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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I think meritocracy is a bad name for the concept, as it implies a particular system of organization. When really it's a metric you can apply to any system. And all systems are very much not the same in how meritocratic they are.

To structure society such that intelligence is privileged over every other human trait is to create a very dumb underclass, and to reduce the average intelligence of the working class as many of the smart kids are siphoned off to the middle classes. It also naturally creates a social division between those who meet the arbitrary and changing benchmarks for "education", and those who do not.

And this incongruous with the rest of your post, essentially "meritocracy isn't real, and it's bad that it's real". But yes, depriving lower classes of highly capable representatives is an inevitable consequence of meritocratic systems. I think that's a vastly preferable outcome to forcing these capable people into roles below their potential.

I think this is where the class/income distinction is important. We need highly intelligent lower-class people, because we need highly intelligent people running industries like resource extraction which will never be high class. A role being difficult doesn't make it classy, and a society that siphons off its best production plant operators and logging magnates to become ad-revenue optimizers and theoretical history researchers isn't on a good path long-term.