
Quote Meritocracy Unquote - raganwald
http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/01/quote-metritocracy-unquote.html
======
neilk
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 a certain grade need a college degree, and
often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no _noblesse
oblige_ ; those at the bottom deserve to be there.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment>

One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of
programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit _outside_ of an
institutionalized system.

Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate,
even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and
barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient
to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for
certain kinds of objective merit.

~~~
raganwald
_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."

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't
> hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work.

This, indeed, is where things get very dicey. Meritocracy tends to converge on
winner-takes-all markets, which result in an extreme inequality of outcomes
and all the socioeconomic harms that entails.

~~~
yummyfajitas
How does meritocracy converge to winner-take-all?

~~~
Jare
Why wouldn't it? In terms of pure merit, NOBODY deserves ANY prize except THE
single best competitor.

Physical limits and other regulations even things out but, particularly in
computer and digital products and services, physical limitations are less and
less important.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_In terms of pure merit, NOBODY deserves ANY prize except THE single best
competitor._

Could you explain this claim?

~~~
turtle4
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 that is unproven altogether (C)? Hence, a trend toward a single
dominating entity.

In reality, I think things are more nuanced, of course. No one awards purely
on merit, as you also have timing, capacity, and costs to balance. I'm not
really aware of any market that you could consider a -true- meritocracy to the
extent of the GP comment. And maybe I misread the comment altogether, but that
is my understanding.

~~~
Jare
You read it correctly, thanks a lot of clarifying my terse comment. Naturally,
no market is going to behave perfectly like this, but I think it's important
to understand where the natural tendency points to, and what kind of elements
will alleviate, smooth or otherwise disrupt the absolute winner-takes-all
nature. If you are going to say deliver a new product, you need to understand
that unless your product has something superior to the competition or you can
subvert the meritocratic dynamics (say, through marketing & PR), it will
likely die because there's no reason NOT to choose a competitor.

------
steveklabnik
> 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 make money, which means producing
something that has a high exchange-value. Don't let your own notions of use-
value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. How many times
have I said "That idea is stupid, I'd never use that" and then it became a
smashing, overnight success? Too many to count.

1: Basically, "how useful is this thing to me?"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value>

2: Basically, "how much could I sell this for?"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value>

~~~
coolsunglasses
>Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares
about: exchange value.

This has been the key lesson of my career as a programmer and entrepreneur.
Reading Marx made me a better capitalist.

I tell people that ask for book recommendations to read Marx all the time and
they sneer at me even though they know I'm not a Marxist.

~~~
CleanedStar
I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can
understand things like the huge dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and then the
crash. Or the (sub-prime) real estate bubble. Or how the finance sector is
growing, in GDP percentage wise and in power, relative to the economy which
produces real commodities.

Then again, according to polls (and my experience), the majority of Americans
believe "every word of the Bible is literally accurate", and that "the Virgin
birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and
the Wise Men from the East" are "historically accurate". Over 70% believe in
"God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death,
miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the
world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, expecting people
to understand how wealthy people discretely work the economic system is way,
way beyond most people.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
> Then again, (...) [o]ver 70% [of Americans] believe in "God, Heaven, the
> resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the
> virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really
> works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, (...)

There is a way to phrase this sentiment without alienating quite as many
decent people. Try to find it next time.

(I, too, am an atheist; but I don't see a need to enforce atheism on HN.)

~~~
Crake
I personally do not really mind "alienating" the "earth is 5,000 years old"
crowd by not respecting their complete and total disrespect for science and
logic.

If your wife told you that she was pregnant, but it wasn't your kid--would you
believe her if she said the sperm just sort of came out of nowhere? Or would
you say that it's not how conception (or marital faithfulness) actually works?

(note: that's a general non-specific "your" up there, which does not refer to
an actual wife, who if you have one I do not mean to in any way impugn)

------
pcalloway
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 recommendations.

Or perhaps wouldn't have accepted Dropbox without the MIT credentials.

Based on the stories the founders tell, YC was very skeptical of both ideas
(but it's probably hard for them to judge).

