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Comment by bberrry | Hacker News Reader

For some reason this idea that meritocracy is undesirable has been making the rounds recently. I haven't heard any proposed alternatives that would be at all viable in a society where we want critical roles to be performed by competent people. Do we really want incompetent people running things because they will botch their attempts at being unethical? It certainly seems like the author is making that argument.

Yes, we don't want an ever increasing wealth gap but dismantling meritocracy strikes me as the worst possible way to deal with that.

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> ... we want critical roles to be performed by competent people.

Yes. Over the last few years, we've seen the problems caused by having critical jobs performed by less than competent people. (I'm sure you can fill in your own examples.)

The problem is that there are (at least) two kinds of "fake meritocracy". There's credentialism: "This person must me competent; they graduated from Elite Institution". And then there's elitism: "This person must be competent, their parents are rich and famous". Neither tells us much about their actual competence at any specific role. (All right, credentialism tells you that they were competent at graduating from Elite Institution, but we aren't hiring them to have them do that over and over.)

I wonder if part of the reason for the criticism of meritocracy is because of the failings of fake meritocracy. (I suspect that another part of it is a complaint that those who win the meritocracy game get too much of the rewards, which I think is a fair criticism.)

There's a brief discussion of that: "Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel suggests that the most exclusive colleges should move away from tournament-style admissions. Instead, he’d like to see them set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold." You could apply this thinking society-wide: if you're competent enough to do your job then that's it; there's no rankings.

> set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold

Isn't this what they already do at a theoretical level? If you have 800 seats in a given class, you keep raising your admissions bar until you get ~800 qualified applicants.

Now we can discuss whether donations and legacy status should play into that bar or not, but I think that's a separate issue.

I don't think that's what was intended. I think the idea is "Set your admissions bar to the minimum level, then admit however many students meet it."

Or, if you have only 800 possible seats, "Set your admissions bar, then pick 800 of them randomly". The more you "raise" the bar, the more your definition of "raise" matters. It will tend to select people who can afford (in time, money, connections, etc) to meet your specific criteria. And you run the risk of accidentally setting your criteria to be "more like me" (in looks, patterns of thought, etc.)

If you assume that your school can benefit anybody smart enough to meet your criteria, why not take as many as you can? And why not aim to get more people who couldn't focus on your criteria? Randomness won't seek them out, but it at least won't prefer a 1500 SAT by a student who does nothing but take SAT tests to a 1460 SAT by a student who has to work two part time jobs.

I think the best proposed alternative is to spread out power. You can't have incompetent people running things if no one (or everyone) is running things. Is this viable? I'm not sure, but I think we could distribute power at least somewhat more then we currently are.

How many surgeons do you want operating on a patient? How many pilots should hold the stick? Politics might be particularly suitable for more distributed power but I'd say that's an exception.

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