Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”
groups.google.comMeritocracy, like all words that reduce to "good thing", are always troublesome. No one ever claims to be a "bad thing"ocracy. The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?
Using words to maintain a culture has a sort of Newton's third law. It might push you towards striving to be "good thing", but it also pushes back, making people resistant to the idea that you aren't striving for "good thing". This is an inescapable fact of how humans hold values.
Better words are the ones that aren't exclusively evaluated by humans. These are things on which people can agree there exists an impartial measure of the thing. There is no such measure of merit. Merit is an undecidable value at best and an incoherent one at worst.
So, counterintuitively, "good thing" words to describe values are kind of bad. It is easy to construe acknowledging their badness as thinking the underlying concept is bad. I think that is happening in this comment thread. I think rewarding people with trust and responsibility based on merit is a great idea! I think it is detrimental to the cause to codify that in your mission statement.
Well meritocracy means we will try to select and give influence/recognition based on merit. When someone tries to push an idea like "let's have more Asians" or "let's have more men" in the project we can direct them to the very first statement where they see we do selection based on merit and not skin color, gender or sexual orientation. Any attempt to introduce gender/race/sexual orientation quotas will promptly be rejected on those basis. There is value in wording it like this beyond "let's do good".
Who gets to define merit? Say a certain style was more likely to pass code review. And that style was more often associated with people with CS degrees, vs self-taught programmers. Even though it's a stylistic choice, functionally equivalent, one is "better" than the other and is introducing bias.
It's very easy to do, especially because consistency is important for legibility, but a stylistic choice nonetheless. I think a decent, practical solution to some degree are prettifiers/code-formatters and linters. Because the style is codified, and trivial for anybody to apply.
Usually calling something a meritocracy implies that it also has public bars for promotion that you can constantly self-test against and so iterate toward.
A common example is a marital-arts dojo: every student can take a belt (rank) promotion test at any time, and as many times as they like; and it is crystal-clear what such a test entails (usually, being able to beat someone who is already at the given skill-level, with both participants using a defined subset of the taught skills that the target ranking "expects.") Thus, even without taking the official test, students can simply ask their peers who have reached that skill level to spar with them, and in-so-doing iterate toward being of that skill level themselves.
For a more hypothetical example: a meritocratic public schooling system would be one where there're no "years" of education, but rather "ranks" (or just a big unified "tech tree" of topic-units to study), with tests to attain new ranks/unlock new topic-units; and where each student can take each test an infinite number of times (presumably with procedurally-generated tests that resist answer-memorization.)
In such systems, you (ideally) will first very quickly equilibrate to the rank in the system that your initial level of merit allows you to reach, and then will continue forward through the system at the rate you're willing to grind to increase your merit.
You should follow the project's style when you start contributing. If style is pointed out in code review, fix it.
Well yes, I agree. It's a bit of a toy example, simplistic, but hopefully one we can all relate to.
It does illustrate the issue of using "meritocracy" without anything else. It's like saying "we follow a style guide", and then not providing that style guide. Obviously sub-optimal.
(The example breaks down since providing a style guide is doable, whereas providing a "merit guide" is hard/impossible? In that case, is it better to remove that? I don't know.)
Just because it's hard to accomplish pure meritocracy doesn't mean we can't strive for it or have it our stated values. It has an advantage that we can reject all efforts which contradicting the principle and could possibly undermine the project.
> Well meritocracy means we will try to select and give influence/recognition based on merit. When someone tries to push an idea like "let's have more Asians" or "let's have more men" ...
Isn't the argument normal something more like: "I don't think we are living up to the description of meritocracy. Our demographics lean heavily one direct and we lack female/male/asian/<descriptor> for no merit based reason. Lets do something about that."
The core of such arguments are an attempt to support/bolster meritocracy.
> "good thing" words to describe values are kind of bad.
This makes no sense to me. Values are principles or standards of behavior. If I try to keep good values, this makes me evil somehow? Why would common standards of behavior for a group with a common goal be bad? Wouldn't it help the group continue in the same direction?
You have to separate the word from the underlying concept(s). They're not the same thing. If they were the same thing, I could conjure of invisible pink unicorns with an utterance and make all the world utopia by having everyone recite "I am a good person and I won't do anything bad". Words can fail and everyone acknowledges that at least tacitly. Hypocrisy is the purest form of words failing. Let's put it that way: Even if you call yourself a meritocracy you can still be a hypocrite. On the other hand being a meritocracy without calling yourself one is no problem. If you call your organization of 300 people a meritocracy, there will be 300 notions of merit. What benefit is there to calling yourself one if the word itself has no concrete, actionable content and doesn't unify people's vision?
This sort of trickery is easier to see when you are part of the management of an organization. The bulk of my relevant personal experience is as a software consultant where I have been embedded in many organizations, all of which considered themselves "good thing"ocracies, but usually fell far short of the mark. We are all hypocrites like that. Words are tricky devils. If you don't treat them with a healthy suspicion you can get in trouble. You have to make them servants of your goal, not arbiters of what your goal is.
If your argument against the use of "meritocracy" is true, it would apply just as much to "diversity" or "equality", meaning that you are arguing those generically good words should not be used as well. Am I missing something?
