Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children?
That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.
I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.
I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.
> universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
and that is now called school isnt it? Everybody gets at least some minimal standard of schooling.
The fact is, meritocratic is meant to describe the opposite of nepotistic (or sometimes hereditary/aristocratic). Under a nepotistic system, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed without becoming the in-group somehow.
Poor people typically have none of those extra resources. Some poor people with extreme talent will be able to overcome the challenges of relative poverty, but others with equal talent won't.
It's extremely hard to create a true meritocratic system, and Gaokao certainly isn't it.
It’s unfair. But nonetheless true that students who were better able to prepare due to superior resources are nonetheless better prepared.
This would mean that says Musk's kids would need to get sufficiently higher scores than children of someone with no wealth.
If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic. If there 100 desired spots that are allocated by the exam, and 1000 students, and wealth (tutors/extra time etc) moves the needle enough to make a meaningful difference, it's basically nepotistic just the in-group is who's parents can afford it. Depending on where you are this can compound each generation.
Merit is about demonstrated ability, not how much effort, time, or money was put into getting the ability.
As long as you convert money into ability and ability into results, that's merit. Nepotism is when you convert money directly into results, buying a score.
i very much beg to differ. A poor but high aptitude student today is able to escape the "caste" they're born into. Under a true nepotistic system, this cannot happen no matter how much aptitude he/she possesses.
I don't think you can have a truly meritocratic system unless everyone starts on a level playing field with the same access to resources. That is not a system that exists anywhere on this planet.
only if you twist what you mean by meritocracy to mean equality.
Why don't you apply that exact same argument but to sports and athletics? People born with superior genes do perform better (ala, tall people in basketball).
Merit doesn't mean everyone starts at the same spot. Merit means your outcome is determined by how good you are at it - no matter how you get to become that good.
Is it not free anymore?
Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sense because now schools leaned more heavily on grades and extracurriculars, both of which can be gamed by wealthy families far more easily than a standardized test.
How do you figure? Many things in life are meritocratic. Apply for a job welding, they'll ask you to weld some coupons. If you can do it, you get the job, if you can't then you can't. If your father was a welder or a banker makes no difference, merit is about being able to do the work, not whether life was fair to get you to that skill level.
Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely.
Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it.
But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.
It turns out that often it being easy to describe in broad strokes how to do something doesn't make it easy to do in practise.
Considering I would be classified as a member of this group, let me ask:
> but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice
If attention is a choice, then how reliably can you control your attention based your choice?
For the sake of analogy, is being able to control one's attention like controlling one's breathe? As in, one can consciously be aware of and control their breathing to some degree, but without a conscious choice, breathing will still operate in the background. Or is attention something like a voluntary muscle movement which requires explicit intention?
I am asking because I have/had little to no control over my ability to focus. Thus, I am curious what it is like for others.
and that despite that they choose not to?
Effect of tutoring is greatly overstated.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.
I always find it slightly ironic how mother nature gets so much reverence from ostensibly communal types, despite her being the most shamelessly power hungry entity ever conceived.
Not "more intelligent", just "unusual in some way". People can be wealthier than average for all sorts of reasons unrelated to intelligence (as defined by IQ). Here's a sampling of them:
Being social and good at sales. Most successful real estate agents I've met don't strike me as particularly brilliant.
Working a boring job, living modestly, and investing in index funds for 20 years.
Winning the lottery (either literally, or by accidentally buying something cheaply that turned out to be worth a lot)
Marrying rich and divorcing.
Inheriting wealth.
Being a successful athlete or entertainer.
Being good at selling to people absolutely requires intelligence. So do many entertainment fields, and athletic achievement more than you might expect.
Investing consistently in an index fund over 20 years requires a bit of intelligence and a lot of grit.
Grit is basically conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is not correlated to intelligence. [1] This is why the stereotype of the dim but methodical plodder exists.
Sales ability is obviously a thing, since there are successful and unsuccessful people. But being able to connect with people (EQ) is crucial to be good at sales. Likeable people make more sales than unlikeable people. Being likeable is orthogonal to IQ.
I'm not denigrating successful entertainers' and athletes' cognitive abilities. They are brilliant in their fields. That's not the necessarily same thing as IQ. I'd expect the IQ distribution among that population be the same as the general population. That means some of them are high-IQ individuals in addition to being world-class singers or swimmers or actors, but most are average IQ.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...
Yeah, it flies in the face of Hollywood's jock/nerd dichotomy, but in my experience there's an awful lot of correlation between honors students and athletic participation. I think the root of it might be good genetics and early life nutrition contributing heavily to both.
So a lot of the time, it's not "being smart" that carries you to wealth, its avoiding the "disastrously stupid things" that stops you from being poor.
But thankfully, most crime in the aggregate is done by unintelligent people.
> most crime in the aggregate is done by unintelligent people.
That is a tough one. For I believe there is more to reality than what data can currently capture. While I do agree that most violent crime is carried out by unintelligent people, there is an untold amount of crimes being committed by individuals that are average to beyond intelligent. So, I would argue the unintelligent ones get caught more frequently and that skews the perception that they commit more crime.
Luckily that is no longer needed, as in capitalism such a person can provide good value to society just via greed. He shouldn't be a leader, but a greedy engineer isn't an issue.
If we're talking about IQ, then there isn't strong evidence for this.
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The notion that the deeply oppressive status quo is somehow fair and just is one of the worst post-hoc rationalizations that purportedly smart people can fall into. Open your eyes.
What the actual.... This is on HN? How low have we sunk here?