Using “objective” measures like SAT or ACT scores is the worst way schools can contribute to a meritocratic-based distribution of status positions, except for all the others.
I feel that this entire discussion seems to come at the system from the wrong direction entirely. Yes, any hierarchy will pile up losers at the bottom, those at the bottom will often resent being at the bottom (no matter how deservedly), will therefore reject the system, and one of the better ways to minimize this is to have a multiplicity of hierarchies simultaneously such that few people are ever at the bottom of ALL of them at any given time. Likewise, it's helpful, perhaps even necessary, that people have a reasonable expectation that, wherever their current position in those hierarchies, they can theoretically advance upward in at least one of them by talent, effort, or luck. That's all true, relevant, and even useful... But it's still just working the issue from the implicit perspective that the focus is to minimize the resentment of those at the bottom or, more charitably, to make hierarchies that aren't deserving of resentment.
What always seems to get lost in that effort is a recognition that hierarchy is not simply a natural reality, nor simply "a social construct", but ultimately it is a means to a purpose. Hierarchy is a tool. It is functional. Hierarchy is a sorting method. A properly working meritocracy sorts and ranks people by their suitability to hold certain responsibilities. Yes, high positions tend to come with high status, often with fame and wealth, but those are simply incentives for qualified people to work towards, compete for, and hold those positions that bear immense responsibilities requiring the utmost merit. Deliberately obscuring merit ranking by avoiding objective measures of merit or artificially manipulating measures of merit may address the resentments of those judged lacking in merit, but at what cost to the accuracy and efficiency of the function of meritocracy?
It's true that there is a lot of resentment from the bottom. Similarly, hierarchy in general and "meritocracy" in particular are criticized routinely by some dissatisfied with the very idea that people can be sorted and ranked. Yet, nobody who is dying really wants their doctor to be less than the best available. People didn't tolerate deliberate ambiguity in the competency of aircraft designers and pilots for much longer than it took to broadly recognize that such ambiguity resulted in unacceptable malfunctions and unprofessionalism. World leaders across the globe are being booted from office via elections, not because people at the bottom resent being at the bottom (that's always been true), not because the gap between the bottom and top is growing or too large (people are typically upset or not that there IS a gap, but the actual size of it seems to make very little difference in how broadly or deeply it is resented), rather the rising resentment across all these otherwise dissimilar societies is rooted quite clearly in the sense that the meritocracy has FUNCTIONALLY failed. The the positions of immense responsibility are currently held by people who are demonstrably UNQUALIFIED to hold them. It's not truly "anti-elite" in any sense of rejecting that elites should exist or should have high positions of responsibility, not truly a rejection of hierarchy or meritocracy, but instead a rejection of the people who have failed to fulfill their responsibilities within that system. Our elites seem corrupt, deluded, incompetent, LACKING IN MERIT.
Brooks therefore comes across more than a little like someone trying to cure a common cold while ignoring a metastasizing cancer. Restoring the perceived legitimacy of the meritocratic system is not essentially about minimizing how many people there are at the bottom. That's fiddling about the edges without getting to the core issue. It's essentially about restoring the actual effectiveness of the system at sorting and ranking people to best enable us to find those fit for the responsibilities of each position, high and low. It's about removing those who prove themselves unit from their positions. It's about finding the people who will succeed in those positions. It's even, perhaps most difficultly, about us collectively finding the humility to accept wherever we end up in the sorting and ranking, because it is more important that the most meritorious people be given the high positions than it is to advance ourselves into high positions.
All isn't fair in love and war. Short-sighted selfishness, ironically, becomes self-defeating when confronted by problems that require long term cooperation.
> Our elites seem corrupt, deluded, incompetent, LACKING IN MERIT.
You've sort of done an elision here, smoothly moving from "elites" as defined by the Ivy league, or demanding careers with high comp, to meaning solely "politicians."
Yes, politicans are awful, and the entire system should be changed from the ground up, because all our current system ever gives you is a choice between two 90 year old mediocrities that nobody positively WANTS, but are bad enough that some people are horrified enough by one of them to vote against them.
But politicians are a vanishingly tiny slice of everything, and all the other parts of meritocracy actually do work. Surgeons are highly compensated because skill matters and is worth a lot. Ditto FAANG and finance people and business owners and the like - they make high comp because what they do drives a lot of measurable value, and the economic growth they and similar people drive has been the engine that improves standards of living and has raised a billion people out of poverty in the last 50 years.
Scientists and researchers aren't nearly compensated enough in my own opinion, but most of the ones I've known have been pretty happy with their lives, and they definitely had to grind for years and be on top of their game to get there.
I think the "sorting and ranking" functions actually work pretty well, outside of politics. Within politics they don't work as well, because there's not any actual standards or objective criteria politicians have to meet. That's the problem with democracy - politics is literally a popularity contest, and not much else.
"You've sort of done an elision here, smoothly moving from "elites" as defined by the Ivy league, or demanding careers with high comp, to meaning solely "politicians.""
I don't think so. Are there any prominent scientists in the US today on the level of Einstein, Schroedinger, Turing, von Neumann, Planck, Enrico Fermi, or EO Wilson? Are more famous academics in the humanities famous for something insightful than for something stupid or absurdly obscure?
