I think it is a post about the word "meritocracy" meaning many things to many people, and not being very useful for certain types of discussion.
If two people understand each other and agree to disagree, fine. But recently, I've seen a lot of online arguments about these kinds of things, where I get the impression that there are two reasonable people talking past each other without really understanding each other.
I think that meritocracy is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of equality of opportunity. Given a pool of candidates, we should pick the best ones (eliminate false positives). AND, we should invest as much as we can reasonably afford to ensure that we get people with good potential into the pool (eliminate false negatives).
My overall view is that we're going to go into a serious economic struggle in the next twenty years, and like any sports team, scouting is as important as coaching :-)
Then I think I misunderstood the point your post - I hope you can see how it could happen. And I am probably yet another example of exactly what you were trying to warn against - people on the Internet talking past one another.
I think we actually agree overall. Leaders should be chosen as best we can by merit and we should seek to expand the pool as best we can.
This brings up another idea I wonder about: If choosing leaders is so hard can we somehow reduce our dependence on them? Put another way can we move to a more emergent approach to organizing ourselves rather than depending some "leader" to decide how we should be organized?
If two people understand each other and agree to disagree, fine. But recently, I've seen a lot of online arguments about these kinds of things, where I get the impression that there are two reasonable people talking past each other without really understanding each other.
I think that meritocracy is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of equality of opportunity. Given a pool of candidates, we should pick the best ones (eliminate false positives). AND, we should invest as much as we can reasonably afford to ensure that we get people with good potential into the pool (eliminate false negatives).
My overall view is that we're going to go into a serious economic struggle in the next twenty years, and like any sports team, scouting is as important as coaching :-)