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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Greene seems to preen like he's speaking hard truths to doubters, but he's clearly eliding the hardest truth: if you remove merit, quality suffers.

What is Greene implying? If you push the big button that says "disparate impact" and "dignity, uplift," good things go up. There are no trade-offs. (He also says "freedom of association," and I think he means it, but I don't think he really means it: freedom of association means bringing back the secret societies and country clubs the Civil Rights Era had to destroy in the first place.)

It's tiresome at this point to talk through all the examples: diversity over merit in airline pilots and traffic controllers, judges, trade negotiators, engineers, etc.

I think the liberal position is a belief that equality and excellence are really the same thing. If only we stop shackling minorities, excellence will flourish. I think it sounds nice and in many cases is probably true: think of all the gifted kids who could excel with the right opportunity. But somewhere along the way this all becomes entangled with race, and ethno-narcissisms, and ugly political realities: Harvard can't just admit the best students, it has to have a little chinese, some black, some latino, a little ethiopian, some finno-ugric-somalian-jew. And so the dream of "equality" or equity defeats itself, because true excellence cannot flourish when every class and tribe asserts privileges and rights that must be upheld.'

My belief is that the world is shaped, on the whole, by the truly excellent. And the only question is whether you create a system that rewards them, whoever they may be, or one that stands in their way.

(He also says "freedom of association," and I think he means it, but I don't think he really means it: freedom of association means bringing back the secret societies and country clubs the Civil Rights Era had to destroy in the first place.)

He does mean it, and he's well aware of the implications.

Reading the article and then this comment makes me wonder if you skipped the article.

To make a long story short, the 'truly excellent' want minorities at Harvard. Now what do we do with your 'liberal position'?

Somebody who is not me has a position that is not mine. Looks like I have been totally eviscerated.

I'm sure the author of the article feels the same way about your comment.

Great talking to you!

Don't do this kind of petty low-effort back-and-forth sniping (you and @hanikrummihundursvin both).

Speak plainly and without mockery.

if you remove merit, quality suffers.

If you remove merit, yes.

If you remove 'merit', not necessarily.

We all know Goodhart's Law, right?

There may be some abstract sense in which, for the next marginal position you want to hire for, you could in principle rank every person in the world on how much they would increase your long-term profitability, control that for how much pay they would demand, and get a ranked-order listing of candidates by merit.

But why in the world would you think that whatever combination of resumes/test scores/etc you get from your limited candidate pool, combined with whatever HR person has to make the decision, would return anything close to the same result?

Like, the first problem is that we don't even really know what we actually need for any marginal position, the second problem is that we only have very indirect proxy measures of the things we think we need, and the third problem is that everyone knows what those measures are, and we are mostly selecting on ability to produce those measures, not the things they are proxies for.

(and the zeroth problem is that the HR person is probably underpaid and overworked and lazy and doesn't care that much and isn't that competent and doesn't know that much about the position, to begin with)

If the options were 1. Have a true, perfect meritocracy vs 2. Have affirmative action, obviously you pick 1.

But the option is 'Everything is a shitshow, our metrics are fucked, most of what happens is arbitrary and depends on starting conditions.'

Given which, we may as well throw in additional arbitrary bullshit that 1. We expect to work counter to some of the other anti-meritocratic arbitrary bullshit already in the system, maybe readjusting us slightly more on target, and 2. Accomplishes other important social projects we care about.

My belief is that the world is shaped, on the whole, by the truly excellent. And the only question is whether you create a system that rewards them, whoever they may be, or one that stands in their way.

Are you referring to Trump or to Biden here? I guess both, since they were both leader of the free world for a while.

Or maybe Sam Bankman-Fried? He really rose to the top and gained incredible wealth and influence incredibly quickly, he must be one of the truly excellent elites that we should reward and let guide our future.

And etc. This is a nice sentiment, but it's not how the world works by default, and it's not how the world works today. Things are way more contingent and contextual and stochastic than that, and the traits that lead to someone seizing power and influence aren't identical with the traits that make them excellent at wielding it for the public good.

You don't get this outcome by default, just by taking a hands-off approach. You have to monitor and regulate the system to make it give you an outcome like that.

  • -11

I guess every job in society should just be handed out by lottery then, since figuring out if someone would be good at something or not is apparently impossible. That sure does make hiring easier. Every time say... a civil engineer... quits or retires we can just replace them with someone who was working at McDonald's the day before. Have fun next time you're driving across a bridge.

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