I don't think meritocracy implies cosmic fairness.

The way it's used by most hackers is to say that someone's work is judged only on its own merits, rather than the author's social status or how good they are at playing political games or anything else orthogonal to the work actually being valuable.

At least, that's the ideal.

Judging people on their work is partly about fair play. But it's also justified by concern for the results. A system which rewards the people doing great work will produce much more of that than a system which rewards political connections.

I care quite a bit that the best cancer researchers should get hired, and the best ideas get the money -- their progress is likely to directly affect people close to me. And this is true but less obvious for almost every field... an economy where everyone was focused solely on zero-sum competitions would not grow very fast.

I don't quite know what cosmic fairness means. But perhaps cosmic unfairness involves people's talents not being identical. The goal of trying to get the fastest progress against cancer does not align with the goal of trying to remedy such unfairness.

To back up the other comment, recent studies find that students from worse secondary schools with worse grades end up outperforming students from more selective schools with better grades once in medical school.

So in order to get the best doctors you can't just be all "meritocratic" by looking only at the results, i.e. grades, but have to take other factors into account.

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The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/

What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300

If our concern is with results, then we should be looking for the best predictor of results, and school type may well improve our predictions, as you say.

We should aim to admit to medical school the people who'll make the best doctors at age 40, not just the people with the best scores at age 18.

The problem carries through time, not just at the moment you're making the decision to invest. What about the better potential cancer researcher who was left behind because their parents were poor? What about the one that decided to go learn programming because they couldn't get the exclusive internship due to lacking connections?

The position that states "remedying inequity costs more than simply giving it all to the current best" is a shortsighted one.

I had a meeting with a very successful guy who is CIO at a major tech startup who was looking to acquire our company.

Because we were friends for a while I said something to the effect of "I just want to make sure this doesn't look like nepotism"

His response was basically, "Who cares? I love Nepotism. that means me and my friends do better and help each other out."

Kind of shocked me to be honest, but after thinking about it it makes total sense. Why wouldn't you help your friends? I mean I help my friends all the time, but there seemed to be an artificial cutoff when it came to hiring and buying companies or otherwise giving them outward signs of "success."

Not sure I can make a rational case against Nepotism even though it feels wrong.

Suppose it is clearly the wrong business choice for your friend's company to acquire your company.

Suppose a friend promoted you over someone else who was vastly more qualified, and worked much harder than you for that promotion.

Etc.

Now suppose you're the one getting screwed over instead of the friend benefiting.

It's not nepotism if friends benefiting is merely a side effect of making the best business (or whatever) decision. But if that decision process is subverted in order to benefit friends, negatively impacting other stakeholders that you have a responsibility to, creating a work environment which is deeply unfair and unmeritocratic, etc., then that is absolutely a problem. This should be pretty obvious.

The problem with that approach though is that it's never clear cut.

Maybe someone is "vastly more qualified" technically but doesn't have any business sense or some other quality that is unknown to the rest of the group. There were many times where I thought that the wrong person was promoted or hired, to find out later that they were actually a good fit. Were they the PERFECT fit? I don't know, but there is value in having history with someone to have a higher confidence they will meet the minimum standard.

There's always someone or some group that is "better" for a job or acquisition or whatever based on some metric.

It's a real problem in my mind for "market information." Generally people go for a product they know, that can fit the bill, over a product they don't know that might be better. Same goes for hiring and personnel etc...

I was merely giving you the clearest possible examples, since you seem to be confused about what possible harm nepotism could cause.

Sure, in some situations, it may be ambiguous who is actually the better pick. For argument's sake, let's assume such choices are ALWAYS ambiguous. If you're consistently picking your friends in those situations, you're nevertheless creating a perception of nepotism (read unfairness) throughout the rest of the company, which will minimally be harmful to morale. So yeah, even if you're not being particularly nepotistic, guarding against the perception of nepotism is still important.

My bigger concern, however, is that it's very easy for someone to rationalize nepotism when they're a beneficiary.

I really don't know enough about the specifics of your situation to know if nepotism is much of a concern, but I definitely don't think your friend's "nepotism is GREAT" stance is worth taking seriously.

What is confusing is that I realized there are cases where Nepotism could be net-comparable or even net-benefit. I had never considered there to be an ethical upside to nepotism before, only a downside.

So that's why I was shocked.

If you are directing other people’s money to your family it is a disservice to those other people. If it is your own money, go nuts. Nepotism vs family business, basically.

Nepotism is generally bad but there is one small perk to it within reason - they know the person they are hiring more already. It is a form of risk aversion in that sense if they already know that a person is adequate - assuming they don't appoint someone regardless of being qualified.

