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Danterious @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Do you believe in meritocracy? Why or why not?

This is the definition I am using:

a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit.

107 comments

  • I don't.

    The core issue: Who determines merit, ability, and position? The people who write the rules are the actual government, and governments secure their own power. Like every flawless paper-government system, it crumples as soon as the human element wets the paper.

    However, assuming the rule book could be written flawlessly, with "perfect" selfless humans writing the initial rules and then removing themselves from power, there are unsolved issues:

    • Popularity contests in determining merit. (I like Johnny Depp better than Amber. Who loses more status?)
    • Comparing apples to oranges. (Are Athletes or Artists more worthy, what about the Plumbers and Mailmen?)
    • Power corrupts.
    • Do morals and ethics have a say in merit? (Save the entire planet, then start kicking cats. Still a hero?)
    • How long does a merit last? (When a champion, or athlete, is no longer fit, are they de-positioned? Look at Rome.)
    • Brilliant mathematicians get rewarded with what? (Better supercomputers, or political power? What qualifies them to make policy?)

    • All of these arguments try to argue that implementing meritocracy perfectly is impossible.

      But ask yourself, what is the alternative? A system in which the most capable person isn't in charge? Should we go back to bloodlines, or popularity contests, or maybe use a lottery?

      I agree it's very difficult to determine merit, and even more difficult to stop power struggles from messing with the evaluation, or with the implementation. But I would still prefer a system that at least tries to be meritocratic and comes up short, to a system that has given up entirely on the concept.

      I'll try to answer some of your questions, as best as I understand it:

      Who determines merit, ability, and position?

      Ideally, a group of peers would vote for someone within the group, who is the most capable, with outside supervision to prevent abuses.

      Popularity contests in determining merit

      Popularity shouldn't factor into it. Only ability. (and there's no doubt Depp is the better actor :P )

      Are Athletes or Artists more worthy

      Each one is worthy within the scope of their domain of expertise, in which they have demonstrated merit.

      Power corrupts

      Always true in every system. That's why we need checks and balances.

      Save the entire planet, then start kicking cats. Still a hero?

      If kicking cats is wrong, it should be against the law, and no one should be above the law. All other things being equal, whoever has the most capacity to save the planet should be the one to do it.

      How long does a merit last?

      For as long as you can demonstrate it. If someone better comes along, they should take your place.

      Brilliant mathematicians get rewarded with what?

      More mathematical problems. And ideally, also lots of money and babes.

      At the end of the day, it's a cultural problem. Meritocracy can only work if there's a critical mass of people who believe in it, understand it, and enforce it socially. The same can be said of democracy, capitalism, and basically any other social order.

      • Thank you for your insight. Please forgive me for the tongue in cheek responses on a few select thoughts.

        system in which the most capable person isn’t in charge?

        Every system since time immemorial. And which will continue until "most capable" is better defined, objectively determinable, and implemented by the greatest power.

        popularity contests

        The foundation of every democratic, republic, and individual choice based system today.

        it’s very difficult to determine merit

        Very true. Considering all people under any one governing system would never agree on what is virtuous, worthy, valuable, honorable, or respectable. Just try to convince people who believe, "If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying," to believe otherwise. Many Chinese believe if you didn't cheat to succeed, it's your fault for failing. Consider it a pitfall of cultural reconciliation.

        a group of peers would vote for someone within the group

        Each one is worthy within the scope of their domain of expertise, in which they have demonstrated merit.

        How are resources distributed between groups? Equally? Every time a new group arrives a new slice of equal pie is collected piecemeal from the other groups and handed over? Do we compare apples and oranges to determine who gets more resources. Who sits in the "administration" group to judge merit between two disagreeing groups?

        How long does a merit last?

        For as long as you can demonstrate it. If someone better comes along, they should take your place.

        What's a retirement plan look like? Or is this still an ownership system where you can hold on to any property indefinitely and determine it's ownership upon death?

        Brilliant mathematicians get rewarded with what?

        More mathematical problems. And ideally, also lots of money and babes.

