OMG,

"Networking is nothing more than an attempt to gain an advantage on the basis of criteria which has nothing to do with the merits of the relevant activity. It is reprehensible for the same reason as drug cheating Olympians."

Have you got no friends and no social skills? this is the silliest analagy i have ever encountered.

Life is about building relationships, so to parallel it with drug taking makes no sense whatsoever. Are you dark on people who network as you feel it gives them an unfair advantage? It does not matter what you do, if you cant build relationships with people in anything that you do, you will not succeed.

i am dumbfounded you took this line, have you got nothing better to do

I agree with Realist on this - what a silly take on the Marion Jones story. Mirko's analogy of social networking with cheating has to be the weakest and most tenuous that he's presented here.

Actually, I would have thought that an individual 'cheating' (i.e. breaking the rules) to win a running race is behaviourally about as far from making strategic social alliances as you can get.

On the other hand I suppose it is interesting that Mirko has focused on two disparate human behaviours that are highly adaptive in evolutionary terms, but he doesn't appear to be aware of that fairly critical aspect of his topic.

Mirko's hypothesis fails at its first sweeping statement that "we all want to live in a meritocracy, whereby people succeed or fail purely based on their capacity to perform the task at hand."

Mirko's glib conception of a meritocracy ignores the ethnographic facts about how human beings collectively judge who is best able 'to perform the task at hand'. Unfortunately for Mirko's meritocracy, no means of deciding merit can escape the contaminating clutches of social networks which, deliberately or otherwise, set the normative standards by which the performance of individuals is judged.

How do we determine who is the 'most (naturally) talented and hardest-working athlete', the 'brightest students', the 'best business ideas' the 'most dedicated and resourceful person?'

By getting together and agreeing, whether formally or informally, on what the standards and benchmarks should be and how and under what conditions they will be measured and evaluated. And that process can only but occur through a social network, my lad.

Mirko's meritocracy is a chimera that could never exist in human society because the means of constituting it are unavailable to human beings who must carry out their activities in social networks in order to make any progress whatsoever.

You might as well argue that we're "cheating" because we have opposable thumbs, while chimps have to make do with clumsier hands.

Whether from a meritocratic or social networking paradigm, this article merits a 'fail'.

And why discuss this? What possible benefit does this article have for the readers? You are right in thinking I am an idiot and wasted time in replying. But it continually astounds me the articles that add little at all to the human experience.

Some people have too much time on their hands.

I implore those that might follow to not post to this fellows contribution - I recognise the hypocrisy in my own contribution here - Mirko is a serial pest and offerererer(er) of opinions on all manner of things - and needs to be stopped - NOW

Let him devote all his time defending Mokbel and other nefarious scalliwags - but Puhleese! discourage him from writing.

I think the author tackled networking badly. The references to "social" networking really shot the argument down. Its business networking that really could be argued to constitute cheating. There are specific functions within busines areas and professions that are held regularly to enable new exploitative links to be sought out and formed, and professional and business students are now taught networking. This form of networking is purely in a strategic sense, they are not out looking for friends of even groups people that have the same common goals and beliefs. Most business networking is conducted on the basis of "what might you be able to do for me" and if the answer is good enough, the seeker will quite happily lie about their own beliefs/opinions etc in order to "get-in" with those that he believes to hold the most advantage for him. What the implication of this is, is that for the most part only those with the "right" connections will get a chance, or at least will be given first chance. You might have a brilliant product or idea, but unless you know the right people to get it off the ground, or to help you promote it to financiers etc, then it will often never see the light of day. On the other hand, plenty of inferior things do get up, mostly purely on the basis that the originators had the right contacts. What Mirko also badly pointed out is that we like to believe that we live in an egalitarian society, the old "fair go". Unfortunately the way that business networking now works is that there is no such thing. That's why it may be considered akin to cheating.