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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The same arguments would prove that math isn't a meritocracy. Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely. And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good. Indeed, that's what the word means in ordinary usage.

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Way to miss the point and exemplify it in the same breath.

The article is about how SV thinks it's more meritocratic than it actually is and how this false pride is a problem in and of it's own.

P.S. P.G. When this thread started I was almost tempted to make a snide comment saying "3.. 2.. 1.. Flagged off the front page."

It actually took a bit over an hour but it's now indeed been flagged off of the front page despite getting a significant number of upvotes while it was there.

Is that not just another example of allowing a vocal minority (flag-wise) to silence a majority who are apparently interested in discussions like these?

"SV thinks it's extremely meritocratic. It's only very meritocratic. This is a big problem."

I would in no way say that SV is even very meritocratic. Compare start-up demographics numbers to population-at-large numbers... The fact that commenters like you would read this article, hopefully think for half a second, and then still insist that SV is "very meritocratic" is exactly the problem.

Yes, there are too many pesky east-Asians and Indians.

There might be a Jewish problem as well.

I'm not sure if you are making an intentional reference to this or not, but it does make an interesting counter-point to the assertion that mathematics is a meritocracy: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

"This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value."

(Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759642)

I don't think that's a counter point; it's a long discontinued practice of deliberately discriminating against people of a given race because other people of that race were too successful.

It's not something I support, by the way, in case the sarcasm in my above comment wasn't apparent.

It is one example (of many) of access to a mathematics education not being a meritocracy. In the linked discussions on that paper, there are people arguing that this practice is ongoing in the US (although tweaked a bit to be less obvious).

Regardless, I think it is important to realize that access to a [mathematics] education not being a meritocracy is different from mathematics itself not being a meritocracy. It is related, so this is only a partial counterpoint, but I think it is interesting to consider nevertheless. Certainly one has to keep in mind that biases in our education system will influence what we see in industry, even if the industry really is a meritocracy.

Isn't that the definition of "positive discrimination" and "affirmative action" ? Both of which are most certainly in wide use today.

The problem, I think, is external to SV. It's not that women and minorities find themselves blocked within SV - it's that they don't get into that path in the first place. The problem starts long before someone gets the opportunity to drop out of Stanford CS to pursue their dream of selling Facebook for Cats to herd-mentality VCs.

And what if it's only moderately meritocratic? Or even below average?

I'd love for PG to run an analysis once of what words occur most frequently in flagged posts and their comments.

I don't think you could get a better representation of this community's unspoken biases than that.

I'm also pretty sure you'd find that words like feminism, female, sexism e.a. would feature quite high on the list.

Maybe the community has a bias against pointless class warfare. You want to make an effective feminist statement in Silicon Valley? Start with a github profile.

Right, right. Let's skirt past the idea that men may be in any way responsible for the industry they dominate, and focus on the fact that women aren't creating enough GitHub profiles or having enough hackathons.

In addition to shifting the blame, this is a convenient way to avoid taking any sort of responsibility for our own behavior or our peers, so congratulations on squaring that circle.

This community, like most others, has an unspoken bias against third-wave feminist bullies.

Look what happened to the "Atheism Plus" communities. They have been completely taken over by bigoted "social justice warriors" and their activism.

Completely.

Atheism is almost never discussed. And when it is, it is always discussed in the context of third-wave post-modern feminism. Think I'm lying? Take a look at any Atheism Plus community. Any!

Once a community accepts the tenants of post-modern discourse, it's over.

SV believes so strongly that it's meritocratic, that every successful person believes they deserve it. That's a problem.

Why is that a problem? Because someone who can say with moral certainty "this is my money, I earned" is not an easy mark for the sort of people who produce nothing but demand an equal share of the work of others? Because they won't subscribe to the ridiculous notion that there is no virtue in creating wealth but only virtue in giving it away? Maybe that is precisely why those who produce nothing hate the concept of meritocracy so much. It makes it harder for them to guilt people into giving away what they rightfully earned.

