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Words Matter – Moving Beyond “Meritocracy”
- magissima 8y agoGood! Meritocracy is a fake idea used to justify giving power to those who are already powerful, and the word was invented in order to satirize the idea[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology
- bvinc 8y agoThe only time I ever hear it is from SJWs talking about how we shouldn't value open source contributors on their merit, but we should instead somehow ascertain their race and treat them differently according to it.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoYeah, how dare we promote people based on whether or not they are good at what they do.
- oconnor663 8y ago> I personally long for a word that conveys a person’s ability to demonstrate competence and expertise and commitment separate from job title Totally. > or college degree Absolutely. > or management hierarchy This one's less clear. On the one hand, obviously a toxic work environment can ruin anyone's performance, and accounting for that is important. On the other hand, most work has to happen in some kind of work environment, and to some extent we all have to learn how to work well with people around us. That's an important skill for any job.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- user812 8y agoThe culture war in action. I don't know why, but Mozilla is one of the few corporations that has fully embraced the toxic ideology of "diversity" and "feminism". So much, that it will probably perish of it. Their corporate culture has been overtaken by what one could call toxic womanhood. I want to emphasize this with a quote by famous thinker Hannah Arendt: "I was actually old-fashioned. I have always been of the opinion that there are certain occupations which do not suit women, if I may put it that way. It does not look good for a woman to give orders. She should try not to get into such positions if she wants to retain female qualities. I do not know whether I am right or wrong about this. I myself have somehow, more or less unconsciously - or let's say better: more or less consciously - directed myself accordingly. The problem itself played no role for me personally. You see, I just did what I wanted to do." This quote to highlight how the cultural perception of reality can change within a mere 60 or 70 years. The culture war has progressed to such a state that I don't even know if such matters are allowed to be discussed here anymore, because the "progressive forces" don't want to accept that there is anyone that could reasonably be against their ideology, that is, the counter-ideology gets suppressed.
- nicoburns 8y agoSo there is an extent to which I'm sympathetic to what you've written here. I do think that feminists (and I consider myself to be a feminist) are often dogmatic and not open to discussion or criticism. There is reason for this, namely that they are trying to protect groups (such as women and racial minorities) whose voices have traditionally been ignored, and thus there is a tendency to err on the side of favouring the opinions of these groups over other groups. I think there are positives and negatives to this, but it can be dogmatic. However, I think you need to consider what you're saying: > It does not look good for a woman to give orders. She should try not to get into such positions if she wants to retain female qualities. Are you saying that women should not be in positions of power? That quote also talks about "female qualities". And I think you should consider that many women are not very feminine, and many men are not very masculine. And to my mind there is no reason why those people should be constrained to act in a certain way just because of their gender. If you think that they should, then I'd be interested to hear why...
- malvosenior 8y agoIs there a place where developers who disagree with this type of political movement can gather? I do believe in meritocracy, I believe on the internet no one knows you're a dog and I believe in judging people based on their code contribution alone. I also have very little interest in letting non-tech interlopers into projects. Where do I go?
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoIt seems to me that by rejecting the idea that merit is important, these projects will decay and devolve into irrelevance. The problem is that even the Linux kernel itself has been infected with this memetic cancer. I would suggest it's time to re-read "1984", because real life is rushing towards imitating it, and it's not just the government. Newspeak and doublethink are rapidly infecting many corporations.
- snikeris 8y agoFor me, this news brings "Atlas Shrugged" to mind more than "1984".
- basic1 8y agoLinux has a meritocracy of patches not people, Reddit was the great meritocracy, unfortunately Reddit played the game and Linus didn't.
- user812 8y agoI would have never thought to see it play out in real life when I read it. It is absolutely frightening. George Orwell - A Final Warning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXm5hklbBsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXm5hklbBsA)
- ardy42 8y agoI hope Google rejects meritocracy harder and faster than Mozilla, so we can continue to have a competitive open-source browser not built by an advertising and tracking company.
- izzydata 8y agoWhy though? Is this some kind of political stunt? I can basically guarantee this will increase the usage of the word meritocracy across the internet. So.. good job Mozilla.
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- caseyf 8y agoActual title of article: "Words Matter – Moving Beyond 'Meritocracy'" More descriptive title, taken from the article text: "Mozilla has taken steps to discontinue using the word meritocracy as a way to describe governance and leadership structures."
- CWuestefeld 8y agoI personally long for a word that conveys a person’s ability to demonstrate competence and expertise and commitment separate from We have a word for that: "meritocracy". The fact that we may have failed to achieve this fully doesn't mean we should throw out the word. By the Mozilla logic, we should also throw out "democracy" because our government(s) have failed to include all stakeholders; throw out "feminism" because a few of them have demonstrated that they're anti-male rather than pro-female; "education" because we've so badly failed to properly educate our youth (and adults!). Really, pretty much everything we've set as a goal for ourselves, we've failed to achieve in its entirety: such is the nature of goals. But those lapses are just further goals for us to cover. Throwing up our hands and changing the goal posts, or at least how we reference the goal posts, isn't going to get us any closer to them, and seems more likely to confuse the issue, taking us at least somewhat farther away.
