
Why Meritocracy Doesn't Work - TristanKromer
https://grasshopperherder.com/why-meritocracy-doesnt-work/
======
amirmc
> _In case you’re not familiar, a meritocracy is a political system where
> power is allocated to those with the most ability. In the case of Silicon
> Valley, this equates to “the best ideas win and the best people get
> promoted.”_

IMHO the problem is that no-one, not even this article, actually defines what
_' merit'_ means — so people fill it with their own (likely biased) opinions.
Even in the above quote, 'best' is only defined _after the fact_ — it's
literally just the ones that survived (the article does mention this later
on).

The meaning of 'merit' will probably be different for different companies,
groups, etc. Hence it feels difficult to talk about any kind of 'meritocracy'
without clarifying that meaning first. I suspect that would become it's own
debate.

Edit: The interactive site called Parable of the Polygons would seem relevant
to some of the points this article makes.
[http://ncase.me/polygons/](http://ncase.me/polygons/)

~~~
TristanKromer
That's a good point. It could be the author of the manifesto thought merit was
pure coding ability and others might define it as the ability to work well in
a team to achieve a collective goal.

~~~
WorldMaker
When grading based on a metric, it's helpful to know what that metric actually
is.

Furthermore, how do you even define grades or metrics for "pure coding
ability" or "works well in teams"?

Both have massive subjective components, don't they?

Isn't "works well in teams" really "works well on _my_ team"? Trying to
pretend like it's an objective measure of "works well in the platonic ideal of
teams" doesn't actually make it an objective measurement.

Same with "pure" in "pure coding ability": adding an objective seeming word
like "pure" doesn't excuse that there is no such thing as a platonic ideal of
coding ability to measure against. There's "codes well in this problem
domain", there's "codes well in this environment", there's "has the baseline
experience to code well quickly now", there's "has the learning ability to get
up to speed quickly", etc... Where's the objective measurements?

A lot of "meritocracy" talk is built on sandcastles of wish-it-were-objective-
metrics without any sort of in depth analysis to how objective the metrics can
possibly be, much less actually are in pragmatic, impure reality.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
I think a meritocracy can exist in the real world. Are personnel decisions
made, or do we strive to make them, on the basis of a person's value to the
organization? Do we strive to identify and ignore confounding factors? Does a
person's productivity depend on things besides skill, work habits, or
leadership ability? This would be a difficult undertaking, operating a
meritocracy.

Also, it's possible that a meritocracy is doomed to be subverted in any given
enterprise.

~~~
WorldMaker
There's no objective system I know of that accurately measures a person's
value to an organization. As soon as you try to reduce things to such metrics
you lose sight of them as people.

Yes, it's great to strive to eliminate one's own biases and "confounding
factors" to make one's organization stronger, but most "meritocracy" thinking
is about finding the right magic numbers to describe people and that is its
own bias/set of confounding factors.

People are often more than just "value", they are part of relationship webs,
and full of complex emotions. You generally can't just assume a person is an
interchangeable widget/commodity in your system and you insert paycheck and
receive some magic amount of "value" in exchange.

A person's productivity absolutely depends on things besides skill, work
habits, and leadership ability, however you define them and however you try to
metric their value. A person's productivity might be powered by finding that
random coworker's leftover cake baking experiments in the break room on those
Wednesdays when they need it most. Another's might be powered by interesting
gossip. Other people's are tanked by the extra buzz of the a/c on days in the
Summer above 80F. You can't predict when someone might have a huge break-up
that ruins their productivity for weeks and you can't predict when someone has
just the right sort of vacation that their productivity is amazing for the
next year... and so on and so forth.

The very term "culture fit" alone, and how often it is used in "meritocracy"
contexts, is a giant neon sign that meritocracy doesn't exist in the real
world and people are trying to keep themselves warm at night rationalizing
that the decisions they make on semi-random metrics or gut "culture fit"
decisions are the best they could make, rather than deal with messy subjective
world of dealing with actual people.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
I don't think you're doing a meritocracy if you use 'culture fit'. I think
it's at best a cop-out.

I do share concerns with you about the ideas you are disadvocating. Such as
that a person's productivity not a neat weighted sum. Such as that we could
systematically find all the numbers that need to be summed. Plus concerns I'm
not sure if you're getting at, such as the idea that sort of results from
pushing a meritocratic view, which is that a person's value in the world is
their value to some small collection of enterprises, their one job or their
two jobs.

If you are paying people for their work and also providing some encouraging
words, what do you then use to determine the pay packet or the words to say?

~~~
WorldMaker
That's an interesting question and I think the big point here is to
differentiate _merit_ from _meritocracy_. There's nothing wrong, and a lot
right, by trying to base payment/encouragement upon _perceived_ merit. The
disconnect is trying to make it systemic (meritocratic) and forgetting the
subjective nature of merit, and that the only merit you reward/punish is that
which you perceive.

It's very easy to build a culture based on merit metrics and tautologize that
numbers are objective, this merit system is based on numbers, therefore this
merit system is objective and thus this is objectively a "meritocracy".
There's a number of logical fallacies wound up in that thought process, but
that's how a lot of bureaucracies get formed, and a how a lot of them
rationalize themselves as objective/benign.

I guess the underlying problem is that merit is great, but the illusion that
"merit" scales to form benign meritocracies is something that we need to
question a lot more than we do.

