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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

I'm becoming convinced by the idea that meritocracy itself is bad and a terrible way to organize society. But perhaps I'm biased by being a failure in the meritocratic system.

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It's hard for me to imagine someone not being meritocratic. You would really, in your deepest heart of hearts, be sincerely ambivalent about whether your, say, dangerous surgery was done by the best surgeon in the country vs the lousiest? And if we say yes we would prefer the more meritorious one for that job, why not extend it to virtually every job?

Honestly, anybody that passes a certain bar is probably fine for me. We already have that with medical licensing, board exams, residency matching, etc. If anything we could probably loosen the bar, since residency spots are artificially scarce because of the residency cap.

To be perfectly clear, I don't dispute ability exists - I just don't think that should be the ideal organizing philosophy for society.

Have you not heard of the caste system? We in India created an entire social order and religion based on keeping high quality jobs for a certain group of people based on identity and lineage. And karma was the justification given to lower caste people for why they got such a bad deal in the current life.

And this might be getting a little personal, but just read that person's username. Acharya is a common Brahmin title, so I'm not very surprised that he thinks this way.

I am becoming convinced by the idea that democracy itself is a bad and a terrible way to organize government. But I am also at losses for a less bad way. In similarities, I am at losses for a less bad than meritocracy. I am listening to hear more other options but am not hear any less bad.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" as Churchill supposedly said

I'm interested in hear about why you believe you're a failure in the meritocratic system.

I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons:

1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective

2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)

That's around my line of thinking, pure meritocracy is both too subjective and far too harsh to the people who aren't in the lucky egg club, especially in increasingly global winner take all games (an inevitable consequence of globalization).

I'm a failure by meritocracy by nature of losing at all of the tests we use to judge success and merit - test scores, elite school admission, elite institutions etc.

What do you do now?

he's a SDE at Amazon

Why the feeling of failure then ? There is nothing there that is not in your company now. You are not a graded apple to be sold at a store. If you are intelligent you will recognize these are human constructs, and nature/problems don’t recognize your degree - they are available for everyone

Regarding 2, why is it better to select on non-genetic traits? Those traits would be determined by the environment, which doesn't feel any more fair to me to judge on, and in general seems like something we try to avoid (i.e. we do not want rich kids to do well purely because they grew up with better resources).

I'm genuinely asking because I have no clue what people want "merit" to mean. I always assumed the entire point was to remove environmental factors (to varying degrees).

I don't think merit should focus on traits, I think merit should focus on effort. Though the problem with that is that traits can be a multiplier for effort.

I don't know what merit should really mean though. It seems like there will always be some sort of hierarchy in society, so I guess defining what constitutes merit is a pick-your-poison kind of situation.

That's fair enough, I think effort should be an important piece. I just suspect that's got a large genetic component too.

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