Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quote Meritocracy Unquote

braythwayt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#111

Post by james1071 »

neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

Yes, amusing that the author uses the word without apparently understanding its origin and nuances.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#112

Post by roc »

raganwald wrote: post #49
neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

Those at the bottom deserve to be there. I didn't put this in the article, but a few hours later I think this is an interesting point, thank you. If the post's proposition is correct and that "meritocracy" is all about minimal false positives, then we can also agree that there are people at the bottom who are qualified, but that's a cost of setting up a system optimized for minimizing false positives. I know from man…

> "so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s. Which means that you'll miss a few As and lots of B+ people."

It's actually worse than that. When you exclude huge swaths of a sample like that, you have no context for the true scale.

So while you can hire the best of the sample you see, while understanding you may miss other people nearly that good, you may also be missing people who are better (perhaps wildly so) than even the best of those you chose.

Consider the case of competitive sports during times of segregation.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#113

Post by DannyBee »

raganwald wrote: post #100
DannyBee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the Galileo example is interesting, the "black people" one is not. The application of actual force (IE whipping people, beating them, lynching them, etc) is not really something normally applied in business place itself (though there are businesses that seem to apply force to the external environment in order to make their business dominate ). For example, I can't think of any business that is having gladiator…

You mean like Microsoft, where Ballmer is the CEO because he and Gates control enough of the stock and the board that is supposed to oversee him? And where they would absolutely be failing were it not for the "Windows Tax."

But they are failing by most accounts? Microsoft is generally viewed as having been slowly failing since Ballmer took over, at least, AFAICT.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#114

Post by UnFleshedOne »

chrischen wrote: post #74
EthanHeilman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. As by the peacock, "fitness" is not the same as our everyday use of fitness (certainly a bird that spends most of it's energy on giant butt feathers is not fit in the traditional sense, but does have a sexually selective advantage) and is certainly not meritocratic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl#Evolution_and_sexual_se... 2. Consider the tragedies of the commons that often occur in nature. It is the structu…

1) If sexual preferences can be genetically predisposed or even predetermined, then sexual preferences can be selected for through evolution as well. This means that if giant butt feathers are destructive towards actual survival, then all the female peacocks sexually selecting for this otherwise useless trait are disadvantaging their offspring and every peacock in on this giant butt feather thing will be disadvantage…

But until that butt-feather-loving predator comes along, the definition of merit continues to be how big a feather you have sticking out of your butt. It is just that the definitions change once in a while.

Nothing bad about that, but nothing good either.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#115

Post by SilasX »

steveklabnik wrote: post #2

> They have one test, the market has another. This is actually one of the biggest things I appreciate from studying Marx: the reminder that 'use-value'[1] and 'exchange-value'[2] are two, separate things, and while I generally want things based on how I can use them, the market doesn't care about that at all. Startups would be wise to heed Marx's words here, and remember this difference. Your job as a startup is to m…

I'm pretty sure that it's long pre-dated Marx for merchants to give superior weighting to what they can sell over their personal use cases ...

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#116

Post by thewarrior »

raldi wrote: post #107
thewarrior wrote: post #82

After reading the article , uncomfortable thoughts began to float into my consciousness . A sense of unease at having to confront the hypocrite within . We as a species have progressed so far and have built up such complex societies that life seems far removed the Darwinian struggles of the jungle . Perhaps stemming from an innate sense of fairness or hoping to maximise societal potential we try and impose our own me…

Out of curiosity, why do you put a space before the period at the end of your sentences? It makes them hard to read, and confuses word-wrap.

Some habits die hard. I'll avoid it in future.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#117

Post by yummyfajitas »

turtle4 wrote: post #101
yummyfajitas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of pure merit, NOBODY deserves ANY prize except THE single best competitor. Could you explain this claim?

He's saying in an absolute meritocracy, things are only awarded by merit. Given the choice between awarding a contract to company A or company B, once A has already shown to have more merit than B, all future work would logically go to A, and B would die out. Presuming that A doesn't do something to demonstrate they don't deserve merit any longer, why would you ever go with a proven inferior (B) option, or an option…

A single dominating entity in a given niche. Why do you assume consumer preferences are homogeneous?

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#118

Post by ucee054 »

chrischen wrote: post #70
Evbn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "merit" and whether such a thing is desirable to me. I don't have much love for a cockroach's merit.

I define merit as deserving to live. Because you can't cheat the universe, if you live then by definition you have merit. You can't create merit, it already is. You can only align yourself with merit.

No, merit is deserving to live tomorrow when conditions change.

Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet.

And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.

Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#119

Post by chrischen »

jacques_chester wrote: post #84
chrischen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did the meritorious survive? Because it's a meritocracy. No, the meritorious survive because you can't cheat the universe. I'm saying you can't make the world meritocratic because it already is and it's not changeable. You can only align yourself with how the world works so you don't get screwed. For example, let's say I'm an employer and I decide to hire the least competent candidate for a new job. I, as the e…

My point is that you're taking what is and then applying the label "meritocracy" to it. But the world itself has no moral content, it's humans who create and apply it. Meritocracy is essentially a statement that people are rewarded according to their merits, whatever those might be. It carries baggage in the form of an unstated moral component riding shotgun. If you ask people whether "meritocracy" is the same as "na…

I'm confused about what we're talking about now. My definition of meritocracy has no moral content either.

I'm not saying meritocracy is the same as natural selection. Meritocracy is the system which aligns itself with natural selection. Merit is assigned by humans, and if assigned perfectly well it should align with natural selection. However, humans are error prone and therefore can never create a completely meritocratic society so meritocracy will never be on the same plane as natural selection.

I guess you can say meritocracy is natural selection emulated by humans. However the universe ultimately forces the selection by merit (perfectly, as whatever the universe chooses is fair) and the humanly chosen merit is gauged by how accurately it aligns with it.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#120

Post by chrischen »

ucee054 wrote: post #118
chrischen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I define merit as deserving to live. Because you can't cheat the universe, if you live then by definition you have merit. You can't create merit, it already is. You can only align yourself with merit.

No, merit is deserving to live tomorrow when conditions change . Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet . And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid . Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not rule…

> Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet.

I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose.

> And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.

Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually.

> Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.

If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?

Post reply on HN