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Comment by yedava | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be quite a bit of outrage against the idea that merit doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Let's consider the times when these institutions have had meritocratic admissions. What exactly have the meritorious students from these institutions contributed to society? The primary accomplishment is that they've engineered a corporate take over of society. The 2008 financial crisis, the tech driven surveillance society, all came from the talented minds of the merited elite.

So it is any surprise that there is support for the idea that merit is a meaningless idea? The gifted class hasn't made life any better for the rest of the society.

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Yes, I 100% prefer to live in a building designed by an engineer with the best scores instead of the one with the correct skin colour.

I wonder what test scores the people who invented steel had.

I dont care, but they probably wouldve had good test scores.

Then let's try something simpler. What were the test scores of Linus Torvalds? Which gatekeeper certified that he was qualified enough to do engineering at the level he has done?

Test scores are meritocratic but looking at actual achievements is also meritocratic.

There's little difference in looking at test results and actual work which it is meant to proxy. At least in principle.

A McKinsey consultant got there through meritocracy, but they will likely be working on something that makes life miserable for people, whereas someone working on an FOSS project will likely make life better for people. As a measure of usefulness to society, meritocracy, as determined by test scores, or career achievements is useless.

Are you suggesting that talented people are a net negative on society?

Your point is unclear.

What a bizarre take. What about the wheel? This argument is ridiculous

This is not a very good use of rhetorical questions or the Socratic method

But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes? On one hand there is the lived experience of being in the underclass, which might cause someone to be less supportive of tech authoritarianism from the consumer surveillance industry. On the other hand personal benefit fuck-you-got-mine is a strong attractor regardless of someone's past, and I'd think that more "privileged" people could be more independent and better at pulling in a different direction than the overall group behavior.

> But how do you suppose that putting people with less academic merit in those positions will create better outcomes?

It won't and that's the point. We should stop wasting our childhoods chasing meaningless standardized tests because the rationale for the tests is built on a lie. You can randomly pick people to run corporations and we won't be any worse off.

Meritocracy is a lot like how Winston Churchill described democracy: the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives. What’s your alternative? Hereditary aristocracy?

Considering the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth, it's difficult to square admissions to top schools as a "meritocracy". The root of the problem here is the vast wealth inequality, and the way schools are funded via property taxes — something with a lot of problems and bias on its own.

One way to address some of this is to properly fund all public schools so academic success isn't largely a tossup of where one's parents could afford to live. Trying to correct for this at the admissions level is a divisive and bandaid solution.

> the biggest predictor of academic success is wealth

Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children. That is, the same qualities that make someone more likely to become wealthy are also qualities that promote academic success, not that wealth causes academic success.

> properly fund all public schools

Some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation are funded quite well, and the US nears the top per-student spending around the world[0], well above the OECD average. There is no amount of funding that can supplant parents who value education and a culture that values education.

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

>Perhaps the better way to think of wealth is as a proxy for intelligent, conscientious parents who care about educating their children.

That just doesn't line up with reality. In the U.S. the vast majority of wealth accumulation is in the form of homeownership [1] — Which has a stark and undeniable racial divide of which we're still seeing consequences today. Specifically racist zoning laws and redlining by banks that refused to give loans to PoC.

A lot of these laws are still being enforced today (i.e. 5,000sqft minimum lot sizes and huge setbacks requiring the purchase of lots of unproductive land that less wealthy people can afford).

Now, during the course of these discussions someone usually brings up a 'model minority' that's succeeding academically, and I'll agree that there's a cultural aspect to this as well. However, if they also own their homes disproportionately to other minorities, they're benefiting from an inequitable system that's still in place.

I'm not trying to reduce anyone's academic success and hard work down to a matter of money, there are lots of successful people despite their obstacles. But we can't pretend the system is setup to reward everyone solely on merit.

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-diffe...

The US has a notoriously terrible social safety net compared to peer countries. The "worst-performing public schools" are using their money to provide food, transportation, healthcare, and counseling services in addition to academics.

Baltimore City schools are just another few thousand per student away from producing a student body GPA above 2.0!

There's a lot more to this issue than school funding, but teaching as a profession should pay for a solid middle class life to attract the best talent. Could we at least agree on that?

Modern society has problems, and they should be addressed. Yet there will always be issues to address, problems to resolve.

Yet these schools exist in one of the freest societies that ever existed, with untold riches in terms of health care, prosperity, and quality of life.

Ask someone from 1800AD about antibiotics, vaccines , cars, computers, electronics and electricity. The advantages of a modern state are astonishing, and all come at the feet of modern universities.

Heck, metoo, the woke movement none of that could have ever existed without decades of courts ruling on the rights of the individual. Quite literally the woke movement's mocked boomer narrative was astonishing, as the woke movement would have never been given room to breath in 1930.

Boomers enabled the woke movement.

We have our society, those that came before us to thank, not belittle. And yes, we have our own things to fix.

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