The next question I think of is whether Airbnb would have succeeded without
YC. I suspect not. As good as those guys were at staying alive even they had
limits, which they seemed in danger of reaching at that point.

Dropbox had a better chance probably, since it was already very well received,
but maybe they would have fumbled it without the YC help. Certainly they
wouldn't have done quite as well.

If personal connections was the thing that pushed some of YC's big successes
over the application/interview acceptance hurdle it's fair to conclude that
they've probably missed out on some others that didn't have those connections.

~~~
rainsford
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 sometime be hard
to beat a personal opinion from someone you trust. That may narrow the field a
little bit (nobody has personally experienced all the alternatives) but it may
also improve your decision.

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

------
tokenadult
A very thoughtful post. I especially like the discussion of the difference
between sensitivity and specificity

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity>

(the post uses other words) or in other words the difference between type I
and type II errors.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors>

There are so many interesting ways to think about this. Some of us may have
Venn diagrams in our minds' eyes, thinking about the set of {all highly
competent programmers} and {speakers invited to programming conferences} and
just how those sets overlap.

Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much
more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young
learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities. I think there are
probably a lot of diamonds in the rough in communities all over the world that
never get picked up, much less polished. Programming communities can thrive by
being welcoming to people who are other than the usual suspects just like
current programmers. Props to the author for reminding us not to neglect
anyone.

~~~
milfot
"Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much
more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young
learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities."

This is a very positive way of looking at this. I would argue that we have a
fairly good sense of how much more (a lot) and that this informs the tendency
for entrenched meritocracies to restrict access rather than open the
floodgates, so to speak. People are generally overprotective of their position
or status, the past and what they have built for themselves.

I wholly agree that "communities can thrive", and I believe gain a lot more,
by being open and welcoming to people not (just) on the basis of merit, but on
the basis of curiosity / interest / engagement.

------
davekinkead
Reminds me of a good talk by Alain de Botton highlighting the nasty side of
believing we live in a meritocracy whilst ignoring the role of chance.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...](http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html)

~~~
return0
That's a great talk. Meritocracy doesn't really exist, but it's good to strive
for it.

------
jacques_chester
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.

------
asalazar
Meritocracies are great sometimes but they have the nasty side affect of
promoting people into jobs they suck at. Just because you're the best at being
an individual contributor, it doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager,
and being a good manager doesn't mean you're going to be a good executive or
entrepreneur. In organizations that value meritocracies absolutely, you end up
losing your best people if they don't scale.

~~~
SwellJoe
This is known as the Peter Principle. But, I would think a meritocracy would
strive to test for, or respond to, promotions into levels of incompetence by
pushing the person back down into a role where merit is higher than other
available candidates.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle>

------
mindcrime
First of all, I absolutely agree with the general sentiment of this article.
And I don't mean to nitpick, but I just want to point out something about this
bit:

 _But we don’t ask why they know their stuff. How did they get into a good
university?_

Depending on exactly how you define "good university", I contend that the
importance of this may be overstated. For the sake of argument, let's go with
the idea that to many people "a good university" means "Ivy League". IF you
take that premise, it makes sense to look at where a number of high-level
leaders, like, say, the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies, went to college.
Luckily, that's been analyzed:

[http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_...](http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf)

Now, as you might expect, a number of Ivy League schools _are_ very well
represented. But, equally important is this:

The University of Wisconsin is tied with Harvard for the largest percentage of
S&P 500 CEOs, at 3%. This is above Princeton, Stanford and Yale. And the
University of Texas is right in there at 2% as well. Now this is not to say
that UW or UT are "bad" schools, but are they what most people are talking
about when they talk about the whole elite / non-elite dichotomy?

Another tidbit: If you look at only the CEOs of the top 100 out of the S&P
500, four schools are tied for "most well represented". Those four are
Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and, wait for it... The University of North Carolina,
all with 3% each.

For what it's worth, it appears that it can at least be said that going to a
reasonably well regarded State school is borderline just as helpful as going
to an Ivy League school, if you plan to be the CEO of an S&P 500 firm.

