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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

Once again we are presented with a false dichotomy: either embrace meritocracy wholesale or reject it entirely.

Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success.

By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing "or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it, especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be given proper account as we morally reason about things.

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Rejecting meritocracy entirely as an ideal to even strive for is pure poison. How could a society possibly function if it doesn't elevate competence above incompetence and expertise above charlatanism? I think we're going to find out!

I think one of the reasons smarter folks tend to fall into manichean thinking on luck vs. talent is that, as the level of success grows, luck plays a larger and larger role. So it is an emotionally powerful fact for people competing at the higher end of the success curve.

The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit.

Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense. Discussing luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.

Success comes from merit, luck, and corruption in some proportion. In successful countries merit is a larger portion than in unsuccessful countries. When people say the entire concept of merit is %PEJORATIVE BUZZWORD% so we should stop striving for it what they are really saying is they want success to be allocated by luck and corruption and they think the corruption will benefit them.

Previously it was solved by wars, those who are more competent conquered those who are less. And once they became less meritocratic themselves were conquered by others.

Oh, it still happens that way.

And there are more types of war than just one country going against another. There’s te culture war and the war against drugs. Some say that business is war.

Elevating incompetence over competence, as a policy, has been tested for at least 75 years in some Asian country. One can see the results in the bureaucracy, the courts, the police, the education system, etc. of that country today; it is catastrophic. Of course, Amartya Sen who writes books on rationality defends the irrationality of such a policy in that country. I am not naming the country or the policy for 'sensitive' reasons.

The author pulls a switcharoo. He starts off arguing that the world believes in meritocracy and then proves this belief is false by demonstrating the world is not perfectly meritocratic. But I imagine very few of the people he refers to who believe in a meritocratic world believe it is perfectly meritocratic.

He then makes a weak argument based on some psychology 301 research that a belief in meritocracy can be harmful. I'm somewhat convinced. But the problem is meritocratic structures are very useful, and if we dismantle meritocratic belief I doubt meritocratic structures would be far behind. And I'd rather live in a world where we at least strive for a meritocracy and fail then one where we give up.

2 sentence Summary:

1) “Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic.“

2) “Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.”

Wait, what? The first “the world should be run” is one hell of a thing. But how did the author get to the rest? So, not only should the world be run, but it can be run and in such a controlled manner that and all luck is squeezed out of it and most people believe this.

Reminds me of my teanage self thinking about the world after a progressive teacher introduced the subject in class - the reasoning is so simplistic and pedantic. But here it is, published in the Princeton press!?!

> But how did the author get to the rest?

I would say:

- a recursively iterative process of compressing billions of dimensions down into a very small number (typically < 5), using mostly predictive heuristics (a highly sophisticated but often incredibly inaccurate process which is typically invisible to the one doing it, and usually observers as well)

- aggregation

This is a really good point and I fell for the all or nothing nature of the article hook line and sinker. Very often the correct answer is something of a middle ground and this case seems to be no different.

Nothing can be done about luck, but a lot can be done about striving to judge people on merit instead of birth, race, relations, etc.

It is important to distinguish between meritocracy, and the ideology of meritocracy. The article fails to make this distinction when it says in int conclusion

> Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.

when the evidence presented attacks the ideology of it, but not meritocracy itself. The former refers to

* Putting people with merit into positions of responsibility, or

* Rewarding people who have merit.

The ideology includes 2nd-order and nth-order effects like:

* believing that people who are rewarded have merit (including that one had merited the success/failure one has)

* believing that proxies for measuring merit are accurate

* believing that our present implementation of meritocratic principles is both widespread and fair

In my opinion, ideally, we should retain the first principle of trying to give responsibility to people of merit, but abolish the ideological notions that meritocracy is successfully being practiced to good moral effect. And because merit and capability itself is so greatly affected by chance, and so too its measurement, we should strive to reduce how much we reward those seemingly with merit vs. those without.