It's important to be able to tell the difference between something you earned and something you were given without earning it.

If someone fails, does that necessarily mean they didn't deserve success? Or is it possible that external forces took from them something they had, "with moral certainty", earned?

The article points out that white males are overrepresented in SV success stories. Are you going to argue that they are dozens of times more productive than women, or non-white people?

Let me make the point in a way that does not pit groups of people against each other. If you do the same thing over and over, hustling and making pitches, and then one day you get someone to fund you, does that make you inherently better on that day? Do you have more "virtue" on that day than you did the day before?

Let's say someone founds a company and it fails. This person feels like they didn't deserve to fail, so they start another company and it succeeds. This person will take the success as s true measure of what they deserve, and will ignore the failure as a fluke. But they will look at failed companies around them and feel superior, even though they also failed once.

There are lots of people founding similar companies, making similar pitches to the same investors. I can't see an argument that they "deserve" wildly different valuations.

Holding wealth creation as a virtue devolves very quickly into worshiping money. Anyone with money is to be respected, and anyone who doesn't have money has nothing interesting to say.

You begin from the premise that everyone who believes they have earned their money is correct. This is why the phrase "born on third base, think they hit a triple" was born.

It's fine if your premise is that people who have money deserve it a priori. But let's be honest. A great many haven't worked orders of magnitude harder despite orders of magnitude greater wealth. A great many are not themselves (but for their wealth) orders of magnitude inherently more valuable to society than everyone who has less.

In your mind, is it possible for someone to disagree with the article without "exemplifying the problem"?

That's the issue with first-world "social-justice warriors", like the author of the linked opinion piece. If you disagree with their premises on factual grounds, you're labeled as part of the problem. It makes honest discussion impossible.

For example, you completely ignored the point that PG made. You didn't even attempt to address it. You just labeled him as the enemy and went on to make your own point.

He made a good point, but in my mind, he didn't go far enough. Both (American) mathematics and SV are disproportionately dominated by east-Asians and Indians relative to their respective population sizes. Why does everyone ignore this?

In post-modern Marxist discourse, who is speaking matters more than what is being said[1]. There is literally no way a white male could win the argument. Since he belongs to the oppressive/over class, his viewpoint is corrupted and invalid.

By the way, this is the bread and butter of what they teach to kids in the soft majors in university nowadays.

[1] http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html

It's a shame that love and compassion has indeed left both the liberal arts educations as well as the worlds of business and entrepreneurship. But fear not, there is a coming Romantic Renaissance! Once again our children will turn to poetry, the arts and the love and celebration of their neighbors!

The danger isn't in rationalism, or in relativism, or in whatever weird and distorted man-made system of thought is de rigueur.

The danger is that the love of every man leaves our hearts and souls.

All systems of thought are ultimately erroneous because they must have been made by a single subjective vantage point. The truth comes from without, not from within.

This is the message in all great and lasting art. I dare you to find me a great song or a great poem where the messages of eternal and unending love for our brothers and sisters are not at the root of their creation!

I'd quote some poetry here, but I'm afraid the lot of your are quite illiterate! I apologize to those who do have a love of letters, but hopefully you'll grant me the license to call out this forum of philistines!

Art wins! Love is real!

I am seriously trying to figure out if you are trolling or not. I mean, there's something to what you're saying here. Just that you've picked the weirdest-ass venue for it. You're not supposed to give a shit about your fellow human being if he or she is (imputatively) genetically incapable of or unwilling to perform the same feats of achievement as you.

> " I dare you to find me a great song or a great poem where the messages of eternal and unending love for our brothers and sisters are not at the root of their creation!"

I am guessing he is not sincere, unless he has something against instrumental pieces...

I am completely sincere and I was referring to all manner of artistic creation.

Are you familiar with the concept of poetic license or has your digital life completely beaten out any sense of art from your world?