I know of one case of using it productively involves incentives. If you have sensitive data to process that is resistant to automation but fundamentally simple and know a son of a high level partner who is receive considerable support from him with things like paying for college or apartments then that sort of nepotism makes some objective sense even if it is unfair. Betrayal on their part would also be betraying their family and harm their means of support.

I don't think the cutoff is artificial. It comes down to conflicts of interest. If you give your friend a ride to the airport, he benefits, you choose to do it, and that’s the end of it. If you hire your friend preferentially, you’re compromising your duty to your superiors to hire the best candidate.

In your example, your CIO friend has a responsibility to the company to make the best acquisition on the best possible terms. If he’s treating you preferentially because you’re friends, he’s not doing that.

In the societal sense, it is maladaptive - your CIO friend assumes that his friends deliver the best outcome.

That's not what the friend is assuming per the wording.

The friend seems to be plainly stating they don't care if the max outcome is what is occuring or not, insofar as they all at least do better. Helping their friends out is more important than maxing out the quality of the outcome.

Societally, reinforcing and protecting social trust systems may be dramatically more important than maxing out business success outcomes.

I don’t see how that can be true. Tribally, it might be (for a small tribe in a large group). Society wide, it’s definitely bad. I don’t want a bridge built by an uncle politician who “trusts” his nephew engineer’s company. Outcomes should (and do) result in trust, not the nepotism.

Nepotism in a private company is very different to nepotism in government.

The price in the first case is paid by the litigious investors. In the second one, by the unwilling tax payers.

There's another good reason for nepotism - trust - the most valuable commodity in business, and one of the hardest to acquire/assess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless you're a strong believer in free will, someone who is lazy, sleazy, unintelligent, etc. (has little "merit") did not 'choose' to be born that way, or even if they say they did, they did not choose to have the nature/nurture that caused them to be the kind of person to make that 'choice.' No more than a bird chooses to eat a worm or a salmon chooses to swim upstream, anyway. We can build productive societies based on incentive structures we put around merit, such as capitalist market systems. But in reality, nothing is fair and simultaneously everything is fair. Fairness is undefinable outside of a closed system. It's just how it is. Heuristics to define merit are just forms of evolution for human society that allow more productive people to command more responsibility.

> However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups.

This is too broad. Is it really so? I believe that we don't want to disadvantage ourselves relative to other groups. But that we want to gain advantage at somebody's else expense - not sure.

It is absolutely so.

I would much rather help a friend or group of friends do well as opposed to randoms or people I don't like. First, I like my friends and want them to be happy (and am going to be the one who hears about it when they aren't), so I have a vested interest in helping them achieve happiness and success whereas I have a weak interest in the happiness and success of randoms as we have no relationship. Second, if I can help my friends become happy and successful, they become better able to help me become happy and successful (by pooling resources, providing advice, providing introductions, creating mutually beneficial opportunities, creating happiness by spending time with me, providing trust and facilitating vulnerability, providing capital or expertise etc). This sets up a positive feedback loop and creates strong ROI for my efforts. I get net negative ROI from helping a random (assuming no relationship will develop and I expend time or funds) so it's far less likely that I will use my scarce time and resources to do it.

The entire world runs on relationships, favors, and reputation.

Exactly. How many friends have you helped move for free? How many total strangers?

We do a lot more for people we know and like and trust than for randoms; I don’t believe this is restricted to just a few cultures. It shows in nature as well, unless there’s a massive amount of anthropomorphism going on in those studies. Rather more likely, it seems there would be selection pressure in favor of helping your offspring and those close to you.

How do you know that's not a cultural norm you learned? Blanket pronunciations on human nature tell me more about you than anyone else.

I'm fully willing to admit that there may be functional cultures in the world which frown upon showing preference to friends or family at the expense of random people. I've yet to see any of them though.

Well this is certainly one axis along which they vary.

There's a line between "is it OK to start a start-up with your dorm-mate?" and "is it OK to spend 5% of the nation's budget buying submarines through your brother-in-law's banana company?"

You have information about your dorm-mate, and you aren't acting on behalf of others. But if the same norms applied to CEOs and judges, we could not have our civilisation.

"But if the same norms applied to CEOs and judges, we could not have our civilisation."

Those norms don't apply to CEOs and judges?

News to me.

There was an article posted here recently about the originator of the term "meritocracy". He wasn't entirely positive about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179583

From one of my comments: That's the weird part: “I.Q. + effort = merit” sounds pretty positive, right?

But,

"A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations."

The intended result doesn't sound very appealing. Then there was this quote:

"Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts,” and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again…. If they have been labeled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”"

That sounds familiar.

"But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring.” And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “I.Q. + effort = merit.”"

And so does that.