Those words are also empty if they are not provided along with a rubric of what they mean. Equality is perhaps more troublesome than meritocracy while diversity is somewhat better.
It is not obvious that diversity is a good thing, so it has more bits of information if you make it a value. Not much, though, if you do it like most corporations in a shallow and vague way.
Better words are the ones that aren't exclusively evaluated by humans. These are things on which people can agree there exists an impartial measure of the thing.
What do you propose we replace it with then? I happen to think that the word "merit" is apt to describe what any good software company is looking for in its employees. If an individual brings value to the company, they have merit and should be rewarded for it.
The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?
How is this relevant? If someone is voicing dissent about a culture there's a million barriers they can hide behind instead of facing the allegations ("we're committed to working towards a more diverse and inclusive environment..."). Are we to cower away from any word that can be twisted to justify bad things as well as good things, for fear that people will abuse them?
The word "meritocracy" doesn't seem like a line of code specifying an objective action that is to be taken to solve a problem, it describes a vision of how someone would ideally like their company to operate. How about we just call out bad behavior when we see it and not let it pollute the vision? That's what needs to happen, or we'll be locked in this battle until one political group manages to suppress the others (that, by the way, seem to have the exact same endgoals they do).
>The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?
Context. Is it helpful for x business goal?
If you mean your post as a general argument against organisations claiming to value any vague "good thing", I can respect that. With few word changes in your comment, you could use it to argue against claims of valuing: privacy, diversity, inclusivity, environment etc.
Do you believe organisations should remove all claims of valuing such things?
I never take such value statements at face value and neither should you.
Very nice way to put it.
What do you think of Google's "don't be evil" clause and that it was recently removed? Same thing, or subtly different? Not trying to be inflammatory, I don't know what to think myself: rationally I think it should feel the same, yet somehow it feels different.
I think it feels different, at least to me, because "don't be evil" doesn't signal any value about how I would be treated if I worked at Google. We often evaluate such value statements by empathizing with the people affected. Everyone here wants to be evaluated on their merit. Everyone thinks they're meritorious.
So it's easy to see opposition to the word "meritocracy" and, putting oneself in the shoes of a member of the Mozilla org, feeling mistreated. On the other hand removing "don't be evil" doesn't feel like Google is going to start mistreating people I empathize with^.
^ I feel that way for different reasons :^)
This is why I support measured merit instead of merit. If you have merit but didn't show it, it doesn't matter.
This frightening shift away from meritocracy sounds suspiciously like what happens in India. In India, everything from government jobs, admissions to colleges and universities, etc is based on this quota system based on caste, religion, and other subdivisions instead of meritocracy.
The intentions are undoubtedly good. But the actual results? Every government department is horrifically inefficient because a whole lot of people who do not know how to do work land up there due to these quota systems. In many cases, if you fit in a special category, you can basically fail in your university entrance examinations, even not attempt more than one question, get that question wrong, and still get admission.
People regularly riot, often violently, to pressurize the government into declaring their group as minorities so that they can specifically get these benefits.
ISRO and the Army are the only public institutions in India that operate on meritocracy. And they are pretty much the only public institutions held in any regard by the public.
This may have a feel good effect in the short period and some people may feel like they are somehow morally superior. But this will always lead to a whole lot of pain in the long term.
This is about changing the very nature of how open source projects work for people with radical political views to 'feel included', specifically to have their political views validated.
It is not about improving actual diversity, Mozilla already has those efforts. Mozilla should welcome and support contributions by everyone, I even recognize the systematic barriers that some people face, but I don't think we should be altering how key open source software projects function to affirm the believes of a small but loud group of radicals, particularly when their solutions for diversity don't actually increase diversity, they just increase the power of that loud group.
Can someone explain how striving for meritocracy stems from assumption of equal opportunity? I want projects I am part of or benefit from to be guided by meritocracy. It means some people have better chances to contribute or gain influence there than others. Those are more competent people who often got better opportunities through life. I want that because I care about those projects. I don't see how chances not being equal contradict any of it.
Let's say you get "a" tries to succeed. You'd expect equally talented candidates x, and y, to have Pr(x|a) == Pr(y|a).
But what if y only had "b" tries, where b<a? What would y have to be to make Pr(x|a) == Pr(y|b)? Our intuition seems to say that there will be a lot of variance in Pr(y|b). But the candidate's skill hasn't actually changed, just we aren't measuring it with the same fidelity!
And that's all there is to it. If you no longer assume everyone has an equal chance to show their skills, then the meritocracy isn't actually working as intended. Good "y" candidates are getting ignored for worse "x" candidates, just because "x" candidates had more chances.
I get the idea, but Mozilla is building things.
If I want the best engineer to build my bridge, I don't want to give bonus points for skin color or private parts. It's not like the trucks going over it will be any lighter or have smoother tires because the person building it grew up in a single parent household or something. When the rubber meets the road, some engineers are better than others and it affects the end product.
My fundamental concern is that the moment that the deciding factor isn't how good someone is at what you need them to do, you're driving a wedge through "the world as it is (cold hard reality)" and "the world as you want it to be (equal outcomes, diverse, empathetic)". The deeper that wedge gets, the tougher of a time you'll have meeting goals in the real world, where whether or not that bridge holds during a tornado is completely independent of the background of those who built it.