I asked CoPilot to "list some famous American scientists working today", and it came back with Anthony Fauci, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jennifer Doudna, Frances Arnold, and Eric Lander.
I submit that our host Robin Hanson has been selected /against/ because of his intelligence. He's clearly on the cutting edge in many ways; yet Paul Krugman is much more famous. I asked Copilot to list famous economists working in the US today, and it listed 6, all of whom are famous for advocating leftist politics.
Actual politicians are a tiny %. Their selective pressure against merit is not.
Policy backs corporations against individual rights at enormous %. Judges ruling on those cases come from the same crop as politicians, same for how courts treat civil forfeiture. Anticompetitive practices take ages to be penalized, if you tow the correct lines. Crap like John Deer blocking right to repair doesn't happen in a meritorious vacuum, any fines from behavior like this are a slap on the wrist at most, the misaligned incentives are still overwhelming, and not by accident.
You can trace this back to the ruling class lacking merit, and thus using whatever means available they can get away with to suppress competition. Perversion of evaluating merit and making that process opaque are features, not bugs.
History has seen the pattern of merit earning status, ruling class decay, then working to suppress replacement many times in many different cultures. Those with status rarely see it drop without a fight. That fight takes many forms.
The elision is yours alone. I put politicians in the same series of examples that I called out doctors, aircraft designers, and pilots. I realize that definitions of "elite" vary widely, with "Elite Human Capital", "Social Capitalists". "The Intelligencia" and others, but for my purposes here I quite deliberately describe them solely in reference to holding positions of immense responsibilities. There are nuances to each industry and role, sure, but the lowest common denominator is that people entrusted with immense responsibilities have proven themselves untrustworthy and/or incompetent in those positions, which reasonably calls into question the system that placed them in those positions.
The medical profession overwhelmingly failed in its response to COVID. From outright lies by Fauci, to politicized efforts by researchers to quash the lab leak hypothesis, to professional associations and employers alike falling to defend dissident professionals who, with relevant expertise and solid research citations, challenged the prevailing "consensus" on response and treatment. No, meritocracy (or more properly, the prevailing ambiguity about which medical professionals actually have merit versus those who have held positions and status they have proved unsuitable to hold) has disappointed the public. There's been a clear mismatch between which medical professionals have the positions and status versus which ones were objectively more competent in fulfilling their responsibilities as medical professionals.
I used aircraft as another example referencing Boeing finally dismantling their DEI department and recommitting to merit-based hiring and promotions after numerous high profile failures of their aircraft. When even ENGINEERING, one of the fields of study traditionally among the least infected by the rot in our universities, at one of our flagship companies has degraded below minimally acceptable standards of performance, that's a huge red flag that our training and credentialing institutions are no longer accurately sorting and ranking based on MERIT (as defined as being the most fit for the given purpose, aka competence in the position).
You praise the finance and CEO types, but I don't agree. ESG may finally be waning in influence, but investment has been badly distorted for years by bad metrics driven by social justice activists and disconnected or detrimental to actual business performance. Likewise, numerous companies embraced what amount to diversity quotas for hiring and promotions, pushed DEI training and offices that multiple studies have found to be actively counterproductive and harmful, and done significant damage to their brands with attempted virtue signaling that unnecessarily injected them into culture war issues that (on net) cost them customers, profits, and prestige. Bluntly, a lot of what "leading" companies have done lately is rather indisputably stupid in purely business terms. Similarly, while I will be the first to readily acknowledge that the typical American CEO is impressively credentialed, extraordinarily intelligent, and often almost compulsively workaholic, nonetheless CEO compensation has often been found to be loosely (at best) associated with actual contributions to the success of the company and American CEO are frequently quite overcompensated with compared to their peers elsewhere in the world. Even the largest, most successful companies have shown a pattern of late of their "success" owing far more to lobbying, abuse of monopolistic power, and buying out smaller upstarts than to any significant innovation in products or improvement in customer satisfaction. We've seen major missteps here.
Scientists and researchers even moreso have shown themselves ideologically captured and unreliable. Replication failures abound, junk science gets published as long as it fits the desires of the activist class, leading scientific publications have openly put political activism above the objective search for truth or empirical determination of fact, professional associations have imposed political dogma as litmus tests for membership and injected the same into their credentialing pipelines, entire lines of research are effectively declared off limits to avoid offending certain groups, contrary results to "The Consensus" are frequently suppressed, with dissidents retracted, censored, fired, and smeared, and prominent voices actively argue against open debate while seeking to hide their data and methodology. Nope, I have tremendous respect for the scientific profession and it's precisely for that very reason that I am so deeply disappointed by the current execrable state of our scientific institutions. They are, if anything, even MORE corrupt and incompetent than our political institutions, which is one hell of a low limbo bar to shuffle under.
Our government is plagued with scandals and failures. So is our media, our education system, our most prominent businesses and several entire commercial sectors, our managerial class and creative classes. It's genuinely easier to list which positions of immense responsibility haven't had public failures:
I actually agree with every one of your examples, but I still feel like I should point out that this isn't a "meritocracy" problem you're pointing to, it's a "politics" problem, up and down.