The main problem here is the age old dichotomy of Dionysus and Apollo... er, I'm sorry if I resort to stories, shall I instead delve in to the labyrinthine machination of modern philosophical thought? But then don't you see the amount of wasted effort that poets have to go through to "convince"? Again, the burden of proof shouldn't be on me to convince you that "seeing is not believing". I can't ever prove that to you, or to anyone. I'm not choosing the life of a missionary, rather a story teller.

If this doesn't make sense, I'm sorry, but I guess I need to enter your maze...

I think the main issue in Silicon Valley is the emphasis on rationalism. There is no art or love. There is rampant irreligious sentiment. There is rampant disbelief in the magical nature of our reality. You can say it isn't magical and it is completely rational, but the truth of the matter is you can't ever prove that. You can only theorize. The problem arrises when you start to put your misplaced faith in to science and technology. That's the fucking problem here!

Misplaced faith, faith in the creations of men, and not faith in fellow men, is the fucking problem.

Faith in Seasteading, Transhumanism... faith that men will become transcendent, hero worship... it is all signs that people have turned away from humanity!

Put your faith in to your fellow men directly, not through the lens of something else.

Stop building fucking mazes for your desires to get lost in to! Online dating sites? Social networks?

"There is literally no way a white male could win the argument."

Where to begin?

"win the argument" -- in what other way could anyone "win" the argument? Who's the referee? This is such a backward and binary way of looking at this topic.

And that's as if the only way for this to move forward is to win or lose, and as if a white male must naturally adopt a dissenting opinion.

As for the rest, who knows? You can of course find the least articulate, most extreme examples of a heterogenous group of people and argue with that, and maybe you'll "win" the argument. But you haven't really contributed anything to the dialog except criticize something most people already disagree with. It's kind of a waste.

PG either failed to grasp or completely ignored the point the article made and immediately went on to reiterate how SV is nearly as much of a meritocracy as his perception of a near perfect meritocracy (math.)

By doing so he gave an almost painfully accurate example of the problem the article addressed, hence my use of the word "exemplifies."

As for the east-Asians and Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming. It's worth considering that that itself might be contributing to their disproportionate presence to some degree (i.e. in which way does causality go in this case.)

> "As for [...] Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming."

I find that incredibly hard to believe. There are a lot of racist ideas and stereotypes surrounding Indian programmers. For just a small taste of it, coming from or perceived by this community, search "indian programmers" with quotes on hnsearch. Pages and pages of people either making negative generalizations about Indian programmers, or pointing out that other people make negative generalizations about them.

This community tends to put a damper on that sort of thing, so rest assured that there are plenty of people who have opinions a lot stronger than they are willing to voice on this site.

You're correct. I should have limited myself to saying that at least there are stereotypes (and a few key public role-models) of well-adjusted, successful Asian and Indian entrepreneurs.

The point I was trying to make, staying with the spirit of the article, was that these stereotypes and the reality we see influence each other to a much greater degree than we often dare to admit.

To be fair, if you accept the premise that Silicon Valley is driven by power and prejudice rather than merit (for the record, I reject it), then clearly, pg is part of the problem. That doesn't mean you reject his argument, it means you ignore it as an irrelevant analogy.

I think it's a lot more interesting to take pg's argument in a different direction. If you accept the premise that intellect is evenly distributed regardless of race or gender (for the record, I accept it), then why is mathematics dominated by white males? Because it's an observable fact.

Start applying Five Whys and see what happens.

Math is a field famously overrun with white men. Probably not the best comparison to make if you really want to talk about what a "meritocracy" should look like. Unless, of course, you think white men naturally have more merit than everyone else..

I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.

So anyone who questions merit vs privilege is "Marxist"?

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see any Marxism here.

Cultural Marxism substitutes white male oppressors for capitalist oppressors. The rest of the philosophy is strikingly similar.

"Cultural Marxism"? When did Marx talk about culture in that way? He spoke very directly of class and economics. What similarities are you perceiving here? Expectations of equal opportunity are far different from the inversion of political subjugation that Marx proposed.

