Originally Posted by hummingbear

Ok, so upon what metric do we determine merit? Flight hours? We’ve all known guys w/ a career’s worth of flying under their belt that crush any delusions that experience alone makes you a superior aviator. Interview performance? That will definitely find you the most confident candidates- though confidence does not always equal competence. Design me a scale by which we can always choose the most deserving candidate & I’ll be the first to say I was wrong.

It’s an imaginary concept. If “merit” always equaled performance, Tom Brady would have played about three unremarkable minutes in the NFL. As humans, we’re just not as capable of knowing who’s going to rise to the top as we’d like to believe. We are sometimes able to recognize excellence, & can generally gauge competence from incompetence- which is important, & shouldn’t be ignored; but from there we have to make some difficult decisions. Questions about whether demographics should factor into those decisions are certainly germane. But can we at least please stop pretending “just hiring the guy who deserves it the most” is an actual thing we can really do?