I think employees should be judged on how well they can deliver toward the company's goals, and for the most part, I think that happens. Actions like these are more about virtue signaling than anything else.
"When the rubber meets the road, some engineers are better than others and it affects the end product."
This is overly individualistic. A given engineer is not better or worse in some absolute sense. They are better or worse at a given job, which takes into account many other contextual factors: the specific goal, the rest of the team (who will be pursuing a that goal cooperatively), and the unique challenges which face that team/goal combination.
For example, it may be that your engineer Dmitri is best at solving particular types of design problems, but he only speaks Russian, and he's having trouble on a team with no other native Russian-speakers.
In this case, the "best" engineer to hire for Dmitri's team is a Russian, even if they're "worse" at solving design problems on an individual basis. In the abstract, hiring an engineer based on the language they speak goes against the meritocratic ideal, but in practice it is obviously the decision which best moves the team toward their goal.
More generally, one could say that even though language-diversity is not obviously or directly related to engineering effectiveness, it is still related. Having many languages represented on a team increases the odds that the performance of people like Dmitri will not be limited by a language barrier in the first place.
It's funny you mentioned "the world as it is" vs "the world as you want it to be". Because from my perspective, you're describing the world as you want it to be: each person has an abstract platonic "skill value" which can be objectively and universally evaluated, and which translates predictably and directly into metrics like load-bearing capacity. This is a lofty ideal, but does not reflect how organizations and teams actually achieve goals.
"The world as it is" involves orgs with lots of subjective, local, interdependent systems which often involve interpersonal dynamics, norms, and emergent social phenomena, all of which have an indirect but very significant effect on metrics like load-bearing capacity.
> A given engineer is not better or worse in some absolute sense.
I'll just address this first: Often they are. It is idealist and simplistic to claim otherwise. Some surgeons are better at performing surgery than others, some engineers are better at building bridges than others, and some programmers are better at programming than others. They're not inherently better people, but that's not relevant.
I think the view expressed in your comment is overly reductionist. Of course everyone works on teams, and of course there are more factors at play than simply being better at some task in a vacuum. But that doesn't change facts like:
* Some people are smarter than others
* Some people are more dedicated than others
* Some people have more experience than others
* Some people have life circumstances that allow them to contribute more than others
* Some people have values more in line with the company's success than others
This is kind of what I mean by "the world as it is" vs "the world as you want it to be." The points above are common sense to people that don't have the world view expressed in your comment. The idea that all people are equally valuable is only true in the abstract sense. When you actually need to accomplish a concrete goal (like putting a man on the moon), some people are absolutely more valuable than others toward doing that, and an organization that pretends that's not the case is shooting itself in the foot.
Having a meritocratic structure doesn't even inherently mean individualist. It could be measured at the team or project level. It also doesn't have to be (and typically isn't) exactly the measurable contributions ("load-bearing capacity") to the goal itself that determines the best "engineer." More often your "best" engineer is the one who is easy to work with, embraces tough challenges, and can adapt well to changes.
But honestly: I think everyone already knows these things. That's why I see this more as virtue signaling: it's one thing to change a governance statement. It's another when it's actually put into practice.
Having a meritocratic structure doesn't even inherently mean individualist. It could be measured at the team or project level. It also doesn't have to be (and typically isn't) exactly the measurable contributions ("load-bearing capacity") to the goal itself that determines the best "engineer." More often your "best" engineer is the one who is easy to work with, embraces tough challenges, and can adapt well to changes.
Yeah I totally agree with that. To me, that shows that the measure of merit is, #1: extremely subjective and #2: influenced by all kinds of factors that would not traditionally be associated with merit.
Basically, I think that it often makes sense to do affirmative action within a true meritocratic framework, but that the term meritocracy is generally used to juxtapose against affirmative action. If the term is being used to argue against its true meaning, then it's not a useful term and should be retired.
For someone who doesn't care about private parts, why are you the first person to bring it up? If you care about delivering success, you should take a moment and think hard about why you feel so strongly about the race/gender aspect, and are not thinking about the probability theory.
> For someone who doesn't care about private parts, why are you the first person to bring it up?
Sorry--sometimes the endless stream of euphemisms and language policing bores me. This isn't an isolated event and I think we all know what's being said here.
> If you care about delivering success, you should take a moment and think hard about why you feel so strongly about the race/gender aspect, and are not thinking about the probability theory.
I really don't care about the race/gender aspect, but it's being injected into Mozilla's governance statement and here we are discussing it.
This assumes meritocracy we want is based on skills. I think "working as intended" is actually based on "shown skills", not "skills"; people with mad skills which didn't show it in the project don't have merit. I've seen "do-ocracy" used instead for this reason.
Do-ocracy does not assume equal opportunity.
This is a really weird critique of the idea that people with fewer opportunities should be given a few more chances to show their skills. It's directly increasing the metric you're interested in, but you're still against it for... reasons?
In a true meritocracy, all candidates are judged on equal footing so P(x|a) isn't compared to P(y|b). In practice this is very possible (albeit expensive) to achieve, given a set pool of candidates. Although judging based on past achievement has the problem you describe, it can be used in place of a fair test (eg, judging candidates based on resumes instead of technical interviews) since high past achievement is strongly (but not perfectly) associated with high skill.