        A good workhorse is rewarded with more work. A never truer statement. Merit sounds exhausting today.

        it’s a cultural problem. Meritocracy can only work if there’s a critical mass of people who believe in it, understand it, and enforce it socially. The same can be said of democracy, capitalism, and basically any other social order.

        I'm 60% with you. Regardless of how detrimental a government is, culture controls most of how we think and feel, just look at government trust ratings by country. However, there's still more to be accounted for. Implementation and population still count for something. Keeping culture unchanged is futile, everyone comes up with their own ideals and injects them into the next generation, thinking it'll make things better. Not to mention corporate ideals, such as the diamond's are forever from jewelers, personal responsibility from tobacco, apple is a status symbol from Apple, and on and so forth.

        Back to topic: Most people don't and won't care about the government, they just want the government to solve their problems or get out of their way. Getting a population to "believe in [government], understand it, and enforce it socially" is a much taller order than it sounds. For verification: the Americans, with the two most rubbish candidates you could possibly find, all seem to think voting for anyone other than rubbish R or rubbish D is throwing their vote away. Let alone the significant remaining percentage who think their vote doesn't count for anything at all.

        Checks and balances entail compromises and disagreements, which individually prestigious people should be subject to. As you said, "no one should be above the law." If the meritocracy is not the law, who is the law?

        Thank you for taking the time to read and think.

      • Brilliant mathematicians get rewarded with what?

        More mathematical problems. And ideally, also lots of money and babes.

        Bony fingers!

    • The core issue: Who determines merit, ability, and position? The people who write the rules are the actual government, and governments secure their own power.

      You touched on a really important point here: when humans are judging skill, it’s subjective and not really meritocratic.

      One of my favorite psychology professors says that people really like the idea of meritocracy, when it’s actually present. He gives the example of sports, and how people aren’t bitter about a particular team winning, or that there’s big inequality between the players, and that the reason people are okay with that inequality is the presence of the playing field and the high speed cameras and whatnot means meritocracy is the actual basis for reward, not personality politics.

      In business, government, etc it’s all people judging other people, and on an individual basis. A group of people evaluating is better, like star ratings for an uber driver are probably more trustable than performance evaluations from someone’s boss. The latter can be so heavily distorted by that one person’s judgment.

      The ideal is using measurable performance as the measure of “merit”. Like when people run a marathon. As long as the course is visible to confirm nobody’s cheating, that marathon time is yours in a way your degree or your job or your salary isn’t.

      It’s also why people are so in favor of free markets deciding resource allocation rather than people: the free market is at least a large crowdsourced combination of everyone’s needs, instead of just some mental image of those needs in the mind of a few committee memebers.

      • I truly appreciate your contribution to this long dead conversation. It is to my regret I didn't respond sooner, but I cannot seem to withhold my desire to share. The following could be summed up as, "Everything wrong with sports. Merit is ambiguous. People abuse ambiguity for their own gain."

        the presence of the playing field and the high speed cameras and whatnot means meritocracy is the actual basis for reward,

        to confirm nobody’s cheating

        Cheating in this context might be summed up as: Violating rules, unsporting. Possibly underhanded, deception, fraud, or trickery. A disparity or unfairness through action.

        Sports being a meritocracy is absolutely true on a small scale. However, with a macro view some disparities come to light.

        Disparities:

        • Genetics.
        • Environmental development. (Such as being trained from a young age, being able to afford a better coach, better nutrition, more opportunity, etc, etc.)
        • Trickery. {An American football case, where the quarterback confuses the opposing team by standing up with the ball and walking toward the goal, comes to mind.)
        • Undetected cheating. (Performance enhancing drug usage. Not illegal doping, but doping that hasn't been determined as such yet. Delaying select competitors before they get to the field. Etc.)
        • Luck. (The wind blowing the ball. An opposing competitor stepping on an uneven spot of turf, or their gear malfunctioning,)
        • Individual contribution and shared merit. (Do the players on the team who didn't contribute still gain merit?)

