Comment by kashyapc
1 day ago
The article on "effortocracy"[1] is pretty very well done. Quoting the end of the article:
"... if you take anything away from this, it is to recognise that if meritocracy is based on achievement only, then we must be sure not to confuse it with effortocracy when it comes to its moral weight."
Related reading: The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel (I was hoping the article would reference this, and it does.)
I don't think we actually want an effortocracy. Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement? There's no inherent moral worth to futile effort that doesn't actually yield any reward, regardless of how laborious it might be.
This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.
This is the inherent friction of most overly “scientific” management systems. A decent line manager is aware of who on their team lifts up the team with glue & peer acceleration type soft work.
Systems that try to get too “objective” fail to recognize this as most KPIs are on direct outcomes that are easy to measure, though often less important.
No joke I once worked at a company with multi-category numeric ratings that then rolled up to a total rating score that had 2 decimal places of precision.
2 replies →
> Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement?
Of course that would be ridiculous. You're trivializing the author's point. I'm not sure you've actually read the article in full. The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.
Many of the tech robber barons and VCs (who call themselves "angels") carry the air of "my winnings are entirely of my own making". They rarely acknowledge the role of good fortune (in various aspects) in any meaningful way.
They inhale their success too deeply, as Michael Sandel memorably puts it.
> The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.
But that's the whole reason why we reward outcomes in the first place. If it was possible to reward only "well-directed" effort regardless of outcomes, we'd be doing that already!
Then why do we have books on grit? And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?
I'd be willing to bet that grit has a lot less to do with successful founders than luck and/or access to a lot of money. There are way more unsuccessful founders filled with grit than successful ones.
The reason there are so many books on grit is because it's a very compelling lie that anyone can succeed if they just try hard enough without giving up. It's useful for the person who hasn't succeeded because it gives them hope. It's useful for the person who has succeeded because it implies that they earned/deserve what they have because they were better than others or tried harder than others did. These are lies, but they are comforting to a lot of people and so they sell a lot of books. Books that say things like "Be born to wealthy parents, preferably in a rich nation or your odds of success are highly unlikely, then also get really lucky" just aren't going to sell as well.
2 replies →
Because you need effort + the ability to create value, not one or the other. Some people have one but not the other and seek out help to bridge the gap.
2 replies →
A lot of meaningful things are difficult and laborious, but not all difficult and laborious things are meaningful.
> And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?
Based on what? Biographical accounts by successful founders?
Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness [1] covers the topic of mis-attribution of some causal factor X (i.e. grit) to some phenomena (i.e. business success) that can be effectively explained solely by randomness. In the specific case of successfully starting a business, causal factors are often mis-attributed post-facto through a lens that blatantly ignores survivorship bias [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
1 reply →
To strong-man their argument, they don't seem to be arguing to reward effort only, in their words:
> "To truly measure and reward by an effortocratic measure we need both a top-down and bottom-up approach
- At the top, reward people who have overcome more to get to the same point
- At the bottom, level the playing field so that potential, wherever it is, can be realised"
The way I think of it is using a vector analogy. They're arguing that a meritocracy only reward the end point, and that instead we should value both the magnitude of the vector in addition to its end point. You're interpreting effortocracy (not unfairly IMO) as only rewarding the magnitude of the vector, which is indeed absurd.
In my opinion however, they themselves are straw-manning what they point to as "moral meritocracy". As I understand it, their main gripe is that achievements are not only rewarded, but also ascribed higher moral weight, which is plain false. People vastly prefer rag-to-riches story to born-rich ones. So much so that you have many rich people straight up lying about their origin stories to make it sound more rag-to-riches than it is.
Edit: removed last bit that was harsher than intended.
But we do do that. People scream from the rooftops that it's unfair to give people money for doing nothing (i.e. welfare or UBI) but it's fine to give the same money to someone who digs ditches all day, and to someone else who fills in ditches. As long as a CEO is involved, for some reason. All of Graeber's bullshit jobs are effortocracy.
Well, i would say that there are two common fallacies w.r.t. meritocracy:
1) Mixing up merit (ability to provide achievement) with effort.
2) Assuming it has anything to do with moral weight. While it primarily targets just decision making and distribution of deserts (rewards).
Why distribution of deserts should be meritocratic? Because that ensure that collaboration is positive-sum for everybody involved. Considering this, fair reward for participation in some group effort has to satisfy a condition that reward is at least as large as a missed opportunity (of collaborating in some other group, individually, or not collaborating at all).
I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.
Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.
Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.
The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.