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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
Context. Is it helpful for x business goal?
Do you believe organisations should remove all claims of valuing such things?
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.
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 :^)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do-ocracy does not assume equal opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats 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.
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"?
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Yeah, when evaluating PRs I rarely even look at the person making the contribution, I look at the code.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
The Mozilla and Rust communities are by far the most inclusive communities on the web and more inclusive all the time.
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.
This is quite literally how euphemism treadmills start out.
Today it's "meritocracy". Tomorrow it's "talent".
It will never be enough.
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).
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.
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.
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.
This pretty much makes my point for me as well that an attempt to "help" me is nothing more than pure condescension and racism.
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.
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.
...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.
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"?
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.
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?
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 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 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.
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.
Sincerely, Someone who cannot even keep zer own room clean.
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.
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.
Meritocracy perpetuates the status quo, which is just a local maximum and not the overall maximum.
