[kashyapc]

The article on "effortocracy"[1] is pretty very well done. Quoting the end of the article:

"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."

Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)

[1] https://nonzerosum.games/effortocracy.html

[zozbot234]

I don't think we actually want an effortocracy. Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement? There's no inherent moral worth to futile effort that doesn't actually yield any reward, regardless of how laborious it might be.

[cgannett]

This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.

[steveBK123]

This is the inherent friction of most overly “scientific” management systems. A decent line manager is aware of who on their team lifts up the team with glue & peer acceleration type soft work.

Systems that try to get too “objective” fail to recognize this as most KPIs are on direct outcomes that are easy to measure, though often less important.

No joke I once worked at a company with multi-category numeric ratings that then rolled up to a total rating score that had 2 decimal places of precision.

[sokoloff]

I got a review with that exact method and amount of (false) precision in an engineering team that was under 30 total people.

To that boss’ credit, the text feedback was actually useful, but the numeric scores were comical.

[cgannett]

ugh what a pain

Another issue is that often effort is the only lever one has in providing value as what tasks you are assigned constrains potential value output.Hypothetically, If my boss assigns me a stupid project destined to failure and tells me to shut up when I push back I'm really not going to get much value regardless of how much effort I put in... unless I was wrong in my assesment which is admittedly possible. Good management I suppose would then use effort as a proxy to try to find projects with potential to match one's effort.

[kashyapc]

> Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement?

Of course that would be ridiculous. You're trivializing the author's point. I'm not sure you've actually read the article in full. The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.

Many of the tech robber barons and VCs (who call themselves "angels") carry the air of "my winnings are entirely of my own making". They rarely acknowledge the role of good fortune (in various aspects) in any meaningful way.

They inhale their success too deeply, as Michael Sandel memorably puts it.

[zozbot234]

> The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.

But that's the whole reason why we reward outcomes in the first place. If it was possible to reward only "well-directed" effort regardless of outcomes, we'd be doing that already!

[NonZeroSumJames]

Some of us would be advocating for this, but at present there are many who refer to taxes as theft because they take money from wealthy "deserving" people and give it to poor "undeserving" people.

If we took the moral value away from meritocracy-as-indicated-by-wealth as it is, not giving it the bait-and-switch moral weight of a "well-directed efforts" Effortocracy, it would be less of an uphill political battle to level the playing field for those with great potential to contribute to society but who are currently locked out by poverty or other accidents of birth.

[VinLucero]

Then why do we have books on grit? And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?

[autoexec]

I'd be willing to bet that grit has a lot less to do with successful founders than luck and/or access to a lot of money. There are way more unsuccessful founders filled with grit than successful ones.

The reason there are so many books on grit is because it's a very compelling lie that anyone can succeed if they just try hard enough without giving up. It's useful for the person who hasn't succeeded because it gives them hope. It's useful for the person who has succeeded because it implies that they earned/deserve what they have because they were better than others or tried harder than others did. These are lies, but they are comforting to a lot of people and so they sell a lot of books. Books that say things like "Be born to wealthy parents, preferably in a rich nation or your odds of success are highly unlikely, then also get really lucky" just aren't going to sell as well.

[zozbot234]

The thing is, an "unsuccessful" startup founder filled with grit has many side-opportunities after the fact despite her "failure". Founding a startup is so risky that these side benefits are actually a far bigger part of the draw, since success is ultimately just as rare as a winning lotto ticket - compare the number of failed startups with the handful of unicorns, and it's pretty much in the same ballpark.

[sethammons]

Grit, like luck, in necessary but in insufficient.

[wijwp]

Because you need effort + the ability to create value, not one or the other. Some people have one but not the other and seek out help to bridge the gap.

[zajio1am]

Yes, also effort is something a person can influence directly, while ability cannot or only indirectly (education ...) so it makes sense to focus on things people can influence, but but achievement is the ultimate target.

[zozbot234]

I don't believe in the least that the only thing a person can influence directly is brute effort, and that's the argument you'd need to make in order to build a case for "effortocracy" over rewarding good outcomes. A whole lot of effort out there in the real world is wasted due to entirely preventable errors and mistakes.

