Down with Meritocracy (2001)

 (theguardian.com)

7 points | by js26 小时前

1 comments

  • ghusto4 小时前
    I went in to hate-read, but ended up mostly agreeing.

    Mainly, I agree that the issue isn't ability being valued, but which abilities we choose to value. In a completely free market, abilities that get you the highest salary are what we will value, and those are in turn determined by competition with other nations. Unsurprisingly (perhaps to us), this turns out to me maths.

    Now children who may be otherwise gifted are lumped in with troublemakers. Very much like being sent to prison for weed, and coming out with an BSc in burglary.

    • vacuity1 小时前
      Selecting abilities to value is quite complicated to do well. Even in a software engineering role, one person may be great at documentation, while a few can teach others, and someone else might excel at debugging. But it would be impractical and a nightmare to test someone on all of those in addition to coding, even if high scores in all areas aren't expected. Perhaps it would be better to focus on experiences and impressions of a person and their skills across a group, so that we see how someone interacts with a realistic environment of a job. The collective of the old teams's lived experiences around a person should approximate that person's characteristics, and the new team would provide input on how those characteristics vibe with them. Listing out specific abilities is easier to track and measure, but constrained.