How about believing it can exist, with appropriate changes in fundamental market mechanics?
They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.
Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
Can you point to anything akin to the Sokal Hoax that happened in the context of sociological empirical studies?
Also, if you don't trust sociologists in general, replicating the study will not convince you anyway. It is a good idea to replicate, but it is not a good idea to care about the opinion of those who dismiss entire scientific fields based on ideological prejudice, be the field sociology, immunology, climate science of evolutionary biology.
I fail to see how it’s interesting that people with different capability as well as possibly willingness to work doesn’t succeed at equal rate in intellectually demanding jobs.
Meritocracy is when such people of different class backgrounds succeed at about the same rate on average. Intersectionality muddles that water in an unhelpful way.
Even the Sokal scandal is somewhat simplified. It was not so easy for them to get the paper accepted, in fact they were rejected many times by other journals. This is rarely mentioned.
The cited work in TFA compares performance evaluations with raises. It found that for the same performance evaluations, an explicit focus on meritocracy leads to worse monetary outcomes for women. That seems fairly objective and methodically sound to me, and not at all related to Sokal-style bullshit.
The income gap is a complex topic, and it is clearly not as simple as either extremes of the cultural wars paint it. It is not true that the pay gap is 100% due to discrimination against women, but it is also not 100% true that such discrimination plays no role. As usual in real life, there are nuances and complexities that cannot easily be reduced to simple slogans.
Silicon Valley has a religion-ideology that we have no name for yet. It is a very American kind of Protestantism with zero gods. I know the environment and I know what I'm talking about, even though I accept you might disagree. My view is that the self-proclaimed ultra-rationalists are not as rational as they would like to think.
It is true that Sociology has a left-wing bias. In my view, this is true of all academia. There was a time, not so long ago, when academia had a right-wing bias. This too is a subject of sociological research :)
They essentially wrap simple concepts within a format that require immense effort to parse, maybe to present an intellectual challenge or to obfuscate what is actually said. Great for staying fashionable as a tool for showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops due to the amount of studying needed to pierce the veil, but not so great for knowledge seeking.
To me it seems like what they are saying are:
- culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)
- culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)
- either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power
These are interesting to some degree, but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists have.
I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.
Postmodernism, at its core, is precisely a criticism of conventional epistemology. I am not a postmoderinst, but I do find that some of their views are interesting, or at least worth considering. I would not be surprised if you are right, and that postmodernism goes down in history as a fool's errand. In any case, I think that it is good that people kick the foundations of knowledge to see what happens. If nobody does that, it becomes very easy to fall into religion/ideology without noticing.
To borrow a term from another thinker who also hates postmodernism (I think), knowledge should be anti-fragile.
> showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops
You are absolutely right about this part. Just don't think that Sillicon Valley's Matcha Tea Boutique Shops are so different. The environment is also full of terms and clichés that mostly serve to signal tribal alignment, that really say nothing new and only create a barrier of entry for outsiders: "let us create a curated list of use-cases for under-the-radar angel round startups that are attempting to leverage blockchain technologies for adtech verticals."
> culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)
Right, but he also has some interesting things to say about our relationship with the "mentally ill", how that relationship is different in other societies and why our approach may be pathological for all of us. For example.
> culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)
Some might say this, but overall culture is just taken as a powerful force that shapes the reality we inhabit. The thing is that, if one doesn't cherry-pick, some postmodernist ideas actually became mainstream. "We inhabit narratives."
> either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power
I think this is mostly true. No problem if you disagree, but it doesn't seem like such a crazy hypothesis to me.
> but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists have
This is a confusion between postmodernism in general and "grievance studies".
> I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.
For me, the academic duty is to think seriously and independently. Any other red line only guarantees that we get stuck in local maxima. I think that the unusual views should have a place, and knowledge seekers should make an effort to understand them if they are going to criticize them.
It is therefore reasonable to treat this kind of academic papers exactly as what it looks like, basically as politically motivated reasoning useful only to people that believe in those ideological tenets. Basically, as a secular theology for the intersectional faith.
EDIT: I too fail to see its relevance.
Choosing someone less qualified for a job because equity is not meritocracy. Rather, there are many less capable and willing to work from that upper class that would wish to take advantage of a less meritocratic system when they can’t competent with someone better from less privileged circumstances
You display a dismissive, even disdainful attitude about the matter, and I really don't feel like fighting uphill like that today. But if you really want to have a good-faith discussion about this then you can start by explaining how you read their position as "redefin[ing] meritocracy into... equal outcome", when the only occurrence of the string "equal outcome" in The Fine Article was:
> Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes.
The context was a "fake game of skill", where players were told they had won. This is about self-belief, not outcome.
EDIT: Phrasing
EDIT 2: And my new favorite: "People that share the intersectional beliefs does not believe in scientific reasoning."
People who make statements like that don't appear to believe in logical reasoning.
You might agree that creationists when expressing something resting on their faith might have some scientific methodology issues. I think we might agree that it is not illogical to point out that some research done by creationists have a religious overtone. Research outside their creationist dogma might not warrant such scrutiny.
Can you after watching the following two videos, which contains core thoughtleaders in intersectionality like DiAngelo, that intersectionality does not have a religious overtone? [1,2] If not, why not?
If so, why is it then illogical to point out that the authors are expressing something that to at least some degree seem to rely on intersectional dogma and that this has a religious overtone?
Primarily that you seem to be making a category error in saying that because people within the movement have acted in bad faith, intersectionality itself — or, possibly worse, the legitimate concerns it's trying to explore — is bullshit.
I'm not here to debate the movement with you, but if your notion of it is something other than "people marginalized along multiple axes have an especially hard time of things", and particularly if it's something more nefarious than that, then you're quite possibly operating from someone's "they're coming to take your $whatever!" narrative, instead.
However, can you at least see how arguing from belief regardless of how true you think it is does not make a convincing argument for someone that doesn’t share those beliefs?
It is ok that intersectionality is a political movemennt, go ahead. Just don’t pretend that arguing from belief is science, and use that to argue that a belief is a fact.
You can also imagine that the rewards in this system become a solid part of the legal system, and so workers could sue their managers for assigning unjust rewards. This basically means that there is always an external "eye" that keeps things in check.
For me, I don't really care whether meritocracy exist or not so it more advantageous for me to believe it doesn't exist.