The real reason meritocracy should be discarded
Just watched “Do we really have free will? with Robert Sapolsky”
and as much of a fan as I am of the professor and his books, he has missed the point on free will.
First the question is free will or not (obviously not as Sapolsky points out) but rather sentience or not where sentience is the ability to go beyond original programming, OP, via culture or memory.
Sapolsky wants us to be more careful with our blame game meritocracy where winners are lauded and losers are shamed (plus potentially jailed). Since there is no free will there is no point in shame or praise.
But meritocracy is about sentience — the possibility of changing OP by having a culture that rewards or punishes behavior. Does mass incarceration discourage crime? Probably not. Does enormous inequality make us more productive? Definitely not.
Perhaps at one time in the past trying to reward people more for innovation and success resulted in a more productive society but that period is long gone. First of course is that meritocracy is false and bad for you but that’s not even it’s greatest problem.
The real reason meritocracy should be discarded is that our society cannot be certain what is productive.
For the simple manual labor society was traditionally concerned with perhaps meritocracy was a reasonable tool. If you want children to collect firewood then offering a prize to the child that collects the most might work out.
However the more abstract and collaborative jobs get the less effective meritocracy is. Let’s say you lived in the 1800s and wanted to fund the arts. Do you become a patron to a select “best” group of artists or just blanket grant money to artists in general?
If you want to reach a potential Vincent van Gogh than blanket funding artists works better. You would have no way of knowing which artists works were “great” for the ages and van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. On top of which artists were working together to achieve impressionism and if you fund van Gogh but not Gauguin (who also died unappreciated) then inspiration might not happen.
Unfortunately this level of abstraction and collaboration is no longer just a feature of the arts but is now pervasive across much of the labor market. Worse yet jobs that do not feature abstraction and collaboration are usually considered bottom of the meritocracy in status and pay. So one is either in a highly abstract and collaborative position whose productivity cannot be measured or in a concrete, individual but very lowly rewarded position.
Even our society’s pseudo answer to this problem, “market forces”, has run its course. Market forces were at their best one step up from our children gathering firewood where a market for firewood had been established and people competed to sell that product.
However you can’t get from a firewood market to say a natural gas market without doing a lot of funding outside the bounds of all meritocracy. And where the firewood market had low sunken costs and anyone could join and compete, the natural gas market is the opposite with enormous sunken costs and very few, maybe only one, player.
Furthermore let’s replace the firewood with say software. You can tell whether firewood will burn well or not by inspecting it and, worst case, you might by a bad batch of firewood once and then avoid that vendor the next week.
With software you won’t know if what you bought works well until a year or more later. Frequently software is more about the ongoing development and maintenance then even what you initially bought. Say for instance the search engine you choose is best in class but over time becomes full of ads and unusable.
Or an innovative new financial instrument eventually causes the 2008 economic collapse. Or gas cars win over electric but eventually cause climate change.
At that point the meritocracy is working against you because the winner take all reward structure weeded out everyone but your blind guess at the best product. Plus the “competition” to become your blind guess removed the collaboration necessary to do better.
And sadly its turtles all the way down — we not only don’t know what top level direction is best but we also have no real way to evaluate the individual workers building the software, financial instrument, car, etc. Imagine van Gogh and Gauguin work together in a corporation and must quarterly justify their salaries versus Paris Salon prize winner Pierre Jules Cavelier.
Pierre will win, because he did, but more by blind chance and a willingness to conform. The only reason modern art doesn’t still look like below is that a rising middle class bought art and so intervened in the Paris Salon’s circular meritocracy.
For a while the new middle class was the solution to a number of meritocracy issues. But eventually we hit the Frodo Baggins problem, “Can you protect me from yourself?”
Since our society can no longer discern what is productive it becomes the responsibility of leaders in a meritocracy to proclaim the merit of whatever they are doing.
As in the diary of Samuel Pepys from 1660 one markets one’s work over dinner with other elites, or, if selling to the middle class, in a million targeted advertisements.
Eventually marketing merit becomes the meritocracy itself. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix are the new Paris Salon and gatekeepers to middle class acceptance. How do I know that Stefanie Schneider is an artist to watch in 2023 ?— cause Google told me so and this applies to all manner of products instead of just art.
Are the algorithms these corporations use creating human sentience? One would have to conclude they are as they match the definition of a layer of programming beyond human OP perfectly. However they are a very weak form of sentience because the algorithms are only designed to predict OP’s response and reflect it back.
Could these algorithms or some other form of culture do more than just reflect human original programming? That and not whether we have free will is the real question. Robots that can over time augment their own programming are very different from wind up toys that cannot.