Yes Fauci and the CDC actively misled the public - as a purely political move.
Yes, DEI is a ridiculous value-pyre that we spend something lik $8B a year on in pointless sinecures that actively *detract* from business performance - but it's the OPPOSITE of "meritocracy." It's purely political. It's entire function is to *subvert* actual meritocracy, and put a thumb on the scale for various politically favored minorities, with a glare and an "or else..."
And Boeing is the *archetypical* example of "company ran by nerds taken over internally by smooth talking executives more skilled at corporate politics than actually doing anything." Mcdonnel Douglas gutted Boeing and are wearing their skinsuit, and they live on political handouts and favoritism as the only domestic aircraft builder.
All of your problems with science as it's practiced are political and primate dominance game things that let less meritricious scientists still get publications and high positions. Politics once again.
Your main complaint isn't against meritocracy, it's against politics infiltrating everything and *diluting* meritocracy, and voters or other primates in the group not caring enough to cast the politics-players out in favor of purer meritocracy.
And I agree, THAT'S a real problem. But it's not a problem of meritocracy, it's a problem of politics.
I don't know what the solution is. I honestly think a solution looks like something shaped like Stephensonion or Gibsonian clades or phyles, where peopel voluntarily choose to self associate at a higher level. Think a nation that you actively choose, with admission criteria.
But until we get there, or find better ways to self-organize with less politics and more meritocracy, we'll still have the struggles you've pointed to.
When a doctor tells a patient that they are immunocompromised, resulting in a simple cold being life-threatening to them, is that a complaint against their immune system or a complaint against the common cold? Clearly, against their malfunctioning immune system, yes? When a computer becomes infected by a known Trojan Horse, do we complain about the foolish user who downloaded it and security suite that failed to block it or do we complain about the Trojan Horse? Threats are a given, so it's the unnecessary vulnerabilities that we really get upset about, right? When an assassin nearly kills the President-elect, which is the more direct cause we severely criticize, the abject incompetence of the Secret Service charged with his protection or the existence of would-be assassins? Clearly the missteps of the protective detail, because the existence of would-be assassins wouldn't matter if they'd properly fulfilled their function.
Same thing here. Meritocracy is a wonderful system in theory and, despite a few quibbles that even I have with it, generally the least bad possible system in reality for sorting and ranking people into functional roles where competence is immensely important for everyone involved. Our politics, disfunctional as it is, even unprecedentedly insane as the far left have become of late, is still pretty much within the historical average bounds. We can easily cite multiple historical examples of politics being far more forcefully intrusive into all other areas of society. So, the baseline threat of ideological distortion of the system isn't actually all that much higher than usual at this time and place in history. We therefore can't just blame "politics" for the recent changes. Our meritocracy SHOULD be able to recognize and reject the injection of irrelevant matters like politics.
So, why have our institutions that are intended to produce, credential, and allocate meritorious individuals failed so much worse than usual lately? Sure, there has been a politically motivated direct attack on them for decades, "The March through the Institutions", but that doesn't really address the issue of WHY that effort to corrupt our institutions succeeded so easily and thoroughly, especially in the absence of the sort of violent coercion typical of most such institutional takeovers historically. Our meritocracy itself has proven flawed. Not inherently, not unavoidably, but in the way we practiced it there were the equivalent of unpatched vulnerabilities, foolish users, and an immune system that failed to recognize, quarantine, and remove infection even as it degraded the health of the system. Multiple redundant protective mechanisms failed to protect and preserve the meritocracy in nearly every field. That's a systemic failure, therefore criticism of the system itself is necessary.
So MY complaint is NOT limited to politics. I have many complaints about politics and suggestions how to improve it, but I recognize that ultimately it's always going to be the equivalent of stepping outside or connecting to the Internet: full of viruses that threaten the health of itself and everything else that comes in contact with it. So I'm more concerned here about the functioning of our meritocratic systems in regards to long term results DESPITE the inevitable ongoing political attempts to subvert it. I think it's fair to, for example, criticize communism as a system because every time it's attempted at scale the long term results seem to include tyranny and mass casualties. Frankly, very similar complaints can be lodged against democracy; the USA's Founders grappled extensively with the history of democracy having historically proved very unstable and prone to falling into tyranny or anarchy. OTOH, the few places that we find meritocracy throughout history, it's often been a very stable, very resilient system over the long run, despite existing simultaneously with very tumultuous politics. So, why hasn't our meritocracy likewise proven resilient against political infection? Why does our version of meritocracy seem to be immunocompromised?
That needs to be answered (and fixed), but almost everyone seems more interested in either attacking meritocracy as a concept (from the Left) or defending it as a concept (from the Right), but when it comes to working with the concept in reality, both sides seem more concerned with manipulating PERCEPTIONS than really looking at where it's working, where it isn't, why, and how to make it work better. That's how we get cover ups of institutional failures: when even the defenders of meritocracy start conflating trust in institutions with meritocracy itself, resulting in prioritizing being trusted (even when not deserving of it) over actually deserving trust (even if not given it). I don't trust our current meritocracy because it has failed. That doesn't mean that I don't WANT us to have a meritocracy, it just means that I want one that consistently works: one that is sufficiently secured against manipulation, distortion, and subversion to REMAIN genuinely meritorious (not eventually become a hollowed out skin suit for a parasite with good PR).
