Meritocracy and inclusion sometimes come at odds. How can we include everybody if we only want to have the best? There is no clear cut answer, but there is an answer for us.
First, let’s define the terms. Meritocracy means high-quality work is celebrated and rewarded. We at Shoshin College are on board with that. Inclusion means that everybody is included, regardless of their differences. We are on board with that too.
If a stranger comes, the inclusion principle tells us to include them — hire them, admit them, etc. — maybe even unconditionally. But the meritocracy principle tells us to filter them and include them only if they are good enough.
Through this lens, we might feel like it’s impossible to do both. Yet, it’s important to understand why we want inclusion and why we want meritocracy. Once we understand the functionality and use of each principle, we can merge them.
We want inclusion because its lack creates elitism. We want to create something for the world, for everybody, not just for the few. However, if someone creates obstacles for others we have to draw a line. We allow ourselves to exclude people only if they do not follow our basic principles of behaviour, i.e. our Code of Conduct.
We want meritocracy because we want to live in a society where things work well and jobs get done in a high-quality way. However, we are a learning place. This is where we build that high-quality way. This is where we test things, where we try different strategies, and where failure is ok. As a learning place, we do not ask a student to be great; we claim we can help them become great.
Status quo
This is opposite to how existing learning institutions work today, a strategy based on a frame of market competition and efficiency maximisation.
Universities (because of profit or rankings or prestige) have an incentive to maximise the quality of their graduates. It is easier to have great graduates if you get great admittees. It’s much harder to get less-than-great admittees and make them great. However, this process is the core process of a university: to admit one and make them much better. Yet, in an efficiency maximisation world, admitting less-than-great students means more work in order to make them great (let’s assume a simplistic model of linearly acquired knowledge).
This is what we reject. We do not aim to maximise the greatness of our graduates in comparison to other schools. We aim to maximise the greatness of our graduates in comparison to ourselves.
How to become expert at thing:1 iteratively take on concrete projects and accomplish them depth wise, learning “on demand” (ie don’t learn bottom up breadth wise)2 teach/summarize everything you learn in your own words3 only compare yourself to younger you, never to others
—Andrej Karpathy, November 2020