Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

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Your problem is you can't define meritocratic in a way that everyone will agree with (if they don't agree and you try to impose this outside the democratic process anyway, they will attack you and imprison you).

Indeed the very first objection you got was "literacy tests are racist". If you read the wiki page for it you'll see that the argument is not about whether they actually tested literacy or not (after the initial phase when "good moral character" exemptions disappeared), but rather whether it was legitimate to exclude new waves of immigrants who didn't speak good English at all (Italians, Russians ...).

Whether to even check the ID of voters in a rigorous way is opposed on similar grounds. If you can't check the ID of voters you certainly can't check their ID when they apply to become bureaucrats, and if you can't even answer "who is this applicant" then how can you answer more sophisticated questions about them?

> Your problem is you can't define meritocratic in a way that everyone will agree with

Of course you can't. One man's merit is another man's vice. The very notion of a meritocracy is literally a sarcastic joke [1].

But the problem is even worse than that. EVEN IF if you could define a universally agreeable "meritocratic" system, you would still have the problem that people with power would abuse the system to lock out others.

Suppose 100% "meritocratic" people were selected at random. They then immediately change the rules. Now 99.99% of people disagree with the legal definition of "meritocratic". But tough shit, cause this ain't a democracy, and the other 00.01% of people have all the power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

What is considered “merit-worthy” is defined by the society implementing it. There is no such thing as objective universal merit across time and culture.

I don’t see why this is controversial. It’s no different than “fair” or “justified” or innumerable other values that a society has to work out a definition for.

> What is considered “merit-worthy” is defined by the society implementing it. There is no such thing as objective universal merit across time and culture.

I think the point of the comment you're responding to is that it's not defined by the society implementing it, but by those in power. So whether the idea of 'merit' changes across time and culture might be true, but is beside the point.

It's not a joke, but it is relative (like most conceptual words). A vote decides on the definition of merit in the least relative way possible: by letting everyone contribute to the definition. A definition of merit decided by the heads of a bureaucracy is extremely relative - to whatever those few people think they want.

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