Changing Atlantean Schools

Atlantis, as has often been said, is a meritocracy. And that said, there are two major flaws in that — the question of what merit is, and the problem of deciding whether such merit is appropriately privileged.

I spoke to Wolff, who once was Sir Wolff, almost Lord Wolff. And Wolff laughed that deep rolling laugh of his, that rare and dangerous laugh, and he told me some stories.

There is always privilege, he said, and always people who resent such. There are those who claim the aegis of the Dauntless Hero, but who have never sought to live up to his ideals. I have said, not all our sons from Cathay or Sind or more distant lands are worthy of the name. Indeed, I suggest that each year, not more than 20% of such sons be allowed to claim a birthright. We need new blood.

I replied, "My friend, how can you deny such people their birthright? Their fathers were alumni, why should they not benefit?"

Wolff's laughter now had an edge to it. Four generations of my lineage have been sons of the Hero. Far be it from me to be ungrateful. But I must quote the words of the Man, when he said not all who called him Lord would be recognized by him. I suggest that the Governing Authorities decide, case by case, on who should receive such honours. And when there are no more places, THERE ARE NO MORE PLACES.

His voice turned melancholy. But the main problem is that of Atlantis itself, a nation now of nit-pickers, if not fruit-pickers wandering soulless orchard roads. Why should the young be sifted like chaff and wheat at 12 short years of age? And to four decimal places too, forsooth. They should be banded, banked and balloted. If randomness prevail to some extent, fewer will be inclined to overclock their children, or as the terrible legend goes, send their children through the fire of Moloch.

Give them their bonuses for proximity, but do not give them too much. Let each council of each school choose who they take in, but only to a fifth of the harvest. Let the remaining four fifths be as random as the raindrops in the ocean. Then we will know which schools are truly best, and which have been as milkmaids stealing cream.

I laughed at that. The spell shattered, and I awoke alone to the sound of distant howling, as if a wolf had claimed all the wilderness for his own.

Dealing with the Problem of Meritocracy

The problem of meritocracy is merit. This problem is twofold: firstly, the definition of merit is mutable and contentious; secondly, the reach of merit is variable in duration and uneven in scope. There is no doubt that we can define various merits and what they imply; there is also no doubt that merit has scope and duration with respect to its influence over what we are likely to be able to achieve, having attained it. However, the nature of that relationship is too vague for a modern person's reasonable comfort.

What I propose therefore is that the burden of meritocracy be removed from the poor sad arbiters of the civil service and the admissions committees. We should make those who apply for entry justify the inclusion of all the elements of their CVs — if a prospective medical student lists a hundred achievements, make him demonstrate by reason or example why they are relevant to his intended profession and the life it entails. And give them all the same limits — a thousand words, two thousand — it matters not except that we acknowledge that a life is a life, and no matter how much merit you cram into it, there will be limits to how much use a hundred pieces of merit can be.

But who determines what is sufficiently reasonable or exemplary? That comes back to the first half of our problem — how do we know what it is?

And who knows what will be useful that we should look for its seeds in the past? That comes back to the second half of our problem — how do we know what it does?

That's what we should do during the interview. Find the uncommon and the rare, and make the candidates justify those first. By definition, these things are outliers, and not many. Next, find the very common, and put them in a Likert scale instrument. Make all the candidates rank these common merits, say 20 of them. Take the top merits from this phase and mark them as 'to be ignored'. Clearly, since everyone has them and wants them, they are of no value in differentiation.

At this point, we can select say 1500 candidates for 300 places in a medical school. Put them in groups of 6. Play survival games of various kinds. Add the scores. Pick the second or third best (but not both of them) from each group of 6. That gives a selection of 250 successful candidates who are adept at doing well but not too well, and 1250 unsuccessful. Make the remaining 1250 compete for the last 50 places in some other profession. If they won't, eliminate them; clearly, they are the kind who shun opportunities.

You should now have a thousand or so. Ask them to wait a year, then put them back into the mix.

"So arbitrary!" everyone will cry. "What gives you the right to do this crazy thing?"

Nobody. If I am made an arbiter, I will be arbitrary. That is what arbiters do.

Meritocracy, Graciousness & Success

Today we were treated to a fireside chat on the topic of three virtues sadly misinterpreted by modern society (so the speaker said). This is nothing new, but the speaker invested this sad state with urgency. We do not want a meritocracy based on false and soulless merit, nor success based on selfish endeavour.

What we do want is to be people who have found mastery, and growth, and service. Especially the last, or else how can the best that is yet to be ever be?

Dartington and the Gnome

When one trawls the archives, one learns the most amazing things. This is a tale of Lord Dartington before he became a Laboured Peer, and how he met a Gnome to surprising effect.

It seems that one Young, an inquirer into the lives of those in Londinium's sunrise quarter (what we would have called a muckraker, but now call a sociologist), dug deep into the past and decided (a la Marx) that the sad and sorry state of these lives was based on the fact that they were tagged as people of insufficient merit. Essentially, the apparatus that defines merit, and the delivery of labels of merit, had bypassed them to their everlasting disadvantage.