- notacoward 8y agoThe OP specifically addresses that issue. "Sometimes good words and good aspirations get tarnished with history, and need to be set aside" ...and... "Sadly, “meritocracy” is not that word. Maybe it once was, or could have been. But not today." Like it or not, words have more than etymological meaning. They also have historical and cultural meaning, that might be sharply at odds with their etymology, and that precludes their use even in situations where they're technically accurate. "Meritocracy" has become such a word. Like "traditional American values" and "celebration of European culture" as synonyms for racism, "meritocracy" has become a rallying cry for opposition to diversity, inclusion, and egalitarianism. All as the person who originally coined the word meant it, BTW. We can coin new words that are just as etymologically valid without the cultural baggage.
- CWuestefeld 8y agoWell, the OP mentions it. But you haven't actually provided any rebuttal to my analogy with terminology for other missed goals. I think they're pretty good examples of words that are "historically tarnished" in similar ways.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
- imglorp 8y agoI was interested what wrong could be perpetrated here. The key reason given is, > The notion of “meritocracy” can often obscure bias and can help perpetuate a dominant culture. The link at Atlantic is dead at the moment but it's on wayback[0]. Atlantic asserts that you can't use performance as an objective metric because, in practice, when all other things equal, they are still observing discrimination. I don't know what to think any more. I would like an objective measurement but I don't know if the data support it. 0: https://web.archive.org/web/20181004050116/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/meritocracy/418074/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181004050116/https://www.theat...
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoThe metrics are bad. And since the metrics are believed to be good, they further entrench winners. It's like a ML algo. You take all people who have been put in prison, how long, and their faces. You also take a big subset of non-prison people - same thing. (You know where this is going). You build a classifier that, for a given face, estimates yes/no for prison and how long if yes. Lo and behold, you show it darker face images, and prison estimation ratchets up and the estimated time served up up up. Is the ML racist? Technically, yes. But it's observing racist underlying societal things. Yeah, it's ugly. No, I don't have good answers, other than directly addressing when we catch stuff. But We (royal) don't see it as a problem. The status quo changes slowly.
- nicoburns 8y agoI think the key observation is that metrics (of employee performance) are always bad. And thus it makes sense to compensate for that by taking into account other factors.
- AstralStorm 8y agoUsing metrics as goals is a key feature of bureaucracy. In meritocracy, direct results should matter.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoMeritocracy comes down to "Who deems someone worthy of merit?". Who or what makes the consideration? Is it done in a fair and impartial manner, or is the word "Meritocracy" used as a tool to further disenfranchise people out of the 'in group'? If you dig in further, past the simple buzzword, its a method of distributed control of power, controlling social acceptance and shrouding it as "merit". What does "Meritocracy" come down to? Turns out women don't get 'merit'. They get 'social media' positions. They get the fuzzy fluffy jobs because that's all they're good for, regarding merit. Similar with African Americans. Pidgeonholed, natch. Older people, same - seriously they 'just can't keep up!'. I read the Hacker Manifesto back in '89. I accepted it. I lived it. And as much as I wanted to accept "that we're all alike", Real Names and similar forced policies to disclose identity have poisoned this back to racism, sexism, nationalism, and ageism. I don't like it, and I don't like whatever pretty glitzy name is given to do this round of demeaning and ostracization.
- CWuestefeld 8y agoTurns out women don't get 'merit'. Please provide citations.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoSure. https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/jun/24/false-theory-meritocracy-women-lose https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/jun/24/... The main takeaways here are: 1. Players have a range of qualities. It is nigh on impossible to rank them in a simple linear order, since strengths and weaknesses come in bundles, not as a single order of merit. 2. What makes someone a winner or a loser varies as they move up the ladder? Success criteria are context-dependent. Qualities suited to the top position may have little value in the middle, and vice versa. Indeed we may kill off the very leaders we need in middle echelon tournaments. 3. Something like the Peter Principle operates, where people are promoted to their level of incompetence. We advance people on yesterday's, not tomorrow's, competence. It is also striking that no one goes down. Losers just get stuck in their positions or exit the game. 4. People move ahead as much by luck as through performance. They get a good break, have a strong sponsor, make the right friends and get handed an opportunity to shine. https://theconversation.com/women-in-tech-suffer-because-of-american-myth-of-meritocracy-94269 https://theconversation.com/women-in-tech-suffer-because-of-... "In the U.S., women own 39 percent of all privately owned businesses but receive only around 4 percent of venture capital funding. Put another way, male-led ventures receive 96 percent of all funding." https://www.nawbo.org/resources/women-business-owner-statistics https://www.nawbo.org/resources/women-business-owner-statist... https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/272646267/how-the-meritocracy-myth-affects-women-in-technology https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/27... Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies There's plenty enough to dig further in this area. The numbers are damning, and show that "Turns out women don't get 'merit'." rather effectively. Well, unless you think that half of the population has 'fair' representation with only 4% VC funding, or 6% CEOs.
