I thought meritocracy was a discredited concept.
And I acknowledge that we often don’t do a good job of this; but surely that doesn’t mean we want to move away from merit based decisions.
1. How meritocratic are the decisions we make today?
2. Do we want more meritocracy, or less?
I think there's specific ways we fail to make meritocratic decisions (credentialism, "culture fit", big company politics). But in my experience these things are the exception, not the rule. We don't start by trying to figure out if someone is a good culture fit, then assess their technical skills afterwards. We assess technical skills, then if we like what we see we check culture fit.
I don't know about the GGP post, but I've certainly talked to people who claim to reject (2) - saying that the whole idea of meritocracy is flawed. But I'm always confused by that argument. Would you accept a rubbish pull request in a personal project? Would you hire someone with no technical skills into a technical role in your company? If the answer is no, then you're on team meritocracy-is-good.
"Not very" based on my experiences.
> 2. Do we want more meritocracy, or less?
Ideally you want more meritocracy -but- that relies on a level playing field which is much, much, much harder to implement and would involve people paying taxes, etc.
> Would you accept a rubbish pull request in a personal project?
Honestly, I might, if it was something I was never going to get around to and it scratched >50% of an itch. Or if I could see it had potential for later work. Or if it was from someone I wanted to have contact with.
> Would you hire someone with no technical skills into a technical role in your company?
If you add "relevant" after "no", you'd be surprised how often this happens.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
I think you can see inklings of this in support for Trump, Brexit and distrust of elites the term for the new 'meritorious' social class.
Further merit in a job should extend well beyond technical skills.
Reading that article it looks like the term 'meritocracy' was coined to refer to the former, but we didn't have a word for the latter and so the word has been co-opted and muddied. "Meritocracy is a discredited concept" could thus mean any combination of these statements:
1. We don't / can't currently hire based on collage degrees
2. We don't / can't currently hire based on relevant ability
3. We shouldn't try to hire based on collage degrees
4. We shouldn't try to hire based on relevant ability
People in this extended comment thread seem to be arguing assuming that these stances are interchangeable, or arguing assuming that there is consensus about which of these points we're arguing and they know what it is.
Personally, I believe that we should try our best to hire based on relevant ability. Because I want the most qualified people as coworkers and creators of the products and services I consume. I welcome debate of the idea, but arguing about meanings badly is pointless.
Slatestarcodex wrote a great piece about this whole thing a few years ago. I highly recommend having a read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-meritocracy/
> The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.
Take for example your quote from Slatestarcodex. That's purely about qualifications. Surgeon A might be an alcoholic and Surgeon B might have an incredible success rate. Are their qualifications relevant then?
Anyway the point of the article and book isn't about merit as just qualifications but about the detrimental impact of rewarding only merit on the stratification of society. Changing the criteria for merit just alters the stratification.
Often, things are named by those that do them the greatest injustices.
I don't mean that to be inflammatory at all by the way; but there are people in the world who believe the circumstances of their place in society plays a significant role in how you should weigh them and their contributions.
So, I wouldn't jump to "discredited" just because there's one blog post from a surprisingly influential person. I would instead say "contested".
"Affirmative action" is the PC term for what he described, and is pretty broadly accepted...
More exactly, it is the psychological trait "Belief in a Just World" (BJW.)
One doesn't have to look far in our actual civilization to see innocent victims, injustice, but that still doesn't penetrate the existential strata of the universe eventually righting all wrongs.
Here's a good analysis of the psychological studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ0lR23T7FA
If you don't have time to watch the video, the most significant points are:
1) Believing in a Just World / Meritocracy, is an evolved emotional buffer to the chaos and reality of ever-present injustice.
2) BJW trait correlates with higher measures of happyness after traumatic events like natural disasters - and seems to be a trait that remains relatively static among persons regardless of the tradgedies they suffer or windfall they receive.