------
xanon
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Meritocracy is not perfect, but explicit discrimination is so incredibly prone
to abuse and corruption that is not even a contest. Society is made of
individuals. We can hope they strive towards a phenotype-blind process, and
shun the ones that explicitly discriminate. Or we can institutionalize
explicit discrimination and raise everyones awareness to phenotype
discrimination. For which the rational self-interest response is to
discriminate. Trapping us all into an endless prisoner dilemma lose-lose
tarpit.

~~~
TristanKromer
I see your point although it's quite depressing.

------
fundabulousrIII
Meritocracy has never worked because the thinkers submit to 'higher
authority': in this case $$.

The only real revolution is when the thinkers stop taking orders. That is only
practicable when every political|business system fails. There was a time when
IT was merit guided and based..it took a long time for the idiots to catch up
but they are here now and dictating.

Every thing I deal with this these days is idiot oriented.

~~~
d0lph
There's nothing wrong with that, capitalism would even things out, a company
that is sexist will make less money than one that isn't. This is because the
available talent for a company is more limited if you exclude women.

~~~
TristanKromer
That's not an inherent property of capitalism.

Capitalism rewarded the slave trade for generations.

The invisible hand is really human preferences. That's what will determine
whether a company is punished for sexism or rewarded.

Humans stopped Apartheid. Not the abstract concept of capitalism.

~~~
d0lph
To the contrary, non-slaves produce more value than slaves, therefore slavery
is not only unethical, but also un-capitalistic.

Capitalism explains many things, certainly people stopped Apartheid, but it
can very well be both, slavery and segregation are unproductive, and therefore
anti-capitalistic.

~~~
amirmc
> ... _non-slaves produce more value than slaves,_

Probably not to the slave owners, or anyone involved in the slave trade. They
had little incentive to change.

Claiming that capitalism somehow spurs these things is the wrong way around.
It can certainly benefit, but it's not the driver.

~~~
d0lph
To the slave owner yes, but their entire productivity is lower, it's better to
have a businessmen rather than someone who can just pick cotton and do basic
chores.

I think capitalism has a hand to play, to ignore it is naive. I think there
was not one driver that ended slavery, but many things working together.

------
d0lph
> However, believing that a 90 degree angle is perfect doesn’t have much
> impact on the job performance of a senior polygon and there are lots of
> other questions that don’t predict job performance.

So, I think this is not a meritocracy if polygons are being promoted based on
non merit related qualities. It feels like they're attacking Meritocracy as
being institutionalized, but then claiming that there are other biases not
merit related. Ultimately, it's almost like they're defending meritocracy,
saying it's not fair that an equally skilled man would be preferred over a
woman based on gender.

I am fascinated by this, does anyone know what alternate system is proposed?
In their article they make a few merit based judgements of who should be
promoted.

Also this seems bit much: > "Successful venture capitalists claim that they
have “pattern matching” powers. The evidence for this is that they have been
successful." [...] "I am saying that this is a terrible argument. It has the
same intellectual rigor of a casino lounge lizard explaining their magical
rabbit’s foot. “I haven’t lost yet!”"

~~~
TristanKromer
I probably wasn't clear there.

It's not that the concept of meritocracy is inherently bad. It's just that
it's impossible to implement unless all people are perfect, have an exact
understanding of what "merit" is, have perfect information etc.

So I'm disagreeing with the idea that Silicon Valley (or Google) is a
meritocracy and that the "level playing field" that some people use as an
argument against diversity initiatives is actually inherently biased.

Also, I'm not saying all diversity initiatives are great. I know pretty much
zero about what makes one initiative better or worse.

------
candiodari
I feel like what is missing from this article is that there are in fact group
differences, and just what they imply. The article really tries to be neutral,
so let me try to do the same.

There are 2 groups, squares and triangles, and contrary to what the article
says, understanding of right angles is in fact important for senior polygons.

Now further assume standard deviations in understanding of right angles
between squares and triangles differs by one sigma between the groups. Let's
take the same as in the article, squares understand right angles better.

(in reality, in properties that might be important for jobs, speed, IQ,
strength, ... standard deviations of 1-2 between groups are very normal
between groups. For IQ, when selecting the groups on purpose, you can pick
groups with a 3.8 sigma difference)

Given that assumption, what would the expected distribution be, given 50-50
squares vs triangles in the population ? (this is assuming that every time a
senior polygon position opens up a square and a triangle face off for it, and
the one with the best knowledge of right angles gets the promotion)

1 sigma: ~76% - 24%

2 sigma: ~92% - 8%

3 sigma: ~98% - 2%

4 sigma: ~99.7% - 0.3%

To give one relevant example, one might take the diagnosis of vitamin D
insufficiency. If a patient comes in with these symptoms, and they're black,
they're about 3 sigma more likely to have that problem. So if a patient comes
in complaining that he's been having bone pain for months/years (in other
words, the husband/wife/kids dragged them into the emergency room after
they've been complaining about it for 10 years), if the patient is black you
should probably prescribe a food supplement and 1 hour of sunlight (yes,
really). If the patient is white you get them into an MRI and look for bone
cancer. Why ? Look at the above numbers to see how often you'd be right. Now
of course if the supplement doesn't work after a month you should still get an
MRI, but using it as a first stab at the problem is a waste of time.

This is why you can't have meritocracy. Races are different, in ways that
society finds important (and literally everything else as well), and "small"
differences will result in large imbalances in outcomes. Small is taken here
as compared to what one sees in reality for differences society judges as
important.

This is also why island species only occur on islands (google island species,
and don't take islands too literally). If there is a 1 sigma difference in
procreative success between differing island races, the "worse" one's
population will halve every generation. It is easy to see that this will not
result in a mixed race result, one race will die out. It's harder to see
intuitively that this happens at 0.1 sigma as well, but run the math and
you'll see it's true, just takes longer.

