An excellent article on the processes at play, and how they are distinct from meritocracy. It seems to me that our current system sits in a sort of grey area between the testing-focused meritocracies of East Asia, which provide for a smart elite at the cost of imposing a strong conformity incentive, and the older, rugged individualist American meritocracy, in which individuals who get results are promoted, and those who fail, regardless of intelligence, just “couldn’t cut it”. In many ways, we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds—I see plenty of smart, well-testing derelicts who could’ve been pipelined into very productive work, and I see plenty of high-agency people in the process of being beaten down by a system that doesn’t want the boat rocked.
Something I don’t see mentioned in these sorts of discussions is impact this has in practice, on issues of national scale and importance. As a timely example, consider the hypersonic missile race. As you brought up, war tests claims of meritocracy ruthlessly, and in a way that makes it very difficult to obfuscate failure.
Infamously, the U.S. was first passed by Russia (in 2017)[1], then China (in 2019)[2], and expecting its first fully-operational hypersonic missile system in 2026. [3]
Even Iran is speculated to have fielded hypersonic missiles, though, for obvious reasons, this is murky.
This is despite a vastly larger investment on the part of the U.S., with a much larger population than Russia has to work with.
The pipeline that used to win these conflicts for the U.S. involved pipelining smart young Midwesterners into the military, ASVAB-ing them into R&D at the first opportunity, and relying on a culture of pride in results to get the effective ones noticed and promoted. Increasingly, this pipeline has thinned at both ends, with the internal selection effects fraying and the kids who would’ve gone in treating the system, increasingly, as hostile to their interests and seeking other paths. What remains are people who optimize for compliance and uncontroversiality - I’ve seen this change across industry as well. I wish I knew what the kids who would’ve been designing hypersonics are doing instead, now, but I’d venture a guess that the answer is depressing. The best of them probably go into AI capabilities research, on the basis that the field has enough money, influence, and perceived importance to escape much of the anti-meritocratic pressure seen elsewhere.
even with every demographic advantage, the system isn’t looking for people who won’t perform enthusiastic consent. It sent me an invitation to audition, but when I wouldn’t dance, it silently moved on.
I strongly agree with this, and it’s worse than it sounds. Anecdotally, the people who take sincere pride in their work—the people whose ultimate desire is to solve hard problems or build beautiful things—are also the people with a strong, implicit revulsion towards lying, or any kind of performative behavior. This isn’t necessarily anything on the autism spectrum; they view it as fundamentally ugly or dishonorable. Selecting for people with a passion for status instead of a passion for greatness isn’t merely orthogonal to quality of the people who eventually make it into the elite.
As a side note, I will say that a lot of online figures, VB Knives in particular, have built a ‘brand’ around apologism for the status quo that is seemingly optimized to provoke outrage and backlash rather than to be correct, and, while I generally prefer to assume good faith, I don’t assign a high probability to him looking at counter-evidence to his position and changing his mind.
Speculation continues, since they haven’t used it yet, but I don’t see any serious people claiming that they’re lying when they say it’s ready for use.
I’m unable to find strong recent news on this. Most sources I can see say they intend to field it “by 2025”, but I can’t find credible sources saying that they’ve done so.
Until a few years ago the kids went into quant. They still do, but AI capabilities has started recruiting them too. There’s another issue you’re missing with the USA military’s R&D. A majority of the students at MIT are now foreigners or children of foreigners, up from ~10% fifty years ago, and the USA has repeatedly stated China is its greatest threat.
The talent exists, even specifically for war. MIT holds a Battlecode competition every year and the top teams would bring drone warfare to a new paradigm. They are not interested. War is unpopular in general among college students, but it is especially unpopular at MIT. The military sends recruiters every year to the career fairs and everyone walks right past them. They get fewer conversations than startups which are semi scams.
During WWII the USA actively recruited German scientists, but today Chinese scientists are deemed a ‘security risk’. I heard an MIT professor moved back to China due to safety concerns last year. I have not heard, but suspect that many students did not return to MIT after Trump denied Harvard visas. Amusingly, at the same time US universities have become less friendly to foreigners, China has increased scholarships for foreigners.
Maybe I’m wasting my time arguing at length against obviously bad faith apologetics, but on the other hand there’s not much that can be done without common knowledge that they’re in bad faith.