The existence of the saying, "all's fair in love and war," does not mean this is a universally accepted principle. Most people believe it is possible to engage in war crimes, and most people would agree that cheating on your partner is not fair.
It's more a saying used by bastards to justify having been bastards, similar to saying "life isn't fair" to justify having done something unfair to someone. Not everyone is like that; not everyone has an equal degree of narcissism and psychopathy. Lots of people are relatively non-bastards. Life may not be fair, but the non-bastards *want* life to be fair, and are willing to play fair themselves (most of the time) and to punish the bastards who are seen as being unfair.
Incidentally, "fair" means something like: incentives are aligned with what helps strengthen the group. It's fair when a person is rewarded for acting according to rules that, when generally obeyed, help the group, and it's fair if they are punished for doing the opposite. Depending on context, "the group" could be: family, a group of friends, a corporation, society, a social cause, the country, humanity.
I'm sure few (Western) people believe in the proverb literally. Although I'm sure more would agree if interpreted as "It's more understandable to question rules when personal stakes are immense (emotionally or regarding survival)".
However, the point of the post is not whether the proverb should be taken literally, but that the same mindset seems to apply to people discussing status as well ("I fight for what's mine or should be mine, and if rules are at odds with that, then the rules should be re-evaluated"). Robin has a long history in pointing that people fight eagerly for status.
Thereby looking to eliminate current status markers likely does not eliminate status competition in itself, but instead devalues what is currently (perceived) high status and revalues what is currently low status.
Status is where non-bastards are *most* concerned about fairness: we don't want people to gain status unfairly, and if we do see that, we get mad. We don't want to see people gain status by lying or cheating, or gain/retain status while hurting people or stealing from people and getting away with it.
The whole point of "status" is to separate who we regard as good from who we regard as bad. If someone is doing bad stuff - and we aren't one of the bastards that likes and condones that as long as the perpetrator is on "our side" - then we rightfully get real mad about it.
Surely the proposal being discussed is not intended, or expected to eliminate status from being a thing, but to prevent some particular metric being the sole or main marker of status. In a similar way to how a political system or philosophies might seek a balance of powers, without naively imagining that it's possible to prevent anyone having power over anyone else ever again.
Brook's condemnation of meritocracy falls flat. The gatekeepers have been (to protect their status) grading on a curve heavily weighted towards DEI for quite awhile now. Those disinclined to bend the knee and adhere to acceptable group think are sidelined. I for one support a strict meritocracy in some fields, medicine and aviation come to mind.
Here's some ideas; pay taxes on your endowments, cut the fat and waste out of your institutions to lower the cost of the education you offer and stop giving children of alumni a advantage in admissions.
Log that under leveling the meritocracy playing field and watch the quality of applicants rise. And don't offer degrees in bullshit endeavors that have no real value beyond virtue signaling.
Brooks, having dwelled on the Mt. Olympus of journalism most of his life, naturally sees himself at the peak, and he cannot imagine that there might be different peaks. Everything he says is a contradiction: I, the most elite of elites, am going to tell you plebeians what's wrong with the meritocracy that has brought me to the top. Only I, at the top of the mountain, can understand and instruct you. He perhaps doesn't realize the contempt in which he is held by the plebeians.
I see lots of proposals to destroy meritocracy, and no proposals to restore meritocracy. Before the late 1960s, every elite school had full-tuition merit scholarships. It was understood that one of the main purposes of elite schools was to /produce/ a meritocracy by providing a path from the lower into the upper classes.
And they /did/. Columbia provided free education to anyone in the state of New York who passed a certain score on their entrance exam. Most of our famous scientists who went to elite universities before 1970, had one of these merit scholarships.
Today, no elite university has even one full-tuition merit scholarship, unless it's tied to race or gender. They have "financial aid", yes. When I was applying to college, their "financial aid" plan was, We will pay for the remainder of your tuition after your parents have sold their house and spent all their money. (Leaving nothing for the other children in the family!) A policy which actually made it rational for parents to spend all their money on lottery tickets, because otherwise they were /definitely/ going to lose all their money.
Financial aid has increased, but many of these schools have so much money, from donations and from academic grants, that there's really no excuse for charging anybody anything, when they've become so crucial to career success that they are /de facto/ government institutions.
We should return to actual meritocracy before giving up on the concept.
What you write, Robin, about whether there is connection between the object estimated and ourself affecting out sentiments made me think of Chap. 4 of the section of the first part of TMS. The opening paragraph follows:
"We may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of another person by their correspondence or disagreement with our own, upon two different occasions; either, first, when the objects which excite them are considered without any peculiar relation, either to ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of; or, secondly, when they are considered as peculiarly affecting one or other of us."
Using “objective” measures like SAT or ACT scores is the worst way schools can contribute to a meritocratic-based distribution of status positions, except for all the others.
Yes, though I'd say more of the onus is on employers than on the schools. Employers could look at SAT, ACT, GRE, and AP scores. But they don't.
