# Yes but in this article even you are not willing to name the harm.
Date: 2025-12-04

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Yes but in this article even you are not willing to name the harm. The real underlying problem is that merit is broken.

For merit being broken even the most successful honest about the harm program fails - white men in charge is replaced by beautiful people in charge or people with certain degrees in charge or seniority exclusively in charge.

You can't have people with the most merit in charge because merit only existed in extreme and obvious circumstances. A person who could read had more merit than a person who couldn't. You could immediately justify literate people being in charge of the illiterate.

Even your example of a black pilot finally reaching the cockpit by outperforming their white male counterparts demonstrates the failure of merit. Outperform how?

Of course if merit is just a good feeling you have about someone then all sorts of human biases will come into play in generating that feeling.

Merit exists in sports because we can measure things about an athlete that are impossible in the corporate world. But even in sports it's extremely difficult for young athletes to get the backing of an academy and measurable "merit" really only exists later on in their career when potential turns to actual.

So pushing any concept of merit will inevitably result in tribal behavior. If not based on race or gender then on something else superfluous. In the military economists recorded the ridiculous use of height by the French and later on bayonet skills by America (long after bayonets served any purpose on the battle field). In software we are currently using LeetCode tests as our bayonet equivalent and it's just as ridiculous as bayonets as an AI can solve any such test.

Now one may argue that bayonets or LeetCode or whatever is better than race and gender but you still end up with the same tribal, hierarchical, incredibly toxic culture. The harm caused by broken merit systems is that we all end up living in dystopian workplaces and pseudo science prospers and that pseudo science can feed back into fascism.