& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-28 Tu: If you have a test or another activity to select who is “the best”, you had better make damned sure that the test or activity accurately measures or reflects what you really want done. In the limit, you optimize for test-takers—and people who have devoted all of their time to become expert test-takers have spent none of their time learning to do anything else. They are thus likely to be far from “the best” at what will be their real job. How can you tell if you are falling into this trap? Divide your population up into groups. See how well the best test-takers are spread out among those groups, If there is no reason to think that those who will actually be best at the real job are anything other than uniformly distributed among the groups you have chosen, and yet if it turns out that those who score highest on the test are strongly concentrated—then it is highly likely that you are missing huge numbers of potential candidates, and wasting a huge amount of talent. Rajiv Sethi ran across a very interesting paper on Finland that is on point here...
The wealth is all going to have to go to fighting the baked-in consequences of environmental damage (global warming, ocean acidification), so a large part of that $200-million-per-year living standard will be spent on environmental maintenance and remediation.
Consider how much each person currently pays in taxes (and government borrowing) towards water systems and sewer systems. And it's not enough. Now multiply that by factors of thousands or millions.
I mean... yes, this is going to be utopian if we can get there. But your fundamental error is to think of the goods as private goods. Every person is going to get far, far more PUBLIC goods. Instead of imagining $200 million per year for each person, imagine 2 quintillion spent per year on management of ecosystems. Doesn't that sound a lot easier to imagine?
I guess that the general validity of the Finnish experiment depends on the invalidity of "g"--the generalized aptitude that some people say is measured by IQ tests. Damned if I know.
I vaguely remember reading 10-15 years ago that Berkeley Law had created a project to determine what made good lawyers so that they could then use those qualities, whatever they might be, in their admissions process. I expected the project would founder because nobody could agree on what made a lawyer "good" -- earned the most money? became a law professor? became a judge? did the most for the poor? -- but anyway I never heard of it again and I wonder if it still exists.
One way to look at notional meritocracy is that what you want to know is who is going to have the most productive (or effective, or however else you like to think of it) career which requires knowledge of the future which you can't have, so you should probably not try to do that.
It's really tempting, though, because there are scales testing works on. ("did you retain that information?", say.)
Another way to look at it is that creating a machine to encourage people to identify as smart is a mistake (no one is smart; smart is putting a "this is special" sticker on specific skills and enforcing it socially) and test-driven anything does just that. Quotas dilute the supply of people who think they are smart, thereby producing better results because the proportion of the profession who are going for being effective (because they know they are not smart) is greater.
The wealth is all going to have to go to fighting the baked-in consequences of environmental damage (global warming, ocean acidification), so a large part of that $200-million-per-year living standard will be spent on environmental maintenance and remediation.
Consider how much each person currently pays in taxes (and government borrowing) towards water systems and sewer systems. And it's not enough. Now multiply that by factors of thousands or millions.
I mean... yes, this is going to be utopian if we can get there. But your fundamental error is to think of the goods as private goods. Every person is going to get far, far more PUBLIC goods. Instead of imagining $200 million per year for each person, imagine 2 quintillion spent per year on management of ecosystems. Doesn't that sound a lot easier to imagine?
I guess that the general validity of the Finnish experiment depends on the invalidity of "g"--the generalized aptitude that some people say is measured by IQ tests. Damned if I know.
I vaguely remember reading 10-15 years ago that Berkeley Law had created a project to determine what made good lawyers so that they could then use those qualities, whatever they might be, in their admissions process. I expected the project would founder because nobody could agree on what made a lawyer "good" -- earned the most money? became a law professor? became a judge? did the most for the poor? -- but anyway I never heard of it again and I wonder if it still exists.
One way to look at notional meritocracy is that what you want to know is who is going to have the most productive (or effective, or however else you like to think of it) career which requires knowledge of the future which you can't have, so you should probably not try to do that.
It's really tempting, though, because there are scales testing works on. ("did you retain that information?", say.)
Another way to look at it is that creating a machine to encourage people to identify as smart is a mistake (no one is smart; smart is putting a "this is special" sticker on specific skills and enforcing it socially) and test-driven anything does just that. Quotas dilute the supply of people who think they are smart, thereby producing better results because the proportion of the profession who are going for being effective (because they know they are not smart) is greater.