Slashdot Mirror
Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company:
Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."
... Because there will always be some jackass that kisses the boss's ass while you work your hands to the bone and aforementioned jackass gets the promotion while you get the equivalent of a pay cut in the form of a tiny raise. That kind of crap gives you high blood pressure, stress, and anxiety.
Except that one of those doesn't exist and the other does.
Like climate change, it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
Next on Slashdot.. how merit is racist and sexist. /s
It's a really really old saying. So yes luck bestows merit but the important part isn't that. True Merit is needed to take advantage of Luck. Nearly every experimental graduate student will tell you it takes 2 weeks of work to get a PhD but it takes 5 years to find be prepared to recognize the 2 weeks.
It's also slightly like the repairman called in to repair the machine after the comapny techs have exhausted themselves with no success. He just taps it with a hammer on the side, it works, and he sends a $1000 bill. When they company thinks the hourly rate for just a single tap can't justify the bill they denad he itemize it. So he sends the new bill. $1 tapping in side, $999 knowing where to tap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Lucky I read this article.
I'll judge it on its merits.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Which in itself is depressing and disheartening to see.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
It is the story of merit of the current elite. Instead of "god gave me the right to be king" it's "me being so damn good gave me the right to this position". When in reality neither was ever true. Believe the elite's fables at your own peril. Right now, it's costing the lower 90% dearly, complete with the lower middle class being dumped with the lower class, and the entire shebang slowly sliding into poverty while the upper, and shrinking, part is getting ever richer.
So you better believe that meritocracy crap if you're rich, or you get to admit you're a fraud. Everyone else already knows, but has so far been powerless to do anything about it. Meritocrats, thy name will soon be Romanov.
Meritocracy is a concept so nebulous that it's hard to say much about because "merit" is a very nebulous concept. I can feel the downmods already.
The thing is very very few careers and jobs are solo ones. Engineering in particular is a team sport. Even the very best 10x engineers cant build the entire system all by themselves; there are too many niche areas of expertise and just too much stuff to get done.
The thing is once you are in a job with other people, merit isnt just about *technical* merit. Metit is about your ability broadly speaking to generate value for the company you work at.
Now here's where it gets trickier still: good people generally find it easier to move between jobs. Bad people cling on to their job like a life-raft because they don't know where the next one is coming from. Bad working environments tend to concentrate bad people because the good people cycle out faster and the bad people stay.
We have all (well probably many of us) been in or seen situations where that's happened. Even something as neutral as "attrition" where the budget is cut and they stop hiring new people (even replacements) and rely on natural cycling to redcue the workforce. As the project tems get strained the working environment gets worse until the good people start to leave.
Well, toxic individuals are part of it. A great programmer who causes other pretty good programmers to leave is not a net asset. Unless that programmer can do everything (which we know isnt the case), the company would be better off with someone with les sharp techincal skills who doesn't cause all the other techincally skilled people to leave.
And the thing is good people do leave. You spend a lot of your life at work. You've only got one life and there's a ton of interesting stuff to do in it, so why waste any time on arseholes?
And that is the point where merit becomes a whole load more than "can code well" and so on. Engineering is a team sport and teams do not work well with lone wolves no matter how skilled.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
that mythical equality has been used to justify inequality.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
First, stop equating money with success. There are truly outstanding people out there who eschew money, use it to achieve better things (hoarding money isn't success... spending it to help things get better for everyone might well be!), or who don't value it enough over other things to bother to "succeed" in making more than they need. There are Nobek prize winners who rejected the prize or donated it.
Don't equate celebrity with success. The most successful people don't seek celebrity and often died in obscurity (famous scientists among them).
A meritocracy, like democracy, isn't a bad thing to strive for, but impossible to achieve with human nature. But you have to judge by actual merits.
Though Gates has his foundation he still has more money than he could ever reasonably use for his entire family and friends for generations to come. Is that a merit? I'm not sure.
Like evolution, merit is not about every outlier on the scale... it' s about pushing the average upward overall over time. There will always be freaks of nature and 'the lucky' who thrived by chance rather than their genes or outlook (e.g. living in an enclosed valley witg no predators, ot literally avoiding every predator, or living in a food-rich environment from birth, etc.) That doesn't mean that how they operated was what made them successful... merely chance.
People win the lottery or inherit fortunes and then buy manors and act like lords. They always have. It doesn't mean *they* are inherently more successful.
Put Trump back in the streets, penniless, without contacts or influence, or inheritance and see how well he does.
But, if anything, it means we should all strive for success and should spread the luck we do have around. Because singular examples of success are far outweighed by multitudes of examples of failure despite enormous hard work and efforr and determination.
and everybody gets a trophy. Awwwww...
