Elitism, meritocracy or just the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Hi guys. You know, I hate to put people down, but it does frustrate me that SIM students demand to be treated as equals with NUS, NTU or even Harvard and Oxford graduates despite the fact that if they had the grades to go to Oxford, they would have done so and not even considered SIM at all. SIM has the stigma of being the very last resort for students who have done so poorly for their A levels that they have no where else to turn to for a degree - they want to believe that this unfortunate turn of events doesn't mean that they would be condemned for life, unable to find a decent job. But when I point out that gatekeepers like me prefer brighter, more intelligent candidates who have proven themselves by getting into a good university, all they can do is accuse me of elitism. Look, gatekeepers have a job to do - we need to identify the best candidate(s) for the job rather than try to level the playing field and treat everyone as if they are the same. I am talking about meritocracy here - whereby people are selected on the basis of merit, this isn't some kind of social exercise where we try to help people. Hell no, quite the opposite! Meritocracy discriminates against anyone who is more stupid, less able, less qualified, less experienced, less articulate, less eloquent, less presentable, less attractive and if you want to equate meritocracy to elitism, then you don't know what elitism means. In today's post, let's explore these terms.

Do you want to blame elitism or meritocracy?

Now if you were to go back a few centuries, the UK had a ruling elite which comprised of the royalty and the aristocracy. Now these people were fabulously wealthy whilst the rest of the people were very poor - there was no concept of social mobility then. The children of the ruling elite could be hopelessly stupid, yet they could still expect to be placed into positions of power because of their high social status. And those who are born into the lower classes have little chance in expecting to get a decent education or job quite simply because they are not part of the elite. So take myself for example: I came from a very humble working class background but I got lucky with the genetic lottery and managed get scholarships to university which led to me working in corporate finance today. This was possible thanks to meritocracy which rewarded individuals like myself who have proven myself worthy - this wouldn't have been possible under a system dominated by elitism because my parents were working class folks and didn't belong to the privileged elite. So for all the SIM graduates accusing me of elitism, you're using the wrong word. I believe in meritocracy, I owe my social mobility to meritocracy - I don't however condone elitism at all because I would have been condemned under that system.

I suppose the closest thing we can find to this kind of social nirvana that the SIM students are dreaming of, where everyone is treated equally regardless of IQ or ability is a pretty extreme form of communism. Take Cuba for example, doctors in Cuba are paid very little under their communist regime because the government doesn't want to create an elite class who are richer than the others. There are other very socialist countries such as Finland where the pay gap between blue and white collar workers is a lot smaller but Cuba takes it to quite an extreme by paying their highly skilled, highly trained, highly intelligent doctors so little - about US$40 a month. That is why many doctors in Cuba have little choice but to move abroad to learn enough to feed their families. So I can imagine an SIM student being very happy in a place like Cuba because at least they will be all earning as much (or should I say, as little) as a doctor under that communist regime which doesn't believe in meritocracy, refusing to financially reward even the top Cuban doctors capable of heart transplants. Whereas in a meritocratic, capitalist country like Singapore, a top heart surgeon would command a much higher salary than your average SIM graduate and somehow, in the eyes of the SIM students and graduates, well they are wondering why they do not have access to those kinds of jobs that pay that well and why the system is "unfair".

This kind of communist system in Cuba was created to achieve social cohesion - it was counting on doctors practicing medicine out of a genuine desire to serve the people of Cuba, to heal the wounded, to cure the sick and that noble feeling of having done something so worthwhile should be enough, money shouldn't even be a part of that equation. But the problem with paying Cuban doctors so little is that they end up either working abroad to earn more money or they end up leaving medicine and working in the tourist industry where they can potentially earn a lot more money dealing with rich foreigners. This kind of communism, extreme socialism may satisfy some people in Cuban society but it is far from an ideal solution - should those who have little of value to offer their employers be paid as much as a doctor capable of open heart surgery? You see, this is so extreme that I think even SIM students would have a problem with it especially if they are brought up in Singapore which is a shamelessly capitalist society. But meritocracy and capitalism go hand in hand - you can't have one without the other and what the SIM students are really protesting about isn't elitism, no. They are not happy with the fact that they are screwed under meritocracy and would prefer an alternative to the curent system.

However, I have an alternate theory that explains the mindset of these SIM students and graduates. You see, they don't really want to live in a country like Finland or Cuba which takes socialism to quite an extreme. They are quite happy with the current system whereby some people are paid a lot more than others - they just don't want to get the raw end of the deal in this kind of system. This is what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitiveinability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude. In short, it is when stupid people genuinely believe they are clever. Now before you accuse me of being mean and elitist again, here's a short video to explain how the Dunning-Kruger effect works which does explain clearly what is happening:

So with this in mind, is it possible that students who have done disastrously in their A levels actually suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and think they are as brilliant as Oxford and Harvard students? Well actually, yes. You like to think that grades are usually a pretty simple and straightforward indication of one's academic ability, but haven't we all done a bad exam before and felt really frustrated by the process? I'm sure we've all been there before - in Singapore, we talked about 'spotting questions', ie. trying to predict which topics would be covered in the exam and focusing on those chapters. It is a bit of a gamble of course and if you get lucky and 'spot' the right topic, then you know all the answers. But if you predicted wrongly, then oh boy, there's that sickening moment when you read the question and think, "oh shit, why didn't I revise this chapter? What made me think they were going to focus on that other chapter? So unlucky!" In fact, teachers (and tuition teachers as well) can play a big part in helping the student 'spot' the right topics in their preparations so the quality of your teachers can also play a significant part in your results. Likewise, haven't you been sick on the day of an exam and sat there in the exam hall with a runny nose, congested head or even a fever? I can think of so many valid reasons why a perfectly competent and intelligent student can have a really bad day and mess up the exam. This is why many people feel that judging a student's ability on just a few exams is too harsh and course work that can be carried out outside exam-conditions should be taken into consideration and given equal weightage in the results.

