On "Meritocracy" and Machine Learning
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best - The Communist Manifesto
thinking about how it's pretty common to critique the total failure of systems that are naïvely described as "merotocratic" to actually elevate the most meritorious people, when in fact the whole idea of meritocracy is in fact born of the false belief that people can have an absolute "merit" (let alone that it determines how much power they should be able to exert) - nex3
A key moment in my professional and personal development was when I was reading a ton of data science / machine learning articles for work, I found one in which the author outlined a very solid approach to comparing model performance, then completely undermined it (intentionally) with a paragraph on the inadequacy of "merit" as a concept.
He wasn't simply attacking overly simplistic ML assumptions, but tied the difficulty of defining "merit" in a sterile computational system to professional, social, and political ones - if we're losing sleep objectively defining the quality of a statistical construct, how could we ever be comfortable applying that logic to the messy systems of human interaction and governance.
It was a relatively short aside in a fairly unimportant article, but the comfort with which the author pivoted from technical to fiercely political was genuinely inspiring to me, and still informs a lot of my thinking.