Reading the summary you've linked to, isn't the implication for this thread that certain puzzle type questions, if they do a reasonable job of measuring general intelligence, are useful predictors of job performance? (With the big caveat that in the US they are potentially illegal.)

The popular response here of "I'm never going to solve these puzzles in my day to day" seems to wholly miss the point.

Whether or not the term "meritocracy" is thrown around as propaganda is a separate issue from whether or not we should want to live in a meritocracy, which is what the article was about. In fact, most people don't want to live a pure meritocracy, as that would for example preclude the freedom to give gifts to others (as gifts are by definition unearned).

I think one property that our economy ought have as we head into a future of machines increasingly displacing human workers is this: If all human work in the economy stopped, wealth should converge to an approximately fair distribution, preferably within a small number of lifetimes.

And in a world without work, what is "fair"? It will almost certainly go to those who own the machines.

I almost wrote "uniform", but that seemed simplistic since it didn't take into account factors like age, number of children, etc. But if the majority of the wealth goes to the few owners of the machines, then the economy certainly doesn't have the property I'm talking about.

The following are mutually exclusive:

a) All children have equal opportunity.

b) Parents are able to spend money on their children.

I've spoken with many people who are in favor of both a) and b) and don't see the cognitive dissonance, but from this:

> like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.

I guess you really favor a) over b). Unless your point was that exams should be selected to minimize the influence of last minute cram efforts which disproportionally benefit those with expensive tutors, in which case I might agree with you.

Excellent point. I certainly favour a) over b), but in the real world we need to appreciate there is a balance here. The aim should be to limit the effectiveness of parental help by giving 80% of the benefit to all children.

In regards to b), not all help is monetary in nature. Some of it can be in the form of social favours, familiarity of cultural norms (national, company and industry culture) and expectations etc.

This is mostly right. This is certainly not about the boycotters believing all information (or even all academic publications) should be free, as the other branch of rayiner's thread assumes. And if Elsevier was more reasonable in their rates, this issue might never have come up or gained momentum.

However, as academics look around and see that the costs of publishing and hosting have become negligible compared to the value of their volunteer contributions, most of them feel that their own works should be freely available online or even that other academics ought to make their works freely available in accordance with culture of academia.

This is perfectly reasonable (of course it is -- look at the people involved) and I agree with you that rayiner is off the mark on this one.

That sounds terrible.