The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back at Fred's talk history in detail we learn that one of the conferences has a slight bias towards white men they don't even know about, and another is a committee of mostly men who agree that male speakers are just better.
By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.
> A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it.
Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together.
To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
Do they actually anymore? Aren't many male and white dominated organizations actively trying to be biased the other way?
When I studied engineering, my university had a "women in engineering" club which did a recruitment evening and I went along. When I talked to an employer, they told me "this is really for women, you should go to the general one instead". From what I understand, that kind of bias is widespread in America too. Where is this male and white preference happening?
I know many fields are dominated by white men but that fact alone doesn't show that it's because of systemic bias. Wasn't that stuff mostly stopped in the 1960's which is before anyone working today got started?
Just the other day there was a story on HN about an AI fighter pilot beating a real pilot in a simulation. But the company that did it was given special priority for government work because it was owned by a black person! A white owned company doing the same thing might not have got that contract.
We live in a society where tech conference organisers, far from being biased in favor of white men, are actually desperate to shield themselves from accusations of anti-female/poc bias. Derive from that what you will.
Correct. Meritocracy, when iterated over time with the effects of previous iterations brought forward, can have unintended and counter-intuitive consequences.
You're conflating the principle and the implementation. Meritocracy is good in principle, but your specific metric is bogus. Feel free to criticize the implementation/metric, but that's not a valid criticism of the underlying principle.
As an analogy, safe driving is a good principle. Assessing the safety of a driver by past behaviour ("this person hasn't crashed in a while") is decent but biased metric. E.g. "drunkenness" might be a better metric. But the choice of metric doesn't (in)validate the underlying principle.
To be fair, "it's impossible to implement this principle, and every attempt inevitably backfires" is, if actually true, a pretty damning criticism of a underlying principle in its capacity as something you'd actually want to implement.
A has a solid proposal and they're a known good quantity on the "speaker circuit"
B is a newcomer and their proposal looks really interesting too--maybe even more so--but we don't know them so maybe A is the safer choice
(I'd argue that this is the way that a lot of conferences have historically operated and many still do to some degree--which is OK to a point. You don't want to exclude traditional crowd-pleasers.)
But maybe if A's proposal is just solid, it wouldn't hurt to reach out to B for some additional information and to offer mentoring rather than just go with the safe easy choice.
Sure, but to the extent that you're going with the safe easy choice, you're not deciding based on merit. There are cases where that makes sense, but the ones where it doesn't aren't a problem with meritocracy; they're a problem with giving up on meritocracy.
It's easy enough to use my thought experiment to make it a meritocracy. We watch their latest talks. Fred is a better speaker. Thanks to more experience because he has done more talks. Thanks to confidence because he has never heard "no thanks". He got more talks and experience thanks to sexism.
By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.