Any political system comes with trade-offs. Meritocracies fundamentally excuse bad behavior, democracies fundamentally allow mob rule/bad decisions in haste, monarchies fundamentally ignore commoner's problems, bureaucracies are too risk averse and slow, etc, etc. If we rejected political systems that allow failings and excuses, we'd only have anarchy.
To the topic at hand, the kernel folk don't seem to be particularly political, and obviously they don't want anyone behaving badly in their community, but one does suspect that there is a game of political football afoot that is not going to benefit the kernel. The kernel is a technical project - people who reject the idea of technical merit have a home in society, but that home isn't in the Linux Kernel community; it is a space where merit is meaningful. The kernel maintainers should first and foremost concerned about the technical quality of the kernel.
That’s a non sequitur. There’s no reason that a meritocracy must allow bad behaviour from high performing contributors. Linus’s behaviour has been accepted, even lauded by certain members of the community, but I’ve always seen it as brash, arrogant and off putting. The simple fact is that people who have power tend to abuse that power, but that has nothing to do with meritocracy as a concept.
Except that by definition, meritocracy creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way. Those with "merit" are trusted and respected more than those without. This means that complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. And even when bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of chasing away their "merit".
In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.
A democratic system based on popularity share all those problems attributed to meritocracy. Those deemed popular are trusted and respected more than those without. complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. When bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of loosing influence and power.
What I would like to know is if meritocracy has a higher risk of causing abuse compared to other systems.
Linus is an incredibly influential figure in tech, having written both Git and Linux. He has decided to work on his own behavior.
This could be a watershed event in that regard.
Linus' contribution is not just the code he commits, but his ability to organize and marshall developers. That ability is tied to his communication skills.
To the extent that his discourse drives skilled developers away, it is a detriment which is presumably why he is working on it. If it were to get extreme and he became unable to lead due to his toxicity, "meritocracy" would imply that he would step down or be removed.
And such dynamics should be acknowledged and opposed wherever they exist.
>Have some minimal set of rules
Except as I said, these rules are frequently ignored or applied less fairly in one way or another for those with "merit".
Power itself can't be opposed. By definition, opposition doesn't exist without power.
Abuse can be opposed and to some extent mitigated but it's not at all a static game. When you build walls humans go around them, climb over them, dig under them, or break through them. There is no wall that one person can build that another cannot overcome.
So to be opposed to "power dynamics" is to be opposed to non-universal capability, an extremely radical position which I am not sure you hold.
Could you expand on your definition to clarify your position?
You either believe in capitalism and thus meritocracy as its twin, or neither. Why do capitalists get to take away so much profit, and why should we award patents to inventors, if we don't reward those with "merit"?
Yes, if someone has control over your life or death, you should probably do what they say.
That is what most people call "violent coercion".
>You either believe in capitalism and thus meritocracy as its twin, or neither.
Well, quite...
>That is what most people call “violent coercion”.
Really? Is it?
There’s no point in continuing here, I’m afraid we’re too far apart to gain anything from this discussion. Have a good day.
And if they choose whether to kill you based on whether you do what they want, that's violent coercion.
This may often (?) be true in practice if you remove "fundamentally", but not always and it doesn't have to be. In an environment where people work together to produce an outcome, the ability to interact positively and productively with others is a valuable behavioral merit. It keeps one talented asshole from chasing away all the other talent. You can have a meritocratic organization where "works well with the team" is a requirement. Where this breaks down is when talented people sit back and allow abuse (or worse, start to emulate it) because they're all starry-eyed about an offender's other talents and achievements.
Getting rid of meritocracy is "Everyone gets an A+". Teams will quickly get in trouble if everyone got A+ for "works well with the team" but some should've gotten a D- or an F.
Meritocracies don't have to excuse bad behaviour if they simply penalise it. Perhaps those stuck in bad situations and complaining about meritocracies are really just suffering from the ill-effects of cronyism, favouritism or some other "ism".
You are talking about getting rid of ranking, possibly the concept of merit. It isn't possible to have a meritocracy with no concept of merit, but that is much stronger than not being a meritocracy.
For example, I could rank a team of 5 from A+ to F, then put cousin Ahmed in charge because he is a relation of mine. That would be a system that is not a meritocracy, because to be in charge a person would have to be related to me, but there is still a concept of merit. I would expect my cousin to then consider merit carefully as he divides up tasks.
To use your example, your cousin was put in place due to nepotism. This is very much covered by my "some other ism" as corruption or at least bad behaviour. Cronyism and nepotism both bypass natural "best person for position based on merit" selection criteria.
Integrity is well within performance measures under a meritocratic system, eg police who are corrupt can't be seen as acting as the ideal for police officers or authority by any useful measure (merit). If you hired your cousin that nepotism impacts both yours and your cousins integrity and therefore merit. This bypasses the meritocracy and is actually simple corruption.
Plenty of other "isms" are also really just corruption in various forms: sexism, racism, tokenism, ageism. I'm sure there are plenty more.
Also, the experience of the less privileged is that some people use claimed-impartial tests and barriers to exclude them in particular, and so when a test comes along it is demotivating, as it might just be an attempt to exclude them. Look at the voting reforms in various places for examples of this.
Using tests to try for pure meritocracy only works when everyone has had the same kind of background and nobody has bias. Look at the examples of CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias. Essentially, if you're recruiting (or filtering any set of people) and aren't actively controlling for bias (anonymization is key), you will be biased.
That's not true. The original studies used low class names for blacks and hispanics, but not for whites. (For example, they didn't use names like Cletus or Billy Ray.) Once this was corrected for, they found almost no bias in resume screening.[1]
1. https://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2014/wp1419_ko...
