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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> ... 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.

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.

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