Mozilla doesn't appear to be addressing your version of meritocracy, but the actual definition of meritocracy, which still gives those who had the opportunity to build skill an advantage.
If the sample sizes differ you should use a statistical test not just the variances
I think the concept is "a purely-meritocratic system cannot be achieved without equal opportunity". This is because one's contribution to governance is proportional to their merit and to their opportunity to express this merit.
For a concrete example, a programmer in Seattle has much higher opportunities than the same programmer in rural Burundi, so he can put the same effort into much more work, and ultimately be much more relevant in supposedly meritocratic governance.
However, the original post is not concerned with opportunity due to geographic location or access to technology, but rather to a bias where code submitted by programmers with a feminine username and profile picture is approved less often than average. Note that the linked study does not refer to Mozilla explicitly, though.
Note that the cited study actually shows PR from women are approved more often than average. Study authors themselves state this.
Why is there an assumption that competence is lost by allowing for equal opportunity?
We can prioritize equal opportunity and then meritocracy within that. There's no need for all this handwringing about loss of quality, when there's been no demonstrable evidence of that.
Things get better for a subset of educated people, and nothing gets worse for anyone, but we still get 1000s of comments like the one above.
Overfitting.
It doesn't. I can't explain falsity.
Meritocracy means your elevation within a group is not influenced by your ancestory, wealth, socail status, who are your friends with, how much you were/are-being oppressed, charisma or twitter followers.
The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.
The radical group pushing these language changes are explicitly opposed to meritocracy.
They don't think they should have to justify their positions or their influence, they get it by having the 'right' politics.
They are committed to advancing their own personal and political power and influence by language enforcement, then use of secret code of conduct proceedings, all of which are subject to abuse.
Even where open source has failed to be inclusive and diverse empowering a fringe minority and instituting authoritarian language policing and secret proceedings will not advance inclusion or diversity.
They make no substantive contribution to diversity or the project.
> The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.
Honest question. Do you think you've cleared anything up with this definition? I don't think you've gotten anywhere closer to the truth. If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission. In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard. That should serve as a warning that it's not so clear.
And anyway, does the mission really have to say "We are a 'help the mission'ocracy"?
> If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission.
This is how you get evaluated on a quarterly (or yearly) basis at a job. You had goals. Did you achieve them? Did you fall short? You were given tasks and a timeline (perhaps you even helped set the timeline). Did you complete the tasks? Were there excessive bugs? Were you on time?
These are all relatively simple things to measure, which is why they're used so often. If you tie merit to your performance in relation to stated goals (and I think that's reasonable), it's pretty straightforward to measure.
If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
An engineering team's goal is to take a problem and implement a solution. That is the mission. Anything that leads towards the completion of the problem their team wants to solve is in service of the mission. I don't understand what is complicated about that, what are you seeing that we're not?
In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard
Once the mission is no longer worth pursuing or becomes muddled, teams fall apart and motivation crumbles. My github has plenty of repos I've stopped working on because I stopped seeing why it was worth my time to work on those projects and moved on to things that would be of greater benefit to me. That's how things should be.
If the group does not have enough consensus on what mission is or what is in service of the mission, then group cannot advance anywhere and can only be disbanded.
>>If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission.
If only.. Maybe we could call it hmmm a Mission Statement... Yea that would work...
Now let see what Mozilla's mission statement [1] is
>>>Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
Seems like it pretty easy to understand that the mission of Mozilla is and from that it would be fairly easy to say if a person is working for or against said mission.
It is especially relevant that it is not influenced by your ancestry.
It's worth noting that back in 2014, GitHub removed a meritocracy rug from their office for similar reasons: https://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/
This is the suggested modification:
"Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."
While it removes the word "meritocracy" it clarifies and validates the exact manner in which meritocracy is being promoted: "members as they show their ability through contributions to the project". While there is a debate to be had between the two formulations, the current HN title seems misleadingly editorialized for two reasons:
1. It is a proposal by two members, yet to receive ratification from the organization.
2. The suggested change still emphasizes the principle of meritocracy without using the word.
It also adds language about debias.
So it doesn't simply remove meritocracy to appease the far-left activists.
It specifically inserts language to appear them, reaffirm their world view.
Is it really necessary to create a safe space for fringe political activists to create substantive diversity? No.
It's also promoted by high-level Mozilla employees in response to a recent anti-meritocracy movement.
After what happened to FreeBSD's CoC you can hardly claim this is happening in a vacuum, it's a cause now.
> It also adds language about debias.
I'm confused as to why debiasing here is bad. If your contention is that bias doesn't exist, then this shouldn't have any effect. And if the distribution of authority does have a bias other than "ability and contributions to the project", why wouldn't they want to fix that?
"The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."
That sounds a lot like affirmative action.
Exactly, it’s equivalent to saying “meritocracy”, except that it uses words approved by the far-left in place of a word disapproved by them.
Insofar as many people's definition of meritocracy seems to preclude any consideration of someone's race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, etc, they're not equivalent.
Bias can't be addressed by ignoring attributes you suspect to be affected by it. In the new wording Mozilla explicitly commits to address bias, which is important.