I feel that this entire discussion seems to come at the system from the wrong direction entirely. Yes, any hierarchy will pile up losers at the bottom, those at the bottom will often resent being at the bottom (no matter how deservedly), will therefore reject the system, and one of the better ways to minimize this is to have a multiplicity of hierarchies simultaneously such that few people are ever at the bottom of ALL of them at any given time. Likewise, it's helpful, perhaps even necessary, that people have a reasonable expectation that, wherever their current position in those hierarchies, they can theoretically advance upward in at least one of them by talent, effort, or luck. That's all true, relevant, and even useful... But it's still just working the issue from the implicit perspective that the focus is to minimize the resentment of those at the bottom or, more charitably, to make hierarchies that aren't deserving of resentment.
What always seems to get lost in that effort is a recognition that hierarchy is not simply a natural reality, nor simply "a social construct", but ultimately it is a means to a purpose. Hierarchy is a tool. It is functional. Hierarchy is a sorting method. A properly working meritocracy sorts and ranks people by their suitability to hold certain responsibilities. Yes, high positions tend to come with high status, often with fame and wealth, but those are simply incentives for qualified people to work towards, compete for, and hold those positions that bear immense responsibilities requiring the utmost merit. Deliberately obscuring merit ranking by avoiding objective measures of merit or artificially manipulating measures of merit may address the resentments of those judged lacking in merit, but at what cost to the accuracy and efficiency of the function of meritocracy?
It's true that there is a lot of resentment from the bottom. Similarly, hierarchy in general and "meritocracy" in particular are criticized routinely by some dissatisfied with the very idea that people can be sorted and ranked. Yet, nobody who is dying really wants their doctor to be less than the best available. People didn't tolerate deliberate ambiguity in the competency of aircraft designers and pilots for much longer than it took to broadly recognize that such ambiguity resulted in unacceptable malfunctions and unprofessionalism. World leaders across the globe are being booted from office via elections, not because people at the bottom resent being at the bottom (that's always been true), not because the gap between the bottom and top is growing or too large (people are typically upset or not that there IS a gap, but the actual size of it seems to make very little difference in how broadly or deeply it is resented), rather the rising resentment across all these otherwise dissimilar societies is rooted quite clearly in the sense that the meritocracy has FUNCTIONALLY failed. The the positions of immense responsibility are currently held by people who are demonstrably UNQUALIFIED to hold them. It's not truly "anti-elite" in any sense of rejecting that elites should exist or should have high positions of responsibility, not truly a rejection of hierarchy or meritocracy, but instead a rejection of the people who have failed to fulfill their responsibilities within that system. Our elites seem corrupt, deluded, incompetent, LACKING IN MERIT.
Brooks therefore comes across more than a little like someone trying to cure a common cold while ignoring a metastasizing cancer. Restoring the perceived legitimacy of the meritocratic system is not essentially about minimizing how many people there are at the bottom. That's fiddling about the edges without getting to the core issue. It's essentially about restoring the actual effectiveness of the system at sorting and ranking people to best enable us to find those fit for the responsibilities of each position, high and low. It's about removing those who prove themselves unit from their positions. It's about finding the people who will succeed in those positions. It's even, perhaps most difficultly, about us collectively finding the humility to accept wherever we end up in the sorting and ranking, because it is more important that the most meritorious people be given the high positions than it is to advance ourselves into high positions.
All isn't fair in love and war. Short-sighted selfishness, ironically, becomes self-defeating when confronted by problems that require long term cooperation.
> Our elites seem corrupt, deluded, incompetent, LACKING IN MERIT.
You've sort of done an elision here, smoothly moving from "elites" as defined by the Ivy league, or demanding careers with high comp, to meaning solely "politicians."
Yes, politicans are awful, and the entire system should be changed from the ground up, because all our current system ever gives you is a choice between two 90 year old mediocrities that nobody positively WANTS, but are bad enough that some people are horrified enough by one of them to vote against them.
But politicians are a vanishingly tiny slice of everything, and all the other parts of meritocracy actually do work. Surgeons are highly compensated because skill matters and is worth a lot. Ditto FAANG and finance people and business owners and the like - they make high comp because what they do drives a lot of measurable value, and the economic growth they and similar people drive has been the engine that improves standards of living and has raised a billion people out of poverty in the last 50 years.
Scientists and researchers aren't nearly compensated enough in my own opinion, but most of the ones I've known have been pretty happy with their lives, and they definitely had to grind for years and be on top of their game to get there.
I think the "sorting and ranking" functions actually work pretty well, outside of politics. Within politics they don't work as well, because there's not any actual standards or objective criteria politicians have to meet. That's the problem with democracy - politics is literally a popularity contest, and not much else.
"You've sort of done an elision here, smoothly moving from "elites" as defined by the Ivy league, or demanding careers with high comp, to meaning solely "politicians.""
I don't think so. Are there any prominent scientists in the US today on the level of Einstein, Schroedinger, Turing, von Neumann, Planck, Enrico Fermi, or EO Wilson? Are more famous academics in the humanities famous for something insightful than for something stupid or absurdly obscure?