- marcinmozejko 8y agoShouldn’t be better if we made meritocracy still valid and fight with biased opinions and decisions? Statements claiming that meritocracy induces biased behaviour will result in a huge backlash :(
- mishurov 8y agobased and redpilled
- gedy 8y agoIt's a shame, as disagreeing that this type of publicity stunt will actually help diversity and equality means to some type of people that you are against equality.. In any case, it did inspire me to delete the Firefox app from my phone as another symbolic stunt.
- java_script 8y agoHmmm are you in favor of helping diversity and equality in Mozilla?
- chongli 8y agoLeaving aside the culture war third rail topics, the idea of meritocracy is on ethically shaky ground anyway. People who are highly intelligent and motivated already reap the largest share of the rewards in society. Why do we have to go further than that and say that these people "deserve" more? A person who is born with low IQ or low conscientiousness (or both) "deserves less"? At least in a society where rewards are distributed somewhat randomly there is a chance for everyone to have a share. With a meritocracy, no such chance exists, since rewards are then determined by immutable aspects of a person's brain. Maybe if we could build a society where decision-making was separate from reward, we could have a just meritocracy. But right now, as it is, those who make the decisions use their power to grant themselves all the rewards.
- baud147258 8y agoSo you're saying that reward should be separated from the decision? If I make a shit decision regarding architecture on my current project which drag down the entire thing, I should receive the same amount of praise as if I had taken the best possible decision? Or you could remove all possible reward, just so that there's no more incentive to do anything.
- chongli 8y agoOr you could remove all possible reward, just so that there's no more incentive to do anything. In a society where merit is rewarded perfectly, there's no incentive to do anything for all those who lack merit (i.e. the bottom 99%).
- furgooswft13 8y agoI mean, I think we're talking about developing good software, not whether the unwashed masses can live a decent life. Regardless, merit != absolute perfection. Most people are bad at lots of things and good enough at one or two.
- chongli 8y ago
- aestetix 8y agoSeems like a good time to recommend people read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
- brennebeck 8y agoAs I haven’t read it, can you explain the connection and why you recommend it?
- notacoward 8y agoI would hazard a guess that the connection is how the Gulag was supposedly a punishment for the least meritorious (criminals) but in fact the inmates often possessed great merit and it was the guards/administrators who lacked any, because the definition and application of "merit" in Soviet society had become so twisted. But that's just a guess. More elucidation from the GP would be appreciated.
- brennebeck 8y agoAh, I can see that as a possibility. Thanks.
- aestetix 8y agoThat's actually not the reason at all. Given the current climate of tension in the English speaking world, I'm not going to comment publicly anymore on this issue. If you are genuinely intellectually curious as to my opinion, I'm happy to discuss it privately via email.
- brennebeck 8y agoI don’t see your email in your profile?
- 8y ago
- raxxorrax 8y agoI think meritocracy isn't really desirable if you think more closely about it. Still, this is ridiculous. Mozilla has done some fantastic work in shaping the internet like it is today, but this doesn't really bode well for the future. On the contrary, I would think words like "diversity" and "inclusivity", since their politicization, shoulder a lot more subtext directly excluding certain political views. An constructive environment doesn't need to check it's language. Maybe appeal to the conscience of the community. Worked pretty great in my opinion. disclaimer: Only contributed tiny bits to OSS, but I believe this to be false: > open source projects tend to have less diversity than other software organizations. I also think that there isn't any real discrimination based on the idea or the word meritocracy. Ironically, although there is not much merit to meritocracy, there seems to be even less with inclusiveness and diversity.
- pgeorgi 8y ago> but I believe this to be false: >> open source projects tend to have less diversity than other software organizations. You won't find some high school student or a stay at home mom have real impact in corporate software projects, but that's not the type of diversity that's measured these days.
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- notacoward 8y agoI've started using "ferretocracy" to describe what actually exists in most places where "meritocracy" gets thrown around a lot. The idea of letting people succeed or fail according to merit instead of position is laudable, but (as crankylinuxuser already pointed out) the measurement of merit is problematic. A true meritocracy can only exist when the metrics for merit are both the right metrics and accurately measured, with all involved able and willing to keep it so. That's a bit like communism's reliance on altruism or laissez-faire capitalism's reliance on honesty. Things never work out that way. In reality, weasels always find ways to game the system. They exploit every flaw in how merit is defined or measured, who gets to define it, who is aided and who is isolated in their respective quests for merit, etc. Ultimately, the pursuit of "merit" veers off target. Focus on pure technical merit has to be balanced with consideration of other kinds, and with goals (e.g. diversity) that are not necessarily merit-maximizing.
- AstralStorm 8y agoYou can guard against the metrics being inaccurate by calibration and anchoring. And also verification. (and watch the watchers too) It is obviously an active process, much like guarding democracy against demagoguery. Attempts to subvert the system can usually be spotted early. A person designing right secondary metrics that result in good primary endpoints is also meritorious. The usual problems are either complacency, where meritorious people stop being so and are not being degraded, stagnation - lack of further development of merit or unnecessarily high barriers of entry. Merit when developed should accrue over time, yet it should be possible for a "nobody" to get in at high levels.