Comment by kashyapc
1 month ago
> 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!
Some of us would be advocating for this, but at present there are many who refer to taxes as theft because they take money from wealthy "deserving" people and give it to poor "undeserving" people.
If we took the moral value away from meritocracy-as-indicated-by-wealth as it is, not giving it the bait-and-switch moral weight of a "well-directed efforts" Effortocracy, it would be less of an uphill political battle to level the playing field for those with great potential to contribute to society but who are currently locked out by poverty or other accidents of birth.