Young went to the Economic School of Londinium (as did the Gnome); his doctoral exercise was about these lives and was duly traded in for the doctor's cloak in 1955. The Gnome, as you may recall, received his a year later, in 1956, for his work on guessing how much income a nation might have.

Three years later, in 1958, Young, still not Baron Dartington, published a powerful satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which he predicted that birds giving themselves more exotic plumage would feather their nest at the expense of birds who did not know how to capitalise on their own plumage. In 1959, the Gnome started a country on the road to meritocracy. He seems to have convinced the Thunderer of the merits of meritocracy.

And so, Atlantis was founded on the misconception of a satire. Or so it seems. Myths are hard to work out, sometimes.

When City & State Are One (Part III)

Tonight I was at the Atlantean Chirurgeons' Society 50th Anniversary Dinner. The physicians and surgeons of this professional association had their celebrations graced by the High Priest of the White Order himself, and his associated bodyguard of battle sorcerers armed with clairaudience, clairvoyance, and wands of ballistic opposition.

The High Priest gave an interesting sermon, which was full of intelligent comments about the place of professional associations with respect to priesthoods (or at least, as most will say, the White Order which is dominant in this land). Despite the fact that his father is the Thunderer, feared and beloved by the masses, his elitism tonight was focussed on the many physicians in his immediate consanguinity — uncles, cousins at various removes, his sister.

It is a benign and active elitism which prevents Atlantis from sinking beneath the waves. Despite cynicism (the dogs!) and skepticism (the agnosticism!) it is widely acknowledged that most of it is benign, has benign motives, has brought universal education and healthcare and shelter to the populace. It is also a kind of elitism that only a city-state can produce.

What is unique about city-state elitism? In one word, consanguinity. If the talent pool and the gene pool are both small, then the natural or social selection of mating pairs leads to elitism that seems to be nepotistic, but really isn't. It is a fact that the talent is concentrated to a large extent in a bunch of people who happen to share a lot of genes. The small talent and gene pool simply means that those with the genes to succeed at optimal levels will do so and will also be related.

They will also ascend to the top of the meritocracy insofar as intelligence is both an environmental and genetic trait. And the perks of position, the kratos and bia, will ensure that many of those who are similar in outlook (possibly because of shared traits both social and genetic) will continue to stay in the running for such apical positions.

When City & State Are One (Part II)

When the city and the state are one, the focus tends to be on urban geography and urban economics. In a sense, the hinterland of the state is outsourced, and negotiations between the city-state and her neighbours create the embedding environment of countryside and sources of physical sustenance.

Atlantis used to have pig farms and vegetable farms. It still experiments with horticulture and minor agriculture, but the vast majority of its inputs are from outside. Atlantis itself is mostly tall towers filled with wizards and would-be wizards; even the peasants and farmers deal in minor enchantments and live in towers. Most of Atlantis now appears to be what some people might call a service economy: an economic state based mainly on the trading of services of one kind or another.

What has this got to do with education? Well, standardised quantitative education is an excellent tool for stratification. You can actually use grades to create a gradient, from those who do well in national examinations and will one day be priests and wizards, sorcerers and generals; to those who do not do so well and will become hedge-wizards and kitchen magicians, drivers and cooks. Note, however, that even a cook can become rich if he is a great cook.

Drawing Lines (Part V): Elitism vs Meritocratism

A meritocracy is a power structure in which ruling authority is delivered by those deemed most meritorious. The problem of course lies in the definition of merit. History shows us that merit tends to be defined by those in power; the trick then is to 'sell' the idea that merit can be made definitive and objective.

This trick is of course best executed through the use of numbers and statistics, since (for some reason) they are seen as more objective than words and ideas. This means that a proper meritocracy needs a national or global statistic-delivering system which produces statistics correlated to performance in things seen to be of utilitarian value. Examinations are a possible example of one such system.

An elite is of course the most meritorious or most powerful subgroup in a sociocultural entity. Looking at the previous two paragraphs, it is obvious that meritocracy can be used to establish an elite, and that an elite has by definition a large stake in establishing a meritocracy.

The difference between elitism and meritocratism is therefore a subtle one. An elitist believes that there is nothing inherently wrong with cultivating, developing, nurturing, maintaining, and establishing an elite. A meritocrat believes that there is nothing inherently wrong with using a system that identifies elites and then cultivates, develops, nurtures, maintains and establishes them. The difference lies in the fact that an elitist assumes the presence of an elite a priori, while a meritocrat believes that starting from whatever you have, you can develop one.

Closed Systems, No Real Winners

The peril of having a closed system is twofold: firstly, there are no really closed systems in real life, as far as we can tell; secondly, a system that is treated as closed will eventually fall into a state of either stasis or equilibrium in which no new outcomes are possible, or in which there is only a very limited set of outcomes.

This was highlighted in the local morning paper's editorial today. Atlantis, as we all know, claims that (and acts as if) it is a meritocracy. But the editorial today noted, quoting Amartya Sen, that "meritocracy is an intuitively appealing but 'essentially underdefined' principle. It is underdefined because much hinges on what counts as merit. And in a meritocracy, as in any other system, the idea of the good, and therefore of merit, is determined by that system's winners."

