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Comment by ringeryless | Hacker News Reader

what a load of bs. i anticipated a reasonable article at the outset, i even agreed with the thesis statement that changing political mores are resulting in a decline in meritocracy, and i was directly considering Hegseth and Gabbard and RFK as ideological appointments with no competence.

instead, the article purports that diversity iniciatives are to blame, not rash MAGA ideological purges or Trumps random economic policies.

this article is garbage. gtfo

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All right, but there's a real point: Competency actually matters. You can say it's threatened by hiring based on DEI rather than competence. You can say that it's threatened by hiring for political alignment rather than competence. In fact, it can be threatened by several things, including nepotism.

But to the degree the article is correct in showing that this is already happening, it probably can't be due to Trump and his band of merry fellow-travelers. He's only had four months. The problems set in before that.

You can argue about the cause. (Others have said that the article didn't do enough to establish the cause.) But even if you don't accept their cause, the article still has a point: Competence really matters, and we seem to be failing at getting it in the people who run a number of our important systems.

Basic causality argues strongly that MAGA, Trump, Gabbard, Hegseth, RFK Jr, etc are symptoms and not causes of a decline in meritocracy.

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