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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy is a big word.

Chess is a meritocracy. So is tennis and sales. Anyone can play. The best player wins.

Chess coaching is not. Better coaches might win more or get better gigs, but stuff other than coaching "merit" can play a big role.

But rather than getting stuck in a semantic argument... What the article means is that it's a relatively accessible field, on the way that software engineering is. The formal pathways are not as locked in.

A motivated and talented individual can bootstrap a career without formal education, qualification or approval.

All this is relative to, for example, civil engineering, law, medicine... There you'll need qualifications earned via established formal channels, gatekeepers and such.

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Could one say that meritocracy is not meritocracy? No matter what skill you measure, a population with adequate nutrition since conception is going to be far better than a population where malnutrition impacts both pregnancy and children.

So what is the take away, especially with applying this to all areas of our lives? We can do something to try to equalize the workplace, the chess tournament, or the tennis court. But what about equalizing the stage or the bar?

Define "merit". You seem to want to use it to mean something like "potential merit", but that's a pretty slippery concept. Nobody, or very nearly nobody, lives up to their "true potential". It's difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, if it's even possible to do either.

In terms of actual merit, as measured by actualities and not potentials, a healthy population is going to have more merit than an unhealthy population. If that feels weird to say, well, it's just a restatement of the why you want populations to be healthy and why you want to help unhealthy populations become healthy. It isn't because healthiness is somehow an abstract goodness disconnected from any real effect, it's precisely because it represents a real loss in capability.

Personally I don't like the idea of trying to equalize the results at the final measurement bar, like the chess tournament, because that just removes all incentive to improve actual health. We should strive to make people really better and healthier, not break our measurement tools for effectiveness and healthiness, thus guaranteeing a lack of ability to improve either.

>Nobody, or very nearly nobody, lives up to their "true potential".

I agree.

But how do we discuss reasons that are or aren't justified to be taken into account. For example you can break down potential blockers into temporary and permanent. Being sick or the death of a loved one can temporarily hurt your potential. Poor nutrition or a brain injury can permanently hurt your potential.

Do we judge people based on if they can overcome anything holding them back? Or do we wait for them to overcome it before we judge them? What if we are the gatekeepers of a method to overcome our limitations (such as the person deciding who gets to attend university)?

> Chess is a meritocracy. So is tennis and sales. Anyone can play. The best player wins.

I'm not sure you are having the correct definition of meritocracy in mind. A meritocracy is a system where the actors who provide the most benefit to the society, benefit the most. However, in chess, tennis, etc., there is no real benefit.

The term "meritocracy" can be defined in various ways.

Originally it was coined as a satirical characterisation of a hypothetical stratified future society so obsessed with test performances in early years that all power became concentrated in the hands of adults who had demonstrated youthful aptitude and were thus assumed to not need to prove themselves any further thereafter since competition could only demoralise lesser minds; the author took the view that the "merit" of passing test thresholds would often be dependent on access to sufficiently expensive early years education and would resemble and often simply be a justification for upholding traditional social class divisions

As for tennis, I think it's fair to say that tennis fans consider Federer et al to provide them with considerable enjoyment, and far more so than less talented players whose games they don't watch, or indeed most people working in non-entertainment jobs who can only help a few people at once and/or find it difficult to prove how much better they are than other people in the same role

> As for tennis, I think it's fair to say that tennis fans consider Federer et al to provide them with considerable enjoyment

The problem here is that "meritocracy" reduces to "free market", where everybody is simply paid for the benefit they bring to others, and where only the few best win.

Free marketeers often argue that markets are a better reflection of merit than alternative systems. I am considerably more ambivalent towards markets than this, but still think the fact that Federer is (i) disproportionately better compensated than other tennis players and (ii) better compensated than the average person is congruent with his performances having significant merit relative to people who cannot do what Federer does. At the very least, it is impossible to not to agree that Federer has significant merit with respect to the average tennis player (unlike, say, a programmer who is good at salary negotiations, well networked and lives in SV with respect to a lower-earning programmer who is merely better at every relevant aspect of software development) which I think was the OP's point.

And my original point was that meritocracy wasn't even originally conceived as a "good thing", never mind a utopian distribution of wealth and power allocation according to some ideal standard of social utility. Other people have subsequently chosen to [re]define meritocracy as some sort of aspirational standard for allowing more talented people to succeed; people defining 'meritocracy' with respect to the propensity of that skill to generate revenue are making as valid a use of the term as anyone else.

I know HN frowns on this sort of comment, but am perplexed by the downvotes here. Do people genuinely find an explanation of what Michael Young's book which coined the term was about objectionable or irrelevant?

X is a meritocracy, and everyone with skill and imagination may aspire to reach the highest level.

Where X is [machine learning, tennis, chess].

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