The issue is one of a philosophical kind. Just aknowledge that there is a vast gap between acting in self-interest and acting in a philantrophic way. The big game is played in the minds - this ideal or idea of meritocracy is a way to rule. It is a plain sophistic ideology (sophists were those greek philosophers whom argued that everything in the outside was a projection of what you have on the inside, for expl. the medieval cosmic view is based on this). On the other hand we have philosophers which believe the outside is what determines us as beeings and thus it's worth being analized and understood. Archimedes for example was one that promoted this way of thinking.

However, we can all be certain that it's neither just the one nor the other way of making sense of our reality that is absolutely 'right'. It's most likely a mix of both (or more, love maybe apart) - but by 'believing' that every action has always to be in your very own self interest this may gets you rich but everybody else gets poorer in the process.

I'm going to be honest, this is stuff the ruling class knows and has known for millenials (may even before the greeks wrote it down). They would not be granted such privileges if they didn't act in a philantrophic way (expl. Gates foundation). People would turn on them in a revolution that would harm anyone more than it would help a single soul. Thusfor the ruling class - through university and religion - gives us this self centered (sophistic) believe shemes so we would controll (ourselfs) one another.

And no, I'm actually not talking about rich people when I talk of the ruling class. What I mean by that are big rulers of land. Bcs. you can have as much money as you want - if you live on a certain soil you will have to obey the ruler in one way or another.

“And” also helps with some of the upsides and downsides to it. Meritocracy is great as a motivation to push yourself forward and keep working towards a goal. Deciding everything is based on luck really saps from that. Merit is also used to dismiss the life circumstances of other people so being able to recognize that luck plays a part in things can greatly improve empathy.

The point made in the article is that there are different contributions to success made by personal effort (meritocracy) and by external circumstances. The problem is that people intuitively assign weights to these two parts incorrectly. Personal effort, although useful, is in fact a relatively small part of success in a complex society like ours. If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success. But external factors, like the industry you are, your family connections, the neighborhood where you live, personal characteristics that you can't change such as having special needs, your country of origin, your skin color, and other factor of blind luck, can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.

> can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.

This is false in two ways:

- Luck is not sufficient.

- Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is.

A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part.

If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.

Are you taking into account the luck of genetics and what income level you're born into?

As someone born into a middle class family in a certain area, with certain genetics, I have been able to easily obtain middle class, with very little effort. If it's this easy for everyone why isn't everyone middle class? I don't feel like I've worked any harder then people who are worse off then me. If anything, I think I work far less hard.

I am not prepared to discuss or generalize from your specific situation. I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks. Broadly, in the upper class environments I have been in, luck and connections appear to play a larger role in major success.

If you feel guilty about your relatively easy success, I do think that focusing on both gratitude and charity is an effective moral approach.

> I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks

Everyone knows about anecdotes like this. The real question is: how many rich people lose everything (especially the ones born into wealth)? How many extremely poor people move up a lot? You'll see that these are exceptions rather than a common event.

I do not have any hard numbers on this information, although my general understanding is that social mobility has decreased lately. Unfortunately, that may be due to a number of reasons. Excluded from this conversation (luck vs. merit) is nepotism, for example, which is neither.

I am suspicious that this is not unintentional.

> If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success.

Let‘s put it this way: work hard and you might have a chance at becoming successful; don‘t work hard, and your chances of making it sharply plunge to zero (unless your family is already extremely wealthy, which is the case for a very small percentage of the population.)

This doesn't disprove anything of what I said. Effort is a component, but it is a small component compared to other external reasons.

I agree with your overall point, but putting in effort accounts for much more than 1% of success in pretty much any domain I can think of.

there's a sizable chunk of middle and upper-middle class families that can afford to send their children to good schools but not to support them indefinitely. it's a big advantage to start out as one of those children, but it can fall apart at pretty much any point if the child isn't willing to put in the bare minimum effort to advance through the pipeline.

The main problem with the way most people look at meritocracy occurs on the fringes. Billionaires deserve that much more because they earned it; if they didn't, it'd mean the system is broken, corrupt, or both. The destitute deserve it, because they earned it; if they didn't "".

