Mirroring some of the logic in that post, starting from the assumption that neither you nor anyone you know are in the running for a job, (lets say you are hiring an electrician to fix your house) then do you want the person who is going to do a better job or a worse one?
If you are the parent of a child with some kind of developmental problem that means they have terrible hand-eye coordination, you probably don’t want your child to be a brain surgeon, because you can see that is a bad idea.
You do want your child to have resources, and respect and so on. But what they have, and what they do, can be (at least in principle) decoupled. In other words, I think that using a meritocratic system to decide who does what (the people who are good at something should do it) is uncontroversial. However, using a meritocratic system to decide who gets what might be a lot more controversial. For example, as an extreme case you could consider disability benefit for somebody with a mental handicap to be vaguely against the “who gets what” type of meritocracy.
Personally I am strongly in favor of the “who does what” meritocracy, but am kind of neutral on the “who gets what” one.
There was an interesting Astral Codex 10 thing related to this kind of idea: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
Mirroring some of the logic in that post, starting from the assumption that neither you nor anyone you know are in the running for a job, (lets say you are hiring an electrician to fix your house) then do you want the person who is going to do a better job or a worse one?
If you are the parent of a child with some kind of developmental problem that means they have terrible hand-eye coordination, you probably don’t want your child to be a brain surgeon, because you can see that is a bad idea.
You do want your child to have resources, and respect and so on. But what they have, and what they do, can be (at least in principle) decoupled. In other words, I think that using a meritocratic system to decide who does what (the people who are good at something should do it) is uncontroversial. However, using a meritocratic system to decide who gets what might be a lot more controversial. For example, as an extreme case you could consider disability benefit for somebody with a mental handicap to be vaguely against the “who gets what” type of meritocracy.
Personally I am strongly in favor of the “who does what” meritocracy, but am kind of neutral on the “who gets what” one.