... to be successful with is a large part, among with avoiding people who waste your time being a code second.
I've spent 20 years working for countless projects and 10 years meeting a variety of women and only now, in my late 40ies am I finally bearing the fruits of my lessons. I see idiots, timewasters and opportunists coming from miles away and see my sexual interests plummet in seconds when I come across a latently schizophrenic chika, no matter how hot she may look.
On the plus side my relationship now is not only fun but actually productive and my career is starting to pick up simply because I've learned not to waste a single second on opportunites that aren't any or don't advance my own development. Out on people that talk bullshit and only claim to know more than I do but really don't.
Knowing to see through the fake is something people like me have to learn the harder way. I presume that accounts for many differences in the way things go for people.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
As long as you don't let disappointment stop you from trying, you'll be fine.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Absolutism is the biggest of them all. You want absolute perfection... in any system people dream up. The downfall to everything is trying to get to that 100%. Idiocracy is satire going the opposite way to highlight that we don't have enough. It is not arguing we need be extreme but only that we are not doing enough.
Any merit system becomes a huge mess of problems on how do you RATE merit. Any "fair" system will be defined in a commonly understandable reproducible set of rules. Those rules will be static and never able to counter the dynamic power of the human brain to hack that system. It is implemented at some level by humans, which will punch holes in even a perfect set of rules (for sake of argument lets say that is possible.)
If you've done business software, you'll have run into them wanting you to implement their policies (system) in software in ways to try to address the flaws humans have in perfectly implementing whatever BS they designed. If you do, then you discover how people needing to get real work done end up always working around the thing... because the system likely is not complex enough to properly model the real-world it was made for. Being a programmer, it's even easier to spot the poor policy programming problems than the managers who write it.
Merit can't be everything. it promotes people to hack and crack the merit system from all angles; undermining it's whole purpose. You have to accept it doesn't every work perfectly and NOT take it too seriously. it'll reduce motivation to cheat and undermine it while letting lucky ones slip bye. it's a search for a realistic equilibrium in an analog reality. you can't make the world digital.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
We call something "luck" because we don't know or understand every facet of the factors involved. It's an easier concept to understand if you just define it as "preparation meets opportunity". "Luck" here doesn't equate to merit, preparedness and hopping onto opportunities because you were prepared for them, will signify success and merit.
Those of us who have "underclass" relatives, no matter our race, have also see how black, white, etc. they almost always dismiss the role that hard work plays in others' success. Most of the time "life just happens to them." Drugs, booze, kids out of wedlock? Shit happens. Little concept of "damn, I did this to myself."
It's conveniently fatalistic and ignores the fact that yes, you can make your own luck in many cases even if it's not the level you would like to have.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The dog whistle for partying whores who are the 1% (if you live in the US, you are the 1%) who waste every Friday night drinking and then insist the guy taking out the garbage at the office he founded is "lucky".
No, hard work (a huge difference between hard work and working hard, by the by) and determination and sacrifice aren't "luck". You're not being kept down by your birth, you're being kept down becaus you're a bitch.
So, this person is saying that luck rules. But luck doesn't exist. Roll a die. Bet on a number. If you got it right, you are lucky, correct? Maybe. The reason we tend to think of things like rolls of a die as "random" is simply because we can't integrate (and don't even know) all of the variables. What is the weight of the die? Do the little dimples that display the numbers cause any effect on weight distribution or airflow? What is the friction as the die slides across a surface and what amount causes it to slow and roll instead of tumble? What is the force and vector of the throw? Was an spin imparted? On what axes? If you know all the variables, it isn't random. Neither is what this researcher is postulating as luck. Really just an bunch of hooey.
What a load of horseshit. In all my years, I have never come across a situation where I couldn't prove my worth to an employer or client through hard work.
I'm not particularly intelligent. I'm not good looking, nor am I all that charismatic. What I am is persistent, and I have an understanding of what it takes to succeed ( it may sound cliche, but "never give up" ).
Oh, I've had set backs because of nepotism. Idiot managers and bosses surely have gotten in my way. I don't let that slow me down, however; I keep pushing through it.
Meritocracy isn't perfect, but it works when you do that one thing; don't give up. What more could you ask for?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Believing in a meritocracy isnâ(TM)t a bad thing. I *wish* things were that way.
The problem is that *nothing* works that way. Literally nothing. If things were based on merit, Microsoft wouldnâ(TM)t have dominated the computer industry for several decades. A spoiled rich kid with a big mouth wouldnâ(TM)t be president of the US. There wouldnâ(TM)t be entire movements dedicated to the planet being flat, anti-vaxxinations, etc.
Every day we are reminded of the fact that we are absolutely not living in a meritocracy no matter how much we wish it could be, and the people who insist that it is just make the problem worse because they ignore the actual problems.