This is exacerbated, of course, if the system is essentially a closed system or is treated as such. It is a simple way to perdition: since the state is successful, the successors must have the same qualities as the existing winners. If they have different qualities, they must be losers (not to put too fine a point on it). Hence, just as with the College of Cardinals or any other cadre-type system, we should use the winners to select more winners by criteria similar to those by which they themselves were elected, selected, nominated, or chosen with divine imprimatur.

Why perdition? Because the system is not truly closed. As the world changes, if there is not some scope for variation, the unnatural selection will lead to 'winners' who actually cannot cope with the world as it turns out to be. It is even worse if your first iteration of winners was actually a class of 'winners by accident', 'winners by determination', or 'winners by default'. In the first case, you got lucky and are expecting to continue to be lucky. In the second case, you decide who should win and so they did. In the third case, you had nobody else, and what you had was sufficient for the win.

One problem is that the world is interconnected. It is not a purely statistical crapshoot. If you were a winner (and if you created losers, especially), the world will adapt to your win and attempt to emulate, dominate, or otherwise neutralise or defeat your strategy. What was an advantage in the first iteration may become a liability in successive situations. Winners by accident are not normally repeat winners unless they quickly figure out how they won.

Another problem is that the intellectual inbreeding or culling that is likely to occur is memetically fatal to most (if not all) cultures in the long run. You might argue that what succeeded in the past should succeed in the future with some legitimacy, using an inductive approach (an 'all swans I have seen so far are black, so the next one will also be black' approach). Even if it is true, the best you get is stasis. But what if the next swan is white, and you have killed all the observers who would look for a white swan? You might starve to death in the midst of plenty, deprived of your swan diet by disbelief. Winners by determination (or termination) are inherently limited.

And finally, there is the problem of mediocrity. People who win by not having opposition may eventually become unable to identify what is better or what is worse. After all, they are winners, and they never needed to be better than what they are. They never faced a credible and determined opposition, they were never exposed to serious intellectual cut and thrust in a public arena. If you select your future winners and leaders from people like these, you are doomed to the fate of the mediocre – being moderately successful in all things but never emerging from the middle of the statistical distribution appropriate to your situation.

What then is to be done? The first step is to aim for a perspective which treats systems as likely to be open. The second step is to develop talent with an eye to memetic diversity and distribution. And the third step is to stop selecting people who are either like yourself or who are predisposed to agree with you most of the time.

Departure

Schools, one tends to think, must be places where scholars congregate. After all, a scholar is by definition a member of a school. There are other things we imagine to be true about schools – that learning takes place here, that cognitive and experiential progress is made as students are schooled, that all this is taking place in a systematic and orderly pattern, that it is all supported by a well-crafted physical plant and a human organisation that is thoughtfully laid out in ranks and hierarchies.

But in every school, not all of it is true all the time. There are good departures and bad departures. The narrative of departure is always melancholic for somebody, though. More worrisome is the idea that a school has departed from some of its foundational values; this kind of departure is akin to apostasy, though perhaps a lesser relative.

Think of it this way. The Atlantis we speak of is an island fiefdom. It has been a paramount and unrivalled trading centre for 600 years in this part of the world. Economic pragmatism is deep in the bones of all who have lived here and those who come here to live. Do you really think that philosophical and religious considerations will rise to the top?

It is clear that if we were to look at the institutions of learning in Atlantis, we would see that education would primarily be aimed at gaining legitimacy and controlling legitimacy with respect to the outside world. Educational principles and reforms in that area would thus made subordinate to economic principles. At the very least, it could be claimed that economic pragmatism was a large factor in any educational decision.

You could probably say that any educational institution in Atlantis would have the primary purpose of bestowing qualifications
with three main qualities: economic impact on the local arena, widespread acceptance in the global arena, and ease of control and dispensation within the social arena. The first would give the citizens a reason for falling in line, the second would make Atlantis a major provider of qualified talent, and the third would enable the government of the day to determine, control and reward those who should rise to the top.

This would be called meritocracy. Few would realise that in a meritocracy, someone (or some entity) always determines what 'merit' is, and that entity would therefore be the one determining where power should lie. After all, the linguistic bastard called 'meritocracy' is either better called 'aristocracy' (='power to those who are excellent') or 'meritopotence' (='power which one receives from deserving it'). Either way, it begs the question of who is excellent, or who deserves it.

This philosophical basis, no matter how well hidden, is actually not a problem for educational institutions which from the beginning were designed to be tools of the state. The most obvious example would be the Integrated Resortium (formerly the Atlantean Institute), an institution used to producing wielders of thunderbolts and holders of power and privilege.

At the same time, it is (or should be) a serious problem to educational institutions which once thought they had a religious mandate for the education of the young, with the intent of preparing them for all their later life (and afterlife). Playing the game of meritocracy would certainly make them co-conspirators with the wrong spirit, and playing it with great joy (in the style of the former AI) would just make it worse. This would be the last betrayal, the ultimate departure, the curtain falling as the dread Anarch bestrides the stage like a Colossus.

It would be interesting to see if this were true. That is what I've been doing for the last few years.