Moreover, using census results ignores exposure to foreigners with these names. My own strongest association for "Thompson" is the white police officers in Tintin, and more generally for white English people. (Although I'm British so that may not be representative.)
As long as "low class" black names are more readily associated with blackness than "high class" ones, this methodology isn't really isolating anything, just doing a slightly more intersectional analysis.
> For example, based on data from the United States Census, 90 and 75 percent of individuals with Washington and Jefferson surnames are African American, respectively. Similarly, 90 percent of individuals with a surname of either Hernandez or Garcia are Hispanic, and 70 percent of Andersons and Thompsons are white.
I would still question the validity of this approach, and more generally, I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US.
They acknowledge that the names may not be strong signals, but the very reason that's the case is that people are less likely to associate black people with high socioeconomic status in the first place.
Honestly, I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole here. You started by claiming that there was a massive gender & race bias:
> CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias.
When I corrected that and linked to a study, you replied with an argument based on a misreading. When I corrected your misreading, you fell back to, "I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US." If that's the case, then it also refutes the conclusions of the original (flawed) studies claiming racism. After all, if your argument is true, those can be just as easily explained as classism.
I'm not sure there is anything that could convince you that you are mistaken.
People are being unfairly judged based on racial and class identifiers, rather than on their CV.
Perhaps had their backgrounds been different, their performance would be different. Perhaps if the under-performer had more training, their performance would be better.
But right now, things aren’t different. From the organisation’s self-interested point of view, they should just choose the better performing candidate.
An open source organisation may explicitly be interested in attracting marginalised people into the tech sector, to improve equality in society as a whole.
Or even from a cynical perspective, a profit-led corporation may desire to increase their ability to hire competent but undervalued (and thus cheaper) employees in future.
Unfortunately, rather than explaining how self-proclaimed meritocracies often aren't actually judging on merit, such remarks often get wrapped in remarks about cis white males or whatever (or at least - the ones that make the rounds do), which understandably leads to people getting defensive.
Additionally, as a sibling comment shows, there also appears to be some misleading research, which I think is more likely to happen when arguments like these become as heated as they are.
Thus, I'm not sure whether the argument is true or not. However, I think it's good to separate it from the loud voices unsuccessfully making it, and to try to consider it on its own... merits.
The bias in bay area tech companies is just as bad. If you express the slightest doubt about sexism being rampant in tech, you will be ostracized. If you speak up in protest when all the women in the office go to a free screening of Wonder Woman during work hours, while all the men have to stay and work, you will become persona non grata. These sorts of things have happened to me and others I know. It's infuriating. Even if sexism and racism are as bad as people like Coraline Ada claim, these "solutions" are making the problem worse. Discriminating on the basis of race and sex only serves to balkanize us and polarize opinions.
1. https://peerj.com/preprints/1733v1.pdf
2. Scott Alexander explains the whole saga: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exc...
3. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/9aep3y/women-are-bett...
4. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-con...
5. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/more-evidence-of-sexism-o...
And then this gets repeated, retweeted and multipied, and finally people start the discussion with "obviously...", "it is widely known that...", "as it's been established...". Not only it gets a life on its own, but you can receive social punishment for just trying to discuss that.
Inequality is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is the reasons for that inequality that can be unjust.
If you and I are unequal in society either because you made poor decisions or else were unwilling to work as hard as me, that is in fact "just" even if it is not "equal". Equality at all costs simply does not work, which is why it has failed every time humanity has tried to enforce it on society.
We should fight inequality that results from factors like ethnicity, ideology, and disability, but what's interesting to note is that people like Coraline have shown no qualms about creating inequality for those with different political views-- calling even for the explulsion of OSS devs from projects where their only crime is holding a different political view in private.
It's hard to read her comments and the phrasing of the CoC and not think that its purpose is to allow purging those who commit "wrongthink".
That sounds kind of nice actually.
If that was actually the case why would the mediocre straight white male feel threatened?
Honestly that would be a pretty powerful safety net.
Because revealing that gets the majority of people who aren't straight white males united in opposition against it, while the myth of meritocracy, as long as the facade holds up, gets at least some significant share of the losers to buy into the system, which reinforces it's stability to the benefit of the straight white male winners.
> Honestly that would be a pretty powerful safety net.
It is, as long as only the beneficiaries see it, and as long as they don't have any kind of moral compass.
If everyone else sees it (including beneficiaries with a moral compass), they start lighting it on fire, which makes it less effective of a safety net.
Why would that be the case? What would hold all of these very different groups together?
The obvious outcome is a balkanization of the workforce (and maybe broader society).
Why would that scare the mediocre people in the most powerful group?
Yes, I think that’s true - especially in tech. Look at all the amazing open source contributions from people far worse off than even the bottom quartile of Americans.
Rejecting meritocracy doesn't mean not acknowledging ability, it means not structuring power hierarchies around it.
Those most able should be chosen for tasks because those involved in the work agree collectively, without the coercion of power dynamics, that it's best to assign them that task.
Furthermore, there will never be collective or universal agreement in any remotely complex issue, which means some block of the community is inevitably being coerced into accepting a communal choice.
> Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people.
So, if merit is used to excuse bad behavior I agree that it's a problem (a fairly solvable one though I'd think). But I also detect an inequality-of-outcome kind of stance here, as inequality due to merits is seen as a bad thing. I just always have trouble imagining the end game of that kind of thinking - even in Stalinism, people with higher abilities were selected for various more demanding tasks. Are they saying that everyone is absolutely born with the same abilities? Because that's just so easy to falsify with data.