Interesting, just when the "post-meritocracy" manifesto was published, Mozilla changes sides on meritocracy :
authored by Coraline Ada Ehmke who is already well known for their activism in IT and open source with the contributor convenant https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ . Coincidence? or consequence?
> But meritocracy has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology. The idea of merit is in fact never clearly defined; rather, it seems to be a form of recognition, an acknowledgement that “this person is valuable insofar as they are like me.”
That seems strange to me, because most projects are basically saying if you have no commits you're voice is essentially noise to them, which I agree with. If you want to join an FOSS project and a make a difference put your money where your mouth is - otherwise don't expect most people to listen. All the flowery words and PR likely won't change this reality, for good reason.
> an acknowledgement that “this person is valuable insofar as they are like me.”
Yeah, when evaluating PRs I rarely even look at the person making the contribution, I look at the code.
Quote from the covenant link:
> People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions.
Watch out, they are coming for Linus :)
I dont fear for Linus, I fear for linux the project once Linus Retires....
I think this bit from the email is the most important:
> To sum up:
> -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project.
> -The word “meritocracy” itself has become a bone of contention which is unhelpful to us.
> -Meritocractic principles remain highly desirable and should be explicit.
> -We should also acknowledge the importance of measures we take to debias how authority is distributed.
In particular, note the second and third points. The real issue here is that some people get really upset by the word "meritocracy". Is it worth fighting that, or can you just use different words for the same thing?
> The real issue here is that some people get really upset by the word "meritocracy".
Clearly you have never dealt with a white man who is better off than certain women, or people from ethnic minorities, and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better and invokes "meritocracy" all the freaking time.
I have. And I'm a half-Asian male - I can't imagine what it's like to deal with that jerk if I were a woman or an ethnic minority he didn't consider inherently intelligent (yes, really - he was actually surprised I was upset at the things he said because he wasn't talking about me, as if that was the reason for me to disagree with him).
When the word "meritocracy" is used to structurally shut down debates of sexism and racism, it is no longer about meritocracy.
But the problem in this example would be that this man is using a warped, deeply racist definition of "merit". I don't see how that would invalidate the concept of meritocracy itself.
> When the word "meritocracy" is used to structurally shut down debates of sexism and racism, it is no longer about meritocracy.
There seems to be a strange logical fallacy where "Our group aspires to be X" morphs into "Our group is X" - and then, the "conclusion" is drawn, that "evidence Y that were not X must be wrong, since after all, we are X".
From what I've seen, I'd apply the same thing to the concept of "color-blindness". As a society you can aspire to be "color-blind" all you want - if you still have cop violence against PoCs and "random searches" where the randomness is conditioned on skin color, you obviously aren't color-blind.
So this logical fallacy seems to exist and be widespread. However, I don't see how it would invalidate the concepts themselves.
> ... and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better ...
Could you clarify how you reached this conclusion about someone specific, as opposed to a generalized fear such a person might exist?
In many years in the tech/engineering business I have never seen anyone express such a sentiment, despite having worked with more than my fair share of unpleasant people.
Presumption of competence, or obliviousness to one's own advantages are certainly present in the community. But I have not seen anyone express such supremacist ideas before.
>> .. and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better ... > could you clarify how you reached this conclusion about someone specific,
I have seen/heard of this in academia. The specific case I know about was a good chunk of a graduate math department. The attitude seemed to come from the top down mostly, but the graduate students seemed to repeat/reflect the attitude/culture.
Other conversations here give me the impression such ideas might be experiencing an uptick in expression, if not popularity in tech.
davorak was on the money: it was someone working in academia. Genetics, heritability of IQ. You can probably fill in the rest.
The governance documents of a open source software project are not being used to shut down debates about sexism and racism.
The Mozilla and Rust communities are by far the most inclusive communities on the web and more inclusive all the time.
Then they probably have little issue with dropping a word that has been coopted this way in the general context.
> -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project.
I don't see the connection; it is a well established fact that no two people have the same opportunities, regardless of country. In one country you might see large differences between skin colours, in another the prime opportunity differentiator is parental income and so forth.
Therefore you would expect that differences in opportunity (which are infinitely greater than innate differences in ability relevant to software engineering between the various popular subdivisions of humanity [1]) more or less transfer directly to the composition of meritocratic organisations.
If that statement is meant to imply that an actual meritocratic organisation would closely track the composition of the general populace, then I'd say that it fails to acknowledge bias in society, because then the assumption backing the statement is society already providing equal opportunities, which we know is patently false.
[1] Just because something is statistically significant does not mean it's relevant; effect magnitude must always be considered.
Do you think people which get really upset by word X representing entity Z will not get really upset after a while by word Y representing the same entity Z?
This is quite literally how euphemism treadmills start out.
>Is it worth fighting that, or can you just use different words for the same thing?
Today it's "meritocracy". Tomorrow it's "talent".
It will never be enough.
Why exactly do people contend that meritocracy somehow clashes with diversity? The implications being made by suggesting the two be mutually exclusive are frightening.
Suppose:
1. There exist some quality “merit” with a random uniform distribution across the population.
2. Some systems used to measure merit are biased for and against different subgroups of the population.
3. People obtain power and wealth based these biased measurements.
4. Subgroups with more power and wealth expend resources optimizing their performance on the tests, further biasing the results.
