Wednesday, June 14, 2006

V. Sanil: What is called "Merit"?


In the second installment (the first one is here), Prof. V. Sanil (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Delhi) explores the notion of 'merit'. He informs me that this article too was a result of e-mail discussions with his students and friends.

I am publishing it in full with Sanil's permission. Comments are welcome.

* * *

What is called "Merit"?

Whenever my students bag plum jobs or win cricket matches or top in quiz contests I join in their celebration, by wishing and congratulating them, and on rare occasions, treating them to coffee or ice cream. They have won awards, accolades, recognition from all over the world. While feeling proud of my students and sharing their excitement and enthusiasm, I never realized that I was committing myself to the myth and metaphysics of “merit”. I thought they earned their victory through hard work, imagination and commitment. I did not know that the real secret behind their victory was something twitching within their brain called merit. I did not know that every time they passed a test or won a competition, they were expressing their inherent merit, which not only made them win now, but made them the default winners of all future competitions and tests.

Today, I find merit is a matter of contention in the ongoing debate on reservation. Some say merit and merit alone be the criterion for admission to any office. Not many have the audacity to claim, at least in public, that the upper castes are inherently meritorious. They claim that fact that the concentration of merit lies in the upper caste is a matter of chance. The opponents too accept that in the final count it is merit that matters. Their problem is with the concentration of merit within the upper caste. They hold that it is not a matter of chance but the work of systematic exclusion of lower castes over a long period in history, which has led to this concentration. Therefore, since the upper caste skew towards merit is a human creation, it should be undone by human intervention. Reservation is seen to be one such intervention. The sympathizers of this position want a level playing field before the merit game starts. Some radicals may hold that the contemporary standards of merit are based on upper-caste activities like engineering and medicine, and the purpose of the intervention should be to extend the scope of merit to include activities such as sweeping, shaving and tribal art. In sum, all agree that merit is what matters. The debate is about location and the criteria.

It is time we question this consensus on merit. Does merit matter in modern society and institutions? Is merit an adequate concept to understand creativity in modern practices? Does the rejection of merit as myth lead to inefficacy and the celebration of mediocrity? My answer to all questions is the same. No.

Let us begin with the most popular definition of merit. Merit refers to an innate ability to undertake and excel in certain activities, jobs etc. Merit is not a descriptive term. It is also evaluative. Merit demands or commands recognition and rewards. Had merit been a god-given or inborn ability, why should we reward the person who happens to posses it? We respect a person only if he has put in his own efforts to develop and cultivate his inborn abilities. Whether he is born with meritorious qualities or not, it is through his own efforts that he can become a legitimate owner of his merit and worthy of recognition and reward. Here we see merit more as a matter of nurture and less of nature.

Nurturing inborn abilities takes place in society. Hence social factors enter into our definition of merit. The conditions under which this nurturing takes place become crucial for the evaluation of merit. Merit becomes worthy of recognition only of it is nurtured under legitimate conditions. What do we mean by legitimate condition? It is one in which everyone has equal opportunity to develop their inherent abilities. We need a level playing field for cultivating our merit. It is in a society that values equal opportunity that merit becomes worthy of respect. This is where merit meets the claims of social justice. Some emphasize social justice and make it a necessary condition for the identification of merit. Some emphasize merit and claim that possessing and developing in born abilities have primacy over any consideration of the conditions under which such nurturing takes place. Non-interference in the way meritorious people exercise their merit itself is the only criterion for justice. This sets the ground for the merit vs social justice debate.

In my opinion, the best way to solve this merit vs justice issue is to dissolve or de-center the very idea of merit. The question of justice has to meet many challenges. Merit is not one among them. Merit is de-centered not by claims of justice but by the changing conditions of creativity.

There are some inherent difficulties in conceptualizing merit. If merit is an inherent ability then it must be an ability for something. According to this definition JEE selects those who have an ability for engineering. AIIMS entrance test tests your ability to pursue the medical profession. This move to define merit with reference to specific practices has some inherent problems. We can ascribe an ability to do something to a person only if that person is already involved in that activity. At least he should have an active and sincere interest in that activity. Ability for engineering means the ability to do good engineering. Such an ability is discernable only in someone who has a reasonably good idea about the rules, objectives and values governing the practice of engineering. It makes no sense to say that JEE tests the candidate’s ability to do engineering. We know that only a handful of them have any interest in engineering. The same must be true about the candidates selected in AIIMS too. Only a very few of the JEE winners want to take up hard core engineering jobs. Most of our students opt for IITs and AIIMS because they know that a degree from these institutions will ensure them a safe future. Had shoe- polishing or shaving ensured them money and security they would have opted for them. The same entrance tests would have measured their inherent ability to perform these tasks too! A few decades ago, no one could dream of associating merit with an activity such as “managing a hotel”!

One might argue that we can think of inherent abilities without necessarily relating them to any specific activity like engineering or medicine. These are abilities that are needed for excelling in any activity, whatsoever. Logical ability, analytical ability, ability to recognize patterns and memory could be candidates for such abilities. But what is analytical ability if it is shared by an engineer, doctor, artist, cobbler and a panwallah? It could only be something which is as general and universal as human rationality or human linguistic competence. Rationality and linguistic ability are species-level achievements. It makes no sense to see them as merits of individuals. We cannot measure the excellence of a mathematician by referring to some basic logical ability all human beings possess. We cannot understand the magic of a dancer by referring to the human ability to stand erect. So merit, if defined without reference to any specific activity, becomes empty and formal. It might still serve some descriptive function. But it cannot explain why we respect and admire the meritorious.

Some are ready to give some minimal content to merit. Logical ability could be made to mean the ability to crack typical logical puzzles. This tautology is well understood and put to practice by the JEE coaching institutes. They have figured out that JEE measures only the ability to crack JEE! If you practice solving a lot of typical JEE question papers and you can pick up the ability to crack their possible variations. This makes a travesty of the concept of merit.

Entrance tests do indicate some positive qualities. They can give us a good idea about qualities like motivation, preparedness for hard work and concentration, which are important for learning anything at all. However, these qualities do not yield precise quantitative grading. We can safely assume that those who make it to the first 40 percent of the JEE list rate very high on the above qualities. Even if you make the final list by taking a lottery from the first 40 percent, we would not miss out much on the “merit” count.

It is legitimate to specify certain prerequisites for any course. These prerequisites are pieces of knowledge and not abilities. The criteria for such prerequisites are negotiable according to the resources and capabilities of the institution. Some institutions make proficiency in English a prerequisite. Some may admit students ignoring this criterion and provide them with good language courses as part of the curriculum.

Let me summarize. If merit is defined in relation to the ability to perform specific practices it is clear that entrance tests do not measure it. If merit is defined in abstraction from concrete practices it eventually coincides with universal abilities which do not call for any special mention. The only option left is to trivialize the concept by defining it as the ability to solve typical entrance test questions. Hence merit is an incoherent and ill formed concept.

Merit is rendered redundant not through logical arguments but through concrete historical changes in the nature of creativity. Creative accomplishment in modern complex industrial societies cannot be understood in terms of the inherent abilities or merits of the agents. In a traditional society a carpenter’s son becomes a carpenter and a blacksmith’s son becomes a blacksmith. Birth was the entry ticket to a profession. Once you enter with this birth ticket you can strive for excellence. Here merit is not a criterion for entry into a practice. Once you enter through a non merit, hereditary list you can strive for merit within the ongoing conduct of the practice. We all know that modernity and industrialisation changed this birth-based entry. All professions were opened to all. However, it is very important to understand the exact nature of this change.

The idea of merit has its root in a popular misunderstanding of this change. According to this popular version industrialsation replaced the criterion of birth with that of merit. A carpenter’s son would have no privilege in getting a seat in a furniture factory. Instead anyone who has the merit can get admission according to his place in the merit list. But this is not what really happened. Industralisation did not change one set of admission criteria with another. Instead it did away with all criteria for admission! It made it possible that any Tom Dick and Harry could get into any job whatsoever!

This democratization and universalisation of the mode of entry is balanced on the other end by a rationalization of the nature of work. Specific professions like carpentry, smithy, etc lost their inner coherence and distinctive existence. Traditional skill-based production which followed community specific rules and aimed at specific products had to undergo scientific analysis and planning. Work is analyzed and fragmented into some basic elements which can be re-assembled for the production of diverse goods and services. Industrialized society gives us better furniture and better shoes not because those goods are made by a new set of carpenters and cobblers who are more meritorious and skilled than the traditional hereditary ones, but because industrialisation has deskilled the worker. Workers perform some basic and repetitive and anonymous tasks which are integrated at various levels to produce toothpaste on one assembly line and toilet cleaning liquid on another. Thus, industrialisation, through the democratization of entry and rationalisation of work has made merit doubly redundant. This change happened not only on the factory floor but in the design room and the surgery theatre too.

