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"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 practi

"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.

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.