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I had a long and fun argument with someone the last time the kernel came up on this exact subject. A very interesting observation is that in the extreme "meritocracy" 100% implies that people with merit should be excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions.

Any political system comes with trade-offs. Meritocracies fundamentally excuse bad behavior, democracies fundamentally allow mob rule/bad decisions in haste, monarchies fundamentally ignore commoner's problems, bureaucracies are too risk averse and slow, etc, etc. If we rejected political systems that allow failings and excuses, we'd only have anarchy.

To the topic at hand, the kernel folk don't seem to be particularly political, and obviously they don't want anyone behaving badly in their community, but one does suspect that there is a game of political football afoot that is not going to benefit the kernel. The kernel is a technical project - people who reject the idea of technical merit have a home in society, but that home isn't in the Linux Kernel community; it is a space where merit is meaningful. The kernel maintainers should first and foremost concerned about the technical quality of the kernel.

> A very interesting observation is that in the extreme "meritocracy" 100% implies that people with merit should be excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions.

That’s a non sequitur. There’s no reason that a meritocracy must allow bad behaviour from high performing contributors. Linus’s behaviour has been accepted, even lauded by certain members of the community, but I’ve always seen it as brash, arrogant and off putting. The simple fact is that people who have power tend to abuse that power, but that has nothing to do with meritocracy as a concept.

>The simple fact is that people who have power tend to abuse that power, but that has nothing to do with meritocracy as a concept.

Except that by definition, meritocracy creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way. Those with "merit" are trusted and respected more than those without. This means that complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. And even when bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of chasing away their "merit".

In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.

In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.

Linus is an incredibly influential figure in tech, having written both Git and Linux. He has decided to work on his own behavior.

This could be a watershed event in that regard.

Life creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way. This is getting ridiculous. Have some minimal set of rules so that people, including important people, can’t be outright nasty to each other and leave it at that. There is absolutely no need for all this ideological baggage.

>Life creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way.

And such dynamics should be acknowledged and opposed wherever they exist.

>Have some minimal set of rules

Except as I said, these rules are frequently ignored or applied less fairly in one way or another for those with "merit".

I think the very first rule of life is to live. If someone helps you live when otherwise you're going to die, you should tolerate more of his weirdness. If someone helps you live better when otherwise you're going to be quite miserable, you should also be more tolerant. I think this is the logic of meritocracy, and the logic behind capitalism.

You either believe in capitalism and thus meritocracy as its twin, or neither. Why do capitalists get to take away so much profit, and why should we award patents to inventors, if we don't reward those with "merit"?

>If someone helps you live when otherwise you're going to die, you should tolerate more of his weirdness.

Yes, if someone has control over your life or death, you should probably do what they say.

That is what most people call "violent coercion".

>You either believe in capitalism and thus meritocracy as its twin, or neither.

Well, quite...

>If someone helps you live when otherwise you're going to die

>That is what most people call “violent coercion”.

Really? Is it?

There’s no point in continuing here, I’m afraid we’re too far apart to gain anything from this discussion. Have a good day.

If they can choose not to help they're not "helping you to live", they're choosing not to kill you.

And if they choose whether to kill you based on whether you do what they want, that's violent coercion.

And such dynamics should be acknowledged and opposed wherever they exist.

Power itself can't be opposed. By definition, opposition doesn't exist without power.

Abuse can be opposed and to some extent mitigated but it's not at all a static game. When you build walls humans go around them, climb over them, dig under them, or break through them. There is no wall that one person can build that another cannot overcome.

I said power dynamics (i.e. power imbalances) should be opposed, not the abstract concept of power itself.

Power itself is an imbalance. It implies the non-universal capability to do something. When we say "the president of the club has x, y, and z powers" we're not talking about the things everyone else in the club is able to do.

So to be opposed to "power dynamics" is to be opposed to non-universal capability, an extremely radical position which I am not sure you hold.

Could you expand on your definition to clarify your position?

>In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.

Linus' contribution is not just the code he commits, but his ability to organize and marshall developers. That ability is tied to his communication skills.

To the extent that his discourse drives skilled developers away, it is a detriment which is presumably why he is working on it. If it were to get extreme and he became unable to lead due to his toxicity, "meritocracy" would imply that he would step down or be removed.

Which system do not create a power dynamic that can be abused? It seems like an shared problem, where the only reachable goal is to create safeguards so that when power dynamic create abuse there is some form of process to address it.

A democratic system based on popularity share all those problems attributed to meritocracy. Those deemed popular are trusted and respected more than those without. complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. When bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of loosing influence and power.

What I would like to know is if meritocracy has a higher risk of causing abuse compared to other systems.