Those who still believe in the myth of merit misunderstand the radical nature of industrial capitalism. They still hold on to a feudal conception of the nature of work. They cannot digest the revolutionary move made by capitalism to open the gates to each and everyone. They think capitalism was all about not restricting jobs to sons and daughters and opening them up to those who have the real ability to perform those tasks. They do not realize that the fundamental contribution of capitalism was in throwing the whole baby of “entry criteria” of all kinds out along with the bath water. The leaders of Indian industry do not believe in the liberating power of capitalism. They too believe that if birth is no longer the criterion for giving someone a job then something else should be there to replace it. Intelligent capitalists do not fall into this trap. Prof. Rahul Varman who teaches management at IIT Kanpur writes about his experience in a campus interview. He asked an IT boss who came to IIT for campus selection about what he looks for in the candidates. He replied that he can select anyone who has seen a computer keyboard! This man must be one of the rare Indian bosses who understand and trust the liberating power of capitalism.

Some critics of capitalism have doubted its ability to accomplish the democratization of the workforce on the one end and the rationalization of work on the other. They claim that these two moves lead to a conflict, inhibiting the growth of capitalism and leading to its eventual overthrow. Whether you believe in this doomsday prediction or not, freeing entry to jobs from any consideration of inherent ability will remain an irreversible achievement of industrial capitalism.

Rejection of merit in no way implies denigration of creativity. In the complex and highly networked modern industrial world creativity no loner resides in any individual’s head. It can be located and celebrated only at certain nodal points in this network. Anything called merit ticking in your neurons is not the enabling condition for anyone to participate in creative acts. This impossibility locating individual creativity has a challenging parallel in taking responsibility for mistakes. Does it make sense to pin point the individual who is responsible for Bhopal gas tragedy or the challenger mishap? It does not. This is not because of any deficiency in our investigation process. Here responsibility is not fixed as a response to the question “have I done anything wrong?” Instead, even before separating the right and wrong everyone, depending upon his or her institutional proximity to the site of mishap, voluntarily participate in taking collective responsibility. The old inquisitional model has no place in either fixing responsibility or ascribing creativity.

If this is correct why should there be entrance tests and job interviews? They are there as purely elimination procedures. Anyone who has seen a keyboard is eligible for a job in the IT industry. But no industry can provide jobs to all those who have seen a keyboard. So you need to eliminate some. You need a fair means for elimination. An entrance test or interview is one such fair means. However, it makes no commitment on the presence of certain qualities in those who are selected and their absence in those who are eliminated. The fairness of means of selection can be judged in terms of some standards which are internal to the selection procedure. For example, the same level of question papers should be given to everyone. No one is allowed to cheat. Everyone gets the same duration to answer a question. These standards too do not find their justification in some positive quality called merit which those who are selected through these tests allegedly possess.

So both the existence of selection tests and the criteria for their fair conduct can be explained without making any reference to merit. In fact these standards of fairness are conceivable only in a society which has done away with assertions of exclusivity – be it of birth or caste or merit. Hence merit is an imaginary construct posited by those who happen to get through a fair elimination procedure to demarcate themselves from those who are eliminated. They fantasize that they posses some positive quality or substance which justifies their selection. They cannot afford to admit that the justification of selection lies purely in the fairness of the selection procedure.

Here you may ask: if merit is a myth why do not we do away with tests and interviews and select people by drawing lottery? Why not? On many occasions lottery is a fair elimination procedure. Between two equal contestants we often select the winner through taking a lot. Why does tossing a coin become more justified as a means of elimination than say a fist fight? The admissibility of lottery as a just elimination procedure testifies to the fact that the essence of tests is pure and fair elimination. It declares that fair tests do not need any justification in terms of the presence of a positive quality. Imagine someone who is declared as winner through a lottery begins to think that he possesses something positive which made him eligible for that victory. Those who defend merit commit this mistake. If you insist on attributing a positive quality to a winner of lottery, call it luck!

You might have read a popular joke circulated by anti reservationists on the imposition of quota in Indian cricket team. From where does this joke derive its pseudo convincing power? What makes it such a vicious example? Isn’t it strange that the arguments on quota in work place get their most vicious example from the domain sports? In fact only sports can provide a pro-merit example because sports is one of the few areas of modern society where work is not yet rationalized. In an industrial society sports commands such popularity because it is one of the few avenues where we can still make a spectacle of an irrational and playful expenditure of human energy. Sports is a huge money-making business, but, unlike cinema or gambling, it has not declared itself as such.

Sports is increasingly under pressure to rationalize and industrialise itself. However, this pressure it is still an external one and sports has no inner motivation or intelligence to internalize this impetus. Frauds like match fixing are symptoms of this half hearted and incomplete commercialization of sports. Industry achieved progress because it underwent rationalisation and freed itself from feudal notions like merit due to its own inner normative demands. De-meriting has come to sports from the external pressure of bookies and advertisers and is killing its inner spirit. A rigged match, if presented properly by the media, can be more exciting and entertaining to the spectators than a genuine one. This fantasy of merit reaches the height of its perversion in American WWF wrestling. There everything – the contest, actions and spectator response – are faked for the media. Merit of the winner too is faked. This fate awaits all sports. I can see only two escape routs for sports. Either it can redefine the “merit” of players in terms of complex and abstract statistics, which is totally abstracted away from the living criteria of sports lovers (eg. Cricket). Or, sports can turn itself into an entertaining media spectacle – all sports going virtual into computer games, is a move in this direction. However, both these ways demand that we give up the notion that sports has anything to do with the pure expression of the inner abilities of the players!

Art has succeeded where sports failed. Cinema is perhaps the first art form which declared itself to be an industry. This does not mean that cinema is purely a money making business. It only means that it has reorganized and rationalised its production process along the lines of industry. Modern art too has totally done away with any reference to the skill and talent of the artist. Aesthetic appreciation makes no reference to the skill of the artist. This is testified by the popular criticism of modern art. Faced with a painting of Picasso or Hussain, many of us feel that they could very well be drawn by a four-year old child! This popular sentiment is totally justified. What makes it a great art work need not have anything to do with the skill involved in making it. Modern art has dethroned the author. A great artist Marcel Duchamp once took a toilet commode from a sanitary ware shop and exhibited it as a sculpture in the MOMA, New York. Jackson Pollack splashed paint on the canvas. All these crazy acts were made possible and respectable by the fact that in modern art, the skill or intentions of the artist have no place of privilege.

Unlike the cricket players, artists do not have, and perhaps can never have, a data-base for rating. Art has done away with all such merit lists. This is surprising. Common sense tells you that art, more than science or industry, is about inborn abilities – to produce pleasant sounds, to draw perfect pictures, to execute graceful movement etc. However it is art which has broken away from such inborn abilities. Modern music is not judged in terms of the pleasing sounds. Modern painting has nothing do with perfect shapes. Modern poetry is not an arrangement of apt words and metaphors. Children with those inborn abilities can be objects of curiosity and fun. However, such abilities have no role beyond child play.

So industry, art and most other walks of human activity have undergone rationalization and have done away with any substantive notions of merit. However our elite educational institutions – IITs, IIMs and AIIMS still live by the rhetoric of merit. Today we are told that the great threat the IITs are facing is the dilution of merit reservation could cause. However had we asked an IIT student or faculty a few days before this reservation phobia they would have given you a totally different account of the crisis of higher education. Such account would have focused mainly on what happens to these meritorious kids after they enter these institutions. They would have talked about how the coaching institutions have made any genuine expression of creative talent impossible, how students, once they enter, manipulate the system, how the competitive grading has killed ingenuity and pleasures of learning, how the cynical awareness that whatever they learn here is useless has led them to skip classes and focus more on future competitive exams and jobs. All this cynicism and self-criticism have been suddenly replaced by a self valorization of merit.

