"The meritocratic fallacy..." - My Response

#1

The meritocratic fallacy… by DH000-RABOTNIK

“Ah, the meritocratic movement. I once liked what they said in my
"hyperrational” days. But now, I see a few holes in their plans…

For
example, they want mathematics to become ontological. It already is!
More often than not, the more “intellectual” of us justify things using
cold, hard rationality and mathematics. There’s no mention of creativity
and of sentience, even though both are integral parts of the experience
of consciousness.

But perhaps a more fundamental flaw is that
they want a standardised system of merit. What system is this - one
which emphasises the aims of an Elite which they are supposedly trying
to destroy? Are they just trying to emulate most extreme political
organisations and ride on a revolutionary wave before forming a new
oligarchy? And who or what defines the merit? A computer? A rational
egoist excuse of a human? A democratic process? Furthermore, a
standardised system would limit creativity due to bureaucracy. In
essence, it would be comparable to a giant school (just ask the
homeschooling movement)!

Merit should be something that is
defined on an individual and collective basis. In fact, we should be
encouraging personal and social fulfilment in an age of alienation.
Instead of being part of a leviathan of a system, perhaps we should live
in smaller commuinites - or even groups of nomads, travelling
throughout the world and adapting to all that hits us.

Though they are right to blast the Elite, if they come to power, we could witness the formation of another “upper class”…"

Quoted from http://dh000-rabotnik.deviantart.com/art/The-meritocratic-fallacy-554521885

My Response:

I’ve spent more than 6-months reading the roughly 1-million words on armageddonconspiracy.co.uk website. If you have any questions feel free to ask me. Merit - measured by your peers in the field you are in. Now the idea of Meritocracy was designed before computers and robotics, so it is in need of an update. I would say that Meritocracy 2.0 would be the Open-Source Movement. Now take an open-source project like Linux or Blender, there is a very loose and naturally restructuring hierarchy within these organizations. A complex 3D rendering program like Blender has so many problems to be solved that anyone in the whole world is able to submit a solution to any problem. Then whenever there are competing solutions offered by different people, the solution that is most efficient wins. Does that particular coder become a fascist tyrant for the day? NO! But within his field and amongst his peers he becomes famous for his work. The Open-source method of getting things done can and has been applied to engineering, biology and potentially any industry on Earth, it’s not just for coding software.

What we need now is an Open-Source Government. Every area of government becomes transparent, each function is revealed and anyone on the planet is able to submit solutions to every problem. Competing solutions are measured by their efficiency and the most efficient solution is selected. It is the best way forward in my opinion.

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#2

It’s a nice idea in principle, but it may be too much of an emotional appeal in that direction. The meritocratic government must be as powerful as possible, yet, it simply would have the public interest at heart (through intelligent, meritocratic, proven movers and shakers of the world as government officials). This is clearly a very different scenario to power-mad manipulators.

Everything the meritocratic government does, must have a sufficient reason. Why would it lay out all of its plans to its enemies around the world?

It is a fallacy of false dilemma to say that power must always come from the power-mad (this statement is anti-power and anti-reason in its very anti-Gnostic fear of power). If you say the government will always be Bad Government, you are ipso facto saying that government could never be different; and that you don’t trust people smarter than yourself; and that you have no interest in pursuing positive liberty. In which case, you would not be worth listening to anyway!

#3

There are two parts to this. The first part is what someone else wrote (DH000-RABOTNIK), the 2nd part is what I wrote in response. My response had a focus on Open-Source Government.

To date the open-source method has the most successful combination of 100% democratic transparency and meritocratic solutions comparisons.

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#4

I liked your response to DH000, it’s a very succinct summary of what the open-source model is and how compatible it is with traditional meritocratic ideas.

As I see it, security is the only issue. If something is truly open-source then anybody can edit it and there is no mechanism in place to stop our opponents destroying the framework of our society. Wikipedia is routinely vandalised for example, and it’s open-sourced nature is also responsible for the relatively poor reputation for factual reliability it holds. You can’t cite Wikipedia in an academic paper.

#5

Security is not a technical issue for the Open-source community. Knowing how something works doesn’t give you the ability to hack it. Linux is open-source and almost every other operating system is based upon linux. Eg. Chrome OS, Steam OS.

Look at http://sourceforge.net/ , there are plenty of secure open-source applications you can download from there, even though you can see their source, you cannot break the 256-bit encryption that is used.

If understanding the source was a threat to any system then you would quickly see any banking programmer quickly bumped off and thrown into the river. That is not the case because mathematically the security keys that are generated no human has access to, in fact seeing that the source doesn’t send the keys to someone else actually makes the system more secure than a closed-source system.

Also, open-source releases first go BETA and then Stable release. BETA is an optional install by people who opt-in. If there are any security issues located in the BETA then the Stable release will not come out until the problem is fixed.

It’s a non-issue, please research further.

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#6

I understand. My objection was made out of ignorance of the subject, just the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the phrase ‘open source’ is that it is prone to vandalism. Besides which I don’t think an open source government would need to have every aspect of the open sourced-ness online, some things can remain physical.

#7

For whatever is offline, like the human rules or laws. Think as if our legal system was made open-source and people could edit and simplify the laws wikipedia style. Even though the implications of the laws would have a totally offline real-world effect, we can still come to concensus on decisions online.