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Quote Meritocracy Unquote

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Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#51

Post by spikels »

raganwald wrote: post #48
spikels wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then I think I misunderstood the point your post - I hope you can see how it could happen. And I am probably yet another example of exactly what you were trying to warn against - people on the Internet talking past one another.

I think we actually agree overall. Leaders should be chosen as best we can by merit and we should seek to expand the pool as best we can.

This brings up another idea I wonder about: If choosing leaders is so hard can we somehow reduce our dependence on them? Put another way can we move to a more emergent approach to organizing ourselves rather than depending some "leader" to decide how we should be organized?

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#52

Post by jacques_chester »

steveklabnik wrote: post #50
jacques_chester wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hand waving is pretty much the one currency every school of political economy deals in.

I used to be a fully dressed libertard. But the world is too complex for any one humanly comprehensible theory to completely explain. Writing software for a living brought that home. When I got around to reading Hayek, I felt like I was revisiting familiar territory.

I realised that I was doing the same thing as the various lefties I'd mocked during student politics were doing: replacing reality with purity. The cornercase arguments for any strict ideology are always hilarious.

I fully expect that if Rothbardian libertarians were given dictatorial powers tomorrow, they'd buggerise it as much as the communists did.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#53

Post by EthanHeilman »

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.

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 structural arrangement of the system or colony which is disastrous but any individual organism within that system. http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1713/version/1

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#54

Post by EthanHeilman »

jacques_chester wrote: post #52
steveklabnik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hand waving is pretty much the one currency every school of political economy deals in. I used to be a fully dressed libertard. But the world is too complex for any one humanly comprehensible theory to completely explain. Writing software for a living brought that home. When I got around to reading Hayek, I felt like I was revisiting familiar territory. I realised that I was doing the same thing as the various leftie…

Interesting Rothbard is actually a fascist, like a real fascist of the old school. He just usually dresses his fascism up in the pretty colors of capitalism but he choose not to do so in the following essay in which he:

* "dog whistles" racism and sexism,

* advocates a police state beyond the rule of law "Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.",

* and extreme nationalism.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch5.html

>I fully expect that if Rothbardian libertarians were given dictatorial powers tomorrow, they'd buggerise it as much as the communists did.

Yes, I imagine so.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#55

Post by scarmig »

spikels wrote: post #27
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…

That really is one of the great ironies of the English language. And this is not well known - I didn't know this until a few years ago (maybe on HN?). I guess the reality is that "meritocracy" is a goal that in practice is hard to achieve. But does that make it the wrong goal? What are better alternatives? How can we fix it? I think it is very, very hard to actually improve on this but I would love to hear suggestion…

Meritocracy is the best -ocracy there is. Which unfortunately isn't enough for human liberation.

In its ideal form meritocracy guarantees that ruling institutions will choose people who maximize some kind of merit function: there are many ideals, however, that aren't incorporated into that. Equality of outcome (an ideal I don't desire, but many people do) inherently contradicts it. Equality of opportunity is a vague and slippery ideal, but whatever it is the absence of it is very compatible with meritocracy. In the end all that ideal meritocracy guarantees is some kind of global merit function that organizations will use to maximize their effectiveness: individuals per se aren't guaranteed anything. And even that weak guarantee ignores huge and intractable political economy issues about whether different interests have commensurable merit functions, the measurability of individual merit, and whether the people implementing the merit function actually implement it according to spec. But those issues aren't going to go away, whatever -ocracy you choose.

And since meritocracy's fundamentally focused on social and organizational needs instead of individual ones, it's plenty compatible with systems that are horrible violations of the principles of the world we want to live in. Imperial China was, supposedly, quite meritocratic: whoever you were, if you did well on imperial exams, you were selected (if you were male and not Miao). The Soviet Union was similar (though those practical issues I mentioned earlier made it de facto more a clientele system). None of us would want to live in either of those systems, though, despite their meritocratic underpinnings.

Assuming that we have to have an -ocracy, though, is a failure of the imagination. If we want something better, I'd say trying to build a decentralized, self-organized, fault-tolerant society without hierarchy is the way to go. Any given organization can fuck up, and most people will end up fine, living in the interstitial spaces between organizations. If someone is unfairly passed over (according to some imagined meritocratic standard), well, it might have wasted a couple hours of their life but isn't the end of the world, because the zero-sum game of having power over other people just isn't played.

End drunken rant.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#56

Post by steveklabnik »

jacques_chester wrote: post #52
steveklabnik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hand waving is pretty much the one currency every school of political economy deals in. I used to be a fully dressed libertard. But the world is too complex for any one humanly comprehensible theory to completely explain. Writing software for a living brought that home. When I got around to reading Hayek, I felt like I was revisiting familiar territory. I realised that I was doing the same thing as the various leftie…

Absolutely. There's a reason it's called a dismal science...

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#58

Post by kamaal »

As somebody who has pondered this problem over a while. You can give different names to this problem. You could also look at this from a Karma perspective.

You could also question this in very different ways.

I've tried to study this problem in many ways. To an extent I can tell you karma works in very mysterious ways, its slow and there are simply too many factors which are often unknown to us to make a judgement on why a person does or doesn't deserve X in life.

Let me explain with an example. Somebody you know didn't study well in college, he is also not known to be very brilliant either. You are a super genius and you get into Google, he attempts every job interview and fails. But finally makes it to a start up as a very low level employee doing some menial job. You both go on to live life as usual. You assume his career his over. Now something strange happens, in the start up the guy is pushed, is put under tough demanding deadlines. Now the guy who wasn't good with books and exams suddenly discovers despite all that. He has something in himself to 'get things done'. The start up becomes a hit, he climbs the ladder pretty quickly ends up making a lot of money.

You might ponder how this idiot got so successful, though he wasn't good with books and exams. How come he made it that big without knowing even 10% of what you know?

Karma/meritocracy works in its own ways. You don't know how hard the other guy is working, you don't what is valuable to the world or why it is valuable, you don't know how much taking a risk pays off when done properly, you don't know many million things about the other guy to come to any logical conclusion. There are simply too many unknowns to ask 'If it is fair'?

The world is actually fair, in its own way. You simply don't have enough data to decide if the world was fair to somebody or not. Or many times you are jealous or biased or whatever.

Ultimately karma works. It actually does.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#59

Post by scarmig »

kamaal wrote: post #58

As somebody who has pondered this problem over a while. You can give different names to this problem. You could also look at this from a Karma perspective. You could also question this in very different ways. I've tried to study this problem in many ways. To an extent I can tell you karma works in very mysterious ways, its slow and there are simply too many factors which are often unknown to us to make a judgement on…

How would one distinguish the karma hypothesis from mean reversion?

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#60

Post by bad_user »

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

Most companies want those perfect "A"s. However, not all projects require perfect "A"s. In the startup world we like to pretend like our projects are technically demanding and require the best people.

That's not necessarily so. Your project may be the hottest thing since sliced bread, but it may actually be boring from a technical perspective, in which case I would personally trade the qualities of a an A for good hard-working B+ programmers.

Hiring bad apples can happen of course. However this can happen at all levels, regardless of background. Many superstars of our field achieved that status because they know how to market themselves. I've seen people really good at marketing, you know, walking the walk and talking the talk, with stellar resumes, but otherwise lazy and of dubious skill.

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