Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by autarch | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

autarch

I think this bit from the email is the most important:

> To sum up:

> -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project.

> -The word “meritocracy” itself has become a bone of contention which is unhelpful to us.

> -Meritocractic principles remain highly desirable and should be explicit.

> -We should also acknowledge the importance of measures we take to debias how authority is distributed.

In particular, note the second and third points. The real issue here is that some people get really upset by the word "meritocracy". Is it worth fighting that, or can you just use different words for the same thing?

View on HN

> The real issue here is that some people get really upset by the word "meritocracy".

Clearly you have never dealt with a white man who is better off than certain women, or people from ethnic minorities, and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better and invokes "meritocracy" all the freaking time.

I have. And I'm a half-Asian male - I can't imagine what it's like to deal with that jerk if I were a woman or an ethnic minority he didn't consider inherently intelligent (yes, really - he was actually surprised I was upset at the things he said because he wasn't talking about me, as if that was the reason for me to disagree with him).

When the word "meritocracy" is used to structurally shut down debates of sexism and racism, it is no longer about meritocracy.

The governance documents of a open source software project are not being used to shut down debates about sexism and racism.

The Mozilla and Rust communities are by far the most inclusive communities on the web and more inclusive all the time.

Then they probably have little issue with dropping a word that has been coopted this way in the general context.

> ... and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better ...

Could you clarify how you reached this conclusion about someone specific, as opposed to a generalized fear such a person might exist?

In many years in the tech/engineering business I have never seen anyone express such a sentiment, despite having worked with more than my fair share of unpleasant people.

Presumption of competence, or obliviousness to one's own advantages are certainly present in the community. But I have not seen anyone express such supremacist ideas before.

>> .. and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better ... > could you clarify how you reached this conclusion about someone specific,

I have seen/heard of this in academia. The specific case I know about was a good chunk of a graduate math department. The attitude seemed to come from the top down mostly, but the graduate students seemed to repeat/reflect the attitude/culture.

Other conversations here give me the impression such ideas might be experiencing an uptick in expression, if not popularity in tech.

davorak was on the money: it was someone working in academia. Genetics, heritability of IQ. You can probably fill in the rest.

But the problem in this example would be that this man is using a warped, deeply racist definition of "merit". I don't see how that would invalidate the concept of meritocracy itself.

> When the word "meritocracy" is used to structurally shut down debates of sexism and racism, it is no longer about meritocracy.

There seems to be a strange logical fallacy where "Our group aspires to be X" morphs into "Our group is X" - and then, the "conclusion" is drawn, that "evidence Y that were not X must be wrong, since after all, we are X".

From what I've seen, I'd apply the same thing to the concept of "color-blindness". As a society you can aspire to be "color-blind" all you want - if you still have cop violence against PoCs and "random searches" where the randomness is conditioned on skin color, you obviously aren't color-blind.

So this logical fallacy seems to exist and be widespread. However, I don't see how it would invalidate the concepts themselves.

> -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project.

I don't see the connection; it is a well established fact that no two people have the same opportunities, regardless of country. In one country you might see large differences between skin colours, in another the prime opportunity differentiator is parental income and so forth.

Therefore you would expect that differences in opportunity (which are infinitely greater than innate differences in ability relevant to software engineering between the various popular subdivisions of humanity [1]) more or less transfer directly to the composition of meritocratic organisations.

If that statement is meant to imply that an actual meritocratic organisation would closely track the composition of the general populace, then I'd say that it fails to acknowledge bias in society, because then the assumption backing the statement is society already providing equal opportunities, which we know is patently false.

[1] Just because something is statistically significant does not mean it's relevant; effect magnitude must always be considered.

Do you think people which get really upset by word X representing entity Z will not get really upset after a while by word Y representing the same entity Z?

This is quite literally how euphemism treadmills start out.

>Is it worth fighting that, or can you just use different words for the same thing?

Today it's "meritocracy". Tomorrow it's "talent".

It will never be enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com