5. The winners in this system label it a “meritocracy”.
This story rings true to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean merit-based systems are all bad. They can still provide lots of opportunity to the poor who have enough aptitude they can still beat the test despite the bias. Other systems may have worse problems.
In practice, organizations like Mozilla still have a competitive merit-based hiring process even if they say they oppose meritocracy. They might attempt to apply a correction to unbias the merit measurement. Getting rid of the trappings of meritocracy might make it a more welcoming place to work for everyone and raise the total merit (even if there’s no way to measure it).
Why don't you come out and say what you really mean? djajshgsjja is attempting to justify a handicap against the successful subgroups. But what amount of handicap should there be? In what measure should the handicap apply? How can you apply any sort of handicap without a massive bureaucratic intervention, with swaths of each organisation dedicated to applying handicaps? Ah, but the bureaucratic intervention is the linchpin. We arrive at the diversity and equity offices in Universities across North America. We arrive at the Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion by Law Society of Ontario that requires every law firm of 10 or greater to complete an annual report about how they are advancing the goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are parts of an ideology based on absolutely no science or literature, and ignores the deadly catastrophes of the 20th century whose millions of dead were preceded by cutting off the successful subgroups at the knees.
So what you’re basically saying is, meritocracy is awesome, we just need to measure “merit” better.
It is easier to see the issue when thinking what "meritocracy" means as a process as opposed to a state of being. The word "meritocracy" has no procedurality to it, it solely signals values without providing an effective method of achieving it. Signalling values can in fact hurt achieving those values by poisoning discussions about them. Everyone has their own idea of what "meritocracy" means, so it allows people to pretend that they're all on the same page even if they're not. It also invites people to presume that the organization is already a meritocracy and be less self-critical about maintaining that state.
"The word "meritocracy" has no procedurality to it, it solely signals values without providing an effective method of achieving it."
So? Nor do democracy, aristocracy or kakocracy. However they are all useful terms for expressing where the power lies. Hackers are happy to let anyone contribute to the solution, but "f--- your feelings, we've got a job to do here" applies too.
They clash. You either have a meritocracy or diversity quotas; you either choose people because they’re competent or because they are of a certain sex/race.
But what might preclude someone who happens to be of a different race or gender from also being the most competent person for the job?
The people pushing this radical view on diversity and equality tend to paint all people they see as marginalized as unable to compete on a level playing field.
This has always bothered me. Interviews for technology related roles are almost always an assessment of innate cognitive ability, something that has no real correlation with race or gender. The idea that certain groups might be disadvantaged here and require help is especially insulting.
This is bad faith interpretation. The prevailing viewpoint is that the playing field is not, in fact, level.
this is an extreme oversimplification. those aren't mutually exclusive and diversity isn't just "quotas". read a book
Thanks for the recommendation. I read harry potter. It was great. Not sure what I learned about 'diveristy', though.
good choice. great series
As someone who comes from a minority group, I absolutely want to be judged on the technical merit of my contributions and not my skin color, gender or genetic background.
Implying that people who aren't white males can't succeed in a meritocratic environment is racist and condescending. I don't see how this helps diversity one bit.
I have thought about this and I too find it patronising and racist indeed. I don't care about your race, I only care if you are the best.
It's actually a pretty popular opinion among high performing minorities (at least the ones I know -- yes anecdotal). Sadly it's a position entirely absent and forbidden in the debate around this.
While I'm not one for identity politics, I have to say there's just something weird about watching wealthy and powerful white (usually) people debate this issue and completely ignore the voice of those they are supposed to be "sticking up" for.
For me the end goal looks like an attempt to remove the tool I and others used to make social and economic advancement (legitimate skill and hard work) and replace it with some sort of cherry picking of individuals from above. It's definitely something I'm not comfortable with.
I think it has been proven that oppressed people cannot judge their oppression
I think you're missing your /s tag. If that's not sarcasm, I kindly ask you not to call me oppressed.
This pretty much makes my point for me as well that an attempt to "help" me is nothing more than pure condescension and racism.
It s sarcasm. I think we need new vocabularies, the terms have been commoditized to death
Thank you for clarifying.
Sounds quite reasonable from my point of view. This idea that words should only be judged in isolation and not in the historical contexts they have been viewed is not very realistic.
Isn't this a misleading headline? It looks more like "Someone proposes that Mozilla remove 'meritocracy' from governance docs"
Patrick Finch is a high-level strategist for Mozilla, has been there 8 years.
Agreed. Or perhaps leave the original subject line intact (and free of scare quotes).
Why is time spent on things that do not matter? If you want to contribute to Open Source project the pull request literally doesn't care whether your reproductive organs are inside or outside of you (or if they even exist at all) just write some code.
People who have nothing better to do than cry about use of this kind of words (and language in general) probably do not contribute to the project in net positive manner.
Meritocracy is a word used by the right (you succeed by your will and your skills). It's not compatible with the system of believes of the left (the unlucky should be helped more - something like a rule, a rate must compensate that injustice).
It's logical they change that and it confirms the political nature of those subjects.
My advice is to avoid people dealing with that because it's not related to computers.
This is the core conflict. Do we judge people on their competence, or do we judge them by the degree to which they are oppressed?