I asked CoPilot to "list some famous American scientists working today", and it came back with Anthony Fauci, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jennifer Doudna, Frances Arnold, and Eric Lander.
I submit that our host Robin Hanson has been selected /against/ because of his intelligence. He's clearly on the cutting edge in many ways; yet Paul Krugman is much more famous. I asked Copilot to list famous economists working in the US today, and it listed 6, all of whom are famous for advocating leftist politics.
Actual politicians are a tiny %. Their selective pressure against merit is not.
Policy backs corporations against individual rights at enormous %. Judges ruling on those cases come from the same crop as politicians, same for how courts treat civil forfeiture. Anticompetitive practices take ages to be penalized, if you tow the correct lines. Crap like John Deer blocking right to repair doesn't happen in a meritorious vacuum, any fines from behavior like this are a slap on the wrist at most, the misaligned incentives are still overwhelming, and not by accident.
You can trace this back to the ruling class lacking merit, and thus using whatever means available they can get away with to suppress competition. Perversion of evaluating merit and making that process opaque are features, not bugs.
History has seen the pattern of merit earning status, ruling class decay, then working to suppress replacement many times in many different cultures. Those with status rarely see it drop without a fight. That fight takes many forms.
The elision is yours alone. I put politicians in the same series of examples that I called out doctors, aircraft designers, and pilots. I realize that definitions of "elite" vary widely, with "Elite Human Capital", "Social Capitalists". "The Intelligencia" and others, but for my purposes here I quite deliberately describe them solely in reference to holding positions of immense responsibilities. There are nuances to each industry and role, sure, but the lowest common denominator is that people entrusted with immense responsibilities have proven themselves untrustworthy and/or incompetent in those positions, which reasonably calls into question the system that placed them in those positions.
The medical profession overwhelmingly failed in its response to COVID. From outright lies by Fauci, to politicized efforts by researchers to quash the lab leak hypothesis, to professional associations and employers alike falling to defend dissident professionals who, with relevant expertise and solid research citations, challenged the prevailing "consensus" on response and treatment. No, meritocracy (or more properly, the prevailing ambiguity about which medical professionals actually have merit versus those who have held positions and status they have proved unsuitable to hold) has disappointed the public. There's been a clear mismatch between which medical professionals have the positions and status versus which ones were objectively more competent in fulfilling their responsibilities as medical professionals.
I used aircraft as another example referencing Boeing finally dismantling their DEI department and recommitting to merit-based hiring and promotions after numerous high profile failures of their aircraft. When even ENGINEERING, one of the fields of study traditionally among the least infected by the rot in our universities, at one of our flagship companies has degraded below minimally acceptable standards of performance, that's a huge red flag that our training and credentialing institutions are no longer accurately sorting and ranking based on MERIT (as defined as being the most fit for the given purpose, aka competence in the position).
You praise the finance and CEO types, but I don't agree. ESG may finally be waning in influence, but investment has been badly distorted for years by bad metrics driven by social justice activists and disconnected or detrimental to actual business performance. Likewise, numerous companies embraced what amount to diversity quotas for hiring and promotions, pushed DEI training and offices that multiple studies have found to be actively counterproductive and harmful, and done significant damage to their brands with attempted virtue signaling that unnecessarily injected them into culture war issues that (on net) cost them customers, profits, and prestige. Bluntly, a lot of what "leading" companies have done lately is rather indisputably stupid in purely business terms. Similarly, while I will be the first to readily acknowledge that the typical American CEO is impressively credentialed, extraordinarily intelligent, and often almost compulsively workaholic, nonetheless CEO compensation has often been found to be loosely (at best) associated with actual contributions to the success of the company and American CEO are frequently quite overcompensated with compared to their peers elsewhere in the world. Even the largest, most successful companies have shown a pattern of late of their "success" owing far more to lobbying, abuse of monopolistic power, and buying out smaller upstarts than to any significant innovation in products or improvement in customer satisfaction. We've seen major missteps here.
Scientists and researchers even moreso have shown themselves ideologically captured and unreliable. Replication failures abound, junk science gets published as long as it fits the desires of the activist class, leading scientific publications have openly put political activism above the objective search for truth or empirical determination of fact, professional associations have imposed political dogma as litmus tests for membership and injected the same into their credentialing pipelines, entire lines of research are effectively declared off limits to avoid offending certain groups, contrary results to "The Consensus" are frequently suppressed, with dissidents retracted, censored, fired, and smeared, and prominent voices actively argue against open debate while seeking to hide their data and methodology. Nope, I have tremendous respect for the scientific profession and it's precisely for that very reason that I am so deeply disappointed by the current execrable state of our scientific institutions. They are, if anything, even MORE corrupt and incompetent than our political institutions, which is one hell of a low limbo bar to shuffle under.
Our government is plagued with scandals and failures. So is our media, our education system, our most prominent businesses and several entire commercial sectors, our managerial class and creative classes. It's genuinely easier to list which positions of immense responsibility haven't had public failures:
I actually agree with every one of your examples, but I still feel like I should point out that this isn't a "meritocracy" problem you're pointing to, it's a "politics" problem, up and down.
