this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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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.
I do. I just had a surgery and I’m very glad we have ranking and comparisons, and rejection of those who don’t rank and compare well, from the pool of available surgeons.
There would be no feeling of safety in that surgical theater, as I’m going under, if I thought that anyone was operating on the assumption that surgeons cannot be ranked in terms of merit. That would scare the shit out of me.
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.