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This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.
I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.
The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.
Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.
If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:
The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!
This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.
What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
The argument in the example is broadly that grinding tests for 10+ years is a terrible way to determine merit and rewards parental investment / the capacity of the child to suffer / capacity of the parent to make them suffer almost as much as intelligence.
The arguments are twofold:
If it were possible to do a meritocratic sort that was say 95% accurate instead of today’s method being 98% accurate, but this method took 30 minutes instead of 15 years, wouldn’t it be a straightforward improvement from a utilitarian POV in terms of efficiency and reduced suffering?
Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results. Britain performed better, was more agentic, produced more science and engineering through 1750-1950 when universities were the playgrounds of gentlemen (albeit with rigorous marking), we had a large theoretically idle class, and jobs were largely got through patronage and the old boys’ network. This was unfair to many people, yes, but potentially worked better for reasons like (a) there was more slack in the system and fewer resources wasted grinding for maximum-status occupations, (b) talented people were distributed more evenly throughout the system so eg you would have the head nurse in a hospital being about as intelligent as the head doctor because women weren’t allowed to become doctors, which is unfair to the woman in question but makes hospitals run a lot better, and (c) those at the top were somewhat less selected to be grinders and hustlers. It's a bit like the way that hobbyist stuff can be a lot higher quality before something gets popular and all the big companies enshittify it.
There are other arguments against modern meritocracy but those have more to do with whether it makes people happy rather than whether it makes the country perform better, and I figure you’re more interested in the latter.
EDIT:
Keen to hear more of your thoughts.
95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.
It's not a death sentence. And the system to move classified people to the right jobs is far from perfect as well.
Arguably, imperfect classification helps solve that issue so jobs that require a high classification, but are really more suitable for the less capable get filled with the proper person, and vice versa.
In our system, we also have no good solution for exceptions, like the union leader who needs to understand the situation of the workers in a way that can only come from having done the job, but who needs to have skills beyond what the job requires. It would be a bad idea to require a standard for all workers far beyond what the job requires, but also to not have any people who can successfully advocate for those people, at the level of the more classified, where decisions get made.
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Point taken, though these are fake numbers in any case and 'properly classified' is not something you can judge with any refinement. More broadly, if you could put in place a program that 'properly' classified 3m more people but required everybody to be whipped every morning, one might conclude it probably wasn't worth it. There are tradeoffs here.
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Every measurement has costs. What if we could go from 98% to 99% accurate by having kids grind for 12 hours a day for grades, every day, while doubling public education spending? That would prevent millions more from being misclassified.
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I think this is key. As I see it, most successful societies historically either had open aristocracies (a small number of exceptionally able outsiders could get in, often by marrying into aristocratic families) or enarchies (my coinage based on the French ENA - the point is that you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind).
"Being from an aristocratic family" is sufficiently g-loaded to select a plausible class of potential elites if the aristocracy is open and not inbred. In the alternative patronage system, so is "sufficiently interesting to attract a patron", providing that patrons actually have to patronise their proteges rather than just writing a note in exchange for a favour from the proteges father (see for example the role of patronage in the Royal Navy when it was the winningest organisation in human history).
I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.
How do you prevent the preparation for this exam from turning into a decade long grind? Most exams like that (including the French ENA entrance exam and stuff like the International Math Olympiad) effectively are.
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I, for one, would like to read that effortpost, should you write it.
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First, to clarify, this seems like agreeing that some idealized meritocratic sorting is actually a good thing, even though modern meritocracy as implemented in western nations isn't (and meritocracy as implemented in South Korea/China is even worse). Unless there's an unspoken justification for a claim like "any attempt to sort by merit will degenerate just as badly"? As far as the topic I was trying to have with this discussion on the "deeper" culture-war relating to cynicism about careers, I'm reading that you agree with me?---that a significant fraction of people have careers that are very positive-sum, producing lots of value for society as a whole. It matters that the people who gets these careers are as qualified as possible to maximize this societal value.
Now, on the (slightly off-topic) general discussion about meritocracy: I think I agree that there are serious problems with modern meritocracy. This is precisely because of examples like Gino---modern meritocracy has serious trouble identifying such strivers (seemingly) focused on career building and accolade collection instead of people actually wanting to accomplish the societally valuable mission of the positions they get (it's still shocking how little shame she displays in her interviews for the damage she did to progress in her field). You want your scientist to be someone good at science, not someone hyperoptimizing test-taking games.
However, there's a big gap between "this has serious problems" and "we need to throw it out" even if "we need to throw it out" comes with an additional "for this alternative". You have to justify the factual claim that the alternative is actually better. For example, while I do agree that 1 is correct, I do not think that "a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old" comes even close to fitting the hypothetical in 1. There are many arguments here, but at the very least you do agree that "You need more than raw intelligence to do good research" is a cliché for a reason? I'm less confident about 2, but I generally think people underestimate just how hard modern science and engineering is compared to what people where doing in the 50's. The sophistication of what we need to do now completely outclasses anything from back then. There's a very good recent pop-science video on EUV lithography that gives a sense of this---Apollo is nothing compared to the engineering problems people needed to solve to get this working!
I also think there are some easy fixes we can make to modern meritocracy, even staying in the framework of "grinding tests". First of all, the tests can be made much more interesting and less based on rote memorization---grinding for challenging IMO/other olympiad-style problems is much more fun then grinding for the SAT. It's also a much more accurate test of actual interest and creativity. Of course, as anyone who actually did grind for such tests can tell you, even this can both be miserable and get goodhearted if taken to an extreme. The solution there is to have a variety of "tests" in very different formats---olympiads, debate tournaments, science fairs, take-home tests, even on-the-spot jeopardy-style contests, etc.---so many that you can't grind for all of them. Meritocratic sorting could be based on performance on some sort of "top-n" of all the possible tests. The optimal strategy then is to do the ones you're most interested in and the variety of needing to be good multiple very different formats keeps it from getting too miserable. This is just some off-the-cuff speculating right now just to give a vague idea of how the details might work.
Sorry for not fully explaining all the points here, it's pretty late where I am right now---I can expand more tomorrow evening on parts that seem sketchy.
I feel confident in claiming that at least 99% of modern science and engineering falls way below that complexity (and the only reason why people didn't give up on EUV despite the complexity was because the stakes are so high). Gino is a good example. Her study on cheating based on whether people sign before they cheat or afterwards, is a kind of study that has been done time and time again. It doesn't require a lot of intelligence to come up with it, just a little creativity (and even then the emphasis is on 'little').
Also note that specialization has increased, so the overall complexity of certain fields may have increased, but that doesn't mean that the complexity of specific jobs has increased as much.
No, the optimal strategy is then to game the top-N that will be selected.
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