> Meritocracies fundamentally excuse bad behavior

This may often (?) be true in practice if you remove "fundamentally", but not always and it doesn't have to be. In an environment where people work together to produce an outcome, the ability to interact positively and productively with others is a valuable behavioral merit. It keeps one talented asshole from chasing away all the other talent. You can have a meritocratic organization where "works well with the team" is a requirement. Where this breaks down is when talented people sit back and allow abuse (or worse, start to emulate it) because they're all starry-eyed about an offender's other talents and achievements.

I'd go further than just remove "fundamentally" from that statement. I'd say the entire statement is false.

Getting rid of meritocracy is "Everyone gets an A+". Teams will quickly get in trouble if everyone got A+ for "works well with the team" but some should've gotten a D- or an F.

Meritocracies don't have to excuse bad behaviour if they simply penalise it. Perhaps those stuck in bad situations and complaining about meritocracies are really just suffering from the ill-effects of cronyism, favouritism or some other "ism".

Meritocracy means that a political system is organised so that the "meritorious" get power, where merit is based on performance.

You are talking about getting rid of ranking, possibly the concept of merit. It isn't possible to have a meritocracy with no concept of merit, but that is much stronger than not being a meritocracy.

For example, I could rank a team of 5 from A+ to F, then put cousin Ahmed in charge because he is a relation of mine. That would be a system that is not a meritocracy, because to be in charge a person would have to be related to me, but there is still a concept of merit. I would expect my cousin to then consider merit carefully as he divides up tasks.

Perhaps I was not clear. A merit system that tolerates cronyism and "other isms" is not actually a system based on useful merit. And I believe that most people who are hating on meritocratic systems are really hating on corruption or dysfunctional systems. What is the point of getting a "A+" based on some merit based score if Ahmed can get in by being your cousin? Corruption would tolerate this happily. So penalise corruption!

To use your example, your cousin was put in place due to nepotism. This is very much covered by my "some other ism" as corruption or at least bad behaviour. Cronyism and nepotism both bypass natural "best person for position based on merit" selection criteria.

Integrity is well within performance measures under a meritocratic system, eg police who are corrupt can't be seen as acting as the ideal for police officers or authority by any useful measure (merit). If you hired your cousin that nepotism impacts both yours and your cousins integrity and therefore merit. This bypasses the meritocracy and is actually simple corruption.

Plenty of other "isms" are also really just corruption in various forms: sexism, racism, tokenism, ageism. I'm sure there are plenty more.

Part of the point is that the unprivileged don't get the same opportunities in many ways, so they don't do so well in tests but they still do well at the job; therefore, you need to give them extra leeway during recruiting and such.

Also, the experience of the less privileged is that some people use claimed-impartial tests and barriers to exclude them in particular, and so when a test comes along it is demotivating, as it might just be an attempt to exclude them. Look at the voting reforms in various places for examples of this.

Using tests to try for pure meritocracy only works when everyone has had the same kind of background and nobody has bias. Look at the examples of CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias. Essentially, if you're recruiting (or filtering any set of people) and aren't actively controlling for bias (anonymization is key), you will be biased.

From an organisation’s point of view, does it matter how one person came to be a better performer than another? Surely they just care about current state: this person performs better than this other person now.

Perhaps had their backgrounds been different, their performance would be different. Perhaps if the under-performer had more training, their performance would be better.

But right now, things aren’t different. From the organisation’s self-interested point of view, they should just choose the better performing candidate.

This only makes sense if you assume the organisation's interest is only to maximise productivity in the short term.

An open source organisation may explicitly be interested in attracting marginalised people into the tech sector, to improve equality in society as a whole.

Or even from a cynical perspective, a profit-led corporation may desire to increase their ability to hire competent but undervalued (and thus cheaper) employees in future.

> Look at the examples of CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias.

That's not true. The original studies used low class names for blacks and hispanics, but not for whites. (For example, they didn't use names like Cletus or Billy Ray.) Once this was corrected for, they found almost no bias in resume screening.[1]

1. https://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2014/wp1419_ko...

I don't think that shows a lack of racism, rather the existance of classism.

People are being unfairly judged based on racial and class identifiers, rather than on their CV.

The study I linked to shows that there's almost no race or sex discrimination for names on resumes, even in the southeast US. Regarding class discrimination: I don't think you'll get much disagreement from reasonable people. It's ubiquitous. That said, I do think classism is far less common in tech than in most fields.

This doesn't disprove the original contention.

So looking at their methodology, they chose the "high class" black names ("Anderson" and "Thompson") (EDIT: I misread, these aren't the black names) based on census proportions, but that doesn't necessarily mean those names are actually read as "black" by most people.

Moreover, using census results ignores exposure to foreigners with these names. My own strongest association for "Thompson" is the white police officers in Tintin, and more generally for white English people. (Although I'm British so that may not be representative.)

As long as "low class" black names are more readily associated with blackness than "high class" ones, this methodology isn't really isolating anything, just doing a slightly more intersectional analysis.