It is traumatic to live with an exalted self description based on merit on the one hand, and a cynical self awareness that merit does not mean anything on the other. Attempts to manage this contradiction has created many perversions in the academic life of these institutions. Ragging is one of the most widely known perversions of this kind. Relating ragging and merit might look a bit far-fetched. However, it is not. Ragging is prevalent only in elite institutions where new comers are admitted with great emphasis on merit. As we all know, ragging the practice of seniors welcoming newcomers through rituals of gratuitous violence and humiliation. Such acts of humiliation exists mainly in elite professional colleges and only derivatively and as a media driven excess in other colleges. Why should the newcomers who have just proved their merit be subjected to humiliation? Anthropology teaches us that such initiation ceremonies are often aimed at establishing social solidarity. In the elite institutions social solidarity between students is established around the rhetoric of merit. But the senior students who have been in the system for some time know that merit is a myth and majority in the system are just average or mediocre and the testimony of entrance examination results meant nothing. This truth has to be communicated to the newcomers without weakening the shrillness of the rhetoric of merit which sustains them. Ragging is an obscene way of sharing this truth about the lie of merit. It is an obscene wink of the eye exchanged between the seniors and juniors indicating the best kept secret of campus life. The juniors are taught how to construct this vacuous substance called merit, which despite its emptiness, can be used to create a hierarchy between them and the majority outside who could not clear the entrance tests. However, through the violent gestures of domination the seniors reproduce this hierarchy within the campus – between juniors and seniors. Both these hierarchies – between juniors and those who failed in entrance exam and between seniors and juniors are equally dubious but they support and reinforce each other. No wonder the senior who rags you most becomes your closest ally.

(“Five Point Someone”, a novel written by an ex-IITian Chetan Bhagat gives a precise insight into the trauma culture of our elite institutions. This novel shows that the best way to remain sane, humane and untraumatisd in these institutions is to pursue mediocrity voluntarily. Be cool, study for your passion for the subject, ignore arrogant faculty, take up not-so eye catching but creative projects and remain an average five pointer!! )

Let me summarise my argument. Merit is logically incoherent and empirically false and pragmatically useless. It is a fantasy created by those win tests in the hope of distinguishing themselves from those who got eliminated. Entrance tests are fair elimination tests and they do not need to find legitimacy in any such fantasy construction like merit. The persistence of the rhetoric of merit in the self description of students leads to previsions like ragging in the academic life of elite institutions. So merit is illusory and dangerous. All domains of modern industrialized capitalist democratic societies have freed themselves from the myth of the merit.

Even those who are patient with me so far might want to pose a question here: If merit is a myth why do we conduct exams and give grades? Why do we congratulate winners? Why do we recognize the accomplishment of others and motivate them for more accomplishments? You are right. I too think that exams and grades have a positive role. We must recognize the contribution and efforts of others. We must congratulate winners and join their celebrations. I want to be proud of my students and motivate them for higher achievements. But I do not think that I need to believe in merit to do any of these.

When we congratulate someone we are recognizing him as an exemplary instance of humanity and human achievement. By joining the celebration we are affirming our solidarity with his aims, values and dreams. We own him up as the best among us and there by elevate ourselves. When I congratulate a student for cracking a tough question I am not showing my admiration for his fully developed neurons. Nor am I telling him that he has inherited better genes compared to others. All that I am doing is to lift him as an exemplary model for other students and for himself and also for me as a teacher to follow. I am telling myself that I should come up with a more challenging question next time. I am telling the class that we expect similar fetes from all of them. Sometimes a student might miss a big opportunity because he scored just one or two marks less than another one. Such instances make any sincere teacher embarrassed and sad about his own evaluation. Instead of defending the objectivity of merit he would normally admit the relativity of grading and try to console the loser that it is just bad luck that he lost this time and assure him that he is equally good and he would get a better opportunity next time. This is the human context of all meaningful evolution. Teaching involves testing. However it should be motivating and inclusive and not eliminative and segregating.

In traditional societies, achievers recognized and celebrated by ascribing their success to god’s grace. To congratulate someone means to wish more and more of such grace to befall him. We can preserve something from this even if we remove its religious and deterministic aspects. This gives the winner his due but at the same time recognize the non-localizability and contingency of victory. In our secular societies celebration of achievement should be an occasion for affirming human solidarity, diversity and creativity. An incoherent and obsolete concept like merit cannot measure up to this challenge.

Exposing the concept of merit in no away implies that everything is hunky dory with the prevalent concept of social justice. The concept of justice has many challenges to meet. All that I tried to argue is that merit is not one among those challenges. It does not merit any serious attention. However, I do not believe the most impressive emancipatory struggles of our time are struggles for social justice. I doubt if justice can capture their ethical and experimental core. We can get into these issues about justice only after we free ourselves from dubious notions like merit.

12 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    What a post! So many ideas.

    "We cannot measure the excellence of a mathematician by referring to some basic logical ability all human beings possess". This statement is wrong. We do precisely this. The difference is that a mathematician can do what any human can do faster, in a more abstract situation for longer periods of time.An example would be that we all make analogies all the time, the mathematician does that as well professionally and finds interesting results using this technique in very abstract conditions.

    The statement that JEE today measures only the ability to crack JEE is completely true except for a few bright souls.

    "These prerequisites are pieces of knowledge and not abilities". This is a loaded statement combined with Sanil's idea that merit has been completely democratized in modern capitalism."It made it possible that any Tom Dick and Harry could get into any job whatsoever". This is not true. The reference to the assembly line as an example is mixed because it shows the area where intellectual value has dissapeared but does not display the fact that there is a lot of intellectual value in inventing the idea of an assembly line which was done by an individual called Henry Ford;he was richly rewarded by the market for this invention. Edison understood what Sanil is talking about and this is what he had to say about it - "From his neck down, a man is worth a couple of dollars a day. From his neck up, he is worth anything that his brain can produce"

    The example of the IT boss is also mixed becuase it does not mention the case of companies like Texas Instruments, Google, NVidia who do not take any body can recognize the keyboard and use elaborate means of evaluation and most IITians are not upto their entry standards.

    " In the complex and highly networked modern industrial world creativity no loner resides in any individual’s head". This is not true. Creativity lies in the men who invented Jaipur foot, created the first algorithms for Google, invented the transistor, discovered general relativity and the women who inevented secure torpedo guidance and developed the famous Hodgkin-Huxley equations. And we reward these individuals for these inventions.

    The analogy of a lottery hides the fact that any coin tossing is the final step after other many rounds of compeition and not the first and only one.It does remind me of a delightful example given by Parkinson in his book describing his law for the pursuit of progress about the selection for the prime minister of ruritania . The minister is chosen by placing an ad for any person who can satisfy certain prerequisites like fighting a boxing champion for ten rounds , convincing the church elders about the morality of rock n roll and so on . Two candidates land up on seeing this ad and the winner is finally chosen by asking the secretary as whom does she prefer by simply looking at them.

    The portion talking about the crucial problems faced by IITs in undergraduate education is the best because it is absolutely right on mark.More detail on that later in my blog.

    The admission that entrance tests like JEE are elimination tests and provide no means of effectively seeking out creativity are also bang on target. Simple ideas like providing an entry for the kids who do so amazingly well on the Intel science contests where they invent new devices have not been used. The example of Apurv Mishra,16 who invented a device for paralysed people to communicate comes to mind.

    Sanil's writings are very interesting just like Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Yogendra Yadav among others. I wonder if they can be convinced to maintain blogs where we can interact with them fruitfully.

  2. Anonymous said...

    Prof Sanil says :Therefore, since the upper caste skew towards merit is a human creation, it should be undone by human intervention. Reservation is seen to be one such intervention. The sympathizers of this position want a level playing field before the merit game starts".

    Assuming that all that is stated about the discrimination meted out to backward classes is true, what kind of retributive justice is it that tells a girl or a boy in the so-called upper caste, " Your forefathers sinned for 500 years. Therefore, it is only fair that you and your descendants should be placed under a handicap for the next 500 years.."? Like the Aesopian fable of the wolf and the lamb.

  3. Anonymous said...

    Your forefathers sinned for 2500 years and hence YOUR ARE IN A POSITION TO SCORE MOREMARKS.

    So the persons who were deprived education should be compensated

  4. Anonymous said...

    Dr. Bruno,

    Are you suggesting that some folks can not score marks because several generations ago their forefathers underwent hardship? Wouldn't that mean that there was some genetic alterations? In other words, when a Dalit or OBC is born today, are they inherently less equipped upstairs?

    Empirical evidence suggests otherwise though. Scores of OBCs and some Dalits secure seats on a regular basis without resorting to the quota crutch.

  5. Anonymous said...

    Dr. Bruno,

    Are you suggesting that some folks can not score marks because several generations ago their forefathers underwent hardship? Wouldn't that mean that there was some genetic alterations? In other words, when a Dalit or OBC is born today, are they inherently less equipped upstairs?

    Empirical evidence suggests otherwise though. Scores of OBCs and some Dalits secure seats on a regular basis without resorting to the quota crutch.

