Is Society Merit Based?

Unbounded
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You’d know. Anyone else at all knowing is a bonus. Also knowing stuff helps you make better decisions in your life.

Generally activists aren’t very focused on picking the best ideas themselves. In the short term, lots of them wouldn’t benefit, and could lose a lot, from the world systematically picking the best ideas.

To connect this with other stuff: the idea that the world systematically picks the best ideas and people is also known as the idea of living in a merit-based society. A lot of debate exists claiming we do or don’t live in a merit-based society, e.g. because we do or don’t have systemic racism or misogyny.

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I would guess Godwin and Hazlitt didn’t consider it only a bonus (not just friends, but convincing opponents as well), but a large part of the main goal. I haven’t read the books though.

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A version of the merit-based society idea, which David Deutsch repeatedly told me was true, is the “build it and they will come” concept, which says merit rises to the top even without being promoted, marketed, advertised, etc. Social networking, making friends, trading favors, posting on social media and other actions by the creator are unnecessary for information about good things to spread. Information about merit spreads automatically.

This is not a mainstream view. The mainstream view, that says we do live in a merit based society, also says marketing is needed; rising to the top is not fully automatic.

Similarly, the mainstream we-already-live-in-a-merit-based-society position says that career success is merit based but not automatic. You may have to promote yourself, communicate about your accomplishments, ask for promotions and apply for other jobs, not just quietly wait for career success to come to you.

Views claiming society is merit based are particularly popular among people who are already successful. These views imply that their own success was merited. The strong versions which say information about merit spreads automatically imply that basically that everyone in society is always in their proper place or will be soon (after you accomplish something, success isn’t instantaneous but is reasonably prompt).

One of the logical implications here is that if you build something and people don’t come, then it was bad, and people are correct to be dismissive of it (and there’s no need for them to give arguments refuting it).

I now think that society isn’t very merit based (but definitely some, not zero), and that merit rising to the topic is usually not automatic when it does happen.

I think “build it and they will come” was one of many pieces of extremely bad advice I received from my mentor that influenced me for years and hurt me a lot. (And I still don’t think I’ve fully updated all my relevant ideas.) I tried doing it a lot without making a marketing plan and that didn’t work well.

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Did he say it was true of the current society? If so, how did he square that with his ideas (TCS, CR, Multiverse, capitalism, etc.) not being mainstream.

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A version of the merit-based society idea, which David Deutsch repeatedly told me was true, is the “build it and they will come” concept

Yes.

I don’t think he gave good answers to any of that. I don’t remember specifically what he said and how he got me to accept any of it. I did try to argue with him about it sometimes.

PS It’d be better to quote a little more so your post stands on its own better.

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Most of what Deutsch said about a merit based society was indirect. Yes he directly told me to build good things and that people would come. But his viewpoint was also built into many, many other ideas.

For example, he said that hotdogs are healthy, safe food. That indirectly involves a trust in society and its institutions as being good or having merit, rather than a belief that people in power lack merit. He didn’t personally do a bunch of research on hotdogs and nutrition; he thought that other people must have checked such things.

Similarly, Deutsch thinks dentistry works great and that getting fillings and various other procedures has little downside besides some time and money.

Deutsch is the kind of person to assume laser eye surgery is good and safe. (I have no idea what his position is on that specific issue. He’s got lots of contradictory ideas.)

Deutsch generally thinks lots of parts of the status quo are pretty good, like that businesses broadly follow laws and that the laws prevent tons of bad behavior like selling harmful food (and he also thinks we have extra laws preventing some good behavior). He’s particularly accepting of stuff in certain areas like new technologies (new meaning from the last few hundred years, like hotdogs, microwaves, cars, teflon, RoundUp, etc.).

Deutsch primed me to find it easy to believe that e.g. Silent Spring is a bad book. And that is related to his pro-status-quo beliefs, and beliefs that the people in power have a fair amount of merit, so society generally works pretty well and isn’t just irresponsibly poisoning everyone.

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Deutsch thinks if hotdogs and candy were bad, then they wouldn’t have been able to become so widespread, normal and accepted. Society is too merit based to allow that if they were significantly bad.

He also thinks basically that whistleblowing works well enough to prevent conspiracies and to prevent companies like DuPont from purposefully doing awful things. He wrote a 6 part series about conspiracy theories, which I think is wrong.

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You haven’t written anything about that? That could be interesting for me to analyze some time in the long future (not high priority).

I’ve gotten the general expectation that for almost every topic there’s a school of thought that knows better than the mainstream and isn’t being listened to. I’m not saying the mainstream is the worst, because there are other schools of thought that do worse than the mainstream. There’s just usually some group that’s better than the mainstream.

I’ve gotten this sentiment by reading stuff like this from you. Previously I pretty much thought society was adequate. Would you say it’s an overcorrection?

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No essay. Probably some brief comments somewhere.

Suppose there is a mainstream idea and 99 non-mainstream alternatives. What is the chance the mainstream idea is in the top 5 from those 100 total ideas?

Someone who thinks society is highly merit based might say 90%. Some people might even say 99%.

If you think society is not merit based at all, you’d say 5%. If the mainstream idea is selected totally at random it has a 5% chance of being one of the top 5.

If you think merit plays some role, so we do better than random, you could pick a number like a 25%, 50% or 75% chance, depending on how effective you think merit is.

You could also take the position that the good is hated for being the good and that we have various mechanisms to suppress merit on purpose, so the real chance is 1% or even 0.0001%. In a dystopian society like from the books Anthem or 1984, maybe 0.0001% would be a good answer. I don’t think our society is that bad.

If someone gave the answer 50%, I’d say he believes we’re in a fairly merit-based society. He thinks that half the time we manage to use a top 5 idea. He probably also thinks that we use an idea in the top 50 over 90% of the time.

You asked about whether there’s usually some alternative that’s better than the mainstream view. With the answer 50%, how often will the selected idea be the best one? 10% of the time. So even in a pretty merit based society, the best idea doesn’t win very often.

No. I think answering 50% is too high. I think you’re correct that usually the idea society selects isn’t the best of the known options. To disagree with that requires an answer above 50%.

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Something else that lowers the chance of the best idea being used is recency issues. Old ideas are advantaged at being selected by society, but new ideas are attempts to learn from and improve on old ideas, so new ideas have an advantage at being good but a disadvantage at being society’s selection. One way to view it is that society updates its chosen ideas infrequently, and someone may have come up with an improvement since the last update.