Irl some people deserve more than others, but the gap is made up and silly, and everyone is better off when everyone is taken care of. You don't want people who have nothing to lose, but notions of meritocracy make people think it's unfair to take care of everyone.

Is this obsession with oversimplification of complex topics into two choices a uniquely American problem?

As an American I cant help but think our entertainment "news" cycles and narrative compression from commentators has contributed to this issue and our inability to find zen as a people.

1. Story is reported on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/etc.

2. "Now lets go to an expert to tell you what you should think." Not give you background on both sides without taking one or the other... we are going to beat you over the head with who is right and who is wrong. No middle ground.

No, I think it is intrinsic to human nature. We have a need to simplify our picture of the world; if we were to see all phenomena in all their various shades our brains would explode when we try to combine or compare two or more phenomena as we do. That doesn't mean we don't acknowledge the complexity of things (in say a research setting), it's just that we can't make a point if we were to always make such concessions in normal discourse.

That said, in certain political climates, such as the US presidential election season, the tendency to see things as black or white certainly gets amplified.

> if we were to see all phenomena in all their various shades our brains would explode when we try to combine or compare two or more phenomena as we do

Or you would achieve some level of enlightenment.

I do wonder if it has some basis in the manichaeism of the dominant protestant sects of american history.

I actually think this has gotten worse in the past 10 years or so due to social media link sharing, because they realized, and this is purely speculation, that if you have a very sensational extreme article in one direction it will get shared by both the people who vehemently agree and the people who think it's absolutely absurd rather than a "boring" article that people are less likely to act on, especially people from both sides of a debate.

Hear here! I'm reminded of Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents", wherein he expands his ideas about psychopathology to civilization as a whole. Tellingly, psychologists call what what you describe "splitting"[0], and, increasingly, that's what society is doing in the United States.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

> Yes, successful people usually merit their success

Do we have evidence to back up that assertion? Or more generally, a firm definition of what we mean by "merit" there?

The real question in this article is not whether luck or merit determines the success of an individual. The actual purpose of the article is to covertly present a “debate” without proposing anything in place, because we all know that the alternative to meritocracy can only be the ideology of the radical left, which the author seems to embrace (by looking at his other articles). The author argues that other programmers, as skillful as Bill Gates, don’t ever become as rich. This is a false argument, as equality of opportunity can’t and doesn’t guarantee equality of outcome. By making this argument, the author doesn’t take into account the multitude of other factors that contribute to a person’s success. Nobody says that merit is the only factor in predicting the success of the individual.

Also, the author argues that meritocracy inevitably leads to more discrimination. This is a completely unfounded conclusion, as we know that meritocracy goes hand in hand with capitalist societies such as the USA. And I think it’s fair to say that discrimination has declined in the last century, and not increased, as the author falsely claims.

I find it ironic that the article that claims meritocracy is bad, is hosted on the website of a university.

Let me sharpen the dilemma: Are some people better than others, or not?

Unfortunately that makes the dilemma less clear, although more emotionally powerful. Good rhetoric, bad dialectic.

If by „better“ you mean better cognitive abilities, then yes, some people ar better in this regard.

Okay, could you show it? In particular, while you can point to something like the g-factor, can you show that the g-factor exists? It is currently completely hypothetical that such differences exist.

For a good example of evidence, look at the Flynn effect. One way to read the effect is that people dramatically got smarter over the past century, but...how? What exactly actually changed? The biggest correlate is education, suggesting that the quality of schooling is far more important than any innate ability.

Edit: Ah, you believe in IQ. I presume that you won't simply let me win the argument just because of my high IQ, though? So IQ isn't everything. More importantly, though, note that IQ also correlates with sex and skin color, but a cursory look at the genes says that that correlation must be spurious. So indeed what we see is that IQ actually correlates with quality of education, which then goes on to correlate with both sex and skin color thanks to the sexism and racism inherent in our educational system.

The fact that there has been measured an increase in average IQ of the world population, doesn‘t mean that the differences between individuals don‘t exist. Look up some studies and you will see that there are huge differences in IQ, and intelligence is the number one predictor of an individual‘s success.

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