"Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
Which is not to say that Social Justice isn't important. It is vital. But you don't get to it by hiring the wrong people in the wrong roles. A meritocracy excels at producing wealth - Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, better Public Schooling... these are the kind of Social Justice programs that best distribute the wealth back to society.
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
We don't have that, or, we don't have all of that. But we could. And historically, simply confiscating the wealth of the elite, or just stacking their headless bodies in mass graves, doesn't do great things for the prosperity of the average citizen.
By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.
This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it.
Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together.
To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
What if Sarah spoke at a women's only conference. At this conference, it's not just a "bias" towards women speakers, it's a downright rule.
How do we regard Sarah's experience here?
That scenario might negate the above assumption, depending on how you view "women's only" conferences
When I studied engineering, my university had a "women in engineering" club which did a recruitment evening and I went along. When I talked to an employer, they told me "this is really for women, you should go to the general one instead". From what I understand, that kind of bias is widespread in America too. Where is this male and white preference happening?
I know many fields are dominated by white men but that fact alone doesn't show that it's because of systemic bias. Wasn't that stuff mostly stopped in the 1960's which is before anyone working today got started?
Just the other day there was a story on HN about an AI fighter pilot beating a real pilot in a simulation. But the company that did it was given special priority for government work because it was owned by a black person! A white owned company doing the same thing might not have got that contract.
As an analogy, safe driving is a good principle. Assessing the safety of a driver by past behaviour ("this person hasn't crashed in a while") is decent but biased metric. E.g. "drunkenness" might be a better metric. But the choice of metric doesn't (in)validate the underlying principle.
>> a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done
Why? That’s not a meritocracy, it is tenure based. Tenure does not always correlate with merit, so the basis of your example is moot.
A has a solid proposal and they're a known good quantity on the "speaker circuit"
B is a newcomer and their proposal looks really interesting too--maybe even more so--but we don't know them so maybe A is the safer choice
(I'd argue that this is the way that a lot of conferences have historically operated and many still do to some degree--which is OK to a point. You don't want to exclude traditional crowd-pleasers.)
But maybe if A's proposal is just solid, it wouldn't hurt to reach out to B for some additional information and to offer mentoring rather than just go with the safe easy choice.
"Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?"
Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game."
-- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)
Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective.
Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence of elites.)
A properly-tuned meritocratic measure thus looks for what a society needs in its elites to survive and thrive. (We don’t have such a function.) It may not be fair, individually. But it will he efficient, socially.
Paradoxically, those elites must then recognise that their position is largely a result of luck, and thus not an opportunity to become extractive towards the rest of the populace. That latter component means not every selection mechanism should to be meritocratic. This is one philosophical basis for balancing a meritocratic private sector and public service with elected elites, whose selection is decidedly not meritocratic.
They are very different. Merit really means ladder-climbing - plenty of incompetent and amoral people are are good at climbing the ladder.
It is the ladder itself that is the core of the problem.
These debates tend to get diluted absent a specific meritocratic measure.
With respect to college, I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating. We are able, to some degree, to predict this.
Given such a measure, it doesn’t make sense to give a seat to someone who has a 5% chance of graduating over someone with a 90% chance.
A society where the only criteria for access to higher education is that one graduates - and then perhaps goes on to do nothing with their education, or even just maintains the status quo - is a failure in my book.
If we wanted to look at their contributions to capitalism using a market measure (I'm not claiming this is even a good measure) then university dropouts like Bill Gates and Zuck are already examples of how your measure fails.
(Although Gates did eventually graduate 34 years after starting, hopefully the point is clear and we don't need to get pedantic about a simple example).
>A society where the only criteria for access to higher education is that one graduates - and then perhaps goes on to do nothing with their education, or even just maintains the status quo - is a failure in my book.
These two differing opinions showcase the problem with any meritocracy. That being - merit is ultimately subject to an opinion. This is not to say that a metric can be objectively used to determine merit (it can), it's that who's ultimately 'merrited' to determine what merits X?
I think meritocracy would be a really bad way to go about this, because rooting power in 'merit' would very quickly lead to merit being defined as whatever maintains incumbent power. So you'd end up with not only something that isn't meritocratic in any reasonable sense, but also corrupts the idea of merit. And since that's often knowledge-based merit, you'd end up with a situation where whatever 'knowledge' incumbents had proved proficiency in would become something they would protect against all challengers. Intellectual stagnation and extreme discouragment of creativity would be the norm.