        Exempted due to applicability: (read low or protracted defensibly and a vague determination of where "the game" begins and ends; philosophical)

        • Player selection process. (Sure, the wisest managers would ideally select the best players, but offense and emotions may occlude foresight.)
        • Who gets selected to be pulled off the bench? {A big can of worms.}
          • Depends on the coach, instead of the player.
          • The player not played gains less or no merit.
          • Argument to be had about the coach being the chess player of the game and merit based on strategies employed, sharing player's merit with the coach.
        • Player trading.
        • Corrupt judges/referees.
        • Rigged games.
        • Politics influencing decisions.
        • Uncooperative players inhibiting success.
        • Cultural biases.

        people really like the idea of meritocracy

        Back to the first half of my original point. People do really like the idea of meritocracy... when it aligns with their own views. "Merit" is founded on virtue, worth, or value. And all three depend on the evaluator.

        • For instance, a football fan at a baseball match may not find the players very worthy, because it isn't football.
        • Another instance, is cheating meritorious? A superior strategy requiring exceptional ability to successfully sabotage your opponent. (Devil's advocate, and a very Chinese sentiment. I'll not be defending this point, but it is wise to consider the biases inherent in personal culture determining what merit is.)
        • Alternatively honor and respect determine merit. Also highly subjective, just look at Jihad contrasted to The Crusades.

        This leads to the other half: Anything subjective is subject to abuse, because generally humans are selfish and tribal. It's how our ancestors survived. Any permanent governing system must account for, incorporate, protect, benefit from, and forcefully constrain or alter the governed's nature as necessary for the benefit or balancing of the governed and the governing system's continued future. Anything else eventually leads to revolution or collapse.

        In truth, I believe a perpetual motion is impossible. Something must continually power and correct the machine running the humans but humans aren't capable of doing so. We will likely continue to have revolutions and disparities caused by revolutions until our collapse. The best we can hope to do, is make living on this rock less miserable for our fellow inhabitants.

        Please have a lovely day.

  • No.

    Who gets to determine what counts as merit? If it's the people with merit already, it's trivial to corrupt such a system. Think billionares.

    And then, is everyone even given the opportunity to display their merit and if they are, is their merit recognised? I'm concerned esp. about people perceived by society to have inherently less merit. Think disabled people, old people, young people, women, people of colour, queer folks, etc.

    And then, how does the system ensure that merit wasn't faked or even just exaggerated, how does it investigate and how does it respond? Does a sufficient amount of merit allow someone to cover up such things? If implemented, can and would this investigation power be used to punish people with low merit, those that are the most vulnereable?

    And then, why do people that are not constantly being useful to the system deserve less and esp. if meritocracy is the only system in place, do some people not deserve to live at all? Here I'm talking about people that want to have a hobby or two or want to spend time with their friends and family, basically anything that doesn't give merit. I'm also talking about people that can't or don't want to be useful to society.

    Beyond all this, meritocracy aims to replace the people's purpose in life with "being useful". And that's just a really miserable mindset to live with, where you feel guilt if you're not being useful all the time, where you constantly have thoughts like "am I good enough" or "am I trying hard enough".

    • I totally agree.

      IMO the notion of merit is an illusion. It hides the assumption that people can be ranked and compared, but do we truly want to live in such a society?

      Also, is that even feasible?

      It's impossible to objectively compare humans of similar "skill level". For example, think of Plato and Aristotle, they have been dead for thousands of years and their work has been studied but millions of not billions of people, yet people still argue who was the best philosopher of the two. How can we have a meritocracy if we cannot evaluate merit? You may be able to distinguish experts from beginners for a certain skill, but, when considering roles of influence/power, there are multiple skills and attributes to be considered, and the same principle applies.

      It's easier to cheat a merit metric than to evaluate it. Any algorithm that makes a decision based on merit will need to either evaluate or compare it. Both are going to depend on the presence of absence of features that once known to a cheater they will be able to fake them. That makes evaluation and cheating a competing game, where the evaluator and the cheater contiously adapt to one another, with the cheater being much able to adapt much faster.

      Any meritocracy will have to be open about it's evaluation process. If it's not participants with merit cannot know how to demonstrate it and the process is prune to corruption.

      Personally, I believe making decisions based on trust is much better. It's hard to build trust and it cannot be cheated. Of course, cheater may try to influence decision makers with bribes or blackmail. But, once this is found trust is destroyed and they get rejected.