Of course, this all _totally_ overlooking the fact that "CEOs of S&P 500
firms" is a ridiculously small and overly restrictive set to represent "being
successful and a respected business leader" in any sense. If you're the guy
who owns 6 McDonalds locations in your local small town area, or runs the most
successful car dealership in a given area, you're pretty damn successful and -
at least in a local sense - well regarded. And I expect you'll find plenty of
those folks who went to schools most of us have never heard of, or didn't go
to school at all.

Anyway, just something to throw out there. I certainly wouldn't mean to
_discourage_ anyone from going to Stanford, Yale, Harvard or Princeton if they
want to and have the opportunity. But the poor sap left to attend UNC, UT,
UVA, UW, UM, etc., certainly should not feel like they've been consigned to
the dustbin just because they did not go to an Ivy.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
This is bad statistics. You're cherry-picking the state schools to consider
(plus what Evbn said). The S&P 500 has ~500 CEOs, so some random deviation is
to be expected.

(This is purely a methodological comment; I haven't looked at any data either
way. I agree, at least, that going to a state school _should_ not mean that
your life is over.)

~~~
joe_hoyle
I think the point was; one can cherry-pick with deviation, as they are not
_that_ far apart. The parent contends the overstated-ness, not that they are
equal.

------
1123581321
A meritocratic society is a lot of meritocracies chained together, themselves
needing to merit success. Each one can only work with their own inputs, and so
rely on the outputs of the other organizations. If these organizations do not
extend deeply and broadly enough back, then at some point the inputs of an
organization won't be the ones that should be there. This needs to go back to
families at some point. In a meritocracy, mothers and fathers have an
obligation to ensure that the potential of their children is developed and
expressed through participation in society. I believe the failure of so many
parents to do this is responsible for the ineffectiveness of our supposedly
meritous systems, organizations and industries.

~~~
kscaldef
While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think
it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As
raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops
at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for.
Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their
neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison
will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with
limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a
mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared
to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have
perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and
economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various
guises.

Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely
reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its
inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make
improvements, even if marginal.

~~~
1123581321
I didn't mean to say only one is responsible; this is in the context of
raganwald's essay about how quality meritocracies (presumably not needing much
improvement) don't choose the best because they only maximize their inputs and
don't necessarily work with all of those with the most potential. So I wrote
about improving the inputs by examining the prior systems.

What I completely missed, and what you alluded to by mentioning people in
prison, with bad parents, and so on, is that the present generation of
families also have inputs -- the systems that they went through (education,
military, commerce, etc.) and their own parents. The issues we have today are
partly the results of mistakes made by parents living a hundred, five hundred,
even a thousand years ago.

It's a depressing thought when expressed that way, but on the bright side, if
we do as well as we can given our limited inputs today, we at least give the
next generation of parents, teachers and employers a chance to do better than
we could possibly have done.

------
guard-of-terra
The thing described in the article is what I would call "pull meritocracy".
You have a pool of candidates and you pull well-educated, predictable, safe
ones from there. Leaving behind both privileged but not able and able but not
predictable people.

The ideal would be "push meritocracy", where able people push themself into
the system and are able to reach their potential by exercising their ability.
There are also multiple ways to do it (starting up, corporate/government
ladder, non-commercial projects) so they don't get derailed over some
personality quirk.

------
neeee
I think you should turn up the contrast on your blog a little. This isn't very
readable: <http://goput.it/kag.png> Edit: It's fixed, thank you.

------
cbsmith
The essay hits on the right notion but I think needs to be expanded further.
Bottom line is that the most important quality of a leader is that people will
follow them. While the individual is a significant factor in this,
context/circumstance are also important. Often the ideal combination of
leadership "merit" might not reside in a person who is of particularly great
"merit" outside of a particular leadership role (though it is pretty rare in
someone who is absolutely useless outside of the role).

Also note that it is people _will_ follow them; it's about the future and
therefore speculative. No amount of examination can confidently predict who
will speculatively be best able to lead.

A "meritocracy" therefore is founded on the notion that the intellectual
talent and past accomplishments can confidently predict leadership ability for
a context that we can't entirely predict... Yeah, when you got that nailed
down, let me know. ;-)

At best a "meritocracy" functions by making an educated guess, based on past
evidence, who is best able to fulfill a role, regardless of whether that
person's currently role is being fulfilled with any degree of merit. In short:
it is undeniably imperfect, though one case make a case it does at least as
good a job of selecting candidates as any other mechanism... with the possible
exception of a democracy (it's kind of hard to beat working off who the
electronic says they'll follow). But more than that, it has a problem: people
like meritocracies because they feel like whomever is in charge has "earned"
the right to be there by virtue of having the best record of _past_
accomplishment... despite the fact that a well functioning meritocracy would
select based on the expected record of _future_ accomplishment, not on the
record of _past_ accomplishment.

This subtle difference eventually leads to disappointment, disillusionment,
and cynicism, which is undermines the integrity of the leadership of an
organization, if not the organization as a whole. In short: even assuming you
overcame the issues of observability raised by the article, a utopian
meritocracy might not be the utopia imagined by its subjects, which can lead
to an unstable society...

------
lingben
Donald Trump is NOT successful investing in real estate. His projects go
bankrupt left and right and his net return overall has been abysmal when
compared to others who really _are_ great investors.

Trump is good at two things: image and self-promotion.

------
regal
The article has some good points. However, it loses a lot of credit by waving
off Donald Trump's successes as being the result of a monetary investment not
accessible to the many. Trump's real success comes from the education
available to him via his father and his father's company, also not accessible
to the many - but how many children have successful businessmen birthed who
never surpassed or even matched their forebears the way Donald Trump did Fred
Trump? While he did have an advantage starting out, Trump succeeded on his
merits far more than most children of the wealthy and successful do.