  6. Anonymous said...

    Barbarindian,

    There are no genetic alterations, I agree. But there are social alterations. Daliths & OBCs don`t study at same prestigious schools as FCs. They study where there are no good teachers, facilities etc. There are also some of them(upper middle class) who can go to same schools as FCs. For this we can exclude only those from quota.

  7. Anonymous said...

    In villages all caste students study in same bad schools. For this in TamilNadu they are considering implementation of 15% Quota for village students in all communities.(The exact details I still don`t know)

  8. Anonymous said...

    The author's arguments are flawed. He has made valid observations but chosen to intrepret them in a manner which is not coherent. He gives two arguments to prove why "merit" is a myth. The first argument points to the limitations in the current JEE and how/why it can not measure "merit". Then he tries to show that industrialization has demostrated that the idea of "merit" is a myth.

    I have separate rebuttals for the arguments:

    Argument :1
    -----------

    "This move to define merit with reference to specific practices has some inherent problems. We can ascribe an ability to do something to a person only if that person is already involved in that activity."

    That is Correct.

    "At least he should have an active and sincere interest in that activity."

    Not correct. Markers for a success in a given field have nothing to do with an individual's interest in that field.


    "Ability for engineering means the ability to do good engineering. Such an ability is discernable only in someone who has a reasonably good idea about the rules, objectives and values governing the practice of engineering."

    He further says:
    "It makes no sense to say that JEE tests the candidate’s ability to do engineering."

    Correct. And thats precisely NOT what JEE does !JEE tries to select people who have markers for success in engineering profession. The markers are defined by the JEE committe and you can argue that they are wrong - but just wanted to clarify this one.
    You can even say that its not very obvious what those markers are in the current JEE format. That would be a valid objection too and JEE committe e needs to answer that. Markers are just that - indicators and not abilities themselves. In a complex multi variable system, the best we can hope to do is to look at statistical relevance due to lack of better models. So presence of a marker increases the probability of success in future.


    "We know that only a handful of them have any interest in engineering. The same must be true about the candidates selected in AIIMS too. Only a very few of the JEE winners want to take up hard core engineering jobs. Most of our students opt for IITs and AIIMS because they know that a degree from these institutions will ensure them a safe future."

    Again : markers dont indicate interest. About students not taking up hard core engineering jobs -Thats human nature !! Very few people so early in their lives at undergrad level know what interests them most.
    We need to provide opportunities in all areas so that people go ahead and explore rather than go for whatever they should to ensure a financially safe future. If today other engineering disciplines dont provide lucrative job opportunities and only IT does, then it is inevitable that most people will not work in their core areas of engg.

    "Had shoe- polishing or shaving ensured them money and security they would have opted for them. The same entrance tests would have measured their inherent ability to perform these tasks too! A few decades ago, no one could dream of associating merit with an activity such as “managing a hotel”!"

    Agree with the first line. But second line - this is where the argument goes wrong. The current test aims to measure markers for success in engineering. If the IITs were imparting training in shoe polish and shaving, the tests would need to be designed so as to measure markers for success in that profession. Your claim that the current test fails miserably at measuring the markers for success in engineering is a separate topic and calls for change in the test format rather than argue that any concept of test based admission is wrong.


    "One might argue that we can think of inherent abilities without necessarily relating them to any
    specific activity like engineering or medicine. These are abilities that are needed for excelling in any activity, whatsoever. Logical ability, analytical ability, ability to recognize patterns and memory could be candidates for such abilities. But what is analytical ability if it is shared by an engineer, doctor, artist, cobbler and a panwallah? It could only be something which is as general and universal as human rationality or human linguistic competence. Rationality and linguistic ability are species-level achievements. It makes no sense to see them as merits of individuals."

    Author's analysis totally disregards any individual differences between humans.Such differences are biological and natural and provide us as a species with diversity to be
    able to better adapt to our changing environment. There is no biological evidence to show that such differences are rooted in man made caste or race or ethnicity and they exist in any given population group in any corner of the world.

    The analysis also considers any special talent as something totally different and not merely a greater degree of a talent normal humans possess. This is incorrect. For any
    given talent, you will always find a distribution over degree in any given population. So a renowned mathematician has better reasonng, abstract thinking, and problem solving skills than a normal person. Even amongst mathematicians, some have better skills and abilities than others. A sportsperson has better reflexes, has better and finer control over movements of various body parts and physical strength than a normal human. A fine dancer has better balance and grace in movements and other physical attributes than normal humans.

    "We cannot measure the excellence of a mathematician by referring to some basic logical ability all human beings possess. We cannot understand the magic of a dancer by referring to the human ability to stand erect. So merit, if defined without reference to any specific activity, becomes empty and formal. It might still serve some descriptive function. But it cannot explain why we respect and
    admire the meritorious."

    Same flaw in the argument as pointed above.

    "Some are ready to give some minimal content to merit. Logical ability could be made to mean the ability to crack typical logical puzzles. This tautology is well understood and put to practice by the JEE coaching institutes. They have figured out that JEE measures only the ability to crack JEE! If you practice solving a lot of typical JEE question papers and you can pick up the ability to crack their possible variations. This makes a travesty of the concept of merit."

    Correct to some extent. Yes the coaching institutes are training candidates to crack the exam and
    this can significantly bias the test results in favour of people who have access to such resources.

    There can be only two objections to this:
    1) Due to this extensive preparation, the markers being tested by the JEE no longer predict success in academic curriculum and later in engineering profession. In such a case, the test needs to be reviewed and redesigned if needed.

    2) Some sections of the society do not have resources to undergo such an extensive training and hence the demographics of the successful candidates is biased towards urban middle class society.The tests again need to be re-designed so as to nullify any advantage due to coachings. Extra handicap points may be given to candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds to counter this to some degree.


    Both are valid objections but they still dont imply that any measure of "merit" is bad and we should have a lottery instead. IITs need to be given freedom in deciding which markers they need to measure based on their experience on how the markers correlate with academic and professional performance later in life.

    "Entrance tests do indicate some positive qualities. They can give us a good idea about qualities like motivation, preparedness for hard work and concentration, which are important for learning anything at all. However, these qualities do not yield precise quantitative grading. We can safely assume that those who make it to the first 40 percent of the JEE list rate very high on the above qualities."

    Nice to know about the author's belief that JEE actually meausres something useful.

    "Even if you make the final list by taking a lottery from the first 40 percent, we would not miss out much on the “merit” count."

    Does the author have any data to back this up? or is he just shooting from the ...


    "Let me summarize. If merit is defined in relation to the ability to perform specific practices it is clear that entrance tests do not measure it. If merit is defined in abstraction from concrete practices it eventually coincides with universal abilities which do not call for any special mention. The only option left is to trivialize the concept by defining it as the ability to solve typical entrance test questions. Hence merit is an incoherent and ill formed concept."

    Rebuttal summary:
    -----------------

    Entrance tests measure markers for success. Due to individual differences between humans, the degree of abilities comprising these markers vary.Coachings provide individuals who can afford them advantage over those who cannot by providing extensive training in the kind of questions asked etc. The author is considering any "intrinsic talent" on a different plane than norman human capabilities and not treating them as a degree of the normal capability - hence falsely concluding that different degrees of normal human capabilities are not worth any mention and recognition.

    In any country where the supply of educational opportunity is limited and demand high, people will do whatever it takes to get advantage over others - hence the rise in coaching culture. This culture is a recent development and was not this widespread 20 years ago. The examination body can either make tests very different each year - hard to do practically or make them easy and standardised so that too much coaching is of no use to anyone - This is the path JEE is on right now. This again has the problem of too many eligible candidates and too few seats.

    To solve this problem we need more quality educational institutions.

    But to argue that the limitations of the entrance test => there are no differences in individuals and we can pick any one is plain stupid !


    Argument :2
    -----------

    "Merit is rendered redundant not through logical arguments but through concrete historical changes in the nature of creativity."


    "But this is not what really happened. Industralisation did not change one set of admission criteria
    with another. Instead it did away with all criteria for admission! It made it possible that any Tom Dick and Harry could get into any job whatsoever!"


    "Industrialized society gives us better furniture and better shoes not because those goods are made by a new set of carpenters and cobblers who are more meritorious and skilled than the traditional hereditary ones, but because industrialisation has deskilled the worker. Workers perform some basic and repetitive and anonymous tasks which are integrated at various levels to produce toothpaste on one assembly line and toilet cleaning liquid on another."

    Author is arguing that since technology displaced the skilled worker by a relatively non-skilled
    operator, technology will slowly de-skill the worker and then anyone can do anything without any
    "merit".

