Prof's Impromptu Lecture on Meritocracy

Last monday, besides being given a really technical lecture on web performance optimization and troubleshoot, which I can only partially appreciate, Prof Ben also gave an impromptu lecture about his view on Grades, Scholarship and Meritocracy.

For grades and scholarship, I dont really have comments to add to it, except to say that my views on grades are exactly the same as prof, they are their importance has been way skewed in our society such that we are raising model students instead of thinkers. Grades are over-rated, it measures only things that are qualifiable and only in a very specific context. I feel that, if you are good at what you do, and very passionate about it, chances are opportunities will find you and vice versa. Hence grades are only useful enough as both a carrot and stick students, but of course it is not the best of motivations when in face of real talents and real curiosity for learning. They are however, a common yardstick in meritocracy

Meritocracy

There are 2 flavors of meritocracy which is to have an equality of opportunities or to have an equality of outcome and they are often confused with each other. The latter, is however a very simplistic conceptualisation of meritocracy, which translates to this reality -> "No matter what you do, where you are and how you do it, the outcome will be same for everyone" Now, this reality is very disempowering and distressing because it means that no matter now hard one strives, the society will enforces rules and laws such that everyone will produce the same results, just like communism, which I plainly put "makes everyone equality poor".

It is easy to see how these idea fails, yet is it often confused with the former idea, because what we can plainly see are outcomes and people are lazy to think about the principles and reason it out. Complain as they might, but my stand is not to reduce our society's aspiration and ethos to the lowest common denominator just because they refuse to think or does not really understand what meritocracy really is about.

Hopefully this sets things straight. As a person, I deeply believe in meritocracy (the former idea of course), because it means that we are treating all humans with dignity and that we respect their rights to betterment and gain access to more in Life. (= Truly, the implications are daunting, when we factor in the billions of people and the many more to be born as we consider about providing everyone with opportunities. But when translated to practices, what it means that we should not discriminate people based on social stigmas but rather give them a fair accessment based on their character and capacity. No doubt, Life's still unfair, but at least, we should aim to be fair to people and ourselves.

I love the way prof ben uses the food pyramid explain how an different outcomes can and should happen probabilistically even though meritocracy operates. It's simple and effective and it incorporates social mobility into the picture too, =D, and I shall adopt this explanation next time (Is this considered learning from him?)