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I wasn't defending any particular practice as being perfectly meritocratic. If you want to argue that a blind code test (or whatever) is more meritocratic than

I wasn't defending any particular practice as being perfectly meritocratic. If you want to argue that a blind code test (or whatever) is more meritocratic than github code review, be my guest. The point I'm making is somewhat different. The pretty people and the social justice types oppose the idea of meritocracy itself. ...in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth... Using google/twitter's easily googleable demographic numbers as representative, white males only make up about 42% of the "winners". Google/twitter are 60% white and 70% male, 70% of 60% is 42%. White males are only marginally overrepresented. It's actually Asian males who are wildly overrepresented - they make up 21% of google/twitter (70% of 30%) and 2.5% of the population. Are Asian males 8x more privileged than whites? An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops.

sago 12y ago
> But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist Not at all. There is little doubt that 'merit' defined as an capability or skill of an individual is not uniform. The point is that 'merit' is systemically produced. It is a function of money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors. Another way to phrase this is 'privilege', though that word is considered some kind of anathema by people who don't like to see their elevated status and capabilities as somehow a function of their environment. Absolutely Asian males are more privileged in terms of their ability to access tech jobs. Immigrant populations can have privileges in this way. Hindu families that are second or third generation immigrants to the UK from the Indian subcontinent are over-represented in medicine, for example. Is that because Indian people just make better doctors? Or is it because children of Indian descent are cultured and supported and mentored into medicine? Anyone who actually understands the last 20 years of social science, far from 'stopping intellectual discussion' are more likely to recognize that you've simply not found out or understood the issue. Which can, of course, be a sign of racism or sexism, if one is willingly ignorant. But can just be naivete or a Dunning Kruger effect.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  If you want to define "privilege" as pretty much anything which causes merit to be non-uniformly distributed, then the fact that Asian males are overrepresented due to privilege is tautologically true. Similarly, water is wet. All you've really said is "I assign the word 'privilege' to whatever the cause is for Asian males performing well in tech." That's not really relevant to this discussion. [edit: Sago, I think you've gotten off track. hackeruser was using the term "privilege" differently than you, treating it somewhat analogously to wealth and power and orthogonal to merit. When you use the word to describe anything that might cause disparities in merit, you are describing something far different than him.]
  - sago 12y ago
    Nope, I've pointed out that the way you are using 'merit' overlaps with the way social scientists use the term 'privilege'. Change the word 'privilege' for 'boondoggle', it doesn't matter, the point still stands. But as I pointed out, the use of the word 'privilege' is often such anathema that it prevents certain groups of people listening to the point, instead having them focus on the word.
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      To demonstrate that it's not a tautology, can you describe a world in which a group is overrepresented but not privileged? If you can't construct such a scenario, then by definition it is a tautology.
      - sago 12y ago
        Why are you so exorcised by the word privilege? My point was nothing to do with what you seem to have a problem with. My point was that what is seen as 'merit' is a function of a whole bunch of other factors, which means it isn't somehow a racists discussion stopping thing to point out that Asian men have higher levels of 'merit' (when merit is defined in the way I understood it to be in the post I was responding to). My point in using 'privilege' is to say that the idea of 'merit' overlaps with 'privilege' in the ways I described, and that the people the OP might thing of as wanting to 'stop' the discussion, do, in fact, have this discussion a lot, though they'd use 'privilege' instead to mean those things, because that is the term of art. You seem to have a problem with a word. Call it 'probabilistic causes of non-equal representation', then. Point out there are many such causes, and some of them are hardly things we could easily change (there are very few people with very low IQ in top tech jobs, so higher IQ is a 'privilege'). Your reaction to the word, rather than the point, seems rather ideological. Tautology is not a synonym for synonym. And the equation you accuse me of making is a strawman, my point was to unpack merit, not to define privilege. I'm sorry if it was unclear.
pyre 12y ago
> An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops. I think that you yourself are falling into the stereotyping trap here. There are people that would take offence at what you said, but there are also people on the other side of your discussion that would argue that those Asian males gained though skills through privileges that are not evenly distributed in society.

sago 12y ago

> But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist Not at all. There is little doubt that 'merit' defined as an capability or skill of an individual is not uniform. The point is that 'merit' is systemically produced. It is a function of money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors. Another way to phrase this is 'privilege', though that word is considered some kind of anathema by people who don't like to see their elevated status and capabilities as somehow a function of their environment. Absolutely Asian males are more privileged in terms of their ability to access tech jobs. Immigrant populations can have privileges in this way. Hindu families that are second or third generation immigrants to the UK from the Indian subcontinent are over-represented in medicine, for example. Is that because Indian people just make better doctors? Or is it because children of Indian descent are cultured and supported and mentored into medicine? Anyone who actually understands the last 20 years of social science, far from 'stopping intellectual discussion' are more likely to recognize that you've simply not found out or understood the issue. Which can, of course, be a sign of racism or sexism, if one is willingly ignorant. But can just be naivete or a Dunning Kruger effect.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
If you want to define "privilege" as pretty much anything which causes merit to be non-uniformly distributed, then the fact that Asian males are overrepresented due to privilege is tautologically true. Similarly, water is wet. All you've really said is "I assign the word 'privilege' to whatever the cause is for Asian males performing well in tech." That's not really relevant to this discussion. [edit: Sago, I think you've gotten off track. hackeruser was using the term "privilege" differently than you, treating it somewhat analogously to wealth and power and orthogonal to merit. When you use the word to describe anything that might cause disparities in merit, you are describing something far different than him.]
- sago 12y ago
  Nope, I've pointed out that the way you are using 'merit' overlaps with the way social scientists use the term 'privilege'. Change the word 'privilege' for 'boondoggle', it doesn't matter, the point still stands. But as I pointed out, the use of the word 'privilege' is often such anathema that it prevents certain groups of people listening to the point, instead having them focus on the word.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    To demonstrate that it's not a tautology, can you describe a world in which a group is overrepresented but not privileged? If you can't construct such a scenario, then by definition it is a tautology.
    - sago 12y ago
      Why are you so exorcised by the word privilege? My point was nothing to do with what you seem to have a problem with. My point was that what is seen as 'merit' is a function of a whole bunch of other factors, which means it isn't somehow a racists discussion stopping thing to point out that Asian men have higher levels of 'merit' (when merit is defined in the way I understood it to be in the post I was responding to). My point in using 'privilege' is to say that the idea of 'merit' overlaps with 'privilege' in the ways I described, and that the people the OP might thing of as wanting to 'stop' the discussion, do, in fact, have this discussion a lot, though they'd use 'privilege' instead to mean those things, because that is the term of art. You seem to have a problem with a word. Call it 'probabilistic causes of non-equal representation', then. Point out there are many such causes, and some of them are hardly things we could easily change (there are very few people with very low IQ in top tech jobs, so higher IQ is a 'privilege'). Your reaction to the word, rather than the point, seems rather ideological. Tautology is not a synonym for synonym. And the equation you accuse me of making is a strawman, my point was to unpack merit, not to define privilege. I'm sorry if it was unclear.

pyre 12y ago

> An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops. I think that you yourself are falling into the stereotyping trap here. There are people that would take offence at what you said, but there are also people on the other side of your discussion that would argue that those Asian males gained though skills through privileges that are not evenly distributed in society.