    The flaw here is comparison of two different job functions - that of skilled carpenters and cobblers
    to the lineman and assembly line labour. The author is ignoring the fact that infact a more skilled
    worker - "machine" displaced the human worker. The other jobs of assembly line are the by product jobs which got created in the process. And then who decides these jobs require less skill? The skill required here is of a different kind and cannot be compared to the previous one.These jobs are again being replaced by more sophisticated robots which are again more skilled than their human counterparts.

    There are certain things machines can do better than humans and they will replace humans in those functions slowly. However, it does free human creativity, talent and innovation to create more value to the society and creates new jobs which need different skills. How does this argument prove that industrialization is destroying the "myth" of "merit"? I think it is infact re-inforcing it.

    "If this is correct why should there be entrance tests and job interviews? They are there as purely elimination procedures. Anyone who has seen a keyboard is eligible for a job in the IT industry. But no industry can provide jobs to all those who have seen a keyboard. So you need to eliminate some. You need a fair means for elimination. An entrance test or interview is one such fair means. However, it makes no commitment on the presence of certain qualities in those who are selected and their
    absence in those who are eliminated."

    In an ideal society where we have plenty of opportunities, no body will be denied education and a job. However, even in such a society there will be some positions which are fewer in number than aspirants (my assumption - may not be correct) and there will be competition for them and hence admission based on some markers. It will simply mean - those who are not admitted still have a decent education/job. Healthy competition usually promotes excellence.

    "Here you may ask: if merit is a myth why do not we do away with tests and interviews and select people by drawing lottery? Why not? On many occasions lottery is a fair elimination procedure. Between two equal contestants we often select the winner through taking a lot. Why does tossing a coin become more justified as a means of elimination than say a fist fight? The admissibility of
    lottery as a just elimination procedure testifies to the fact that the essence of tests is pure and fair elimination. It declares that fair tests do not need any justification in terms of the presence of a positive quality. Imagine someone who is declared as winner through a lottery begins to think that he possesses something positive which made him eligible for that victory. Those who defend merit commit this mistake. If you insist on attributing a positive quality to a winner of lottery, call it luck!"

    Self contradictory - The author himself said that entrance exams may measure motivation, hard work and ability to concentrate. How is it pure luck?? This is plain BS !!


    "What makes it a great art work need not have anything to do with the skill involved in making it. Modern art has dethroned the author. A great artist Marcel Duchamp once took a toilet commode from a sanitary ware shop and exhibited it as a sculpture in the MOMA, New York. Jackson Pollack splashed paint on the canvas. All these crazy acts were made possible and respectable by the fact that in modern art, the skill or intentions of the artist have no place of privilege."


    It "may" mean that the skill or intentions of the artist in creating art have no place of privilege, but does it mean that the skill in identifying a great piece of art has no privilege too? If i send a roll of toilet paper to MOMA, will they put it as an exhibit?


    "Modern music is not judged in terms of the pleasing sounds. Modern painting has nothing do with perfect shapes. Modern poetry is not an arrangement of apt words and metaphors. Children with those inborn abilities can be objects of curiosity and fun. However, such abilities have no role beyond child play."

    Parameters of what constitutes a great piece of art change with time and society - like fashion. But creating today's music and modern poetry still requires some skill. How is it implied that whatever different skills creating the music of today or the modern non-rhyming poetry requires is not privileged?


    "Let me summarise my argument. Merit is logically incoherent and empirically false and pragmatically
    useless. It is a fantasy created by those win tests in the hope of distinguishing themselves from those who got eliminated. Entrance tests are fair elimination tests and they do not need to find legitimacy in any such fantasy construction like merit. The persistence of the rhetoric of merit in the self description of students leads to previsions like ragging in the academic life of elite
    institutions. So merit is illusory and dangerous."

    Did someone say "logically incoherent" ?? "empirically false" ?? Where is the damn data !! and ragging - now i cant comment on that - can i?


    "All domains of modern industrialized capitalist democratic societies have freed themselves from the myth of the merit."

    Another way to look at it is - they have created more opportunities for everyone. They still admit only 1 in 7 candidates at Harvard and Wharton. MIT does not give admission to anyone but the best students in its graduate programme. Not every scientist works at NASA. But there are community
    colleges for everyone to get a degree. There are state universities, scholarship programs, student
    loans and extra help with tuition.

    So, if you have the "merit" :) and work hard and have the will and persistence, you can get there no matter where you are born : Author's arguments about the invalidity of "merit" do not merit any further deliberation.

  9. Anonymous said...

    Akilan,

    >> Daliths & OBCs don`t study at same prestigious schools as FCs. >>

    I am responding to this post, because it illustrates very clearly why we need hard data.

    You are wrong on two counts.

    1. Daliths and OBCs are not a single group. While Daliths may not be going to the prestigious schools, OBCs certainly are. In fact, OBCs *run* many prestigious schools. Even more so if you consider that all Christians are OBCs in TN. When it comes to higher education, OBCs run an overwhelming majority of the prestigious professional colleges in both engg and medicine.


    2. You assertion is not based on any facts or data. OBCs not only go to elite schools, they dominate the super elite boarding schools in Kodai, Yercaud, and Ooty. Where do you think the kids of all the politicians, landlords, film producers, actors, mill owners, textile giants, go to study ? Where do you think their relatives, cousins, study ? Certainly not in some ramshackle village school. Certainly not with Dalits.


    There are a handful of top schools in Chennai such as PSBB, Vidya Mandir, PS, which may have an FC population. I assume you know that these are CBSE schools and are worthless for state admissions.

    Last year (2005) not a single CBSE student managed to secure admission to TN medical college(source: the Madras High Court First Bench).

    You are painting a picture of rich FC kids dominating all the good schools leaving the downtrodeen Dalits-OBCs to languish in bad schools.

    This is exactly the type of hear-say and personal feelings that need to be dismissed if we want a coherent debate on this issue.

    Only hard data can help us get to that point.

  10. Anonymous said...

    anonymous' long post is an excellent line by line rebuttal of a very long-winded and inherently confused article. I'd just like to add one point about the core construct that the author has set out to debunk. Saying: "Merit refers to an innate ability to undertake and excel in certain activities, jobs etc." sets up a very badly defined straw man, IMHO. (Especially given that this is Abi's blog, and I've figured out that Abi likes good books on social psychology :-) I'd like to recommend a book called "Self Theories" by Carol Dweck. The idea here (and in much of Dweck's work) is that people tend to believe that abilities, such as intelligence, are either fixed and immutable for a person over time, or can be improved with time, practice, and the appropriate incentives. Dweck calls people who believe the former "entity theorists", and the latter "incremental theorists", and her research shows a wide variety of differences in behavior for people who hold these different beliefs. The author of this piece is evidently very strongly entity theorist. This may explain why he gives little or no time to the argument that variations in early education might influence people's abilities in a manner that they reliably perform better or worse when they sit for their JEE or whatever other exam.

  11. Anonymous said...

    There are several overlaps, mix-ups and conflating of terms in this post. I'd like to highlight some of these.

    What is called "Merit"?

    Whenever my students bag plum jobs or win cricket matches or top in quiz contests I join in their celebration, by wishing and congratulating them, and on rare occasions, treating them to coffee or ice cream. They have won awards, accolades, recognition from all over the world. While feeling proud of my students and sharing their excitement and enthusiasm, I never realized that I was committing myself to the myth and metaphysics of “merit”. I thought they earned their victory through hard work, imagination and commitment. I did not know that the real secret behind their victory was something twitching within their brain called merit. I did not know that every time they passed a test or won a competition, they were expressing their inherent merit, which not only made them win now, but made them the default winners of all future competitions and tests.


    I wonder if anyone actually used the "inherent merit" argument, as you described above, in the current debate. Don't we all agree that by "merit" we simply mean the performance in a particular exam? I don't believe there's this interpretation of "merit" as some sort of a permanent status assigned to the individual so she can take advantage of that for the rest of her life, as you claim there is. Is there such a theme called the-possessor-of-"inherent merit"-is-a-"default winner" dominant in the current reservations debate? I don't think so.

    On the contrary, I think everyone is working with the same assumption as yours, which is that victories are to be earned "through hard work, imagination and commitment.'

    Today, I find merit is a matter of contention in the ongoing debate on reservation. Some say merit and merit alone be the criterion for admission to any office.
    Not many have the audacity to claim, at least in public, that the upper castes are inherently meritorious. They claim that fact that the concentration of merit lies in the upper caste is a matter of chance. The opponents too accept that in the final count it is merit that matters.


