
Targeting Meritocracy - mpweiher
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-meritocracy/
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uylishist
For what it's worth, I think this piece is mostly right, especially in
pointing out the lack of recognition that our current society does not
generally "accept that education and merit are two different things."

I think there's more to the criticism of a meritocracy, namely that randomness
plays a large role in opportunities and demonstrations of success, but the
focus of the linked piece is also part of it.

The example of performance of surgeons in medical school is kind of ironic,
given studies showing that grades in medical school only weakly correlate with
real-world performance. The later mention of ability-chess performance
correlations is actually not that different from grade-performance
correlations across a range of educational levels.

Not too long ago, there was a job ad posted here that kind of underscored many
of these sorts of criticisms, essentially suggesting they were only interested
in people from the most prestigious schools. The implication, of course, was
that this corporation was not interested in your actual professional
achievements or ability, but only the status of the school you attended (which
is related at least earlier in life, but not in general).

The example of the person with the degree that's discussed in the piece is
also an excellent one, that arises many times. A better example are companies
requiring administrators to have master's degrees for its own sake, even if
this is not actually required for the job duties. I've seen countless examples
where corporations require master's degrees, and actually do not care what
they are, which raises the question of why the degrees are actually being
required, above and beyond the obvious question of what the job duties
actually entail.

Meritocracy has its own problems, related to randomness in events and
outcomes, but I think the more immediate problem the linked piece discusses
might be better labeled credentialism.

I think it's tied to broader trend toward increasing laziness on the part of
corporations and institution in their hiring practices. Maybe it's not
laziness, but rather, a sign of regulatory capture, or gross inequality, in
that there is such an imbalance in the number of qualified individuals and the
number of jobs that employers have to start using criteria that are only
tangentially related to the job to filter out applications (e.g., I have 50
people who could actually do this job well, and don't want to admit my choice
at this point is actually random, so I'll start selecting them based on
unrelated, or only very weakly related criteria).

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tomjen3
From a hiring managers perspective, there is also the benefit that a person
who has gone through college is a safe choice that it unlikely to reflect
badly on them.

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eeZah7Ux
The article misses the finer points of most of the articles quoted and makes
sweeping generalizations.