> "The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area."
> "The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat."
I don't know how reliable a narrator Smith may be, because as an Outer Party member he's obviously an auxiliary who failed his quals...
Also, we mustn't forget that reasonable incumbents won't protect against all challengers, merely most. The cream of society must consist not solely of the rich and the thick, but also a few nouveau aristos, if it wishes to be stable.
I capture the rising elite
You utilise potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes
They cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/wh...
On the other hand, remember what Roman Hruska said about needing some representation of mediocre people on the Supreme Court?
"We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos."
...and people still make fun of it.
I'm doing really well despite falling off the rails a bit in my early 20s. If I didn't have my family to help me, I'd not be doing nearly as well.
But what is merit? Take the "aptitude and the willingness" in the other reply: we cannot decide to be naturally driven or passionate about something, or being quick learners and so on.
We can only decide to put efforts into something. Unless our energy is depleted by issues that we cannot control, ranging from being concerned about financial difficulties, family issues, to physical and mental health, and so on.
And that's much harder than it sounds because so much of this culture is based on maintaining and perpetuating privilege.
To be clear - the US caste system is ridiculously rigid and self-sustaining. It has no interest at all in being more permeable to social mobility.
Mostly fair is worse than completely fair, but way better than unfair or random.
If 80% is getting a fair deal, but you wanting to solve the issue for the remaining 20% results in making things worse for the 50%, you're not solving the issue.
Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest.
“Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?
For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good.
Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
Right, this is the scientific approach. You have to disprove the null hypothesis, otherwise your theory is unsubstantiated.
However, my hazy understanding from psych lectures years past is that similar experiments have already happened and the results are in. University achievement was found to be correlated with big 5 consciousness and IQ. (I can’t remember the effect sizes.) I have no idea how well the US collage admissions process selects for those traits. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I would bet money a lottery would lower the average academic achievement of collage graduates.
(Edit: first result on google scholar talks about the positive correlation between GPA and consciousness: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/per.732 )
That's not the point though.
Remember, the article proposes to draw a random sample from all applicants who are "good enough", so you would have some sort of aptitude test. However, instead of selecting the best N results from that test, you select a random N.
I wouldn't hypothesize that the results are going to indistinguishable or even that they will be better. I would argue that total welfare may improve as a result and that is worth testing.
The reason is as follows: If you only take the "best and brightest", there's little room for improvement.
I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity.
For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”
> "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the extremely wealthy fail to beat an index fund over the generations because of hubris. The Rockefellers are still rich but their combined wealth as a portion of the US economy is less than the founder of their fortune’s was when he made it.
None of this matters to the organizations offering patents of nobility of course. Ideally they’d be abolished, all real property expropriated and the IP released to the public domain. Anything that reduces their prestige is to the good though. Reducing the fellow feeling of the ruling class by giving them a less concentrated base of experience is to the good.
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-problem-isnt...
> Liberal technocrats give us literally no reason at all to think their interests are aligned with the great majority of people, yet when they are attacked as a governing class they stress their credentials and competency. But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently!
...
> The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others.
> Things have not always been this way.
> Though commentators sometimes speak of the old WASP gentry as an earlier era's national elite, they were not really so: they were the business, cultural, and political elites of one region of America. They ruled the roost in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. During the WASP heyday these states had greater economic and demographic heft than other regions in the nation, and so families with names like Roosevelt, Adams, and Lodge had an outsized influence on national politics and culture. But those families were not competing against the best and brightest of the entire nation: they were competing with each other. Texas' best and brightest did not strive to get into Harvard—they strove to get into Baylor. They were generally satisfied to be Texas elites, and if they operated on the national stage they tended to think of themselves as such.
Churn on that list is largely an illusion.
The wealth required to maintain a spot on Forbes list is growing significantly faster than inflation. Wealth that would have put you in first place in 1992 ($6.3 Billion) or 12.49 Billion in 2020 money, is less than 1/2 what it takes make the top 20 today. Don’t worry Bill Gated may have lost the #1 spot, but hey he’s got 7x as much money despite giving away billions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2020/04/07/the...
It doesn’t, does it?