    Between the 2nd and last sentences above, "Some say merit and merit alone be the criterion..." and "The opponents too accept..." you are basically saying everybody agrees that merit matters (it's a bit confusing the way you went round and round to say it, but I guess you took that famous writer's liberty.)

    Which definition of "merit" are you assuming here? I'll get to the reason why I ask this question in a minute, but there are two things at play when it comes to merit: first there is opportunity to perform (in a course, in a contest, in an exam etc.,) and then, one having taken advantage of this opportunity, the resulting performance measurement itself.

    May I assume that here merit = performance measurement? Good, so we have a baseline definition of merit that both sides agree, but which you are about to attempt to slash and burn.

    Their problem is with the concentration of merit within the upper caste. They hold that it is not a matter of chance but the work of systematic exclusion of lower castes over a long period in history, which has led to this concentration. Therefore, since the upper caste skew towards merit is a human creation, it should be undone by human intervention. Reservation is seen to be one such intervention. The sympathizers of this position want a level playing field before the merit game starts.


    This is a valid statement of the argument. I would say it as: "Opportunities to perform are systematically excluded from lower castes, so that there's no way their performance measurement exists, hence it was deemed that they didn't have any concentration of merit." So reservation is seen as opening up the opportunity for the "lower castes" to perform so that their performance too can now be recorded, pooled with the rest so that the "merit game" can start.

    [...]
    It is time we question this consensus on merit. Does merit matter in modern society and institutions? Is merit an adequate concept to understand creativity in modern practices? Does the rejection of merit as myth lead to inefficacy and the celebration of mediocrity? My answer to all questions is the same. No.

    Let us begin with the most popular definition of merit. Merit refers to an innate ability to undertake and excel in certain activities, jobs etc.


    From here on, you begin to

    aa) equate three dissimilar terms, "merit" and "innate ability," and "one's potential"
    bb) then go on to conflate this with "skill."

    aa) First, what is this mysterious "innate ability" that you keep referring to and equating it with merit?

    Popular definition of merit is not "innate (=inborn, natural) ability" Popular definition of merit is simply what we just said earlier: performance measurement. It is a measure of how you performed in a course, in a test etc. Better performance, more merit.

    Merit is not a descriptive term. It is also evaluative. Merit demands or commands recognition and rewards. Had merit been a god-given or inborn ability, why should we reward the person who happens to posses it?


    You are contradicting yourself here. Is popular definition of merit an "innate ability" so that we don't reward the person who possesses it OR

    We respect a person only if he has put in his own efforts to develop and cultivate his inborn abilities. Whether he is born with meritorious qualities or not, it is through his own efforts that he can become a legitimate owner of his merit and worthy of recognition and reward. Here we see merit more as a matter of nurture and less of nature.


    that we do reward the person for it because it is a result of "his own efforts?" Which one is it? This whole paragraph doesn't make sense. Looks like either some unwitting splicing had gone on here or it just needs a bit more work to make sense.

    Nurturing inborn abilities takes place in society. Hence social factors enter into our definition of merit. The conditions under which this nurturing takes place become crucial for the evaluation of merit. Merit becomes worthy of recognition only of it is nurtured under legitimate conditions. What do we mean by legitimate condition? It is one in which everyone has equal opportunity to develop their inherent abilities.

    I've tried many ways to make sense of the above paragraph and the only way is to substitute "one's potential" for "merit." OK. One's potential will stand a chance of being recognized by others only if it's carefully nurtured under equal opportunity conditions. Agreed. But we are no longer talking about merit as a performance measurement.

    We need a level playing field for cultivating our merit. It is in a society that values equal opportunity that merit becomes worthy of respect. This is where merit meets the claims of social justice. Some emphasize social justice and make it a necessary condition for the identification of merit. Some emphasize merit and claim that possessing and developing in born abilities have primacy over any consideration of the conditions under which such nurturing takes place.

    I am still reading "Merit = One's potential" meaning here. But I don't agree with your equating it with "in born abilities." Maybe I am nitpicking, may be not. Anyway, you are saying that one side says we need equal opportunity to participate first then only the "lower-caste"'s merit will improve and the other side says you can develop your potential under any conditions, you don't really need a perfect equal opportunity situation. OK.

    Non-interference in the way meritorious people exercise their merit itself is the only criterion for justice. This sets the ground for the merit vs social justice debate.

    In my opinion, the best way to solve this merit vs justice issue is to dissolve or de-center the very idea of merit. The question of justice has to meet many challenges. Merit is not one among them. Merit is de-centered not by claims of justice but by the changing conditions of creativity.

    There are some inherent difficulties in conceptualizing merit. If merit is an inherent ability then it must be an ability for something. According to this definition JEE selects those who have an ability for engineering. AIIMS entrance test tests your ability to pursue the medical profession. This move to define merit with reference to specific practices has some inherent problems. We can ascribe an ability to do something to a person only if that person is already involved in that activity. At least he should have an active and sincere interest in that activity. Ability for engineering means the ability to do good engineering. Such an ability is discernable only in someone who has a reasonably good idea about the rules, objectives and values governing the practice of engineering. It makes no sense to say that JEE tests the candidate’s ability to do engineering.


    Here we come to the bb) part, where you conflate "merit/one's potential" with "skill." You don't need to possess the skills of an engineer or a doctor in order to go to school to become one. Skill is a learned craft. That's why one goes to school, to be ready to become one. Some people are good at it, others are not. How do we know? Well, why not come up with a reasonable set of tests that identify, with reasonable accuracy, whether a pupil falls in the ballpark or not? That's all these tests do. They never proclaimed that they are designed to test the "skill." Granted, test methodologies, accuracy of tests, validity of same tests across different demographics, all these are constantly being debated as you surely must know. But these test work. They work for their intended purpose.

    Given the overall efficacy of the art and science of testing methodologies, there is nothing wrong with either JEE or AIIMS entrance tests. Just because you have mistaken them to measure the skill of the profession, doesn't make them so. You just have a mistaken understanding of their role. JEE/AIIMS tests are not there to provide social justice. They are there to sustain those institutions so that they can compete globally. Square peg, round hole.


    We know that only a handful of them have any interest in engineering. The same must be true about the candidates selected in AIIMS too. Only a very few of the JEE winners want to take up hard core engineering jobs. Most of our students opt for IITs and AIIMS because they know that a degree from these institutions will ensure them a safe future.


    This is cynical at best. Really, just by "opting" for IITs and AIIMSs they can fulfill their wish? Aren't these the same students that you applauded for their victories through hardwork, perseverance and making something of their lives?

    Had shoe- polishing or shaving ensured them money and security they would have opted for them. The same entrance tests would have measured their inherent ability to perform these tasks too! A few decades ago, no one could dream of associating merit with an activity such as “managing a hotel”!


    Once again, your basic premise of equating "one's potential" with "skill" and falsely assuming that entrance tests are designed to test these skills makes the above a whole lot of hogwash.

    One might argue that we can think of inherent abilities without necessarily relating them to any specific activity like engineering or medicine. These are abilities that are needed for excelling in any activity, whatsoever. Logical ability, analytical ability, ability to recognize patterns and memory could be candidates for such abilities. But what is analytical ability if it is shared by an engineer, doctor, artist, cobbler and a panwallah? It could only be something which is as general and universal as human rationality or human linguistic competence. Rationality and linguistic ability are species-level achievements. It makes no sense to see them as merits of individuals.
    We cannot measure the excellence of a mathematician by referring to some basic logical ability all human beings possess. We cannot understand the magic of a dancer by referring to the human ability to stand erect. So merit, if defined without reference to any specific activity, becomes empty and formal. It might still serve some descriptive function. But it cannot explain why we respect and admire the meritorious.


    Precisely. No one in their right mind assumes that the excellence of a mathematician can be measured by basic logical ability measurement! Do you realize what you are saying? And then you go on to say that just because we cannot measure it by basic logical ability measurement the excellence of a mathematician means nothing! No one measures the magic of a dancer by referring to her/his ability to stand erect!

    There's no other way to say this without sounding demeaning, but I'll say it anyway. You constructed a fictitious world with figments of your rhetoric, filled it with fictitious premises for JEE/AIIMS tests, and erroneous - woefully other-worldly - statements about how people's excellences are measured and then turned around, accused that same world as defective and are using that as a basis to trash the notion of merit! Man, talk about defrocking a straw-man!

    I have no problems with your ideological position, you obviously are pro-reservation. But shame on you for making such a cynical attempt to build your argument on such shallow grounds and that too willfully! Is this the kind of argumentation credentials that you are happy to be proud of?


