exist in the real world. Are personnel decisions made, or do we strive to make them, on the basis of a person's value to the organization? Do we strive to identify and ignore confounding factors? Does a person's productivity depend on things besides skill, work habits, or leadership ability? This would be a difficult undertaking, operating a meritocracy.

Also, it's possible that a meritocracy is doomed to be subverted in any given enterprise.

I would love it if meritocracy could work. Sadly, it probably won't be accomplished by humans. Maybe after the singularity. :)

There's no objective system I know of that accurately measures a person's value to an organization. As soon as you try to reduce things to such metrics you lose sight of them as people.

Yes, it's great to strive to eliminate one's own biases and "confounding factors" to make one's organization stronger, but most "meritocracy" thinking is about finding the right magic numbers to describe people and that is its own bias/set of confounding factors.

People are often more than just "value", they are part of relationship webs, and full of complex emotions. You generally can't just assume a person is an interchangeable widget/commodity in your system and you insert paycheck and receive some magic amount of "value" in exchange.

A person's productivity absolutely depends on things besides skill, work habits, and leadership ability, however you define them and however you try to metric their value. A person's productivity might be powered by finding that random coworker's leftover cake baking experiments in the break room on those Wednesdays when they need it most. Another's might be powered by interesting gossip. Other people's are tanked by the extra buzz of the a/c on days in the Summer above 80F. You can't predict when someone might have a huge break-up that ruins their productivity for weeks and you can't predict when someone has just the right sort of vacation that their productivity is amazing for the next year... and so on and so forth.

The very term "culture fit" alone, and how often it is used in "meritocracy" contexts, is a giant neon sign that meritocracy doesn't exist in the real world and people are trying to keep themselves warm at night rationalizing that the decisions they make on semi-random metrics or gut "culture fit" decisions are the best they could make, rather than deal with messy subjective world of dealing with actual people.

I don't think you're doing a meritocracy if you use 'culture fit'. I think it's at best a cop-out.

I do share concerns with you about the ideas you are disadvocating. Such as that a person's productivity not a neat weighted sum. Such as that we could systematically find all the numbers that need to be summed. Plus concerns I'm not sure if you're getting at, such as the idea that sort of results from pushing a meritocratic view, which is that a person's value in the world is their value to some small collection of enterprises, their one job or their two jobs.

If you are paying people for their work and also providing some encouraging words, what do you then use to determine the pay packet or the words to say?

That's an interesting question and I think the big point here is to differentiate merit from meritocracy. There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, by trying to base payment/encouragement upon perceived merit. The disconnect is trying to make it systemic (meritocratic) and forgetting the subjective nature of merit, and that the only merit you reward/punish is that which you perceive.

It's very easy to build a culture based on merit metrics and tautologize that numbers are objective, this merit system is based on numbers, therefore this merit system is objective and thus this is objectively a "meritocracy". There's a number of logical fallacies wound up in that thought process, but that's how a lot of bureaucracies get formed, and a how a lot of them rationalize themselves as objective/benign.

I guess the underlying problem is that merit is great, but the illusion that "merit" scales to form benign meritocracies is something that we need to question a lot more than we do.

Totally agree with you. Meritocracy is a great ideal to strive towards, but completely unrealistic.

We wouldn't build a bridge and assume our geometry is perfect. Bridges would fall down. We have to constantly try and measure and adjust for how closely our bridge adheres to the blueprint and adjust or refactor as we go.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Meritocracy is not perfect, but explicit discrimination is so incredibly prone to abuse and corruption that is not even a contest. Society is made of individuals. We can hope they strive towards a phenotype-blind process, and shun the ones that explicitly discriminate. Or we can institutionalize explicit discrimination and raise everyones awareness to phenotype discrimination. For which the rational self-interest response is to discriminate. Trapping us all into an endless prisoner dilemma lose-lose tarpit.

I see your point although it's quite depressing.

Meritocracy has never worked because the thinkers submit to 'higher authority': in this case $$.

The only real revolution is when the thinkers stop taking orders. That is only practicable when every political|business system fails. There was a time when IT was merit guided and based..it took a long time for the idiots to catch up but they are here now and dictating.

Every thing I deal with this these days is idiot oriented.

The $$ is absolutely the higher authority. The question is whether the hierarchy is optimizing for that, or for something else. I think the difficulty for me in reading your comment is that your claim superficially is that $$ takes over and that is bad. But $$ in the organization should be something like profits or productivity. I think your claim might be that higher paid people, idiots, who are supposed to be looking out for $$ force the lower-paid thinkers to submit or quit, and the higher paid people are not really looking out for $$ (as I propose to define it).

There's nothing wrong with that, capitalism would even things out, a company that is sexist will make less money than one that isn't. This is because the available talent for a company is more limited if you exclude women.

That's not an inherent property of capitalism.