This is a false narrative. Merit is not on large part the result of luck, unless you redefine luck to mean competence, ability, determination, and perseverance. Merit is small part of luck, that is, you can get drastically unlucky with life's circumstances and not have any opportunities to demonstrate your merit. However, opposite is not true - you can't get merit with pure luck. There are no people that got Nobel purely by luck, or invented or discovered something purely by luck, or gained competence and peer recognition purely by luck.
A better question to ask is why some people would try to present such obviously false narrative? The answer is rather devious - to undermine hierarchies built on competence. If they succeed and redefine merit to mean luck, then the next step is to take away from people with merit and give it to people without merit. Fundamentally, such dangerous views are against competence and advocate for equal outcomes.
The study presents a forced choice between two incorrect belief systems-- "Merit is the sole determinant of success" and "Merit has nothing to do with success"-- and then tries to determine which belief system is "worse" from a psychological standpoint. Of course, both belief systems are irrational and stupid, and no one with an ounce of common sense would subscribe to either one of them. It's a classic example of how *not* to do psychological research.
Disclaimer: I haven't RTFA. Maybe the actual research is very good, and it's just the summary that is stupid.
Meritocracy is NOT the problem. The problem is what kind of controls are in place to ensure that Meritocracy continues to exist when those in power begin to find way to abuse the system. This argument goes to everything in existence.
Every system is fine so long as it is run by benevolent actors... any malevolent actors will cause damage... be it meritocracy or otherwise. The ONLY system that is the best system is one that creates controls for the "ocracy" to overcome the inherent corruption that humans will bring as they institutionalize the practice being used. This argument is at the core of our very political beings and everyone is missing that key important factor in favor of their political dogma..
Any "ocracy" you create will work well when it is run by benevolent actors. any "ocracy" you create will fail when it is run by malevolent actors. You must always count on a malevolent actor gaining a position of power and controls must be in place to treat that as a certainty, otherwise the system fails because there will be no control to remove malevolent actors without resorting to methods that are likely considered chaos.
Meritocracy is fine, the problem is when a person merits their way to the top and stops being meritorious of that position and finds a way to remain at the top despite no longer meriting this. So really the problem is closer too... how to start being a Meritocracy and STAYING a meritocracy.
Genetics = luck?
Great teacher in school = luck?
Choosing to follow intuition = luck?
Seems to me that, with a sufficiently large value of 'luck', you could encompass almost all circumstances. And I mean ALL.
How about;
Genetics at birth = luck, but study and intellectual exploration = merit
Great teacher = luck, but putting forth the effort to learn and developing your intellect with challenges (from the teacher) = merit
And I can't even touch the third one: if you develop the ability to use intuition to solve problems and choose the 'best' option, that's merit.
In other words, luck is a circumstance, but merit is the result of a series of choices.
And with that, my PhD thesis is complete.....
If merit isn't the answer to success, then what's the point of learning anything? Let's just be drooling idiots, because success might come around no matter what.
This makes me think of the saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know". It's problematic because at the end of your social network chain, there still has to be someone who actually knows something that gets the job done.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
his mom was on the board of directors of IBM, his dad was a wealthy attorney, he had a million dollar trust fund in the 70s and his middle school had a microcomputer at a time when most colleges didn't.
The only "luck" in Gate's life was IBM was too short sighted to see PCs coming and didn't just buy DOS ought right. Even that mighta been up to his mom and Dad's connections in the boardroom.
While I'm on the subject, 60% of wealth in America is inherited wealth (google it). Yes, believing in meritocracy is bad. It causes irrational and nonsensical behavior that leads to crap like our current healthcare system or, if you want to take it far enough, Prosperity Gospel and the divine right of kings.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Whoever wrote this is pretty wildly confused, if they think they can pass off "it's not who you are, it's that your genes are luck" as coherent thinking
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Luck has nothing to do with it. You need money., nothing else, not even talent. That's they way this bankster nation really works. Just ask President Trump. The banksters still give him money despite all his misfortunes that made him go bankrupt four times.
Why does it have to be either one or the other (merit or luck), and not a bit of both, with a heavy dash of gottawanna thrown in? :)
This space unintentionally left blank.
I see "upperclass" relatives who completely ignore the role luck plays. I know an older guy who just barely missed going to 'Nam. He was a doc trained by the military (e.g. tax dollars) and he just barely missed being a field medic. If anyone knows anything bout 'Nam you know that the field medics were the first ones dead. The Vietcong targeted them specifically. He probably wouldn't make it back. They other guys in his class didn't.
