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I don't think of the meritocracy is about rewarding or punishing. Meritocracy is about finding the best person for the job. Who has shitty parents, who has a quick mind, who dies of a cancer at 17. None of it is fair, and your job is only one very small part of that unfairness.

Meritocracy is about putting the best person for the job in that job. It's about efficiency. A more efficient society can make everyone better off.

Unfortunately jobs do not experiment enough and neither do politics. There are no real "training wheels" kind of jobs that allow one to seriously evaluate merit for many positions.

For instance, suppose we're looking for a person capable of managing and devising a high end strategy. How would you even judge someone good at it, with computer simulation games? Definitely college degrees are bad proxy for it.

What happens if you prefer certain kinds of merit over others, like today, where people with social skills and connections can easily outmanouevre others?

How do you even judge certain kinds of merit, like creativity, critical for art and research jobs? Acclaim is not the same thing as merit.

This and other questions make meritocracy actually impossible to implement.

If you're arguing that we could make hiring more efficient I won't argue with you.

But having a meritocracy isn't about about it being perfect but what philosophy you use to fill positions. Is your goal to find the best person for the job? Or do you have a different goal? And if so what is it?

Let’s suppose people initially have equal opportunity and merit. Now let’s say 10 percent of the population will be “chosen” such that they are lucky and have “talent,” such that they’re now better than the others in activities that determine merit.

In the first generation this is fine - after all there are all sorts of people: tall, short, fat, skinny etc.

In this scenario, though, the 2nd generation of people, aka the kids of the first, will all be equal again, except for the children who happened to be born by those who were the chosen. Those kids will be able to be better prepared, all things being equal. Now add the potential for the kid to be both born by a chosen and also be chosen themselves - the merit will grow exponentially.

Eventually at say generation 100, despite things originally being equal - all of those who are considered to have relative merit will basically just be descendants of those who just happened to be lucky.

Add in reality and things like money, oppression, over consuming fixed resources that allow for improvement and you can perhaps understand the frustration of some.

Who cares?

The point of meritocracy is to select people who can solve problems and make the world better. It's not to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.

To put it another way, if rich people raise their children to be more capable of making the world better then why is that a problem? Let's say Einstein was only a genius because his parents bought a nice house with no lead paint. Who cares? Why does that matter? What matters is the work he did.

Now, if you want to pass a law that says "no more houses with lead paint" that's lovely. But it has nothing to do with meritocracy.

I’m not really sure what to tell you - you don’t see the problem my example highlights? Lol. How would you feel if people with merit actively prohibited those without from improving? Still don’t care?

You’re right though, meritocracy wouldn’t be a problem if merit existed only to objectively improve the world.

Is that true?

I see the problem your example highlights. It has nothing to do with meritocracy. It has to do with social policy.

> You’re right though, meritocracy wouldn’t be a problem if merit existed only to objectively improve the world.

Merit doesn't have to be objective. All we can do is subjectiviely do our best to determine merit using whatever tools we can. If we're wrong, we're wrong (and we will often be wrong).

Being wrong is fine and inevitable. It's not an excuse to say "meritocracy is bad".

I’m not following you - meritocracy and subjectivity are inherently contradictory.

Also, the example I gave and the problems it illustrate are inherent to the example - there’s no policy you could invoke that would remedy it. Feel free to share an example of how you’d fix the example to remove the dilemma, if you would like.

I don't agree. We have meritocracies based on things most people consider subjective (art, music, writing).

What makes it a meritocracy is not that there's some objective measure of merit, just that there's an attempt to determine merit severed from factors deemed irrelevant (usually birth, class, race, sex, gender, beauty, etc).

No one is saying we have determined God's own concept of merit. "Merit" can and will shift over time. Different individuals will assess it differently. All we can do is our best.

And by doing the best, you mean doing the most to pervert that system into a hereditary feudalismn for own reproductive fitness, just like happened everywhere this was attempted.

It starts with placing kids in better schools, cheating, disabling help programs and ends up at modifying tests to serve themselves better.

And most importantly, by design creates an underclass of undesirables. People less able or outright disabled, who could be used by others to seize power.

Wasn’t the point of meritocratic institutions to create opportunities for everyone, so that even those of low birth have a chance at success? A rejection of the fixed aristocracy?

That’s the problem with iterative meritocracy, late in the game it becomes indistinguishable from aristocracy.