Yes Fauci and the CDC actively misled the public - as a purely political move.
Yes, DEI is a ridiculous value-pyre that we spend something lik $8B a year on in pointless sinecures that actively *detract* from business performance - but it's the OPPOSITE of "meritocracy." It's purely political. It's entire function is to *subvert* actual meritocracy, and put a thumb on the scale for various politically favored minorities, with a glare and an "or else..."
And Boeing is the *archetypical* example of "company ran by nerds taken over internally by smooth talking executives more skilled at corporate politics than actually doing anything." Mcdonnel Douglas gutted Boeing and are wearing their skinsuit, and they live on political handouts and favoritism as the only domestic aircraft builder.
All of your problems with science as it's practiced are political and primate dominance game things that let less meritricious scientists still get publications and high positions. Politics once again.
Your main complaint isn't against meritocracy, it's against politics infiltrating everything and *diluting* meritocracy, and voters or other primates in the group not caring enough to cast the politics-players out in favor of purer meritocracy.
And I agree, THAT'S a real problem. But it's not a problem of meritocracy, it's a problem of politics.
I don't know what the solution is. I honestly think a solution looks like something shaped like Stephensonion or Gibsonian clades or phyles, where peopel voluntarily choose to self associate at a higher level. Think a nation that you actively choose, with admission criteria.
But until we get there, or find better ways to self-organize with less politics and more meritocracy, we'll still have the struggles you've pointed to.
When a doctor tells a patient that they are immunocompromised, resulting in a simple cold being life-threatening to them, is that a complaint against their immune system or a complaint against the common cold? Clearly, against their malfunctioning immune system, yes? When a computer becomes infected by a known Trojan Horse, do we complain about the foolish user who downloaded it and security suite that failed to block it or do we complain about the Trojan Horse? Threats are a given, so it's the unnecessary vulnerabilities that we really get upset about, right? When an assassin nearly kills the President-elect, which is the more direct cause we severely criticize, the abject incompetence of the Secret Service charged with his protection or the existence of would-be assassins? Clearly the missteps of the protective detail, because the existence of would-be assassins wouldn't matter if they'd properly fulfilled their function.
Same thing here. Meritocracy is a wonderful system in theory and, despite a few quibbles that even I have with it, generally the least bad possible system in reality for sorting and ranking people into functional roles where competence is immensely important for everyone involved. Our politics, disfunctional as it is, even unprecedentedly insane as the far left have become of late, is still pretty much within the historical average bounds. We can easily cite multiple historical examples of politics being far more forcefully intrusive into all other areas of society. So, the baseline threat of ideological distortion of the system isn't actually all that much higher than usual at this time and place in history. We therefore can't just blame "politics" for the recent changes. Our meritocracy SHOULD be able to recognize and reject the injection of irrelevant matters like politics.
So, why have our institutions that are intended to produce, credential, and allocate meritorious individuals failed so much worse than usual lately? Sure, there has been a politically motivated direct attack on them for decades, "The March through the Institutions", but that doesn't really address the issue of WHY that effort to corrupt our institutions succeeded so easily and thoroughly, especially in the absence of the sort of violent coercion typical of most such institutional takeovers historically. Our meritocracy itself has proven flawed. Not inherently, not unavoidably, but in the way we practiced it there were the equivalent of unpatched vulnerabilities, foolish users, and an immune system that failed to recognize, quarantine, and remove infection even as it degraded the health of the system. Multiple redundant protective mechanisms failed to protect and preserve the meritocracy in nearly every field. That's a systemic failure, therefore criticism of the system itself is necessary.
So MY complaint is NOT limited to politics. I have many complaints about politics and suggestions how to improve it, but I recognize that ultimately it's always going to be the equivalent of stepping outside or connecting to the Internet: full of viruses that threaten the health of itself and everything else that comes in contact with it. So I'm more concerned here about the functioning of our meritocratic systems in regards to long term results DESPITE the inevitable ongoing political attempts to subvert it. I think it's fair to, for example, criticize communism as a system because every time it's attempted at scale the long term results seem to include tyranny and mass casualties. Frankly, very similar complaints can be lodged against democracy; the USA's Founders grappled extensively with the history of democracy having historically proved very unstable and prone to falling into tyranny or anarchy. OTOH, the few places that we find meritocracy throughout history, it's often been a very stable, very resilient system over the long run, despite existing simultaneously with very tumultuous politics. So, why hasn't our meritocracy likewise proven resilient against political infection? Why does our version of meritocracy seem to be immunocompromised?
That needs to be answered (and fixed), but almost everyone seems more interested in either attacking meritocracy as a concept (from the Left) or defending it as a concept (from the Right), but when it comes to working with the concept in reality, both sides seem more concerned with manipulating PERCEPTIONS than really looking at where it's working, where it isn't, why, and how to make it work better. That's how we get cover ups of institutional failures: when even the defenders of meritocracy start conflating trust in institutions with meritocracy itself, resulting in prioritizing being trusted (even when not deserving of it) over actually deserving trust (even if not given it). I don't trust our current meritocracy because it has failed. That doesn't mean that I don't WANT us to have a meritocracy, it just means that I want one that consistently works: one that is sufficiently secured against manipulation, distortion, and subversion to REMAIN genuinely meritorious (not eventually become a hollowed out skin suit for a parasite with good PR).
