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Hierarchies are promoted because they coordinate the work of large numbers of people and make them vastly more effective at scale. That's quite meritocratic.

by t-310 hours ago|

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Hierarchies are promoted because they concentrate wealth and power among a few people, who distribute it to a few people they more-or-less trust. It's just feudalism with less violent feuding.

by zozbot23410 hours ago|

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That's a pointless observation though, the interesting point is that hierarchies manage to concentrate benefits because working as part of a functioning hierarchy makes even the individuals involved a lot more effective, to the point where they're better off even with much of the benefit flowing towards the top.

by t-39 hours ago|

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Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? I've never heard of any study that showed that cooperatives are less productive than hierarchies.

by zozbot2349 hours ago|

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Even co-ops have hierarchy-style management, which is often professional management. It's just done on behalf of the collective membership instead of answering to a corporate board. (But the oversight is often weak in any such scenario, so the professionals involved can accrue significant benefits.)

by Nevermark8 hours ago|

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The benefits of coordinated cooperation are called “civilization”.

While meritocracy in high dimensional humans is a muddy thing, as being capable, and being capable at what is actually needed often diverge.

But at the organization level, the benefits of strong coordination of the right things are clear. Virtually every business study, studies this. Virtually every political leadership study, studies this.

Cooperation has so many efficiency and effectiveness benefits. Institutionalizing the right kinds of cooperation, i.e. coordinating it, even more so.

This is the civilization superpower.

This is why billions of people can spend their days doing other things than food production, and can live in places with no food production in sight.

by hnfong10 hours ago|

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I don't disagree. That's why I qualified my statement with "ostensibly".

But being really intelligent, at least for the top 1% or so, is often advantageous enough to offset any disadvantages from your class/cultural background etc.

I also wonder whether your "psychopathy" is just "ambition". After all, while intelligence alone doesn't guarantee anything, "intelligence + ambition" takes you quite far.

Personally, I can see how even an honest-to-god meritocratic society ends up with psychopaths at the top. For most people with normal-ish psychology, the risks and stress that comes with being on top of anything high stakes is just too much.