Define "merit" and whether such a thing is desirable to me.
I don't have much love for a cockroach's merit.
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.