As for me? My mom was nuts. Alcoholic and abusive. Not the "beat you up so the state comes gets you" but the "puts ideas in your head to wreck your self esteem" kind. She didn't mean to do it, but that's what insanity does to you. I spent my 20s getting over that and by the time I hit my 30s was stuck in a dead end job and on my way to bankruptcy.
I blundered into a nice paying job despite no college degree and got a few side projects that panned out and wiped out my debt from my low paying days. I'm no dummy, that was dumb luck. I was in the right place at the right time due to a series of events that were almost comically random.
The result? I've got a kid in college right now. Finishing up Junior year. I can only afford that because my job. Without that she wouldn't have had the resources to keep her 4.0 GPA (college is crazy competitive past year 2 now) and wouldn't have made it. My dumb luck has completely changed her life for the better.
It's survival bias is what it is. The difference is I know it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That sentence demonstrates without requiring much thought what the article demonstrates if you think about it -
the author is an idiot.
Bill Gates isn't a successful programmer, he didn't write DOS. He's an incredibly successful business person, he bought and sold DOS and managed a company to turn it into billions.
Here's a little story about luck. I recently got lucky and got a new high-paying job. Maybe my dream job. Lucky for me, the hiring managers were looking for someone to do the types of things I have been doing at work lately, such as teaching a CISSP course. My class consisted of about 50 employees ranging from our head of internal security to recently hired engineers. The reason I volunteered to do such a class was precisely to raise my profile as a security expert - to put self in front of these managers while I filled the role of security expert. If you want to eventually have options of good security jobs, it doesn't hurt to have the head of security see that you are an expert, I figured. Twice per month I attended a meetings of security groups like OWASP and ISC2. At those meetings I talked to dozens of people about the companies they worked for and which skill sets they were hitting for. I kept on eye on the open positions at three local companies I was interested in. I tried to learn more about the skills they were looking for. I kept my LinkedIn updated with accomplishments and fielded calls from recruiters several times per week - mostly pointless calls. I kept a copy my resume in my car and gave it to someone who might be able to hire me. I did a good job at my current role, asking my co-workers and my boss how I could improve. I struggled to actually be *nice* to co-workers, although my natural state is asshole.
Overall I did hundreds of things to increase my odds of landing a great job. Hundreds of things "didn't work" immediately, yet I kept doing them. Eventually I "got lucky" and two of the things I was doing aligned with what a company was looking for and I landed the great job. How lucky.
It's like wearing a seatbelt. 99.9% of the time, if you don't wear a seatbelt nothing bad will happen. But eventually there will be an accident, so if you don't wear a seatbelt 99.9% of the time, you're probably going to end up hurt.
A large percentage of people who found very successful businesses first started several businesses that were not successful. They learned from their failures and kept trying. Eventually they learned enough and try enough things to find one that worked well - they "got lucky" and did tell right things, by trying a lot of things that seemed likely to be right.
We all make a hundred decisions every day. Starting with whether to hit the anooze button and ending with going to bed in time. Do we stop to help the person on the aide of the road while we're on the way to work?
We have a hundred "luck" situations every day - the stranded motorist could be the president of our company, could be our future spouse, who knows. That's luck. When we cut someone off in traffic, or get cut off, the person we flipped the bird to might be in a rush to get to an interview on time - them interviewing us. In the elevator when we smile at someone oe don't, who that person is depends on luck. In any given year we have thousands of "luck" possibilities. Some will be great opportunities, some won't be.
Success and failure happens when our thousands of choices each year meet our thousands of lucky opportunities. Someone who is habitually rude will, by chance, end up being rude to the written person, eventually. Someone who is always helpful will, by chance, eventually be helpful to the right person.
Luck determines whether our fate happens on Wednesday or on Thursday. Our habits determine whether we'll be doing to right thing or the wrong thing when those opportunities come by.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
True story: my mother tutored a poor black kid from Ds to solid Bs and his bitch of a mother said "boy! Why you actin white" in response to his self-improvement when he showed her the report card. He and I were in 3rd grade, and it broke my mother's heart because he was all but bawling his eyes out confessing how well his report card went over at home.
And yes, there are white people who are like that too, but that's beside the point. Parents who respond like that are, in my opinion, on par with people who rape their own children in terms of how evil they are.
This is only the last leg of the hateful source of leftist thinking: sheer envy.
Marxists said they wanted to fight the rich and force distribution of wealth, because they couldn't accept some people have more than others, but it really was because of their envy of success and wealth, disguising it as virtue with a lot of BS and wishful thinking.
Post-modern leftists say they can't accept any differences of what people can accomplish, blaming any success on privilege. But it's really the same old envy disguised as virtue, as always.
That's why ideologies to comfort the losers, lazy and envious will always be really popular. There is no shortage of them!