Honestly, I think you're just tossing the word "Marxist" in as a form of name-calling, with no viable connection to your point.

Do you believe there are a large number of people in {white/asian men}^C who are good at math but unable to progress in the world of math?

So just because white men predominate in a field that automatically makes the field less meritocratic? If you live in a society where white men have more access to the tools that will allow them to forge their merit, when those white males encounter a meritocracy they will naturally rise to the top. You can argue that the society where these men come from is not meritocratic, but you can not argue that the field they enter is not meritocratic just because they are over represented.

Notice that if any other group is proportionately overrepresented in a population, it can still be "meritocratic". It is only if there are too many white men, and only white men, that a group can no longer be considered meritocratic.

Meanwhile, people tend to forget that half of successful startup founders are immigrants, including large portions from China and India. Most tech companies I've seen are not very white. If Silicon Valley is a good old boys network, the good old boys have done a terrible job at exclusion.

Also, apparently women from other countries didn't get the memo that the tech industry is sexist, and they come in droves to Silicon Valley to kick ass and chew bubble gum.

The plural of anecdote is not data, let alone the singular.

> Notice that if any other group is proportionately overrepresented in a population, it can still be "meritocratic".

false. a meritocratic system will very closely match the demographics of the population at large, because no given demographic is inherently better at a given task[1].

> It is only if there are too many white men, and only white men, that a group can no longer be considered meritocratic.

it's no coincidence that most un-meritocratic systems are overrun with white men-- white men are, historically, a priviledged group. so, of course, if a system values privilege over merit, one will see more white men. is that really that hard to understand?

[1] there are, of course, some small differences in average ability among different populations, but in most every case this is not the overriding factor leading to population imbalances in a given field.

You realize that it is trivially easy to falsify your worldview by glancing at, say, Asian American SAT statistics? Measured ability varies widely across population groups, and not always in white guys' favor. Otherwise, every profession from the NBA to electrical engineering would be perfectly balanced like a college recruiter's pamphlet.

Your statement is just a statement of faith, contradicting all available evidence.

The burden of proof doesn't rest on the person arguing against your borderline phrenological explanations of intelligence.

And yes, faith in humanity IS needed for an enlightened thinker.

The meaning and purpose of life will never be proven. There is plenty of room for faith in our world of rationalism.

You need more art in your life! The world is more than just a bunch of metrics in a spreadsheet to fret and argue about.

We should be skeptical of superstitions, but not skeptical of love, truth, and beauty! Don't misinterpret the quest of the Enlightenment! To listen to love and to live!

How is "different genes have different impact on different mental tasks" anything like a phrenological explanation?

Because it makes it easy to keep his faux-outrage going.

Don't project your misery on to me my friend, it is wasted breathe! I've got the fire of life on my tongue and your motivations are but wisps of faint discontent. In the raging flames of passion all you can see are your own fallacies.

(get it, the play on "faux outrage"? faux/fallacies, outrage/raging flames? sorry to ruin the poem for you, but you know, part of the problem here is that too few people on this forum have ever learned how to read/listen/see...)

I did get it, and it was very well done :)

That's a well stated argument, and it's definitely true that you can't look at the tech industry in a vacuum. But I think it would be very difficult to argue both that US/Western/California society is sexist in a way that prevents women from entering the field, and also that all the men that entered the field have magically freed themselves from the sexist cultural biases and attitudes of the larger society they grew up in.

Also, in this scenario, even if the tech industry is not actively sexist, it is being affected by the sexism of the wider society - and, if you think there is anything wrong with that (eg decreased pool of potential employees/founders/idea people), then it is quite possible to make tech-industry-specific moves that counter the extra disadvantages imposed from outside the industry, like affirmative action programs for girls that give them increased access to the tools that will allow them to forge their merit, even when you can't quite identify the process that is reducing their access in the first place. In fact I think that for a field which prides itself on solving big problems, saying 'it's not us it's the rest of society' is a cop-out, and to agree with your statement and not support affirmative action in some form is equivalent to supporting entrenched sexism.