[ronsor]

A lot of meaningful things are difficult and laborious, but not all difficult and laborious things are meaningful.

[willturman]

> And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?

Based on what? Biographical accounts by successful founders?

Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness [1] covers the topic of mis-attribution of some causal factor X (i.e. grit) to some phenomena (i.e. business success) that can be effectively explained solely by randomness. In the specific case of successfully starting a business, causal factors are often mis-attributed post-facto through a lens that blatantly ignores survivorship bias [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[sethammons]

is grit not required to make it to land in the survivorship bias pool? If your first failure is too hard on you and you quit, then, by definition, you can't succeed. Maybe grit doesn't count when everything goes your way always. I'm not sure anyone has experienced success without grit, but I could be entertained by anecdotes.

[strongpigeon]

To strong-man their argument, they don't seem to be arguing to reward effort only, in their words:

> "To truly measure and reward by an effortocratic measure we need both a top-down and bottom-up approach

- At the top, reward people who have overcome more to get to the same point

- At the bottom, level the playing field so that potential, wherever it is, can be realised"

The way I think of it is using a vector analogy. They're arguing that a meritocracy only reward the end point, and that instead we should value both the magnitude of the vector in addition to its end point. You're interpreting effortocracy (not unfairly IMO) as only rewarding the magnitude of the vector, which is indeed absurd.

In my opinion however, they themselves are straw-manning what they point to as "moral meritocracy". As I understand it, their main gripe is that achievements are not only rewarded, but also ascribed higher moral weight, which is plain false. People vastly prefer rag-to-riches story to born-rich ones. So much so that you have many rich people straight up lying about their origin stories to make it sound more rag-to-riches than it is.

Edit: removed last bit that was harsher than intended.

[immibis]

But we do do that. People scream from the rooftops that it's unfair to give people money for doing nothing (i.e. welfare or UBI) but it's fine to give the same money to someone who digs ditches all day, and to someone else who fills in ditches. As long as a CEO is involved, for some reason. All of Graeber's bullshit jobs are effortocracy.

[NonZeroSumJames]

Yes, I don't advocate for this. I advocate for UBI, so we don't incentivise pointless jobs, and we give people the freedom to do meaningful work. I also advocate, once a UBI is established to do away with minimum wage, so that people can take on low-paid but meaningful work, putting their efforts toward something that generates actual social value rather than financial profit.

Each post can't describe my entire take on society absolutely, but taken with other posts on the site, I'd like to think it's fairly cohesive. I think subsidising industries for the sake of providing employment is pointless and unsustainable approach, it undermines both a genuine source of meaning for people and it undermines the market (making goods more expensive).

[NonZeroSumJames]

OP here: I'm not sure I advocate for "rewarding pointless, Sisyphean tasks", I even identify as a Utilitarian within the post. Effortocracy points to effort as a good predictor of future capabilities (when selecting from candidates for college acceptances or jobs). If person A and B have both achieved the same results, but person B has done so in the face of a much more difficult situation than person A, this is a good predictor that person B is likely to outperform person A in future. You can imagine this as a two lines on a graph: A beginning at 10 and B beginning at 5, at some point of time in the future when different levels of linear development lands both at 15, this means person B has been consistently improving at twice the rate of person A, which is likely to continue.

The same is true of moral character, which as the post points out is a better predictor of future behaviour than an absolute measure of prior contribution.

But the main takeaway is not how we assess people in the world as it is, but how do we set up the world in a way where everyone's efforts lead to their optimal potential merit, which is incentivised by rewarding effort at each step. Part of effort is also thinking about the effectiveness of your efforts, but also many efforts might be seen as pointless and futile until they are not, scientists who contributed to the Covid vaccine had been doing seemingly pointless work for decades until it finally became relevant to MRNA vaccines.

And on the other hand, it is entirely possible to put fairly low effort into profitable ventures that are detrimental to society—porn, alcohol, sugary foods and get rewarded for it. An effortocracy would seek to tweak the incentives differently.

[zajio1am]

Well, i would say that there are two common fallacies w.r.t. meritocracy:

1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.

2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).

Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).

[missinglugnut]

I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.

Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.

Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.

The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.