An excellent article on the processes at play, and how they are distinct from meritocracy. It seems to me that our current system sits in a sort of grey area between the testing-focused meritocracies of East Asia, which provide for a smart elite at the cost of imposing a strong conformity incentive, and the older, rugged individualist American meritocracy, in which individuals who get results are promoted, and those who fail, regardless of intelligence, just “couldn’t cut it”. In many ways, we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds—I see plenty of smart, well-testing derelicts who could’ve been pipelined into very productive work, and I see plenty of high-agency people in the process of being beaten down by a system that doesn’t want the boat rocked.
Something I don’t see mentioned in these sorts of discussions is impact this has in practice, on issues of national scale and importance. As a timely example, consider the hypersonic missile race. As you brought up, war tests claims of meritocracy ruthlessly, and in a way that makes it very difficult to obfuscate failure.
Infamously, the U.S. was first passed by Russia (in 2017)[1], then China (in 2019)[2], and expecting its first fully-operational hypersonic missile system in 2026. [3]
Even Iran is speculated to have fielded hypersonic missiles, though, for obvious reasons, this is murky.
This is despite a vastly larger investment on the part of the U.S., with a much larger population than Russia has to work with.
The pipeline that used to win these conflicts for the U.S. involved pipelining smart young Midwesterners into the military, ASVAB-ing them into R&D at the first opportunity, and relying on a culture of pride in results to get the effective ones noticed and promoted. Increasingly, this pipeline has thinned at both ends, with the internal selection effects fraying and the kids who would’ve gone in treating the system, increasingly, as hostile to their interests and seeking other paths. What remains are people who optimize for compliance and uncontroversiality - I’ve seen this change across industry as well. I wish I knew what the kids who would’ve been designing hypersonics are doing instead, now, but I’d venture a guess that the answer is depressing. The best of them probably go into AI capabilities research, on the basis that the field has enough money, influence, and perceived importance to escape much of the anti-meritocratic pressure seen elsewhere.
I strongly agree with this, and it’s worse than it sounds. Anecdotally, the people who take sincere pride in their work—the people whose ultimate desire is to solve hard problems or build beautiful things—are also the people with a strong, implicit revulsion towards lying, or any kind of performative behavior. This isn’t necessarily anything on the autism spectrum; they view it as fundamentally ugly or dishonorable. Selecting for people with a passion for status instead of a passion for greatness isn’t merely orthogonal to quality of the people who eventually make it into the elite.
As a side note, I will say that a lot of online figures, VB Knives in particular, have built a ‘brand’ around apologism for the status quo that is seemingly optimized to provoke outrage and backlash rather than to be correct, and, while I generally prefer to assume good faith, I don’t assign a high probability to him looking at counter-evidence to his position and changing his mind.
When the Kh-47M2 began “experimental combat duty”. Its first combat usage was in 2022.
Speculation continues, since they haven’t used it yet, but I don’t see any serious people claiming that they’re lying when they say it’s ready for use.
I’m unable to find strong recent news on this. Most sources I can see say they intend to field it “by 2025”, but I can’t find credible sources saying that they’ve done so.
Until a few years ago the kids went into quant. They still do, but AI capabilities has started recruiting them too. There’s another issue you’re missing with the USA military’s R&D. A majority of the students at MIT are now foreigners or children of foreigners, up from ~10% fifty years ago, and the USA has repeatedly stated China is its greatest threat.
The talent exists, even specifically for war. MIT holds a Battlecode competition every year and the top teams would bring drone warfare to a new paradigm. They are not interested. War is unpopular in general among college students, but it is especially unpopular at MIT. The military sends recruiters every year to the career fairs and everyone walks right past them. They get fewer conversations than startups which are semi scams.
During WWII the USA actively recruited German scientists, but today Chinese scientists are deemed a ‘security risk’. I heard an MIT professor moved back to China due to safety concerns last year. I have not heard, but suspect that many students did not return to MIT after Trump denied Harvard visas. Amusingly, at the same time US universities have become less friendly to foreigners, China has increased scholarships for foreigners.
Maybe I’m wasting my time arguing at length against obviously bad faith apologetics, but on the other hand there’s not much that can be done without common knowledge that they’re in bad faith.
To be clear, the article stands on its own.