Isn't the universe by default a meritocracy? Millions of years of evolution proves this... And society can either have policies that work against this default meritocracy or with it to speed it up.
The day before the asteroid strike, we had zero merit.
Now, this is a narrative with many factual errors, but I like to remind myself that we happen to have been doing well for the last 100,000 years or so, but it's the blink of an eye and who knows what will happen next?
Because it's fundamental, meritocracy should call for both minimizing false positives and negatives, as both work towards increasing survivability.
2. Consider the tragedies of the commons that often occur in nature. It is the structural arrangement of the system or colony which is disastrous but any individual organism within that system. http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1713/version/1
For example, let's introduce a new predator that's also attracted to giant butt feathers. It doesn't matter how sexually attractive those giant butt feathers are, the offspring of giant butt feather peacocks will be at a survival disadvantage and will be selected out of the gene pool. The ones remaining are the female peacocks who don't like giant butt feathers, and their offspring (since they're more likely to not produce giant butt feathers).
Nothing bad about that, but nothing good either.
A meritocratic society must still constantly issue its merit accordingly though.
Why is it a meritocracy? Because the meritorious survive.
Why did the meritorious survive? Because it's a meritocracy.
Value and virtue are not the same thing, is the problem.
No, the meritorious survive because you can't cheat the universe.
I'm saying you can't make the world meritocratic because it already is and it's not changeable. You can only align yourself with how the world works so you don't get screwed.
For example, let's say I'm an employer and I decide to hire the least competent candidate for a new job. I, as the employer, cannot escape the consequences of this action and most likely I will pay for it in some form like the company failing or me losing my job. The world is still meritocratic despite my inane decision making. This forces me out of the equation and eventually my successor will have to do a better job hiring or else face the same fate of irrelevance as I. Eventually, all that's left is an employer who does pick candidates based on merit. But if this is true, the employer didn't really create a meritocracy, but merely aligned itself with the equilibrium state of the universe.
This is just a way of looking at what meritocracy means, and it frames it as a purely practical construct necessary for survival.
Meritocracy is essentially a statement that people are rewarded according to their merits, whatever those might be. It carries baggage in the form of an unstated moral component riding shotgun. If you ask people whether "meritocracy" is the same as "natural selection", they will tend not to agree, because merit implies a degree of human agency that is more than merely current emergent phenomena.
The confusion of value and virtue, or natural selection and meritocracy, causes all sorts of trouble. The philosophers have had long beard-stroking discussions about all this under the heading of "teleology".
I'm not saying meritocracy is the same as natural selection. Meritocracy is the system which aligns itself with natural selection. Merit is assigned by humans, and if assigned perfectly well it should align with natural selection. However, humans are error prone and therefore can never create a completely meritocratic society so meritocracy will never be on the same plane as natural selection.
I guess you can say meritocracy is natural selection emulated by humans. However the universe ultimately forces the selection by merit (perfectly, as whatever the universe chooses is fair) and the humanly chosen merit is gauged by how accurately it aligns with it.
I don't have much love for a cockroach's merit.
Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet.
And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.
Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.
I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose.
> And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.
Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually.
> Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.
If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?
And if in fact people are getting dumber, then there must be something about that which makes it... preferable, which means you either have to re-evaluate what dumb means or open your mind to the fact that maybe what you or I think is "smart" might not be good or desirable.