Quote from: mu_enrico on June 29, 2018, 03:20:10 AM

Quote from: Forward_Thinking on June 26, 2018, 08:43:50 PM

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If you are not familiar with S.M.A.R.T. goals here is a post form MIT about them (http://hrweb.mit.edu/performance-development/goal-setting-developmental-planning/smart-goals).
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S.M.A.R.T goal is only a jargon, to beautify or make some hypothesis more convincing. I propose P.E.N.I.S goal (created by me) which is more update and easier to remember:
P: Predictable
E: Easy
N: Number bound
I: Inspiring
S: Specific
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trolling here, I'm just a little bit annoyed by the overuse of a jargon, and to make it sounds more academics.

I think we have different native languages and so I don't want to be too critical of you here, but SMART goals are not exactly jargon but I can see your point. Please allow me to explain, there is a very specific reason why I used the SMART goal system to ask my question. I was debating a highly aggressive person in another post on this same topic and he kept accusing me of assumptions, and saying I was claiming expertise but not proving my expertise, blah, blah, blah. All of those were him just deflecting my questions because I found a flaw in his arguments. He seems to be in love with the Merit system where I am concerned about its unintended outcomes.

This post was my attempt to find a professional and courteous way to obtain an answer to my question. I'm just attempting to understand how much planning went into the Merit system.

From what I have seen offline in professional settings, when someone begins a major intervention like the Merit system that person will set goals. But all goals are not equally useful and the SMART goal system is probably the most famous and is a great one, so that is why I used it here. Maybe people do not set SMART goals and the problem with skipping that step is that you get lost months later trying to figure out "did we do it?" "should we fix X?" "are the complaints right? "are the praises right?" Without an agreed upon standard you end up with what is called "scope creep" now that IS jargon. But it means that your project all of sudden is now asked to fix a lot of things you were never supposed to be working on.

In part, if you don't use SMART goals or some other similar system, it becomes very difficult to defend your intervention when you hit difficulties if you have set no goals, or vague goals. And all interventions hit difficulties. That's just called life

To me, the Merit system is a screening system. It is a method to screen who should and should not rank up. I don't know the goals. It's clear that those goals, if set, were not publicized. Knowing what I know about how people normally implement interventions like this one, seeing the results, seeing the stats, reading the posts, I am pretty sure the Merit system did not achieve what they wanted it to. Since February, I have been warning that the Merit system would likely not achieve it's goals. But I have no way to be sure because I can't find any public goals.

Here is where I first warned of the problems I was seeing: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg30489106#msg30489106 (2/17/2018)

Here is an example of how I don't think the Merit system is NOT working as planned: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.msg41158125#msg41158125 This post shows the numbers of people who have been able to rank up during the new system starting with the Full Member level. The number of people who have ranked up is tiny!

The Merit system is a screening system and they set the standards way too high. If you are familiar at all with medical school screening process, they too set the standards way too high. And in the US we have a nursing shortage as a result. No one wins when that happens.