The existence of the saying, "all's fair in love and war," does not mean this is a universally accepted principle. Most people believe it is possible to engage in war crimes, and most people would agree that cheating on your partner is not fair.
It's more a saying used by bastards to justify having been bastards, similar to saying "life isn't fair" to justify having done something unfair to someone. Not everyone is like that; not everyone has an equal degree of narcissism and psychopathy. Lots of people are relatively non-bastards. Life may not be fair, but the non-bastards *want* life to be fair, and are willing to play fair themselves (most of the time) and to punish the bastards who are seen as being unfair.
Incidentally, "fair" means something like: incentives are aligned with what helps strengthen the group. It's fair when a person is rewarded for acting according to rules that, when generally obeyed, help the group, and it's fair if they are punished for doing the opposite. Depending on context, "the group" could be: family, a group of friends, a corporation, society, a social cause, the country, humanity.
I'm sure few (Western) people believe in the proverb literally. Although I'm sure more would agree if interpreted as "It's more understandable to question rules when personal stakes are immense (emotionally or regarding survival)".
That is, "When ultimate / sacred values are at stake, other values matter less". Robin has speculated whether romance was in fact a building block in valuing some things as sacred: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/was-romance-the-proto-sacred
However, the point of the post is not whether the proverb should be taken literally, but that the same mindset seems to apply to people discussing status as well ("I fight for what's mine or should be mine, and if rules are at odds with that, then the rules should be re-evaluated"). Robin has a long history in pointing that people fight eagerly for status.
Thereby looking to eliminate current status markers likely does not eliminate status competition in itself, but instead devalues what is currently (perceived) high status and revalues what is currently low status.
Status is where non-bastards are *most* concerned about fairness: we don't want people to gain status unfairly, and if we do see that, we get mad. We don't want to see people gain status by lying or cheating, or gain/retain status while hurting people or stealing from people and getting away with it.
The whole point of "status" is to separate who we regard as good from who we regard as bad. If someone is doing bad stuff - and we aren't one of the bastards that likes and condones that as long as the perpetrator is on "our side" - then we rightfully get real mad about it.
Surely the proposal being discussed is not intended, or expected to eliminate status from being a thing, but to prevent some particular metric being the sole or main marker of status. In a similar way to how a political system or philosophies might seek a balance of powers, without naively imagining that it's possible to prevent anyone having power over anyone else ever again.
Brook's condemnation of meritocracy falls flat. The gatekeepers have been (to protect their status) grading on a curve heavily weighted towards DEI for quite awhile now. Those disinclined to bend the knee and adhere to acceptable group think are sidelined. I for one support a strict meritocracy in some fields, medicine and aviation come to mind.
Here's some ideas; pay taxes on your endowments, cut the fat and waste out of your institutions to lower the cost of the education you offer and stop giving children of alumni a advantage in admissions.
Log that under leveling the meritocracy playing field and watch the quality of applicants rise. And don't offer degrees in bullshit endeavors that have no real value beyond virtue signaling.
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
Brooks, having dwelled on the Mt. Olympus of journalism most of his life, naturally sees himself at the peak, and he cannot imagine that there might be different peaks. Everything he says is a contradiction: I, the most elite of elites, am going to tell you plebeians what's wrong with the meritocracy that has brought me to the top. Only I, at the top of the mountain, can understand and instruct you. He perhaps doesn't realize the contempt in which he is held by the plebeians.
Our species would be so much better off if status wasn't a thing. All those resources wasted keeping up with the Jonses...
I see lots of proposals to destroy meritocracy, and no proposals to restore meritocracy. Before the late 1960s, every elite school had full-tuition merit scholarships. It was understood that one of the main purposes of elite schools was to /produce/ a meritocracy by providing a path from the lower into the upper classes.
And they /did/. Columbia provided free education to anyone in the state of New York who passed a certain score on their entrance exam. Most of our famous scientists who went to elite universities before 1970, had one of these merit scholarships.
Today, no elite university has even one full-tuition merit scholarship, unless it's tied to race or gender. They have "financial aid", yes. When I was applying to college, their "financial aid" plan was, We will pay for the remainder of your tuition after your parents have sold their house and spent all their money. (Leaving nothing for the other children in the family!) A policy which actually made it rational for parents to spend all their money on lottery tickets, because otherwise they were /definitely/ going to lose all their money.
Financial aid has increased, but many of these schools have so much money, from donations and from academic grants, that there's really no excuse for charging anybody anything, when they've become so crucial to career success that they are /de facto/ government institutions.
We should return to actual meritocracy before giving up on the concept.
What you write, Robin, about whether there is connection between the object estimated and ourself affecting out sentiments made me think of Chap. 4 of the section of the first part of TMS. The opening paragraph follows:
"We may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of another person by their correspondence or disagreement with our own, upon two different occasions; either, first, when the objects which excite them are considered without any peculiar relation, either to ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of; or, secondly, when they are considered as peculiarly affecting one or other of us."
Interesting yet, ...'" entropy"...