You misread the paper. The surnames Anderson and Thompson have white connotations, while Jefferson and Washington have black connotations. The researchers backed up their choices with data. From page 3:

> For example, based on data from the United States Census, 90 and 75 percent of individuals with Washington and Jefferson surnames are African American, respectively. Similarly, 90 percent of individuals with a surname of either Hernandez or Garcia are Hispanic, and 70 percent of Andersons and Thompsons are white.

Ah yes, you're correct, I got confused by the first-name/surname thing.

I would still question the validity of this approach, and more generally, I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US.

They acknowledge that the names may not be strong signals, but the very reason that's the case is that people are less likely to associate black people with high socioeconomic status in the first place.

Even if you object to their choices of black surnames, they also ran experiments with male and female names, and with hispanic names. In those cases, resume screeners were all but certain as to the race and sex of the applicant. Still, there was almost no discrimination detected.

Honestly, I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole here. You started by claiming that there was a massive gender & race bias:

> CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias.

When I corrected that and linked to a study, you replied with an argument based on a misreading. When I corrected your misreading, you fell back to, "I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US." If that's the case, then it also refutes the conclusions of the original (flawed) studies claiming racism. After all, if your argument is true, those can be just as easily explained as classism.

I'm not sure there is anything that could convince you that you are mistaken.

The emily and jamal paper controlled for mother's education level distributions.

I think that quote reflects a concern about the equality of opportunity ("access to the same resources"), not outcome. And in particular, that rewarding merit as measured solely as the outcome, and not the struggle to reach it, will only reinforce that inequality, since two groups of people who have (on average) the same abilities will have different outcomes if they start from two different positions.

I think what people mean is that purported meritocracies aren't often actual meritocracies, since unequal opportunities will give some people's contributions more weight than others.

Unfortunately, rather than explaining how self-proclaimed meritocracies often aren't actually judging on merit, such remarks often get wrapped in remarks about cis white males or whatever (or at least - the ones that make the rounds do), which understandably leads to people getting defensive.

Additionally, as a sibling comment shows, there also appears to be some misleading research, which I think is more likely to happen when arguments like these become as heated as they are.

Thus, I'm not sure whether the argument is true or not. However, I think it's good to separate it from the loud voices unsuccessfully making it, and to try to consider it on its own... merits.

"Studies show" is carrying a lot of water. I don't have access to the study that is linked, but almost all of these studies about sexism in tech end up not being true. An excellent example was Gender Bias In Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance Of Women Vs. Men.[1] This study claimed to find evidence of sexism. If you looked at the data, it was clear that there wasn't any.[2] Still, it was the basis for articles by Vice.com[3], The Guardian[4], Business Insider[5], and the BBC[6]. None of these news organizations issued retractions. The bias in both academia and news organizations is such that they simply cannot be trusted to be accurate on this topic.

The bias in bay area tech companies is just as bad. If you express the slightest doubt about sexism being rampant in tech, you will be ostracized. If you speak up in protest when all the women in the office go to a free screening of Wonder Woman during work hours, while all the men have to stay and work, you will become persona non grata. These sorts of things have happened to me and others I know. It's infuriating. Even if sexism and racism are as bad as people like Coraline Ada claim, these "solutions" are making the problem worse. Discriminating on the basis of race and sex only serves to balkanize us and polarize opinions.

1. https://peerj.com/preprints/1733v1.pdf

2. Scott Alexander explains the whole saga: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exc...

3. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9aep3y/women-are-bett...

4. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-con...

5. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/more-evidence-of-sexism-o...

6. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439

> None of these news organizations issued retractions.

And then this gets repeated, retweeted and multipied, and finally people start the discussion with "obviously...", "it is widely known that...", "as it's been established...". Not only it gets a life on its own, but you can receive social punishment for just trying to discuss that.

> Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality

Inequality is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is the reasons for that inequality that can be unjust.

If you and I are unequal in society either because you made poor decisions or else were unwilling to work as hard as me, that is in fact "just" even if it is not "equal". Equality at all costs simply does not work, which is why it has failed every time humanity has tried to enforce it on society.

We should fight inequality that results from factors like ethnicity, ideology, and disability, but what's interesting to note is that people like Coraline have shown no qualms about creating inequality for those with different political views-- calling even for the explulsion of OSS devs from projects where their only crime is holding a different political view in private.

It's hard to read her comments and the phrasing of the CoC and not think that its purpose is to allow purging those who commit "wrongthink".

>I just always have trouble imagining the end game of that kind of thinking - even in Stalinism, people with higher abilities were selected for various more demanding tasks.

Rejecting meritocracy doesn't mean not acknowledging ability, it means not structuring power hierarchies around it.

Those most able should be chosen for tasks because those involved in the work agree collectively, without the coercion of power dynamics, that it's best to assign them that task.

Meritocracy doesn't require structuring power hierarchies around merit.

Furthermore, there will never be collective or universal agreement in any remotely complex issue, which means some block of the community is inevitably being coerced into accepting a communal choice.