> That’s the problem with iterative meritocracy, late in the game it becomes indistinguishable from aristocracy.

In a functioning meritocracy, if a genius is born into to a poor family, he will be recognized and promoted.

>> Eventually at say generation 100, despite things originally being equal - all of those who are considered to have relative merit will basically just be descendants of those who just happened to be lucky

At generation 100, a person will have 633,825,300,114,114,700,748,351,602,688 slots in their family tree going back to generation 1. Everybody will be related to everybody.

> [...extreme scenario highlighting large differences in ability and opportunity...] sure that's unfair, but what does it have to do with meritocracy?

The situation isn't always (or ever) so cut-and-dried. Usually you have to compare those 4 applicants across many different and subjective criteria. Moreover your own assessments are, at best, less than perfect.

Sometimes choices between closely matched applicants really do come down to a lottery and this is what some elite schools have to resort to. Sometimes the decision is by referral through a social network, or greased palms. Sometimes other criteria like diversity can be a factor if the candidates are closely enough matched and there is a desire to have more diversity.

For something to be truly meritocratic, it would require that everyone have the same values and that everyone would agree on one "objective" assessment. That's never the case. And worse if it is called "meritocratic" it's always about "merit" as measured by ONE entity and not everyone else.

> At the end of the day if you have 1 position and 4 applicants, the only way you can opt out of a meritocracy is selecting randomly.

You're oversimplifying things. You have a list of criteria based on which you select applicants. You're not basing your selection based on a scalar "skill" value in [0, +inf[.

You have different applicants with different skillsets and personalities. You have to gauge whether that set of skill will translate with good performance on the job. However, you also want to gauge whether the person is actually interested in your project or not, and whether or not they'll get along with you and your team, all of which is nontrivial to judge during interviews. All of your measurements are noisy and biased.

I was interviewing someone recently, and they were a friend of mine. I knew they had the knowledge, but during the interview, they came off as not having done their homework and not that interested in the work we were doing, so my friend, who I knew was more than capable enough, flunked the interview, and we ended up selecting someone less skilled but seemingly more interested. However, after having hired the second guy, I'm actually finding I don't like his personality that much. Hiring is complicated and hard to get right, more complicated than just "merit".

Personally, I'm finding personality, friendliness and eagerness to be more valuable than what people have on their CV, their GitHub, or how much they ace whatever we throw at them in programming interviews. There are people out there who are really good but are total dicks. From what I've seen, I don't think I would ever want to work with Linus Torvalds for instance, even though I use git and Linux everyday, and the guy for sure scores a lot of "merit" points, he's had a huge impact on the world. If I interview you and the feel I get from you is that you're arrogant and kind of a dick, it's not going to matter what your SAT scores is or however many patents you have to your name.

> Personally, I'm finding personality, friendliness and eagerness to be more valuable than what people have on their CV, their GitHub, or how much they ace whatever we throw at them in programming interviews.

Great. You have constructed a meritocracy that prices in "personality, friendliness and eagerness". It's still a meritocracy.

Most crucially, a true meritocracy would fire people at will whenever a better applicant surfaces for any position. What currently happens is that we get many "has beens", or people who seemed ok at the time but are actually getting bad results.

Plus, to judge results you would need either objective criteria or average of many opinions like in democracy.

Except there's no global "meritocracy" where people are ranked by "true worth" in any organization, because:

1. Your measurements are noisy and biased

2. People's "true worth" would value over time, but their compensation and status doesn't always follow

3. Everyone doing the hiring has slightly different criteria

What you have is an approximate ranking which by definition cannot be a true a meritocracy, no matter how hard you try.

I think you are touching on the same point - that more than mere meritocracy, there is an aspect of social mobility. Children of highly educated parents know what to do to get to an Ivy League School, whereas kids from underprivileged backgrounds have often to find this out for themselves. What if you don't have access to a good counsellor or a library to find out this career path?

There are graded policies available. One way around this may be to introduce "grace marks" for underprivileged school districts similar to a handicap in golf, and to reserve some seats for such students. This is not so revolutionary a proposal - there are seats in every Ivy League school for children of influential families, even though they are not really the cream of the crop, intellectually.

I think the point is that there are many people who believe that it is indeed Jim's fault. Such people often base that on meritocracy, which warrants the criticism.

> John gets straight As, and aces his SATs, and comes up with a novel theorum by age 25

OK but who decides those are the right measures of "merit"?