Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

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I interpret meritocracy as being judged by the outcome of your doings. If someone has IQ 10000 but spends it to dominate WoW, then... I don't see why they should be paid a lot (some other people might disagree, though). Likewise, if someone leverages their genetics, family, wealth, skills, efforts, and luck towards great outcomes (e.g. Elon Musk), then they should be rewarded, as they're meritocratically the best.

To all "proponents" of "the luck argument": there are thousands of people far more lucky than Elon and Steve (born to wealthier families, smarter, better connected, etc) that didn't achieve what they have. So... luck obviously isn't the answer.

Having said that, even if luck were the answer, I'd still support meritocracy, because it results in the best outcome. It's not about fairness, fundamentally - it's about creating the best society. If the only people who can do that are "the wealthy" (or whichever category you choose - most likely "the intelligent" these days), then so be it - it's best for all the rest of us if they "rule", meritocratically.

Power doesn't work like that - it accretes to those who are able to leverage it. You generate a permanent power disparity with a gloves off laissez-faire system like that.

I'd worry about your definition of "best society". Is the current system an existence proof in your mind?

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I use "best society" it is code for the following argument that gets as long and involved as there is time to explain:

Human instincts and morals are really well calibrated to small-village life. I take things like the Dunbar number [1] to indicate that we are optimised for a small circle of close relationships.

"Fairness" has a sister in "equality" that is very powerful force on the local scale and scales horribly, to the point where equality being scaled up is usually a warning sign of an incoming economic breakdown where everyone starves. Unfortunately, people keep trying to scale equality up because they want it in their local relationships.

Talking about "permanent power disparities" touches on the same vein of thinking - we know that permanent power disparities are an inevitable feature of society. The attempts to set up societies where there are no permanent power disparities have resulted in permanent power disparities forming, and frequently going to very nasty despots. Modern western civilisation has done _extremely_ well compared to the competition by dangling systemic advantage as the reward for massively improving the industrial base and consumer access to resources. This has worked a lot better than attempts to suppress inequality under, eg, the communist systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I don't see what fairness and equality have to do with one another. Consider a poor person and a rich person. The poor person gives $100 to charity and the rich person gives nothing. They're not economic equals, but which would be more fair? A tax deduction for the poor guy or the rich guy? Extrapolate.

"Permanent power disparity", "best society" - that's completely orthogonal to meritocracy. You could implement meritocracy (i.e. most skilled people in temporary position of most power) even in a system that has a "reset" every generation (e.g. by eliminating breeding and growing people Matrix-style). Like markets, meritocracy should be used to "optimize" the outcome towards whatever the society deems beneficial - e.g. these days we consider renewable energy beneficial, so policy is guiding markets to force investment into renewable energy (by taxes etc - despite renewable energy not being competitive on its own) - just a simple example of markets adapting to the values of society.

Yes, the current system (Western-style democracy, capitalism, freedom, markets) is the most meritocratic of all systems realised so far (AFAIK), but that doesn't mean we can't do better still.

Without splitting hairs, I think we should avoid normatives when speaking across the board about merit. For example, "should be rewarded" is a bit of an odd phrase given that the market and other factors will affect the degree of the reward. You can be a very accomplished scholar, but make very little because the market doesn't reward that kind of stuff. Plenty of things escape market reward and it is profoundly erroneous to elevate the market to some kind of supermetric of human worth or merit and reduce all valuable activity to the profitable. I certainly prefer fairness over unfairness as a general principle, but fairness has its place.

Whether luck is involved or not is of little interest to me. I think we obsess too much about money and tie it too much with human worth. In part because we like to think of ourselves as meritocratic, some of us feel compelled to justify our wealth differences to ward off the envious (plenty of that to go around). I'm not sure how you tie this into creating a "best society". I think arguments can be made that intersections of money and power/power and ambition are the most dangerous. Indeed, an argument against democratic republics is that those with a lust for power will tend to seek office and once they have it, believe they are entitled to it because they merit it as a result of their own actions. Hereditary monarchs, on the other hand, know fully well that they didn't ascend to the throne through their own efforts and that they are in a position of responsibility w.r.t. their people. (Note that most monarchies were not despotic despite the folklore because they were checked to varying degrees by tradition, the lords, the Church, etc, and were guided by advisers who brought their knowledge to the table, thus divorcing expertise from that bounded and constrained power.)

"Should be", "best society", "meritocracy" etc - I used all of these in the sense of my ideal world, not the actual one. Feel free to critique either the concept of meritocracy (in an ideally meritocratic world), or the current society, but please don't combine the two, saying "meritocracy is bad because markets don't reward the best academics" or something similar, that simply a logical fallacy.

This is a frequent criticism that is IMO completely off base. Nobody is saying that this world is particularly meritocratic (although I think Western-style democracy+capitalism+markets is experimentally the most meritocratic system ever realised).

"If the only people who can do that are "the wealthy"..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump#Family_and_person...

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