[jmull]

> anti-meritocratic

How do you measure merit, though?

People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason.

I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair?

People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defining "merit" in a self-serving way.

I think we want to focus on outcomes...

Let's suppose the college experience and fact of an elite university degree confers significant advantages of reach and power to those who get it... and that there are 10x more people able to take advantage of those advantages than there are spots available.

I think the question is: of those 10x people, who are the 10% we want to give a spot to?

I think we want to give them to the people who are most likely to benefit all the rest of us (completely fine by me if they benefit themselves as well -- In fact, I think it will work best that way, by a large degree.)

So that's the "merit" I'm looking for.

(I think when left to intuition, people tend to image "merit" as something that would favor people like themselves and their families... usually, in effect, something quite narrow with a heavy self-serving bias.)

[jimbokun]

> People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter.

Both of those have predictive value for success in university.

So if "merit" means "well prepared to learn the material in a university curriculum", these are both useful measures for predicting it.

[jmull]

On the order of ten times the people who apply and are capable of being successful at Elite University X are given a spot at Elite University X.

Yes, of course it makes sense to accept people who most likely to be successful. But what then, after that?

Everyone’s got an opinion, but what’s the use of that if no one understands the problem? Oh well.

[colinmhayes]

I’m not sure success at university is what they’re optimizing for though. Feel like it’s probably “expected lifetime donations”

[cuteboy19]

But we can for sure say what is not merit. Choosing or discriminating against a person for their race is not merit

[jmull]

Dodging the question.

People want “merit” to be the determining factor… but they don’t want to express or discuss what merit actually is.

As someone has plenty of the characteristics commonly associated with merit, but who also has a strong sense of fairness, I’m awfully skeptical of the faith (and I used that word deliberately) people put in the concept. Why the hell do the talents I was born with or advantages I was given make me any more deserving of material wealth than anyone else?

That’s all I see anyone doing with “merit”… it’s used as a “drop the mic” concept that to justify self-serving criteria for conferring material advantages.

Personally, I think ability should confer obligations more than advantages. (A wildly radical concept, I know, in the morally retarded era we live in.)