Barely Bigger than Twitter

[krinndnz]

All right, try this one: in the abstract, meritocracy is much better than democracy. However, the implementation and maintenance costs of meritocracy - the TCO - are so much higher than democracy that everyone uses democracy instead, and thus democracy is probably a better real-world choice. Yes, even though there's no reference implementation (

Comments

[silveradept]

And thus the difficulty of any political system - it requires humans, who are as far away from ideal anything as possible.

I think the merit protocol has one bad thing going for it - the Peter Principle. (And possibly the Dilbert Principle, as well.) If run out to its natural conclusion, meritocracy creates problems because everyone is promoted to the level of their incompetence, and thus nothing goes well.

[krinndnz]

Meritocracy in the abstract, the way I'm talking about it, actually wouldn't suffer from the Peter Principle. Definitions. Meritocracy: people doing what they're good at. Peter Principle: people get promoted until they're doing things they're not good at. Meritocracy - again I stress that I'm talking about this abstraction - would contradict that, since you'd want people to keep doing what they're good at.

This is why I express my preference as "egalitarian meritocracy," which is much friendlier and just as unattainable. :p

[silveradept]

Ah. Objection withdrawn, then. More concerned about the kind of infrastructure, especially in education, that would be needed to produce not only people doing what they are good at, but people self-aware to know what it is they're good at and positions for those people in those industries.