I tend to evaluate them on their intents. Do they try to make the good?
Intention is also very important. Are they focused on people in the office, or code on the computer?
"This proposal does not seek to change how Mozilla is governed, only how we talk about how Mozilla is governed, which may be reasonably be regarded as contentious."
...said another way?...
"It is reasonable to expect a few questions after we emphasize the importance of changing how we talk about x while we also emphasize that changing x is not the objective."
The reasoning in this part of the email is pretty good.
This is insane.
Words are important. Devs will argue over a correct variable name for hours but think names in other places have no meaning
Words are important. Diversity is important. Changing words like "meritocracy" does not improve diversity. It is the illusion of diversity, a feel-good opportunity for well-intentioned bystanders. The true intent is for a small group of highly politically motivated people to gain more control. The governance documents are about control and changing those documents means a shift in control. The movement we are seeing here opposes meritocracy on political principle, as part of their worldview. It does not stop there though. They believe the only answer for "diversity" to put them in charge, beginning with government documents that reflect their radical worldview, see FreeBSD Code of Conduct. Even if you support diversity, you have to realize these people do not care about diversity or inclusion, they are little authoritarians who want more power to dictate what people say and whose opinion matters more/less based on immutable characteristics. We cannot allow authoritarians with such warped views of the world to seize control of key open source projects.
They're "proposing" to transform from rule by Engineering, i.e. meritocracy, to rule by HR.
Why am I feeling a sudden urge to read Animal Farm?
When it cropped up here a while back I don't remember anything seeming problematic with FreeBSD's new CoC. What's the issue with it?
The problems in FreeBSD CoC were widely discussed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16406946
When people approached some of the FreeBSD Core Team with their concerns about vague language that could be subject to abuse, they were basically told they were all racist transphobes who weren't welcome to contribute to FreeBSD anyways.
So it was a pretty obvious politically-motivated power-grab.
What control do you feel these figures will gain by removing the word meritocracy, specifically?
They are already attempting to control use of language and the foundational view of how open source works, based on their world view that equality is an illusion and only through use of selective discrimination against unpopular groups, as dictated by them, can equality be achieved.
you sound like a conspiracy theorist. it is changing an inappropriate word, not shifting control over the entire company Mozilla. i doubt you care about diversity or improving the quality of the open source project
The evidence cited for meritocracy being an inappropriate word, a study on GitHub pull requests, has been widely debunked.
Meritocracy is only an inappropriate word if you believe that certain groups of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.
That notion is of course incredibly condescending towards members of those groups.
The goal should be to advance everyone in the meritocracy through outreach and training, not to abandon the value of meritocracy.
The proposal itself makes it clear the change is merely for cosmetic purposes, to make certain people feel better, not actually increase diversity.
If you care about diversity you should oppose the notion that certain groups of people are incapable of participating on their own terms.
This is about empowering a small but loud group of political activists who want to remake a software project to fit their fringe world view.
Do you care more about affirming their politics or the quality of software?
your arguments are hypberolic in some cases, as changing or clarifying a word or sentence even is not "remake(ing) a software project". and I think the word meritocracy is vague, a overarching word used to describe many things to many people, mozilla should instead simply be more clear about what that means. what is the "playing field", that itself is a metaphor for sports and physical ability I guess. How will the ability of those chosen for participation under this meritocracy be judged
Really? People who interpret 'meritocracy' in a narrow, little known historical context, as being a conspiracy against miniorities, rather than it's currently accepted form, sound like conspiracy theorists.
that is quite the stretch. thinking a word should be updated or clarified does not make me a "conspiracy theorist". What am I conspiring against? people fighting so hard against a simple change to make the sentence more inclusive are just fighting to keep their antiquated system of bias in place
They are proposing removing meritocracy based on their political view that certain classes of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.
They are the ones advancing a narrative of exclusion, telling individuals in whole swaths that they can never compete in open source projects.
They have no evidence to support this of course, just what they were taught in their sociology classes at uni.
In reality though they are the ones pushing outdated bias.
> does not make me a "conspiracy theorist". What am I conspiring against?
Being a conspiracy theorist means you believe someone else is conspiring against you.
and yet Mozilla put out a proposal to discuss this, not something people just do for trivial matters. so they clearly feel strongly about it, but this dude can't?
also, there's no need for the ad hominem attack. if he is a conspiracist, it should be easy to point out a more simple explanation.
Exactly! Programmers/Developers brushing this off as, ”well it’s only semantics” seem to forget that our entire industry is predicated on the use of semantics...
These people thing changing the code of our institutions works, specifically by giving them more power, that we can rid our institutions of the worst aspects of human nature: racism, sexism, xenophobia.
We can and should combat those aspects for sure, but we are also giving into another aspect of human nature: unchecked power and control, which will almost certainly lead to abuse. There is also no evidence that this will improve diversity.
It's just to make people feel good and put a few radicals in charge who want to dictate everything.
Devs or Developers ?
same thing in the context of my sentence. developers
It seems that some people view the term "meritocracy" negatively because they believe it implies that everyone has the same opportunities. I don't see that implication, but if enough other people do, maybe it's worth re-wording their governance docs.
At the same time, the proposed replacement seems off the target:
> "Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."
