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Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

>The randomly selected applicants

Why would you want to randomly select here?

That's the best way to do it. Otherwise all the money will go to the rich brat children of politicians/etc who are socially connected to whoever they put on the selection committees.

I agree that it's a problem. But how do you prevent it from been overflowed by people like me that can't draw a circle with the bottom of a bottle?

Dunno tbqh. Maybe the media will police it by shaming people who abuse it.

I'm not sure that's true. What kind of rich brat will go through the trouble of all that for a couple hundred euros a month?

Random isn't a bad way of doing it in any case though.

Rich parents are masters of helping their children exploit the system in as many of the thousands of ways that exist. A few hundred here, another hundred there, maybe some one-off thousands here.

In most of the world, rich people are rich because they are good at exploiting government funds. It's a lifestyle.

Mostly because the kind of people who run and advocate for programs like this are actively hostile to the idea of merit. Prioritizing talented people would be antithetical to them.

Prioritizing merit would be fine if there was some way to measure merit empirically, and if that measure couldn't be gamed by anybody with money and/or connections. But this is for artists, so...

I bet you also think government shouldn't be picking winners and losers.

And thinks that s/he's a winner and the stuff s/he enjoys is made by winners, and the stuff s/he doesn't like is made by losers. Merit, universal, objective = ME; Worthless, narcissistic, special interest = YOU.

Why wouldn't you? How do you define merit to artists? Many of the greatest artists of all time lived their entire lives in poverty and desperation.

To not have selection bias so you can measure the effects

Random selection is possibly the fairest way to select almost anything, depending on your definition of fair.

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