    [...]
    Let me summarize. If merit is defined in relation to the ability to perform specific practices it is clear that entrance tests do not measure it. If merit is defined in abstraction from concrete practices it eventually coincides with universal abilities which do not call for any special mention. The only option left is to trivialize the concept by defining it as the ability to solve typical entrance test questions. Hence merit is an incoherent and ill formed concept.

    Merit is rendered redundant not through logical arguments but through concrete historical changes in the nature of creativity. Creative accomplishment in modern complex industrial societies cannot be understood in terms of the inherent abilities or merits of the agents.


    Really? Not even the "merits of the agents," ha? Which definition of merit are you using this time? "The ability to perform specific practices (=skill)" or "innate abilities" or "one's potential" or "performance measurement"? So your dog would have built this entire blog server or that email server over which you traded this trash with your students?

    As I've been highlighting, you have manufactured and concealed so many definitions of the term "merit" and like a howling tabloid headline, are overloading the arguments with by now a sufficiently vague term "merit" so as to hoodwink the reader. This is straight intellectual dishonesty at best.

    Note that you are still not applying the one definition of merit which started off this discussion and moreover, according to which both sides agree that merit is important: merit=performance measure.

    In a traditional society a carpenter’s son becomes a carpenter and a blacksmith’s son becomes a blacksmith. Birth was the entry ticket to a profession. Once you enter with this birth ticket you can strive for excellence. Here merit is not a criterion for entry into a practice.

    Not exactly. To be more precise, the selection process itself was not there, hence the question of merit doesn't/didn't arise. If there was a selection process, perhaps merit would have mattered, perhaps not. But for you to use the absence of selection process to discredit merit is disingenuous.

    Even if I grant you your point, here once again you are doing the conflating of merit with skill and it's hard to make a consistent sense out of your statements. Blacksmith's son was able to enter into profession because he learned his skills from his father and by the time he was ready to enter into his profession, he became a valuable, real skills-based asset to his profession. If blacksmith's son was not helping the family sustain with his skills (by generating more revenue, or by supporting existing customers, for example), I doubt the legacy of the father would've continued much further.

    Also, sooner or later even if the son didn't score high enough points (def #1), or didn't have the potential (def #2), or didn't demonstrate the skill (def #3), father would've sent his butt-seeking-boot his way and forced him to get off his sweet behind and start learning stuff.

    Imagine that blacksmith had two sons, then my point would more clearer.

    Once you enter through a non merit, hereditary list you can strive for merit within the ongoing conduct of the practice. We all know that modernity and industrialisation changed this birth-based entry. All professions were opened to all. However, it is very important to understand the exact nature of this change.

    The idea of merit has its root in a popular misunderstanding of this change. According to this popular version industrialsation replaced the criterion of birth with that of merit. A carpenter’s son would have no privilege in getting a seat in a furniture factory. Instead anyone who has the merit can get admission according to his place in the merit list. But this is not what really happened. Industralisation did not change one set of admission criteria with another. Instead it did away with all criteria for admission!

    Where is all this stuff stated, this so called popular misunderstanding? Can you give us a reference or two, or is it just your opinion? If it is your opinion, please say it so. No one I read or spoke to, makes such a strong connection between industrialization and the notion of merit as you speak of. There are effects.

    More important, traditional societies, which is how you started this section of argument, didn't do away the criterion for admission, but said that, in my words, "As long as you have the skill-set to do this job, work that lathe, as long as you are able to manufacture, innovate great products, that fueled the market-based economy, we don't care if you weren't born within the profession."

    It made it possible that any Tom Dick and Harry could get into any job whatsoever!

    Do you mean to say anybody could get in regardless of one's merit? If so, then,
    Professor, do you understand how stuff gets produced, how it got produced in the past? Where in the history have we seen Tom, Dick and Harry getting into whatsoever job they wished ? Do you know the meaning of the word "job" in the context of actually producing stuff in an industrial environment? Job is work-for-remuneration and no one got rewarded if the work produced was not up to the par. If Tom suddenly decided on a whim to get into aircraft building industry, did he get in? If Dick woke up one day and wanted to get rid of his malaria, did he just got into a job and came out with a cure? Your statements show that you have very little knowledge of what tasks people have to perform and what skills are required to perform these tasks, in order to produce even basic stuff in industrial and technology (modern or ancient) activities. Making refrigerators, turbines, auto-rickshaws and pencils is not the same as writing poetry like Milton or writing a novel or painting. It was never like that. I am an engineer by profession. Industrial, technological work is intricately dependent on what has gone on in the past and is built one on top of the other. If one didn't invent precision glass grinding techniques, not only one didn't get to do astronomy, but the very idea that one could actually see the distant stars would have sounded absurd. And so on.

    Again, if mean to say that, "anybody could get in regardless of the merit" then by all three definitions of merit that you've used in this piece, i.e., 1) performance measure, 2) innate ability, 3) one's potential, it flies in the face of reality, recorded history, and the stuff of engineered products that we see all around us.

    If you don't mean that, then the only nearest alternative you have is to say that, "No, no. All that merit still counts but no one is being tested in them before giving them entry. Everybody just gets in, stuff gets done by each according to his/her ability." Then here too you demonstrate your lack of familiarity of what really makes industrialization, modernity progress forward. Industrialization is not an event all by itself, like a nation's revolution (for example). There may not have been "admissions criteria" "at the beginning" but there is a culling process that weeded out the non-performers. If a worker didn't do the job well, then he/she got fired. Remember we are talking about industrialization and modern technology, not the Indian government office, nor a tenured position at a university. Industrialization, modern innovations, technological breakthroughs did not happen without merit.

    Finally, and this is an important point that only experience and participation will teach you, and that is: it is these key innovations, though relatively small in number that create quantum leaps forward in the industrialization. Someone invents a microchip. But thousands work in a chip fabrication plant. And guess what, these thousands who got to work in that chip fabrication plant are an after-the-fact. They don't get to dictate the turns and changes and advancements in the technology. They merely sustain the day-to-day activity. The question is: what do you want your country to be? A mindless numb labor, or a leader in the innovation? More on this point later.


    This democratization and universalisation of the mode of entry is balanced on the other end by a rationalization of the nature of work. Specific professions like carpentry, smithy, etc lost their inner coherence and distinctive existence. Traditional skill-based production which followed community specific rules and aimed at specific products had to undergo scientific analysis and planning. Work is analyzed and fragmented into some basic elements which can be re-assembled for the production of diverse goods and services. Industrialized society gives us better furniture and better shoes not because those goods are made by a new set of carpenters and cobblers who are more meritorious and skilled than the traditional hereditary ones, but because industrialisation has deskilled the worker. Workers perform some basic and repetitive and anonymous tasks which are integrated at various levels to produce toothpaste on one assembly line and toilet cleaning liquid on another.

    Boy this line of thinking is so 1970s and 80s. Frankly, only you seem to think this way. Everybody is way past this cookie-cutter model of worker. People already realized, it's been some time now, that machines may have deskilled the worker in one skill, but created opportunities for him/her to develop another skill. If you buy into the notion of economic advancement and well-being of the country, and if you agree that this advancement doesn't happen when a country is in isolation then you essentially came to terms that there are some hardships involved. Current skills become obsolete after a few cycles, because products that are innovative today become commodities tomorrow. That doesn't mean other new innovative products don't appear today. You are only choosing to look at commoditization and its effects. How about innovation and its effects and creating the conditions that bring about this innovation?

    Thus, industrialisation, through the democratization of entry and rationalisation of work has made merit doubly redundant. This change happened not only on the factory floor but in the design room and the surgery theatre too.

    Wrong! Both your premises, that the entry has been democratized and the work has been "rationalized" are incorrect.

    Entry has never been democratized. It is still conditional on merit, no matter what definition you want to use. It just isn't based on race, class, birth, color, caste and community as much as it used to a hundred years ago, but still it's there.

    Work "rationalization" is transitory. It is cyclical. It is not a historical phenomenon that permanently regressed work to some sort of "basic and repetitive and anonymous tasks," unless you get your knowledge from those black and white documentaries with 5-second sound bytes talking about assembly line at Ford Motor. Just because the cotton mill in your town looks the same as it did fifty years ago doesn't mean there's a world-wide rationalization of work. All it means is that cotton mill is state-owned, it's manager probably overly incompetent, that's the only game in town and that town is isolated from the external world until internet and cell phone came along. Really, professor...

