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Comment by AniseAbyss | Hacker News Reader

The fallacy of meritocracy. You stand on the shoulders of your parents. If you come from a family of crackheads on the bad side of the rail tracks you already lost the race long before 8th grade.

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Spending extra time reading to your kids, sending your kids to tutors, paying for summer programs, sweating over neighborhood to move into for their good schools...many of these things are now considered “inter-generational privilege transfer”. But not long ago, they were simply called “good parenting”.

Why even bother doing good parenting when the ideologues in charge want to “fallacy of meritocracy” away any advantages you have given to your kids?

I used to be pretty annoyed by conservatives boasting about "family values". I thought it was just performative virtue signaling. But looking at how the far left views the hard work of parenting as something that ought to be "equalized away" has me thinking maybe the I was wrong.

Indeed we would have to make everyone completely equal. Mao tried to achieve this with the abolishment of the family.

While this is very true, you cannot force all parents to become crackheads, so you will always have different outcomes. We have the same problem with wealth in that regard.

You can only improve education in a way that is offers support for people in difficult homes. Perhaps their difficult childhood will ultimately hinder them from becoming the best. But then perhaps their children will fare better.

This is why we can do things to make up for the fact that society has failed these children.

If you make it so that only “merit” is considered - you’re only gonna get rich kids. (And I see this already through SV - it’s nothing but rich or well educated parents for the children here)

What is the argument against letting children who have had a rough lot in their life get a slight lessening of their handicap when applying for colleges or other life changing scenarios that could pull them out of their rut for future generations?

If you don’t and are unwilling to address the root cause (and we aren’t willing to address that in the US - we don’t even have universal healthcare yet guys) then you’re gonna keep having this shit continue.

The merit-based school such as Styuvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF are both filled with rather poor Asian kids.

The demographic profile of these two schools are substantially lower income than the very expensive cities they reside in.

Edit: Got the names of the schools wrong.

You know that isn't an argument against what I said, right? Like, at all. It completely supports what I said.

You said:

> If you make it so that only “merit” is considered - you’re only gonna get rich kids.

He said:

> The merit-based school such as Styuvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF are both filled with rather poor Asian kids.

> The demographic profile of these two schools are substantially lower income than the very expensive cities they reside in.

It couldn't possibly be further from supporting what you said.

Since people here are often ESL. I'll put it this way: "English is a rich language."

Please try to think about how the context of what I said could be interpreted. If you take literally everything at face value - you're truly not thinking critically about anything.

Not sure why you keep arguing against yourself. Many immigrant Asian families have households which are not English-fluent.

> You know that isn't an argument against what I said, right? Like, at all. It completely supports what I said.

It's literally the opposite of what you said, unless you suddenly changed your mind and agree that the merit-based schools are the best option for poor kids.

Agreed that there is a need of support system. Disagreed on making the denominator racial, religious or cultural. That is particularly evading the root causes in my opinion.

You can't force parents to do anything, but you can structure public policy to include recognition that some people get benefits of circumstance others don't.

As analogy: we won't (and we shouldn't) stop billionaires from making money as fast as they (legally) can, but we can sure as hell tax them proportional to their success at it.

Merit, by definition, is what you deserve. I could see the case for merit-based applications that take into account how far you've come relative to where you started.

what is the fallacy exactly?

The fallacy that you went to that nice university because you're smart and not just lucky.

Do you mean that some people are lucky because they were born smart?

This is the real issue that no one wants to address.

Yeah I’m with you here.

Would it be reasonable to say that hard work should be rewarded? Well…ones propensity for hard work, it turns out, is highly heritable. Either from your genes or from your upbringing. You didn’t choose your parents, nor did you choose your upbringing. So your propensity for hard work is really just unearned privilege.

Same line of reasoning can be applied with future orientation, or smarts. People don’t deserve the fruits of their intellect, because they didn’t do anything to earn it.

I’m not sure if there is a name for this kind of absurdity, but “Achievement Fatalism” is a nice fit.

I can sympathize with people who are sad about the inequalities of biology. The trouble is that the best hope for “a rising tide that lifts all boats” is for the top crust of the IQ of humanity to be applied toward fixing real problems. Distracting smart people with stupid fake victim status games literally makes the rest of humanity poorer.

The smartest people I know simply don't find them distracting. They also don't consider them stupid or fake; they have better things to do than argue whether people deserve equal treatment with dignity and mostly do their best to just treat people with equal dignity.

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