What's wrong with something innocuous, like: "We strive to encourage contributions/engagement/participation from diverse communities"?
> The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority
Because this is not about the governance documents of an open source software project, it is about affirming the radical worldview of a small but loud fringe group in the name of diversity.
Except the only diversity is creates is diversity for people with the correct political opinions. It has nothing to do with the actual diversity that benefits an open source project.
It is time we stop listening to this fringe group about how to achieve diversity, they clearly only want power and control for themselves.
We should not let them bully pragmatic moderates who generally support diversity and inclusion into ceding them more authority and dictatorial control.
I think their proposed language could use some work, but a key difference from yours is the commitment to "active interventions". It's easy for an organization to pay lip service to something in a mission statement and go on to neglect or unintentionally discourage it.
It's strange this has so many points and comments but almost instantly disappeared from the front page of HN.
Story with more comments than points always disappear faster from front page.
Gotcha.
After reading the comments in the linked google group it seems like the issue is that they just need to more clearly define (and perhaps more fairly) what ‘merit’ is.
Each team/role should have this clearly defined to eliminate bias/subjectivity. Also by clearly defining that, you help escape a meritocracy where ‘authority’ decides what ‘merit’ is behind close-doors (which isn’t really a meritocracy).
Instead of abandoning a meritocracy because it has implementation issues, why don’t they just fix the problems?
> Instead of abandoning a meritocracy because it has implementation issues, why don’t they just fix the problems?
Because the small group of people pushing these changes don't want meritocracy, they want power and influence merely for having the correct political opinions.
They rely on the cooperation of well-meaning people who support diversity but don't see it's ploy for control and power.
>The first line of Mozilla’s governance[0] states, “Mozilla is an open source project governed as a meritocracy.”
>The use of the term “meritocracy” to describe communities that suffer from a lack of diverse representation is increasingly seen as problematic: it proceeds from an assumption of equality of opportunity.
Is there evidence that the assumption of equal opportunities does not hold for Mozilla? It seems to me that they went to great lengths to ensure equality of opportunities.
I don’t usually follow Mozilla, what efforts do they make that for instance effectively offsets issues of access to education or social discrimination outside of just Mozilla ?
They don't; it's not their problem.
I think addressing social discrimination is a great mission. But organization needs to focus, and can't address every great mission. Social discrimination is just not the focus of Mozilla's mission.
But I guess that’s the point in rewording the mission. The proposal is to align the mission statement with something closer to reality, and give more leaway to adapt.
The post cites "Gender difference and bias in open source" as a supporting evidence, but it is super unconvincing.
The study found, in the study's own words, "Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s". They still conclude bias against women (not men)! They have their reasons, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. For more details than you probably want, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
Meritocracy may be problematic, but the proposition needs better evidence than that.
"I know how to fix Mozilla."
Sincerely, Someone who cannot even keep zer own room clean.
It is hard to be meritocratic for Mozilla when their C-levels get half million US dollars of salary in cash and fly on chartered business jets
fake editorialised title, please change to original
What about it is fake? A senior-level employee and strategist for Mozilla made this proposal to the governance listserv. It's up for serious discussion.
I don’t think I agree that it’s fake per se, but it definitely looks editorialized to me with scare quotes around “problematic“.
I keep writing paragraphs to respond to topics like these, but every time I find myself just linking to @aphyr instead, who put it so much more eloquently than I can.
https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm#c_ubyrb0
Paste:
Suckless makes a window manager: a part of a computer that human beings, with all their rich and varying abilities and perspectives, interact with constantly. Your choices of defaults and customization options have direct impact on those humans.
For example, color schemes determine whether color-blind people are able to quickly scan active vs inactive options and understand information hierarchy. Font sizes and contrast ratios can make the interface readable, difficult, or completely unusable for visually impaired people. The sizes of click targets, double-click timeouts, and drag thresholds impact usability for those with motor difficulties. Default choices of interface, configuration, and documentation language embed the project in a particular English-speaking context, and the extent to which your team supports internationalization can limit, or expand, your user base.
With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your code, documentation, and community about which people your software is supportive and hostile towards. These are inherently political decisions which cannot be avoided. This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are already engaged in “non-technical”, political work, because you, like everyone else here, are making a tool for human beings. The choice to minimize the thought you put into those decisions does not erase the decisions themselves.
At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome, or render the community inaccessible entirely. These too are political choices. Your post above is one of them.
There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion. Consider: you wish to take only the best developers, and yet your post has already discouraged good engineers from working on your project. Doubtless it has encouraged other engineers (who may be quite skilled!) with a similar political view to your own; those who believe, for instance, that current minority representation in tech is justified, representing the best engineers available, and that efforts to change those ratios are inherently discriminatory and unjust.
Policies have impact. Consider yours.
> At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome.
The proposal is not to make Mozilla more diverse, nor would it accomplish that.
The proposal is to change the language to make Mozilla seem more diverse to people with very explicit radical views on diversity.
This will actually have the opposite effect of reducing diversity and only serves to empower the people with the correct views.
That was literally in response to: "Thus, to make your software suck less, you only take the best developers no matter what race, gender, heritage, etc. these persons have."
Meritocracy perpetuates the status quo, which is just a local maximum and not the overall maximum.