It's true that better programmers than Bill Gates never became rich. I think passing it off as "luck" is oversimplifying. Being at the right place in the right time may be a matter of luck, but recognizing that, and having the sense and the drive to take advantage of it, are quite different things.
Passing other's success off as "luck", even if true in some cases, becomes an excuse to stop trying. And then what? As Cake said, is it you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
Putting yourself in positions where "being in the right place at the right time" increase the probability of success. The right place is probably not in the living room playing Warcraft.
Having a skill, being good at something, increases your chances of success. (It helps if the skill is something in demand.) So does Showing Up. Learning to work with people. And working hard. Do you think Bill [1] sat on the couch and waited for the money to come to him?
[1] I'm uncomfortable using Gates as an example as I don't like the guy and I don't like his company. But that's the example TFA used.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
.... the luckier you get
So the end result is that it's not a binary proposition where one is always better than the other. It's a continuous scale with a maximum somewhere in the middle. At the start, merit yields tremendous benefits. But as you implement it more, you reach a point where additional benefits become so small they're swamped out by random luck. And eventually there's no point giving merit additional weight because it won't yield a significant benefit.
People like these researchers - who look only at the extreme end-state of a meritocracy and proclaim that merit has no benefit and everything is based on luck - are in fact the ones responsible for causing the people who believe them to languish in poverty. They convince those people that there's no point trying, so those people don't try, and entrap themselves in poverty.
The same problem of people misidentifying a continuous scale as binary occurs in lots of other areas.
1) can you do the job better than the other candidates?
2) can we teach you to be better than the other candidates for cheap?
Anything else end being some sort of classism or sexism or racism or nepotism.
You must be prepared in order to have success, and merit can improve your chances, but they're still chances.
I invite you to read Mark Twain's story "Science vs. Luck".
What appears to you to be chance is not seeing all of the actions taken to deliver what is in essence a sure victory, the only thing in question is exactly what path it will take.
The only way chance enters the picture is by sometimes derailing those who have set up a path of otherwise certainty.
You truly can make your own luck, I have seen it in my life coming from a poor background, and I have seen it in others as well.
This successful person rises at three am, clips his toenails before breakfast, and deletes every second e-mail, therefore these must be keys to success!
It's very true that a lot of those cooks on success are not sure recipes, but that is just because the actual process of finding success involves a lot more than will fit into a book or even than the person quite understands.
But to call a successful persons success "chance" is to ignore that put in any circumstance, they will continue to be successful. There is obviously a skill there, not chance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You?"
Not necessarily, but it's definitely naive.
There is a meritocracy, but there's also corruption. Those things aren't mutually exclusive and can both exist in the same space.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
the meritocracy story links to this page.
Fix?
And accept our lowest common denominator overlords.
Which pretty much said you needed a basic level of ability, IE a floor, but once you got above that level there was little to no advantage and going above that level of ability and other factors became way more important. Things like being good at self promotion, networking, etc.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
This has been well studied; the predictors of success are: intelligence, industriousness, conscientiousness, some disagreeability, and luck.
Some people are dealt good and bad hands on any or all of those criteria. It's good to both have empathy for the less fortunate and to try not to attribute too much of any of the criteria to those who have significant luck.
Bill Gates has been wrong about so many things, but he had above-average scores on most of those things and quite a bit of luck (that his mom sat on the UNICEF board with the IBM chief). People therefore ascribe extreme intelligence to him - but it doesn't work that way.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But those aren't what anyone thinks about when they hear the phrase "meritocracy", especially in a context critical of the concept.
No, that's what you think about when you hear "meritocracy". The rest of us use the dictionary and realize that when you hear that word you think it means cronyism. Which is what you are railing about. But the rest of us think of meritocracy as hiring someone who can do the job and rewarding them when they do well.
I will say that bad corporate management rarely rewarding merit is the real problem. To add insult to injury they then hide behind the word "meritocracy". That's why you are mad at this word.
But you have to understand that the world runs in cycles and that hack they promoted over you then gets the VP in trouble because they did someone dumb or at least didn't do the smart thing the company needed them to do. Bad management decisions often come home to roost but it just takes time. There is a huge pile of failed companies in the past to prove that. The problem is a bit of survivor bias, you don't think or see those companies that failed due to bad management because they don't exist anymore and you may not have even heard of them. Running your company the way you ideas seem to argue for, would likely end in everyone losing because whether you like it or not, customers will reward merit if they can. And usually they can somehow...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
But those aren't what anyone thinks about when they hear the phrase "meritocracy", especially in a context critical of the concept.