    • This is one of the reasons a free market is important. The collective feedback of a lot of customers is a better signal for real merit than a boss’s evaluation. A free market is a place where a person who fails to kiss enough ass to get good ratings from their boss can instead prove directly to those being served that they can help.

      The “free market” conditions for this particular avenue of choice is a situation where an individual can go into business for themselves without too much artificial hassle. Like yes, maybe you’ll need a car for your own pizza delivery business, so there’s some startup cost, but at least you don’t need a special pizza delivery tag from the government, which can only be gained by … you guessed it … kissing more ass.

      As an autistic, weird person who can get things done well but who always has personality conflicts with bosses, I feel safer in a place with something resembling the freedom to engage directly with customers, to be judged by the market instead of by a boss.

      I often fail at jobs. But I often succeed when out on my own. Whenever someone proposes adding more permission slips to the process of starting a business, it makes me feel afraid, because being in business for myself is how I’ve survived.

  • SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

    and not just privilege's gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

    then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

    However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered "level" playing-field.

    The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

    Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

    Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

    Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

    Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

    Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

    Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

    _ /\ _

    • But what is merit exactly? Who decides the criteria we use to measure it?

  • That's too vague a definition. Like, if person A is an accomplished athlete, the best basketball player ever, I do not think his position of power or success should be, say, president. I think this is actually a very dangerous mindset derived from the capitalistic notion that success determines your--I'll call it value. If you're successful, you must be smart; If you're smart, you can be anything, even the president. Success is equal to wealth in these talking circles, and it sort of ends up as a backwards meritocracy. You gain merit measured by your success (wealth) instead of the other way around

    But if you define it as a place in which positions of authority are given to people who have proven themselves knowledgeable and capable in the field in which the position of authority is being granted, I do believe in it in principle. I say that because principle and practice are rarely the same in politics and sociology. There are countless other factors that will impact your "success" that are not actually based on your expertise in the field. Better people have designed public transport, electric cars, social media, and spaceships than Elon Musk, yet the man sits in a position of tremendous influence. In a just meritocracy, we would never have heard his name

    Which brings about the point that we have certain ideas as a culture (or maybe system) that awards some merits disproportionately more than others. Some will say his merit is in being a ruthless business man. He's good at that, I guess, so he should be the leader of the company. His "merit" of being a bad human being is being disproportionately rewarded compared to the merit of the scientists that actually design his spaceships, and the engineers that make them work. Meritocracy only really works in a closed system. The most capable archaeologist will be the head of the expedition. If you let the ideas go beyond that, and start comparing apples to oranges, you start seeing instead a system's idea of what's important, and by extension that of the society built in that system

  • The problem is the powerful make the rules, but don't abide by them. What starts off as a meritocracy quickly turns into this growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Like we have now.

  • There is a meritocratic aspect to reality. There are also meritocratic aspects to capitalism. So it's partly real, for sure.

    A real meritocracy would nurture merit. In terms of policy that would manifest as socialist policies that create a level playing field.

    Hiring based on identity is fiercely anti-meritocratic. Expensive degrees and high interest student loans are also anti-meritocratic.

  • I'm very wary of the term because it could only be measured correctly if everyone started from the same conditions. People with more resources have it easier to go up.

  • I don't think this would ever be achievable. It also sounds like a broader form of technocracy (to my very much unqualified brain)

  • Nobody is able to speak for other people. This just doesnt work.

    Its just laziness if people prefer to have others speak for themselves.

    Anarchy is the only system where nobody can hide because "it was not their decision" and where nobody has the right to "decide for other people".

    I mean, are you good at gifts? If you dont know what a person wants to get as gifts, how do you want to know exactly what decisions they would make?

  • No.

    Currently: "meritocracy" has nothing to do with "merit" and more to do with eugenics, it's just a word to make white-supremacist-patriarchal-cis-heteronormative-abled-supremacist bigotry sound less terrible than it is.

    In general: because hierarchy is bad for society, since someone always ends up at the artificial "bottom" and treated badly or at the very least as less worthy or deserving (of life, dignity, freedom, access, and so on). The only reason anyone would want/believe in a "meritocracy" is because it makes them feel superior to others.

107 comments