~~~
raldi
I think you've totally missed the point of the article. It's not saying Trump
is bad at real estate, but rather that there might be a million people who are
even more talented at it, but will never discover that fact.

------
kislayverma
The "Outliers" argument. The only way for a meritocratic system to work is by
creating an absolutely level starting plane for all competitors. Which is in
itself somewhat ironic because meritocracy reminds of capitalism (indirectly,
I admit) while the level playing field requirement suggests a socialistic-ish
system.

------
louischatriot
This situation is very acute in "top tier" firms such as the management
consulting big 4. The hiring process is designed to avoid false positives at
all costs, even the cost of rejecting extremely good candidates.

------
chrischen
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.

~~~
raganwald
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?

~~~
chrischen
I didn't necessarily mean millions of years of evolution for humans (have we
even been around for that long?). I meant evolution (the concept) as evidence
that only those who deserve to live, live. Merit is a fundamental rule of the
universe and that you _have_ to be meritocratic. Anything but meritocracy is
foolish and will ensure your demise and irrelevance. It's not one of many
strategies you can use, it's the only strategy. It is a practice fundamental
to survival just like breathing or procreating or being fit.

Because it's fundamental, meritocracy should call for both minimizing false
positives and negatives, as both work towards increasing survivability.

------
JacksonGariety
The tl;dr at the bottom is elegant. I might start doing that.

~~~
EliRivers
In the old days that's what we used to call a summary. If you like that sort
of thing and think you might like to do it yourself, reading up on how to
write essays and the like will be very informative.

~~~
JacksonGariety
I'm not talking about the summary itself, I'm more referring to the way it
sits on the page:

"Broadly speaking:" Blockquote Italics Line underneath

The summary is also well written.

------
thewarrior
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 mechanisms on top of this
existential struggle . Any measure that is at odds with this underlying
abstraction is doomed to fail . So we must try and allocate resources and
authority to those who can best use it .

The ideal system would be where no person has any right to complain about his
situation as he has been given what he rightly deserved . How deserving he is
depends on his merit which actually depends on the resources the very system
gave him in the first place . So meritocracy has to go back all the way back
to the beginnings of society and maybe even deeper. But people would still be
unequal .