The context of TFA is pretty clear on what "meritocracy" is:
"Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of lifeâ"money, power, jobs, university admissionâ"should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the âoeeven playing fieldâ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. "
"In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either âoeessentialâ or âoevery importantâ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. "
Also pretty clear in context of TFA being against meritocracy is the equivalent of being FOR straight up socialism.
What we're all thinking about are two things:
Who is we? The term Meritocracy is obviously totally meaningless in the absence of specific context. The context TFA provided is clearly not the same as the one you are working under.
a. People who coast to wealth on the backs of actual hard working folk. The Paris Hilton's the world. The Prosperity Gospel and the Divine Right of Kings.
Nearly every rich person on earth has done exactly this. They have all extracted value from those hired to labor for their benefit. What specifically is the problem?
b. People given a leg up in the world who act like they earned it all themselves. There's a phrase for this behavior: Pulling the ladder up behind you.
LOL... I wrote this program all by myself.
No no no! You didn't write the compiler or operating system stacks it has to call to operate. Nor have you designed or produced the hardware necessary for it to execute. You didn't develop the lithography devices making it possible to fabricate integrated circuits nor the enabling mathematics allowing for its development. You didn't mine raw materials nor develop processes for refining and processing them. You didn't develop the underlying models of governance that provided services necessary for any of these things to be developed.
Who fucking cares? What difference does it make how much credit or deference someone feels like belching out so long as you are not making fraudulent claims? Credits for every conceivable thing go back to the beginning of civilization.
You've set up your strawman (the hardworking PhD/repairman) and knocked him down, while completely ignoring people's real concerns over how the concept of meritocracy is abused to excuse wealth inequality, uphold a ruling class and punch down on the lower castes.
Seriously TFA is a subjective house of mirrors. It asserts "grit" is a function of genetics and upbringing explicitly dismissing all personal endeavor as "luck".
TFA also isn't so much about Meritocracy itself as it is a citation of a study of how internal perceptions of (nebulous) it as an ideal causes people to become full of themselves:
"Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this âoeparadox of meritocracyâ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice."
"However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of oneâ(TM)s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles
There are a lot of lawyers doing quite well, and even more children of lawyers. Yet only ONE of them is Bill Gates, one built a trillion-dollar company.
So your theory that Gates' trillion dollar company is the result of having a successful parent doesn't quite work out, because 99.9999% of people who have successful parents do not build huge companies. Very clearly parents success didn't cause his, because that doesn't happen 99.9999% of the time. In fact, people who have over $10 million are slightly more likely to have parents who struggled financially. Perhaps financial struggle as a child tends to make people focus more on money.
My parents did well. I, like you, thought that having successful parents would make me automatically successful. That idea lead to me being homeless. Since being my dad's son didn't work to get me paid, I started thinking about what my dad had done to become successful. He grew up so poor the family house had a dirt floor. They ate meat on Sunday nights, or whenever he could catch a squirrel. How did he go from Bubba to country club? That involved scrubbing toilets to put himself through school. So I started scrubbing toilets. Today I have a pretty nice house. I pay for it with my good job; I didn't get a cent from my dad.
Having said that, it may well be that if Gates had grown up poor he'd have only $100 million today rather than $100 billion. He took what he had and multiplied it by 100 million. Had he started with only $100, he'd only have $1 billion today instead of $100 billion.
Meritocracy appears to be the belief that the better you are the higher you will get, but with the expectation that somebody will notice you and pull you up on your merit. That is no usually so [citation needed]. You have to pull yourself up, or convince people with the power to do so - hint: if they feel threatened by your progress they will not only not help you, but actively push you under a bus. You have to have the guts to take the next step yourself and to ask for what you deserve, firmly, and persistently, or you will never move on. But also be sure that you are actually ready and able to handle the next step enough to not get burnt out.
There is an element of luck, but the dice won't throw themselves.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
written by imbecile and reposted here by an imbecile. The only question here is what is even remotely relevant part for /.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
But this just shows that we need MORE meritocracy (i.e. choosing based on skill, not race), yet you advocate for the opposite
who says? I just mentioned Blind Auditions in a separate response!
You know the FAIR way to do that? Help *everyone* who is disadvantaged, regardless of race, equally.
Why yes.
So all the people who are rolling with a penalty get a bonus to even it out. Why do you guys never advocate for that?
We do, why do you think we don't? But you have to remember this:
While White and poor might have penalty to rolls due to poverty.
Black and poor is a double penalty, don't you think? Or do you believe that racism doesn't exist anymore.
Black and poor and GLBT...well now think about the penalty for THAT. Or do you believe that discrimination against GLBT people isn't a thing?
I want to help ALL those people, but you have to admit the bottom one probably has it harder in America than the other two.