    Those who still believe in the myth of merit misunderstand the radical nature of industrial capitalism. They still hold on to a feudal conception of the nature of work. They cannot digest the revolutionary move made by capitalism to open the gates to each and everyone. They think capitalism was all about not restricting jobs to sons and daughters and opening them up to those who have the real ability to perform those tasks. They do not realize that the fundamental contribution of capitalism was in throwing the whole baby of “entry criteria” of all kinds out along with the bath water. The leaders of Indian industry do not believe in the liberating power of capitalism. They too believe that if birth is no longer the criterion for giving someone a job then something else should be there to replace it. Intelligent capitalists do not fall into this trap. Prof. Rahul Varman who teaches management at IIT Kanpur writes about his experience in a campus interview. He asked an IT boss who came to IIT for campus selection about what he looks for in the candidates. He replied that he can select anyone who has seen a computer keyboard! This man must be one of the rare Indian bosses who understand and trust the liberating power of capitalism.

    Wow, we are getting surreal here. You are trying to piggyback on capitalism, so you can avoid accusations from the "right," and then you turn around and read into capitalism strange patterns that only an astrologer, or worse, a palm reader would be capable of. You are re-writing the history of capitalism, re-writing the manifestation of capitalism and by introducing this so called "radical nature of capitalism" you wish to make us believe you've just discovered the true color of capitalism and the answer is: Entry for All! so we must all now support entry for all without merit or without rhyme or reason, just because you are born into a caste.

    Industrial capitalism (wonder what other kinds of capitalisms are there) threw out the "entry criteria?" How did you make this giant of a leap? That IT boss is most likely incompetent for having made that remark to the professor. Is that your sole data point?

    All that in order to trash merit? If there is a baby being thrown out with the bath water, it is not that the capitalism throwing out the baby of entry criteria, but it is you, throwing out the baby of merit, in your delusional attempt to buttress your pro-reservation stance. It's a pity. With a friend like you, all those "lower caste" folks don't need any more enemies.

    Some critics of capitalism have doubted its ability to accomplish the democratization of the workforce on the one end and the rationalization of work on the other. They claim that these two moves lead to a conflict, inhibiting the growth of capitalism and leading to its eventual overthrow. Whether you believe in this doomsday prediction or not, freeing entry to jobs from any consideration of inherent ability will remain an irreversible achievement of industrial capitalism.

    Which critics? Can you please name a few, three, or two, or just one? Because I'd like to read what they said. I wonder who told them that capitalism "accomplishes the democratization of the workforce", as you described it, and "accomplishes the rationalization of work." Whoever said rationalization of work is one of the goals of capitalism? When you make such sense-less statements, you sound like an overenthusiastic school student going berserk on her term paper. This is not even rhetoric, this is plain ignorance.

    Rejection of merit in no way implies denigration of creativity. In the complex and highly networked modern industrial world creativity no loner resides in any individual’s head. It can be located and celebrated only at certain nodal points in this network. Anything called merit ticking in your neurons is not the enabling condition for anyone to participate in creative acts. This impossibility locating individual creativity has a challenging parallel in taking responsibility for mistakes.

    Jesus, you drank too much koolaid buddy! Or read too much cheap science fiction...

    Does it make sense to pin point the individual who is responsible for Bhopal gas tragedy or the challenger mishap? It does not. This is not because of any deficiency in our investigation process. Here responsibility is not fixed as a response to the question “have I done anything wrong?” Instead, even before separating the right and wrong everyone, depending upon his or her institutional proximity to the site of mishap, voluntarily participate in taking collective responsibility. The old inquisitional model has no place in either fixing responsibility or ascribing creativity.

    Should I even say how inane and irresponsible the above statements sound? Have you ever worked in a real company? Do you know how projects are managed? Are you aware of decision-making process? Are you even remotely familiar with cover-your-ass syndrome in large and dysfunctional companies? Because all these have played a very decisive role that ultimately resulted in Bhopal gas tragedy. Plain old incompetence and CYA led to this tragedy and the aftermath of the investigation. Of course you wouldn't know that because who the heck had ever heard of project management skills in India at the time of this disaster? Let me ask a simple question. Before the advent of all this outsourcing boom, before all this IT boom, how many in India really knew how a products-based company operates internally in its organization? That lack of skills, that lack of competence, that "third-world" incompetence is what led to all that tragedy and that also prevented us from understanding the full scope of why it has occurred. Of course, like all tragedies, there are always plenty of fingers pointing one or the other way. Accurate diagnosis of a failed operation is still a rare art, only US Army excels at it.

    To spin real-world incompetence, lack of real-world accountability into some sort of collective responsibility based on some vague notion of voluntary walk to the guillotine is laughable at best.

    If this is correct why should there be entrance tests and job interviews?

    No. This is not correct, so I am not going to respond to all the drivel you say below that is premised on this. Especially that one with American WWF as a representative choice of sports. Whoever said American WWF is an apt representation of sports? To state the obvious, what about baseball, what about football? Do you have any idea what kind of leadership qualities, life-sustaining qualities sports teaches? Have you ever sat through one baseball or one football game on TV and listen to the language, the tone, the value-system by which each play is accorded a measure? Do you know how many people pulled themselves out of the dark dungeons of their lives with the aid of excellence in sports? Do yourself a favor. Turn off that American WWF channel and read up on Vince Lombardi, just as an example. Punch his name on Google.

    Like I said earlier, I have no issues with your stance on this reservation issue. I agree "lower castes" do need help and we need sensible policies that make this happen. I am appalled and disappointed at the disservice you do with this trashing of merit argument, this diluting of the notion of merit, this commoditization of merit that you are resorting to, in order to advance your pet argument, poorly constructed, and delivered with sub-par quality and with no careful thought whatsoever. What I read was not at all a reasoned argument, but a hodgepodge of passages, erroneous conflating, no clear definition of merit, cherry-picked examples, generalizing a backyard example into a global phenomenon, confusing people's incompetence with some methodological shortcomings of capitalism, shaping your argument based on one single comment from an IT manager, which is probably taken out of context.

    Ok, so may be procuring real data to support your argument was tough, hardwork, but what about lining up a sensible argument that resonates with reason?

    If you turn this in as a report, I'd grade it as an "F" and send you back to little leagues.

    Regards,
    Crazyfinger

  12. Anonymous said...

    Sanil's article was a pretty long and confusing one. My head was spinning, but I knew that he must have fooled me with several falsehoods, spun carefully. I read the whole article again and found several flaws.

    I proceeded through the replies, and was glad to see saner people (leaving out Dr. Bruno, who like a parrot, is happy to repeat "upper castes have enjoyed for so long... now let them suffer") rebutting Sanil's theories. Surely, they too must have read it more than once.

    Surprisingly, Abi has been silent on this (otherwise, he generally seems to reply to each of the comments individually... and acknowledge those that are right).

    Since most of what I would have liked to say has already been said by Abhinav, Raj, Barbarinidian, Anonymous, Realitycheck, Tabula Rasa and Crazyfinger, let me congratulate them on all the hard work they put into this.

    Last month, there was this mail circulating that demanded reservations for the poor (regardless of the caste). Fortunately, it didn't try to make it sound like the author had studied it carefully before demanding reservations for the poor... it was more an email written on impulse.

    It is true that some people gain an undue advantage over others when appearing for exams, but that cannot be a ground for demanding reservations. As pointed out by Crazyfinger, it just means that the examination system needs to be revised.

    And while Sanil is criticizing merit, let me ask him (or Abi) "How exactly would reservations be implemented ?". Would people from the "lower castes" be randomly chosen (say, just on the basis of applications) for entry to IITs or IIMs ? No!! Now, you want that very definition of merit (which you had been contending all this while) to be applied to a subset of the candidates. As Anonymous pointed out, random selection would work if you had plenty of resources, so that everyone can attend moderately good colleges (Abi must be thinking again of "It's the supply, stupid!"), and if they persevere there, they would get better options at a higher level (or a job). Till then you have to use this very method "performance measurement" or the markers.

    Professor Sanil, if your students have all agreed to your views, or didn't protest vocally enough, it must be because they are your students (and their grades may be at risk). As Abhinav suggested, please have a blog of your own, where the initial discussions may be held with independent people.

    Dr. Bruno, you might get a better hearing if you stop attacking people personally. Did Raj reveal to you that he is from an "upper caste" ? But you are happy to declare "your forefathers sinned...". I have not seen people disagreeing with you on the assumption that you belong to a particular caste... they disagree on the logic you use, perhaps. In any case, you seem to agree that those who score better marks should get a priority for entry. Don't you know about "Ramanujam School of Mathematics" and "Super 30" ? Now please don't trace the ancestry of those children to find out who sinned and who didn't and things like that. Hard work pays. It's not just the children who did the work, but people like Anand Kumar who have done their part.