13 ms·

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 m

by pg 13y ago

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.

mtrimpe 13y ago
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?
- SilasX 13y ago
  "SV thinks it's extremely meritocratic. It's only very meritocratic. This is a big problem."
  - 21echoes 13y ago
    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.
    - hacker789 13y ago
      Yes, there are too many pesky east-Asians and Indians. There might be a Jewish problem as well.
      - Crito 13y ago
        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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759642)
        hacker789 13y ago
        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.
        Crito 13y ago
        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.
        waps 13y ago
    - beat 13y ago
      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.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    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.
    - newnewnew 13y ago
      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.
      - wonderzombie 13y ago
        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.
    - hacker789 13y ago
      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.
  - sp332 13y ago
    SV believes so strongly that it's meritocratic, that every successful person believes they deserve it. That's a problem.
    - freefrancisco 13y ago
      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.
      - sp332 13y ago
        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.
      - 13y ago
- hacker789 13y ago
  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?
  - newnewnew 13y ago
    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 http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html
    - williamcotton 13y ago
      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!
Crito 13y ago
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...
- eliteraspberrie 13y ago
  Better examples of autodidact mathematicians are Galois and George Green.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Those are indeed better examples, though I had to look them up. The history of mathematics is really something I should read more about.
freefrancisco 13y ago
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?
- pg 13y ago
  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.
  - williamcotton 13y ago
    > 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.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  > 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.
- eliteraspberrie 13y ago
  The end is to sell her book, which is published tomorrow.
- vellum 13y ago
  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.
21echoes 13y ago
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..
- newnewnew 13y ago
  I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.
  - beat 13y ago
    So anyone who questions merit vs privilege is "Marxist"? Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see any Marxism here.
    - newnewnew 13y ago
      Cultural Marxism substitutes white male oppressors for capitalist oppressors. The rest of the philosophy is strikingly similar.
      - beat 13y ago
        "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.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  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?
- freefrancisco 13y ago
hammerzeit 13y ago
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?

by pg 13y ago

mtrimpe 13y ago

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?

SilasX 13y ago
"SV thinks it's extremely meritocratic. It's only very meritocratic. This is a big problem."
- 21echoes 13y ago
  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.
  - hacker789 13y ago
    Yes, there are too many pesky east-Asians and Indians. There might be a Jewish problem as well.
    - Crito 13y ago
      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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759642)
      - hacker789 13y ago
        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.
        Crito 13y ago
        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.
        waps 13y ago
  - beat 13y ago
    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.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  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.
  - newnewnew 13y ago
    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.
    - wonderzombie 13y ago
      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.
  - hacker789 13y ago
    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.
- sp332 13y ago
  SV believes so strongly that it's meritocratic, that every successful person believes they deserve it. That's a problem.
  - freefrancisco 13y ago
    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.
    - sp332 13y ago
      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.
    - 13y ago
hacker789 13y ago
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?
- newnewnew 13y ago
  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 http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html
  - williamcotton 13y ago
    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!

Crito 13y ago

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...

eliteraspberrie 13y ago
Better examples of autodidact mathematicians are Galois and George Green.
- Crito 13y ago
  Those are indeed better examples, though I had to look them up. The history of mathematics is really something I should read more about.

freefrancisco 13y ago

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?

pg 13y ago
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.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  > 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.
ForHackernews 13y ago
> 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.
eliteraspberrie 13y ago
The end is to sell her book, which is published tomorrow.
vellum 13y ago
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.

21echoes 13y ago

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..

newnewnew 13y ago
I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.
- beat 13y ago
  So anyone who questions merit vs privilege is "Marxist"? Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see any Marxism here.
  - newnewnew 13y ago
    Cultural Marxism substitutes white male oppressors for capitalist oppressors. The rest of the philosophy is strikingly similar.
    - beat 13y ago
      "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.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
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?
freefrancisco 13y ago

hammerzeit 13y ago

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?