Quote Meritocracy Unquote • Hacker News Board

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#41

Post by rayiner » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:16 AM UTC

pitchups wrote: post #30

rayiner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are sm…

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion... In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped…

> According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's millionaires never attended college."

Considering something like half of Americans have never attended college, what does that tell you about millionaires?

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#42

Post by Evbn » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:17 AM UTC

rainsford wrote: post #11

pcalloway wrote: post #7

Something relevant to note, is that YC's two biggest successes got into YC at least in part because of personal relationships. IIRC, Dropbox was recommended by former roommates and friends from MIT (Xobni guys?). Airbnb was recommended by Michael Seibel from Justin.tv, perhaps others. In both cases it's possible that YC wouldn't have interviewed or perhaps accepted one or both of these companies if not for those reco…

Even in a meritocracy, those making the decisions need some way to both gather and screen candidates. Properly utilized personal relationships (as opposed to nepotism style situations) can be a good way to do both. Maybe Dropbox and Airbnb wouldn't have succeeded without those recommendations, but those recommendations could certainly have led to a MORE merit based process. When it comes to judging quality, it can so…

But it also leaves a whole lot of merit on the floor with the demerits.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#43

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:24 AM UTC

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…

As a disclaimer, I only made it through a few chapters of Capital before I gave it away.

This distinction was not invented by Marx. In fact a lot of Marxism was invented by Marx; most of it was an extension of the prevailing classical economics. He read Smith and Ricardo.

The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. Marx runs with that to come up with a theory that says some people are systematically skimming the value generated by others and that a series of cyclical crises will cause the total collapse of capitalism at some future date.

Every time there's a market crash or a recession, Marxists bestir themselves to tell us all "I told you so!". The problem is the same as the Rothbardian Austrians blaming it all on the Federal Reserve or Keynesians saying it's a slump in demand. Too simplistic. (I'm a Hayekian, an economist who put "I can't explain particular examples and neither can anybody else" at the centre of his theory of economics).

Complex, chaotic systems naturally move around their phase space, often with large oscillations. That's the bottom line. You can't eliminate the boom/bust cycle. It exists in every industry and always will. Sometimes bigger industries go through the cycle and everyone feels it.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#44

Post by raganwald » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:29 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #32

Isn't the universe by default a meritocracy? Millions of years of evolution proves this... And society can either have policies that work against this default meritocracy or with it to speed it up.

One humbling thing I try to remember, is that before an asteroid struck the Earth 65 million years ago, mammals were no bigger than a field mouse and our warm-bloodedness was specialized for hunting insects at night. Then this lucky strike caused a huge climate change, and those dinosaurs that hand't evolved warm feathers died off, and we were in the right place at the right time.

The day before the asteroid strike, we had zero merit.

Now, this is a narrative with many factual errors, but I like to remind myself that we happen to have been doing well for the last 100,000 years or so, but it's the blink of an eye and who knows what will happen next?

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#45

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:29 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #32

Isn't the universe by default a meritocracy? Millions of years of evolution proves this... And society can either have policies that work against this default meritocracy or with it to speed it up.

You've just made it a circular argument.

Why is it a meritocracy? Because the meritorious survive.

Why did the meritorious survive? Because it's a meritocracy.

Value and virtue are not the same thing, is the problem.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#46

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:31 AM UTC

The main problem, as Hayek pointed out, is that folk confuse value and virtue.

Value is an economic thing. Virtue is a social or emotional thing.

Hayek argued quite comprehensively that value does not flow to the virtuous or vice versa. They are entirely unrelated. Moreover, attempts to align the two fatally break the mechanism which allows value to be created in the first place.

People want value and virtue to go together. But they needn't. And they can't be made to.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#47

Post by jsnell » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:34 AM UTC

pitchups wrote: post #30

rayiner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are sm…

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion... In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped…

But that latter is a bullshit statistic. The number of dropout billionaires is so low (32 out of 1400) that a factor of 2 difference in average wealth is not statistically significant.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#48

Post by raganwald » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:34 AM UTC

spikels wrote: post #37

raganwald wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said that I didn't like Meritocracy? I said that when we use the word, we should all be on the same page as to what it actually means.

If this was just a post on language I think I totally agree - it is a tricky word to define. And I hope you saw the comment above on the ironic origin of the word. However I got the impression from several things in your post that you don't like the commonly held ideal of choosing leaders based on merit (i.e. meritocracy): (1) Donald Trump is somehow an example of it at work (see my comments about him above). (2) It…

I think it is a post about the word "meritocracy" meaning many things to many people, and not being very useful for certain types of discussion.

If two people understand each other and agree to disagree, fine. But recently, I've seen a lot of online arguments about these kinds of things, where I get the impression that there are two reasonable people talking past each other without really understanding each other.

I think that meritocracy is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of equality of opportunity. Given a pool of candidates, we should pick the best ones (eliminate false positives). AND, we should invest as much as we can reasonably afford to ensure that we get people with good potential into the pool (eliminate false negatives).

My overall view is that we're going to go into a serious economic struggle in the next twenty years, and like any sports team, scouting is as important as coaching :-)

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#49

Post by raganwald » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:47 AM UTC

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 many discussions about interviewing that this is one of the major families of strategy: It's better to miss out on a few good people than it is to mistakenly hire a bad one, 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.

This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work. I'm trying to avoid controversy, so I'll return to the straw man scenario of the post: It's as if the Lisp people said, "If Python was any good than there'd be Python people on the schedule."

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#50

Post by steveklabnik » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 3:48 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #43

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…

As a disclaimer, I only made it through a few chapters of Capital before I gave it away. This distinction was not invented by Marx. In fact a lot of Marxism was invented by Marx; most of it was an extension of the prevailing classical economics. He read Smith and Ricardo. The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. Marx runs with that to come up…

Sure, I didn't say that Marx invented it, just that it's from studying Marx that I remember it.

> He read Smith and Ricardo.

Absolutely. The subtitle of Capital I is "a critique of political economy" for a reason. Marx's innovation being, among other things, the 'socially necessary' component of 'socially necessary labor time.'

Also, economics is only a small part of Marxism overall. (1/3 if you ask Lenin.)

> The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value.

We can get into a big argument about how the LTV is not predictive, it'd descriptive, or maybe about how some studies have shown the LTV is just as descriptive as the STV is. That's not really what's important here, though.

> That's the bottom line.

Your comment has a lot of these assertions without a lot to back it up. Ideology can always shore up weaknesses in theory. ;)

That said, I'm not an orthodox Marxist by any means.