The Chinese imperial examinations
This is documented history rather than a laboratory result. The events are well recorded. What they teach is an argument, and the entry makes it openly.
For roughly thirteen hundred years, from the year 605 until 1905, imperial China chose its government officials through one of the most demanding selection systems ever built: the Keju, a series of written examinations. What made it remarkable for its time was that it was, in principle, open to almost anyone, and the papers were judged without the examiner knowing whose work he was reading. Candidates studied for years, sometimes decades. At the highest levels, pass rates were brutal, on the order of one in a thousand or worse. It was not a perfect meritocracy, wealth still bought tutoring and time to study, but the core idea was radical: the same test, scored the same way, blind to family and connections, as the gate to power. A blacksmith's son who passed outranked a noble's son who failed.
The same test, applied to everyone and scored without knowing whose work it is, surfaces real ability in a way that a series of personal impressions never can. Most modern hiring is the opposite of the Keju: a sequence of opinions from people who know exactly whose candidate they are judging, shaped by names, backgrounds, and who referred whom. The Keju's power came from being a genuine process, consistent and blind, rather than a chain of individual judgments. Wherever you can make an evaluation the same for everyone and blind to identity, you get closer to measuring the person and further from measuring your own reaction to them.
Source: Documented history of the imperial examination system, 605 to 1905 AD.
Michael Sandel, 2020
On the promise and the trap of selecting people by measured merit, across history and today.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.