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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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