Capitalism rewarded the slave trade for generations.

The invisible hand is really human preferences. That's what will determine whether a company is punished for sexism or rewarded.

Humans stopped Apartheid. Not the abstract concept of capitalism.

To the contrary, non-slaves produce more value than slaves, therefore slavery is not only unethical, but also un-capitalistic.

Capitalism explains many things, certainly people stopped Apartheid, but it can very well be both, slavery and segregation are unproductive, and therefore anti-capitalistic.

> ... non-slaves produce more value than slaves,

Probably not to the slave owners, or anyone involved in the slave trade. They had little incentive to change.

Claiming that capitalism somehow spurs these things is the wrong way around. It can certainly benefit, but it's not the driver.

To the slave owner yes, but their entire productivity is lower, it's better to have a businessmen rather than someone who can just pick cotton and do basic chores.

I think capitalism has a hand to play, to ignore it is naive. I think there was not one driver that ended slavery, but many things working together.

I'm not 100% sure but, I think you might be referring to utilitarianism, not capitalism.

Certainly it is a utilitarian argument, but in the capitalistic sense a business (plantation) that uses slaves is less efficient in terms of net productivity of the slave than if the slaves were free and instead workers competing to improve the business.

Note: I'm not saying there is no moral reason slavery is wrong, just that in addition it is contrary to the nature of capitalism.

> However, believing that a 90 degree angle is perfect doesn’t have much impact on the job performance of a senior polygon and there are lots of other questions that don’t predict job performance.

So, I think this is not a meritocracy if polygons are being promoted based on non merit related qualities. It feels like they're attacking Meritocracy as being institutionalized, but then claiming that there are other biases not merit related. Ultimately, it's almost like they're defending meritocracy, saying it's not fair that an equally skilled man would be preferred over a woman based on gender.

I am fascinated by this, does anyone know what alternate system is proposed? In their article they make a few merit based judgements of who should be promoted.

Also this seems bit much: > "Successful venture capitalists claim that they have “pattern matching” powers. The evidence for this is that they have been successful." [...] "I am saying that this is a terrible argument. It has the same intellectual rigor of a casino lounge lizard explaining their magical rabbit’s foot. “I haven’t lost yet!”"

I probably wasn't clear there.

It's not that the concept of meritocracy is inherently bad. It's just that it's impossible to implement unless all people are perfect, have an exact understanding of what "merit" is, have perfect information etc.

So I'm disagreeing with the idea that Silicon Valley (or Google) is a meritocracy and that the "level playing field" that some people use as an argument against diversity initiatives is actually inherently biased.

Also, I'm not saying all diversity initiatives are great. I know pretty much zero about what makes one initiative better or worse.

I feel like what is missing from this article is that there are in fact group differences, and just what they imply. The article really tries to be neutral, so let me try to do the same.

There are 2 groups, squares and triangles, and contrary to what the article says, understanding of right angles is in fact important for senior polygons.

Now further assume standard deviations in understanding of right angles between squares and triangles differs by one sigma between the groups. Let's take the same as in the article, squares understand right angles better.

(in reality, in properties that might be important for jobs, speed, IQ, strength, ... standard deviations of 1-2 between groups are very normal between groups. For IQ, when selecting the groups on purpose, you can pick groups with a 3.8 sigma difference)

Given that assumption, what would the expected distribution be, given 50-50 squares vs triangles in the population ? (this is assuming that every time a senior polygon position opens up a square and a triangle face off for it, and the one with the best knowledge of right angles gets the promotion)

1 sigma: ~76% - 24%

2 sigma: ~92% - 8%

3 sigma: ~98% - 2%

4 sigma: ~99.7% - 0.3%

To give one relevant example, one might take the diagnosis of vitamin D insufficiency. If a patient comes in with these symptoms, and they're black, they're about 3 sigma more likely to have that problem. So if a patient comes in complaining that he's been having bone pain for months/years (in other words, the husband/wife/kids dragged them into the emergency room after they've been complaining about it for 10 years), if the patient is black you should probably prescribe a food supplement and 1 hour of sunlight (yes, really). If the patient is white you get them into an MRI and look for bone cancer. Why ? Look at the above numbers to see how often you'd be right. Now of course if the supplement doesn't work after a month you should still get an MRI, but using it as a first stab at the problem is a waste of time.

This is why you can't have meritocracy. Races are different, in ways that society finds important (and literally everything else as well), and "small" differences will result in large imbalances in outcomes. Small is taken here as compared to what one sees in reality for differences society judges as important.

This is also why island species only occur on islands (google island species, and don't take islands too literally). If there is a 1 sigma difference in procreative success between differing island races, the "worse" one's population will halve every generation. It is easy to see that this will not result in a mixed race result, one race will die out. It's harder to see intuitively that this happens at 0.1 sigma as well, but run the math and you'll see it's true, just takes longer.

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