larsonf

"In what possible reality can someone receive a million dollars and feel as though they got fucked?"

The reality where if you play for the Yankees you do not care if you beat the Jamestown Little League Allstars.

Absolutely. These things are incremental and at each step we try to be as fair and realistic as possible.

But what do you think about this?

I think there's something interesting in there, though. In some ways, this argument really acknowledges that laws really are tethered to reality. It's not so much a matter that we can simply will a legal situation into reality. What's fascinating, though, is that this idea that things are sort of stuck in the realities of the past-- that people really do like to be monogamous, that kids really are something that people do, that inheritance issues are going to be there--is a very conservative position relative the progressive approach, which really does sort of say 'we can decide how to structure society'. I mean when was the last time you heard someone say that 'we can educate this demographic because there's 200,000 years of historical precedent'.

I don't care either way. But I'm just noting that there is a profound conservatism within the push to state-defined marriage. Why now want to respect historical precedent as more or less permanent and yet disregard tradition elsewhere?

Maybe someone mentioned this but what if the reason more women don't go into CS/programming is more to do with discrimination from other women and not men? Perhaps women feel they won't be considered 'womanly' as defined by females?

I wonder what this means:

'The best entrepreneurs are ones who work in their field first, gaining valuable real-world knowledge and experience for a decade or more.'

The definition of 'best' here is massively important. If 'best' means 'has an operating business with ~1 million in revenue', then perhaps no one will doubt that a slightly unconventional, experienced, agreeable, 34-year old is predictive.

Maybe I'm totally wrong on this but I feel that not many people are selling their things, moving to silicon valley and missing a good deal of their youth in order to have a successfully operating business in which they hold a little equity, thus putting them in the ranks of perhaps a certain type of 'best' entrepreneurs. I would go even so far as to say that SV's 'best' is massive success--like 'billion is cool'--where perhaps you couldn't even do a predictive test because the outcome is that rare. I mean how many people are really set out to achieve non-power-law-type success if they are in the 'founder' game? Are angels looking for that? Perhaps picking founders by lowest car insurance premium? VCs?

Whoops, let me unpack.

1) That 'merit' is based on genetic variation was purely for the sake of illustration. Of course this is not the case in reality. Yet to boil down the problem to where we artificially limit the factors can help expose the real issue. In Equalistan, the fictitious illustration, everyone showed up at 25 with no history or connections. They immediately took a test. The genetic variation is just to show that random mutations can produce very varied outcomes. In the real world, the situation is inconceivable worse. You have genetic ability, mentorship, poetical power, network connections, wealth, random physical events, etc, that all affect outcomes.

2) Although, again, the example given was purely artificial, it is not so clear that personal 'accountability' or 'responsibility' is something that someone can help. A person with a super-charged frontal cortex will be very 'accountable' or 'responsible' with their abilities. The knock-on effects of stewardship of traits are very much the cause of other traits, whether inherited genetically or contextually (via parents or social structures). But I might be missing what you're saying here.

3) Resource distribution, you're right, is not zero-sum. In fact, on an absolute basis, there is no reason why anyone should ever write an article about injustice of outcomes given that overall standards of living are unbelievable high for people at large, and relative to past ages, although still very far form optimal. But this isn't the point of the article. Relative distribution of resources is the issue. But here 'resources' isn't necessarily physical things, it's anything limited. Power is zero sum, no matter what, and is still a resource to be distributed.

4) Yes, 'deserves' is fully-loaded, and that was the point of mentioning it. We somehow, for some bizarre reason feel that some people 'deserve' things and others do not and we should try to make sure people only have what they 'deserve'. But, you're right, this is nuts, at what point could we possible say that someone can really claim they did something independent of chance to have some moral justification to some resource, power or otherwise? Never. If you are hardworking--how can you separate that from genes plus context. If you are smart, how are you anything other than your inborn ability plus instruction. So I'm not saying some people don't deserve stuff, I'm saying this whole notion of deserving anything is ridiculous. Justification of outcomes as anything other than randomness is just what elitism is.

It seems some of us are missing the implication of the article.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there really were a way to negate all advantages a person could be born into. No social networks, no additional wealth, no additional opportunities, etc. A place where everyone is born at 25 at the exact same moment: no friends, no past, no parents, no money. We can call this place 'Equalistan', population 1 million. Now, in Equalistan, there is still random genetic mutation. Some people are taller, some people have working memories that store more information, some have long-term memories that store more information, some solve problems by simple heuristics, some follow bodily signals for cues, etc. There's no such thing as 'smarter' or 'better' at birth in Equalistan, however, because these only make sense in hindsight. Each person in Equalistan just has a different, inherited strategy at living. Everyone just showed up at the same moment, 25 years old, no history, no buddies, but just an inherited genetic toolset.

Now, in Equalistan, there's a test to decide who gets the most resources. However, no one in Equalistan designed this test because, remember, we are making sure no one has any advantage; each person only has an inherited, random strategies from birth. So everyone takes this test and there is then a distribution of resource possession. But here is the upshot. Every person completely deserves the outcome they receive on the test. After all, the only thing being tested was each person's 'merits'. Now the question is, does it ever matter whether people "deserve" the amount of resources they possess?

The article isn't saying so much that meritocracy begets old-school elitism after assortative mating as much as it's saying that meritocracy itself is a terrifying thing. That it may be 100% the truth that people deserve the outcome they receive in life, but, who cares?