You've heard the saying, "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" - well, even students who have bad results are rarely consistently bad. They would have had some exams or tests where they did score pretty well; thus they would selectively remember those moments when they felt proud about just how well they have done. And haven't we all been in a situation where we messed up and thought, "geez, can we just pretend that never happened please?" Of course, the rational response to having made a mistake is to analyze where we went wrong and try to learn from those mistakes, so we never repeat that mistake ever again - but it is always too tempting to forget or ignore an episode that is embarrassing or made us look stupid. In fact, it happens all the time in sports: when gymnasts make a mistake during a competition, the coach would rarely ever berate the gymnast for the mistake even if it may be a costly one that has just lost the team a gold medal at the Olympics. Have a look at the video below - this was when Alicia Sacramone of the USA messed up her beam routine in the team finals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Her costly mistakes eventually cost the US the gold medal - China won the gold medal by a tiny sliver and that was mostly due to Sacramone's very costly mistakes. However, Sacramone was hugged and comforted by her coaches and team mates even after that bad routine. It seemed everyone in her team rallied around her instead of blaming her for crumbling under the pressure in the finals.

The fact is teachers, coaches, teammates/classmates, friends and family tend to be kind and merciful when we screw up royally, so that makes it only too easy for us to forget or ignore the terrible mistakes we have made. If others won't berate us for our mistakes, then unless we hold ourselves to account - then it is possible to end up conveniently forgetting or ignoring our mistakes and only remembering the times when we were successful. Now this kind of rather 'selective memory' isn't that unusual after all, it simply isn't healthy to dwell on our mistakes or bad memories from the past for that would only make us feel awful and bad about ourselves. Sometimes the memory of an incident that upset me may pop into my head and I would do everything I can to try to distract myself, to think about something else because if I dwelled on that memory, it would just make me miserable. Instead, we prefer to remember the good memories of events that make us feel better about ourselves - thus it isn't that unusual or even wrong for students in SIM to conveniently ignore their poor A level results that landed them in SIM in the first place and just focus on the events in their lives that have been a lot more successful. And this my friends, is entirely normal and probably explains why some people who have had terrible results still genuinely believe that they are intelligent because of this very selective memory process.

One of my readers Di Talasi has accused SIM students of being delusional - others may say that they are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. The two really aren't that different, it's just that Dunning-Kruger is a more scientific sounding term that doesn't sound as disparaging as 'delusional'. It is entirely possible that these SIM students are in the unfortunate situation whereby they are just not good at passing exams the traditional way but they may have other talents in areas which are not covered by the conventional routes that students in Singapore are bludgeoned through. At best, they are asking us to give them the benefit of the doubt that this is indeed the case, that they should be given the chance to prove themselves in ways other than their (rather poor) A level results which is more than a fair request. However, as a gatekeeper, I would then say, "okay, you're asking me not to judge you by your A level results, you're telling me you're not stupid - fair enough, please give me something else to look at please, what am I going to base my judgement on instead? Be reasonable. You can't expect me to give you the benefit of the doubt without giving me anything else to look at." Need I state the obvious? Some SIM students are indeed guilty as accused, their best response is exactly what they are doing - to be disruptive and protest rather than just say, "yeah you are right - I'm very stupid."

Imagine a murder investigation when a man is accused of murder based on the fact that he has the victim's blood on his clothes. The accused claims that the blood only got there because he went to assist the victim but he didn't ham the victim. The investigating detective would then say, "can you prove that then?" There would then be a prosecution to prove that the accused is guilty and for the accused to defend his innocence - this will of course be all evidence and forensics based, you can't just take someone's word for it. Of course, there can be a perfectly valid reason why the accused did get the victim's blood all over his clothes if he was thinking of saving her life after stumbling upon a badly injured woman in an alley - but if the police catch you standing over a dead body covered in her blood, then you gotta admit, you look kinda guilty and there's probably some explaining to do to say the least! Likewise, if you apply for a job with an SIM degree, then you do look guilty of stupidity having taken that option instead of say retaking your A levels and getting better grades that would have gained you admission into a much better university. But what do these SIM students and graduates do when we ask them for an explanation? "You are elitist! How dare you assume we're stupid and useless?" How do we even begin to bridge the gap in a civilized manner if they start off by being so defensive?

Where does this leave us? Well, no closer to a resolution I'm afraid. On one hand, you have SIM students who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, demanding to be treated like Oxford scholars and on the other hand, you may even get a kind gatekeeper who is willing to give them a chance to prove themselves, but when given that precious chance, they often throw it back in the gatekeeper's face, screaming, "how dare you ask me to prove myself, how dare you doubt my abilities!" We live in a meritocratic society whereby people are rewarded according to their abilities and it must really suck to fare badly under such a system, to find yourself at the bottom of the food chain. But what do you think? Are these students genuinely dreaming of a more fair society or are they delusional and suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect? Is it right for society to be organized on the basis of meritocracy, when so much of this meritocracy is mostly based on academic performance? Is there anything wrong with elitism in a capitalist society - shouldn't companies want to hire the very best talents or should they be forced to take on a certain percentage of workers without a proper degree? If achieving a fairer society is your goal, should you lay that responsibility at the hands of the private sector or should you be asking the government to help students from certain more deprived background achieve more through better education?  How do we arrive at a reasonable compromise then? Do leave a comment below - many thanks for reading.