Chair of Womyn’s Studies at the London School of PC:
Just kidding. It’s the editor of Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.
Ms. Clark went on to add:
Well, I can certainly name one white woman who got pulled from waaaaaay near the bottom of the talent pool.
If this is what’s running our “prestigious” medical journals, I’d say “woke”-ism is on the brink of becoming the real pandemic.
She’s just saying that merit follows from sex and ethnicity.
Nice remark from one of the comments.
Clearly the Lancet is well ahead of the pack when it comes to abolishing meritocracy…
“Prestigious” medical journals do not exist any longer. Neither do “prestigious” awards, nor “prestigious” positions; there is nothing “prestigious” about anything in the current year.
The irony in this sad git’s case is, they were all done in by abandoning merit in favor of political statements.
Nice young woman called to ask me to teach a class. I declined on the basis of diversity. The organization is always moaning there aren’t enough women, young people and persons of color in leadership positions. The only way to create opportunity for advancement is for me to step aside.
Yes, but they don’t know anything about this topic. That’s why we need you to teach it.
Naturally, I did not agree with her assessment. That would make me meritocratic, sexist, ageist and racist. I’m committed to diversity, even if it means the organization fails. You wanted this outcome, you’re getting it, good and hard.
Some years ago, I believe it was 2014, I canceled my sub to Science, the bulletin of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The occasion was the publication, by Science, of a bat-shot crazy article that said that because there was some overlap between the testosterone level between the worst performing male athletes, and the best performing female athletes, it was time to eliminate the distinction between men’s and women’s sports. It was a meta study. The methodology was bad. It wasn’t about science.
To this day the AAAS fills up my email inbox with pleas to re-up. In every single request the headline is not physics, or biology, or chemistry, it is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The problem with our idea of “meritocracy” is the implicit assumption that some people are better than others.
Some people are better than others at specific things, but the traits that allow you to get ahead and are selected for in a given environment are not necessarily universally admired nor even make you better at the job you’re meant to be doing.
A perfect example is politics. The best way to reach the top is sycophantism and divisiveness, but these aren’t traits that make you better at policy making or administration. They may even be negatively correlated.
The problem with merit-based hiring is not that it’s an invalid measure of job performance. The problem with merit-based hiring is the results are not politically correct.
If the job calls for a person who has math skills, we can test for math skills. If the job calls for bookkeeping experience, we can rate experience and training. But if the highest scoring people are all Asian Women and we hire from that group, then no Black Men will get hired which is socially unacceptable.
The attack on merit is simply Affirmative Action in a new wrapper. I read a funny book which contains this passage:
“Lack of mathematical ability should be a protected class like the rest. After all, why should a person be denied a prestigious and rewarding career simply because xe is unable to do the work?”
“That’s exactly why!” the Navigator said, hotly. “What good is a Navigator who can’t navigate?”
“I respectfully disagree, Xir. Employment discrimination based on personal traits such as race or sex or mathematical ability is just hateful. That’s not who we are.”
“Yes, it is,” the Navigator insisted. “Our whole space-faring civilization is built on engineering performed by people who can do math. No math, no engineering, no civilization.”
“Pithy, Xir, but irrelevant. Social justice is a moral imperative. Sometimes you have to destroy the village to save it.”
Words could have come straight out of Emery’s mouth.
^ Tokenism replaced meritocracy a while back …
^ Not exactly. Now you have to show who is the best token.
Pedo Joe’s new Haitian spokes dyke is a classic case of what happens when competence is not measured. She’s dumb as a stump.
From my professional viewpoint, the Lancet, JAMA and NEJM have all gone down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, and turned into trashy politicized POS. That goes for my Alma Mater, the U of Minnesota as well. Sickening.
It strikes me that “equity” does not mean equal opportunity or even equal outcomes. It means, in the language of those like Ms. Clark, that her favored groups get more and less favored groups get less. “Equity” thus seems to mean…..really about what the word “fairness” means these days.
It strikes me as well that one of the hottest things in medicine these days, since medicine has given us good ways to deal with the diseases that killed most people a century ago, is personalized medicine–doctors and researchers are finding tiny sub-populations with very specific issues and developing specialized ways of dealing with those very specific issues. So if being “equal” is a goal, each case of personalized or targeted medicine is simultaneously a boon to the health and well-being of men and…..a breach against the equity that Ms. Clark supposedly espouses.
Ms. Clark objects to advances in medicine, I’d guess, and that places her in good company with the Marquis de Sade, but exquisitely bad company with Hippocrates. And yet, as Golfdoc comments, somehow qualified to comment on behalf of the Lancet. Yikes.
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Bikebubba, Clark is playing an interesting game with language. She never defines either “equity” or “excellence.” It’s Twitter.
Maybe she has her own ideas about what those words mean, but she seems to think that her readers will know how she defines these words.
The Tweet that Clark is responding to also defines neither “equity” nor “Excellence.”
So you have the first Tweeter, Pai, putting equity and excellence in tension: you can’t have both. Then Clark asserts that the relationship between “equity” and “excellence” is not adversarial. In fact “equity” is the source from which “excellence” flows!
Since there can be no excellence without equity, and equity wasn’t invented until about ten minutes ago, nothing in all of human history has been excellent.
Is it just me, or the whole talk about ditching meritocracy smells of Soviet definition of equality, and even closer, to chinese cultural revolution?