If by "bad for you" you get your heart and soul crushed every time you realize some sh*t-for-brains got something they didn't deserve when you busted your ass to earn it, then yes, it's bad for you. But if you toughen up and realize that the world is full of weasels whose skill is blowing smoke up other people's asses, it won't bother you that much and hopefully you'll find a way to pull back the curtain on them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Study for your exams.
Pass your tests and exams.
Enter a great college on merit.
Do well at college and learn to study more. Show the world your ability to learn and then do something new.
To have the skills and ability to learn and then use that education.
Enter the private sector and start a business on merit using your own new ideas and skills.
Employ people and export your products and services all over the world.
Thats not luck. Thats skill, hard works, merit, dedication, understanding, the ability to learn, the ability to recall your education.
The ability to adapt to new innovation. The ability to get up and be on time for work.
To make a business deal. To then keep to the terms of that contract. To keep to the next contract. For decades. To be professional.
Who to hire and when. What skills do your workers need? How many workers? Hire on merit so your workers have the needed skills to be productive when at work.
Do your workers have the needed new tools, equipment, software and support to be productive?
To bank your profits and invest in advanced new technology to keep your business growing.
When to move to a much better city/state due to tax changes and new city regulations.
To get past economic downturns. What to do when demand for you products and services is great again.
Thats not luck.
Thats a great person working hard to keep their private sector business going.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
He is an incompetent hack. He is an extraordinary salesman though. You know the scum that sells you trash at hugely inflated prices.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A bunch of rich guys/gals got caught buying their kids success. Agree with most of the people saying this author is a tool.
Very few people believe merit is the only decider of fortune. Clifton uses Bill Gates as an example, so let's look at it... Gates was born to a well-off family (lawyer father), went to a prep school, learned programming early. None of this is "merit", although it was enabled by his father's merit; family looks after it's own.
But then... he wrote software. A lot of it. Starting young. And he did demonstrate merit. High test scores, successful programs. And he worked super-hard.
So did merit alone get him there? Obviously not. But without merit (and effort, an implied part of merit), he also wouldn't have gotten there.
Americans don't believe merit is sufficient. But we do believe it is a factor. As is opportunity.
Sadly, Clifton has demonstrated that while he does have credentials, he entirely lacks merit.
Yesterday, one of the tags of this post was "troll" (now replaced with "heckyeah"), which I found pretty descriptive of the ideas in the linked article and some online behaviours which I truly fail to understand.
Yesterday, I started to write a post about one of the sentences in the summary, and then about a different one and, finally, decided to not post anything. For what? All seemed pretty evident for reasonable people and those really needing some clarifications wouldn't care about them anyway. I am still here writing this post though.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I'll be delighted to have a pilot who failed their exams in a plane designed by an unqualified engineer. At least the computers will use democracy to arrive at the right answer (and we all know democracy never elects an arsehole).
I keep trying to respond, and keep finding that I can't focus on one thing that's wrong there.
The idea that people who are successful deserve that particular level of success is of course faulty. But the moment you dial down the 'particular', the correlation should hold true. Bill Gates might have needed luck to become the richest man in the world, but if he didn't have luck there, he would have taken advantage of another opportunity. Perhaps he wouldn't have had billions, only millions. It's only when we distinguish these levels that the failure occurs. The factors that made Bill Gates successful are part of him, not pure luck. A person with no business sense who doesn't care much about making money wouldn't have gotten there given the same opportunities.
Of course, 'merit' is still a questionable descriptor. Does having business sense, a desire to make money, and enough ruthlessness makes one merit success? Perhaps it does, if all we care in life is money and power. That would be the source of the problem, not the particular definitions.
Money and power go to managers, to people of a specific type who don't usually have any real positive impact on anyone's lives. It's the actual researchers, developers and artists who do what makes our lives better, not the managers or publishers who make the money.
Perhaps we do need meritocracy, in the sense that people who make people's lives better should be more successful. For example, a nurse should make more than a web developer, whose work is basically marketing. But it only works in that direction - determining what we think it important and trying to reward it. Looking at who gets money and power and trying to reason that they deserve it will always fail.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides." They can suggest this all they want, but according to research and ancient philosophy, this isn't how human thinking works. Humans convince themselves of things, according to cognitive behavior therapists and stoic philosophers, by telling themselves things like "I graduated at the top of my class, therefore I am a better person than anyone else." This belief could be prevalent in American society, which is not known for its rational behavior, but because people think and act irrationally does not mean we should throw out the principle of merit. Instead, I suggest we keep the principle of merit, and straighten out this sloppy, illogical thinking.
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" --Einstein
Casteism
I would agree that luck plays a part in extreme cases, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton. There are other people similarly talented who did not become billionaires.
But you can't take fringe / edge cases and use them to prove a rule that applies to the vast majority of people.