There is a huge difference between saying "tech industry, you are so innovative, why don't you look at this problem and see if there is something you can do to fix it" and saying "tech industry, you are racist, sexist, misogynist, and you should be ashamed of yourselves". I am all for the tech industry finding solutions to hard problems, and I am all against the tech industry being blamed for something it did not cause.

Yes, and 'tech industry, you are so sexist and should be ashamed of yourselves' is a reasonable response to people saying 'Lack of women in tech is clearly a sign that women don't want to be in tech/aren't suited to it because anyone can enter tech and pitch a VC if they want', or 'Affirmative action will just mean there are incompetent females getting ahead at the expense of more competent males' (see the complaints about the Etsy scholarships, for instance: usually comes with complete denial of any systemic disadvantages).

I guess in these cases they are being blamed for not seeing the problem and so perpetuating it, rather than for causing it. But at some point it seems reasonable to say that ignoring or denying the existence of something so well-studied is wilful rejection that makes you part of the problem. How about the phrasing 'tech industry, you are perpetuating sexism/racism even if you don't intend to and you should be ashamed of yourselves'?

is a reasonable response to people saying 'Lack of women in tech is clearly a sign that women don't want to be in tech/aren't suited to it because anyone can enter tech and pitch a VC if they want'

Is there any argument against your views for which an ad-hominem attack would not be a reasonable counterargument?

What if those young white men are all working in companies that depend on VC capital to survive and thrive? And what if the VC investment decisions are also made by young white men?

That is the real Silicon Valley of today.

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley? If there is, then the author's argument has some merit. If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal. To what end?

That is an interesting question. I still can't think of one better than math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV.

The to what end question is easy to answer though. It gets you a lot more attention to claim SV isn't a meritocracy than to claim that math isn't.

> math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV

Can you point me to the great mathematical and hard science accomplishments going on right now?

All I see is ad sales and hucksterism.

> is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Obviously professional sport. Especially "one-dimensional" sports like running or swimming. The "best" runners in the world are so named because they consistently run the fastest. There are some qualifiers in terms of who has the time and money to train, and access to coaching, but all in all it's highly meritocratic.

The end is to sell her book, which is published tomorrow.

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Jobs where the individual’s numbers are everything, like sales and trading.

If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal.

The author makes the mistake of looking at Silicon Valley as a monolithic institution. There are many different aspects to life as a dev.

Having said that, coding ability isn’t >*. Things like culture fit and the ability to work with other people also factor in, unless you go the solo dev route. Also, there are still a lot of idiots getting promoted, like the people that end up populating the tales of The Daily WTF.

I would submit that mind sports are the most meritocratic subculture; performance is statistically ranked and sometimes measured directly.

And........ we find that there are no women at the top.

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at speedcubing [1].

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at chess.

There are only a few women in the top 100 at scrabble [2].

There is only one woman in the top 100 at Go (EGF).

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

Here's one story of why a girl quit playing competitive chess as a teenager: http://fanoudraws.tumblr.com/post/68091072768/sorry-this-pos...

Interesting example, both math and entrepreneurship are abound in examples of people making a big splash after going off on their own. From mathematics, people like Srinivasa Ramanujan and Gottfried Leibniz made an impact despite lacking formal mathematics educations. Their results spoke for them, not their credentials.

Edit: Nash apparently did study mathematics, not sure what I was remembering...

Better examples of autodidact mathematicians are Galois and George Green.

Those are indeed better examples, though I had to look them up. The history of mathematics is really something I should read more about.

Math is a good analogy, because I think it illustrates the real question here -- to what degree should we care about the pipeline into the meritocracy?

Is a meritocracy effective if it's selecting the most deserving candidates from a skewed pool? Can we call it a meritocracy? Is it fair, for that matter, to evaluate a meritocracy by expecting an even distribution among attributes like gender or ethnicity?

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