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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

Not coincidentally, The author of your article is the father of the author of the OP. I don't think the definition has shifted so much as the intent behind the word (negative to positive).

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The article mentions Bevin:

"Bevin left school at 11 to take a job as a farm boy, and was subsequently a kitchen boy, a grocer's errand boy, a van boy, a tram conductor and a drayman before, at the age of 29, he became active locally in Bristol in the Dock Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' union."

And was Foreign Minister in the Atlee government, ardent ant-Soviet, arguably one of the founders of the Atlantic alliance and many other achievements. That route is pretty much closed these days.

My own personal favourite is William Robertson - who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1916-1918. He went from a private soldier to that lofty position. Richard Holmes points out that an equivalent rise would be impossible today - even with much smaller forces to command.

These people were successful because they were good - not on "merit" as is usually defined.

Meritocracy still has purely negative connotations among those who study society, and positive connotations among politicians or corporations who wish to justify their current practices. You won't hear the word "meritocracy" mentioned by sociologists or historians as anything but a joke, or, if they're patient, as a starting point of a dystopia.

Of course, it has to be noted that academics lean left, and sociologists overwhelmingly so.

See, e.g., http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/cardiff_klein.pdf.

Right, and did you know that most climatologists are overwhelmingly climate-change believers?! That's just so unfair. Where are all the climate-change-denier climatologists, creationist biologists and libertarian sociologists, I wonder?

At least climatologists actually observe the climate. If the sociologists observed the massive failure of communism in the 20th century they wouldn't be leaning left, that's for sure.

Let's see, so you're equating left-leaning social views with 20th-century communism, and assuming people dedicating their lives to the rigorous study of society don't do their job. Indeed, that is the kind of reasoning that directs both the author of the article as well as others who want to convince themselves they can find solutions to society's problems (or deny their existence) while being completely unwilling to actually study society first. Denialism at its finest. If the "reason folks" were as averse to math as they are to human beings we would have been reading similar unending tirades about why quantum mechanics is just illogical. It is the particular genre written by people who honestly believe their narrow view of the world combined with their self-ascribed intelligence is enough to reason about something they are not only completely ignorant about but actually lack any curiosity of. They will fight for their right to "reason" yet not learn (usually by ridiculing those who do bother to learn the subject first)!

Also, I find it a bit ironic that you call for taking lessons from 20th-century mass-movements considering that the article echoes others similar to it -- written by scientists -- around the same time of the Bolshevik revolution, and served to justify other movements with no better record than that of communism.

Comparing sociology to biology in particular ends up unflattering for the former. Biology is a lot more obviously successful than sociology. Sociology has so far failed to produce its equivalent to evidence-based medicine and whenever treatments it has tried to design for social illnesses have not delivered.

I don't think sociology is completely hopeless but given its track record so far I would sooner expect intelligence (and empathy, willpower, etc.) augmentation to cure whatever problems plague society than any attempt at "institutional change".

Sociology is not an applied discipline and most certainly doesn't prescribe "institutional change". I would sooner expect "solutions" from people who bother to study the system they seek to change rather than those who don't and cast aspersions on those who do.

But speaking of track records, I think that the record of those who have called for "institutional change" and got us civil rights, education and healthcare is far better than that of so-called scientists who have favored "applied artificial Darwinism" and advocated for eugenics programs.

That's a very good point. I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but if you had any self-awareness you'd stop and ponder it. Who do you think ends up doing 'climate science'? Why?

Oh, I ponder it a lot, which is why after getting a 'math' degree I went to study 'history'. There are many reasons why certain people choose to study certain things, and surely 'climate science' draws people whose proclivities are, on average, different from those who choose to study 'physics', 'math', 'medicine', 'history' etc[1]. Nevertheless, taking that into too much considerations would leave us in a conundrum. If evaluating any research would require us to examine the psychology of the researchers, first, we would need lots of psychologists, and what about the psychology of those who study 'psychology'? We're getting close to a Russel's paradox here. In any event, I would sooner listen to those who first bother to study something and only then analyze it.

[1] I'm not a native English speaker -- I don't know if you are -- but you're the first I've seen to write the names of academic disciplines in single-quotes. Is that a thing?

Its called Scare Quotes, and implies a sort of disdain or sarcasm.

Has the intent shifted? The 2001 article specifically called out the Blair government for , well, Blair tbought it was good intent, but that is the problem: Young argued that it was being used to negatively impact society.

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