By definition, most of us fall within 1 standard deviation of "average" in terms of talents, upbringing, and education. Within that group, "grit" and determination do indeed play a large role in success.
It's only at the extreme ends of the spectrum--the very rich and the very poor--that it makes sense to attribute "luck" as a significant factor.
People who say that successful people are "lucky" are, in my experience, mostly just complaining because success wasn't handed to THEM on a silver platter. They seem to think that success somehow falls out of the sky, as this article seems to point out. In reality, success comes from hard work, and repeatedly failing and trying again until you succeed.
For most of us, the saying is very true: "80% of success is just showing up." If you come to the office every day and do your best, even if you aren't very talented, you will be noticed, and you will succeed. You won't be fabulously rich, but you'll do well.
This is more true than people realize. Just come in every day, put in an honest day's work. Even if you have only average skills and average education, if you do that much, you'll do just fine. No, you won't be Bill Gates, but that's not really what most of us want. We just want a decent life. And that goal is very attainable...just by showing up.
Actions have consequences. If you don't believe this, you'll fall for articles like this one.
In the past on Slashdot I've identified at least daily decisions we make, starting with getting out of bed or hitting the snooze button. We have thousands of decision points every year, and multiple years. I made really bad decisions for about ten years, got bad results, then started making much better decisions and getting much better results.
Life is a poker career, not a poker hand. Phil Helmuth has a successful poker career because he in in the habit of making good poker decisions. The luck of the draw determines whether it is this hand he wins, or the next or the one after. We all get thousands and thousands of cards, and make thousands and thousands of decisions. We all get some good cards, some bad cards, and some mediocre cards. Phil makes his living on poker every year by consistently making smart decisions, not on each hand by getting lucky.
I could describe my past, my circumstances, to you in a way that would make me sound like the unluckiest guy alive. I've needed dozens of surgeries for significant medical problems. I could also describe it in a way that makes me sound like the luckiest guy alive. There's good and bad, always.
Most people reading this are in the US or Western Europe, and mostly nerds, tech types. Therefore the vast majority of us are in the top 3% in terms of income. Some of us, though in the top 2%-3%, what about not being in the top 1% while we call in sick to play the new video game.
I've been getting incredibly lucky too, lately.
For years, I did what I wanted to do, living for the now, and kept having incredibly bad luck. As I mentioned, I ended up homeless, living under a tarp on a vacant lot.
Then I switched to making it a habit to focus on five years down the road. Giving up what I wanted at the moment in exchange for what would most likely bring good things five years later. I keep having incredibly good luck since then.
A major study of mega-rich people found that is the major common factor - a powerful drive to build large amounts of wealth, at the expense of pretty much everything else in life. The mega-rich in most cases gave up family, friends, hobbies, etc and focused 100% on business.
Not so for typical millionaires. What millionaires have in common is that they consistently put 10%-15% in their 401k and their employer matched part of that. The power of compound interest, investing a little from every paycheck over time, is 99% of rich people. The 0.001% are the those obsessed with building their empire.
I started to say "obsessed with money", but that's not accurate. One could found and build a very successful space rocket company because you're obsessed with commoditizing space travel. Large amounts of money would be a side-effect.
Well there is also the joke about taking 100 million dollars from daddy and though a lot of hard work and business savvy managed to create an empire worth 105 million dollars....
I also recall a stat (which I think was for billionaires), that most by a large margin (something like 85-95%) inherit all their money rather than making it in any way.
The percentage of Millionaires who inherit any money at all is the same as the percentage of the general population. So inheritance has no measurable effect on becoming a millionaire. I don't know the stats on billionaires.
However, let's think through the idea that "90% of billionaires inherited all their money - nobody makes a billion dollars, only inherits it".
For that to be true, Dad would have had to make a billion dollars. But the claim is that nobody makes a billion dollars. Therefore that thesis contradicts itself and must be false.
Here are some statistics from Forbes. There are about 540 billionaires. They studied 400 of those, so most of them.
7% of billionaires inherited all of their money.
8% inherited nothing
The rest inherited *something* and then grew that to over a billion dollars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...
You made some interesting guesses.
>. So there is a spectrum I'm sure, but one could likely broadly categorize them into groupings. Would be interesting to know, but I'm not sure how detailed any of the studies would be.
In the link I have you Forbes grouped them into 1-10.
10: Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles: Oprah Winfrey ...
1: Inherited fortune but not working to increase it: Laurene Powell Jobs
If you don't want to read their results, here's an interesting "bottom line" number they found (quoting):
--
Looking at the numbers over time, the data lead us to an interesting insight: in 1984, less than half of people on The Forbes 400 were self-made; today, 69% of the 400 created their own fortunes.
--