[tomp]

Actually, one of the main criticism of meritocracy (as in, the social structure that we (the Western civilisation) strive to have, not the stupid "it's not actually a meritocracy" argument) is that, combined with assortative mating, it would eventually result in incredibly unequal society, with high-IQ genes becoming increasingly concentrated.

[kyuudou]

Isn't there some observed regression to the mean with children of high-IQ couples, though? I can't help but think of that part in Idiocracy where the high-IQ couple ends up dying before they can have even 1 kid while the regular-IQ guy is impregnating multiple women multiple times.

Not to mention that high-IQ is itself by definition less common...

Also, I think a "fair" meritocracy is still possible because merit isn't necessarily dependent simply on G; dedication and moral fortitude contribute greatly to merit in companies as well as societies, in my opinion.

[licebmi__at__]

Care to elaborate why "it's not actually a meritocracy" is a stupid argument?

IMO every metric we define will be gamed by bad actors so "meritocracy" will only be used to provide legitimacy to said bad actors. It's quite telling that "aristocracy" (the government of the best) which was supposed to be just like "meritocracy", became to mean just the opposite, meaning nepotism and idiotic inbred leaders.

[tomp]

To make it a smart argument, you’d need to prove (or at least attempt) that being further away from a worthwile goal is better than being closer. Personally, for a lot of these “social systems”, I’d argue the opposite is true; a bit of democracy (Russia) is better than no democracy (DPRK, Soviet Union), and even for the counterexamples (e.g. China vs India) personally I’d still prefer to live in a democracy. Same with meritocracy, making each step towards a worthwhile goals is worth it.

By attacking the goal, you collapse the whole argument. Meritocracy is bad because it results in super-inequality. Representative democracy is bad because it collapses all policy dimensions into one. Of course, it’s also helpful to propose an alternative; I’m a big proponent of direct democracy; no idea what’s better than meritocracy.

[johnrgrace]

That assortative mating can also quickly leads to autism. We've got 30,000 engineers stuffed into a one square mile campus and they get married and have kids. The autism rates of kids with two technical parents is really high.