In this light Platos solution of the noble lie dosent seem so unfair . From
Wikipedia :

 _Plato presented the Noble Lie (gennaion pseudos, γενναῖον ψεῦδος) in a
fictional tale, wherein Socrates provides the origin of the three social
classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato; Socrates speaks of a
socially stratified society, wherein the populace are told "a sort of
Phoenician tale":_

 _"The earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land
were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and
defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers
and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are
brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are
fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they
are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the
farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most
part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden
father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a
silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another.
So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is
that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently
observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their
offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they
shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall
assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the
artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with
unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid
them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship,
alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when
the man of iron or brass is its guardian."_

 _The fictional Socrates, created by Plato, proposes and claims that if the
people believed "this myth . . . it would have a good effect, making them more
inclined to care for the state and one another.This is his noble lie: "a
contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need,
of which we were just now talking, some noble one. . . ."_

A meritocracy is just a more sophisticated and more fair version of the noble
lie where we substitute "merit" instead of a metal without being aware that
merit might also be related to being born in a certain class.

Then there is the ascertaining "responsibility" or "credit" . The author seems
to be differentiating between the two definitions on the basis of how much
credit(right to be smug?) the victors in a meritocracy can take for their
sucess. Then we disappear down a philosophical wormhole into the land of
determinism , nature vs nurture etc . I try resolve this by consoling myself
that maybe this meritocratic victory isnt really a victory . Maybe the theory
that some people are higher and up and some people are lower down isnt
applicable to ranking human beings . Its like asking whether the lion is the
meritocratic victor in the jungle foodchain and the rest of the animals are
the losers . Its one giant interdependent chain in which everything has its
place .

~~~
raldi
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.

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

------
kdazzle
I think the example about programming languages and speakers can also be
extended to gender and race.

------
AlexeiSadeski
Meritocracy is a bit childish.

------
spikels
This is a strawman argument. Forget about Donald Trump as some model of
success. Despite his head start he almost went bankrupt - twice. He is much
less respected as a real estate developer in the world of real estate than you
think. His success has been in PR and celebrity. There are thousands real
estate investors who actually are good at it and started with nothing (e.g.
Sam Zell).

Don't like "meritocracy" then how how should we choose our leaders?

~~~
raganwald
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.

~~~
spikels
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 discriminates against those from disadvantaged backgrounds who likely
will accumulate less "merit". BTW - I agree this is a problem with both
"meritocracy" and the world generally and should be adressed in various ways.

(3) It somehow implies to "some people" that "none of the people in positions
of authority are bozos".

(4) Meritocracy does not "minimizing false negatives".

You seem to be against the ideal not just that particular definition. The only
positive thing you say is that it is better than "picking leaders at random or
having some dictator appoint his drinking buddies".

Do you like the idea of making choices based on merit? You seem to be both
criticizing it as a goal and saying that it is not practical.

I get the sense you would prefer making decisions based on some sense of
"justice" rather than "merit".

BTW - Love your many great posts on development. Thanks you very much. I feel
awkward debating a hero.

~~~
raganwald
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 :-)

~~~
spikels
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?

------
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.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> Ultimately karma works. It actually does.

What is that, your opinion? What is that based on? Does it apply to the kid
who got caught selling pot for the third time, because he didn't know what
else to do with his life, because he grew up in a place and a family where no
one gave him any other choices, and is now spending the rest of it in prison?

Here's my opinion: Karma works sometimes. And other times people are crushed
by the ugliness in this world.

~~~
kamaal
Yes its my opinion.

Karma works because people judge what is fair based on their opinion and not
on facts, simply because too many facts are unknown to take a decision.

>>And other times people are crushed by the ugliness in this world.

Yes this is true, but if you are going to keep talking why you will fail
regardless how hard you work. You will always find enough reasons why you
shouldn't try because you will fail anyway. Thereby you will never try,
somebody else sure will. And by the virtue of merely being there will win. And
then thereby simply going into this deeper cycle of victim hood.

