7 ms·

Possibly because affirmative diversity could be seen as incompatible with meritocracy.

by avip 7y ago

thristian 7y ago
"Meritocracy" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "merit" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of merit by which a meritocracy could be judged. I'm sure there's reasonable arguments against affirmative diversity in general or Mozilla's diversity projects in specific, but incompatibility with meritocracy is not a strong one.
- drevil-v2 7y ago
  How do you define diversity though? How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point? Is it my call and only my call or should there be regulation and legislation to deal with situations like this? I have one spot and many diverse candidates. How do I choose?
  - guerrilla 7y ago
    > How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? When everyone has an equal opportunity. You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      > When everyone has an equal opportunity. "Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.) The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.
      - guerrilla 7y ago
        It turns out that measuring discrimination and opportinity is a pretty well studied topic. It's mainly the discipline of sociology which quantifies this but there are plenty of other disciplines, such as economics, that do it as well. You can do a Google scholar search to learn more. By the way, targets do not need to be attainable in order to produce (also quantifiable) positive effects.
        johnisgood 7y ago
        > It turns out that measuring discrimination and opportinity is a pretty well studied topic. And measuring skills is not?
        thristian 7y ago
        "skill" is not necessarily the same thing as "merit", but it's a lot more measurable. In general, though, the people most skilled at a given task tend to be the people who've been doing it the longest. The second tier of skill tends to be people who have been around people doing that task. That is to say, the most skilled people are generally current practitioners and their children, who grow up to be the most skilled people of the next generation. In short, a "skillocracy" tends to look and act very, very much like an aristocracy, which is kind of the opposite of the idea I think most people try to express with the word "meritocracy".
        belorn 7y ago
        Can you quantify the diversity benefit of having a nudist in a group compared to other diversity goals. Having read a lot on the topic I can say with some confidence that any attribute beyond those that the US law defined as protected classes lack any kind of well established methodology to quantify diversity.
mcv 7y ago
But a lack of diversity is a sign of a lack of meritocracy: clearly not all talent gets an equal chance to flourish. Trying to get more talent on board is valuable.
- hgoel 7y ago
  A lack of diversity isn't in and of itself a sign of a lack of meritocracy, and nor is simply increasing diversity a sign of meritocracy. It's misguided to think that by manually ensuring diversity (eg. By hiring someone for simply being a qualified minority rather than necessarily the best candidate) is pushing for meritocracy. If diversity programs were interested in maintaining meritocracy while increasing diversity, they'd focus their energy on uplifting poor families through things like training or scholarship programs so their kids have a better shot at life.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    That's the usual line, that assume no qualified minority candidates exist. Which is, at root, a biased assumption already. E.g. Stanford (used to) vigorously recruited qualified minority candidates to help improve diversity on campus.
    - hgoel 7y ago
      Isn't explicitly choosing based on their race also making the same assumptions? That there aren't enough minority candidates, and thus they need to explicitly force more of them in? After all, why would there be any bias if selections were completely merit based (that is, blind to race and sex) unless the pools being drawn from were themselves biased? The best way to get around biases in the hiring process obviously being to avoid informing hiring managers about the identities of candidates, instead of emphasizing it even more. My assumption was that not enough qualified minority candidates exist, obviously there are qualified minority candidates, just not enough, thus why they aren't as equally represented in the field in question.
      - hgoel 7y ago
andrewaylett 7y ago
If you're not aware of the origins of the term "meritocracy", it's worth a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment Is your meritocracy measuring merit in the way you think it is?

Possibly because affirmative diversity could be seen as incompatible with meritocracy.

by avip 7y ago

Possibly because affirmative diversity could be seen as incompatible with meritocracy.

"Meritocracy" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "merit" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of merit by which a meritocracy could be judged. I'm sure there's reasonable arguments against affirmative diversity in general or Mozilla's diversity projects in specific, but incompatibility with meritocracy is not a strong one.

drevil-v2 7y ago
How do you define diversity though? How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point? Is it my call and only my call or should there be regulation and legislation to deal with situations like this? I have one spot and many diverse candidates. How do I choose?
- guerrilla 7y ago
  > How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? When everyone has an equal opportunity. You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > When everyone has an equal opportunity. "Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.) The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.
    - guerrilla 7y ago
      It turns out that measuring discrimination and opportinity is a pretty well studied topic. It's mainly the discipline of sociology which quantifies this but there are plenty of other disciplines, such as economics, that do it as well. You can do a Google scholar search to learn more. By the way, targets do not need to be attainable in order to produce (also quantifiable) positive effects.
      - johnisgood 7y ago
        > It turns out that measuring discrimination and opportinity is a pretty well studied topic. And measuring skills is not?
        thristian 7y ago
        "skill" is not necessarily the same thing as "merit", but it's a lot more measurable. In general, though, the people most skilled at a given task tend to be the people who've been doing it the longest. The second tier of skill tends to be people who have been around people doing that task. That is to say, the most skilled people are generally current practitioners and their children, who grow up to be the most skilled people of the next generation. In short, a "skillocracy" tends to look and act very, very much like an aristocracy, which is kind of the opposite of the idea I think most people try to express with the word "meritocracy".
      - belorn 7y ago
        Can you quantify the diversity benefit of having a nudist in a group compared to other diversity goals. Having read a lot on the topic I can say with some confidence that any attribute beyond those that the US law defined as protected classes lack any kind of well established methodology to quantify diversity.

mcv 7y ago

But a lack of diversity is a sign of a lack of meritocracy: clearly not all talent gets an equal chance to flourish. Trying to get more talent on board is valuable.

hgoel 7y ago
A lack of diversity isn't in and of itself a sign of a lack of meritocracy, and nor is simply increasing diversity a sign of meritocracy. It's misguided to think that by manually ensuring diversity (eg. By hiring someone for simply being a qualified minority rather than necessarily the best candidate) is pushing for meritocracy. If diversity programs were interested in maintaining meritocracy while increasing diversity, they'd focus their energy on uplifting poor families through things like training or scholarship programs so their kids have a better shot at life.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  That's the usual line, that assume no qualified minority candidates exist. Which is, at root, a biased assumption already. E.g. Stanford (used to) vigorously recruited qualified minority candidates to help improve diversity on campus.
  - hgoel 7y ago
    Isn't explicitly choosing based on their race also making the same assumptions? That there aren't enough minority candidates, and thus they need to explicitly force more of them in? After all, why would there be any bias if selections were completely merit based (that is, blind to race and sex) unless the pools being drawn from were themselves biased? The best way to get around biases in the hiring process obviously being to avoid informing hiring managers about the identities of candidates, instead of emphasizing it even more. My assumption was that not enough qualified minority candidates exist, obviously there are qualified minority candidates, just not enough, thus why they aren't as equally represented in the field in question.
    - hgoel 7y ago

andrewaylett 7y ago

If you're not aware of the origins of the term "meritocracy", it's worth a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment Is your meritocracy measuring merit in the way you think it is?