If you're not aware of the origins of the term "meritocracy", it's worth a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Is your meritocracy measuring merit in the way you think it is?

"Meritocracy" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "merit" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of merit by which a meritocracy could be judged.

I'm sure there's reasonable arguments against affirmative diversity in general or Mozilla's diversity projects in specific, but incompatibility with meritocracy is not a strong one.

How do you define diversity though? How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done?

Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point?

Is it my call and only my call or should there be regulation and legislation to deal with situations like this? I have one spot and many diverse candidates. How do I choose?

> How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done?

When everyone has an equal opportunity.

You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.

> When everyone has an equal opportunity.

"Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.)

The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.

It turns out that measuring discrimination and opportinity is a pretty well studied topic. It's mainly the discipline of sociology which quantifies this but there are plenty of other disciplines, such as economics, that do it as well. You can do a Google scholar search to learn more.

By the way, targets do not need to be attainable in order to produce (also quantifiable) positive effects.

Can you quantify the diversity benefit of having a nudist in a group compared to other diversity goals. Having read a lot on the topic I can say with some confidence that any attribute beyond those that the US law defined as protected classes lack any kind of well established methodology to quantify diversity.

> It turns out that measuring discrimination and opportinity is a pretty well studied topic.

And measuring skills is not?

"skill" is not necessarily the same thing as "merit", but it's a lot more measurable. In general, though, the people most skilled at a given task tend to be the people who've been doing it the longest. The second tier of skill tends to be people who have been around people doing that task. That is to say, the most skilled people are generally current practitioners and their children, who grow up to be the most skilled people of the next generation.

In short, a "skillocracy" tends to look and act very, very much like an aristocracy, which is kind of the opposite of the idea I think most people try to express with the word "meritocracy".

But a lack of diversity is a sign of a lack of meritocracy: clearly not all talent gets an equal chance to flourish. Trying to get more talent on board is valuable.

A lack of diversity isn't in and of itself a sign of a lack of meritocracy, and nor is simply increasing diversity a sign of meritocracy.

It's misguided to think that by manually ensuring diversity (eg. By hiring someone for simply being a qualified minority rather than necessarily the best candidate) is pushing for meritocracy.

If diversity programs were interested in maintaining meritocracy while increasing diversity, they'd focus their energy on uplifting poor families through things like training or scholarship programs so their kids have a better shot at life.

That's the usual line, that assume no qualified minority candidates exist. Which is, at root, a biased assumption already.

E.g. Stanford (used to) vigorously recruited qualified minority candidates to help improve diversity on campus.

Isn't explicitly choosing based on their race also making the same assumptions? That there aren't enough minority candidates, and thus they need to explicitly force more of them in? After all, why would there be any bias if selections were completely merit based (that is, blind to race and sex) unless the pools being drawn from were themselves biased? The best way to get around biases in the hiring process obviously being to avoid informing hiring managers about the identities of candidates, instead of emphasizing it even more.

My assumption was that not enough qualified minority candidates exist, obviously there are qualified minority candidates, just not enough, thus why they aren't as equally represented in the field in question.

> "why would there be any bias if selections were completely merit based (that is, blind to race and sex)"

But that's a really big "if". Selections are not completely merit based. They are not blind to race and sex. Minority candidates who use a male western sounding name are much more likely to get invited for interviews than if the have a female or foreign sounding name.

The bias is there. We need to undo it or compensate for it. Extra effort to hire from underrepresented groups makes a lot of sense. Bars should not get lowered for them, but they should be able to get a fair shot.

And maybe the problem is not so much that there are not enough minority candidates, but that there are too many unqualified majority candidates who are taking up space.

Its sophistry, to say "to combat race bias, you are using race bias! That's just as bad!"

Of course one is in service to bigotry, and the other to equality. That makes them pretty different.

If you're driving down the road, and your car pulls slightly to the right, you steer slightly to the left to compensate. Sure, we'd all like a car that steers straight. But it doesn't. So we steer slightly to one side.

I do not understand your analogy. Are you implying that we cannot be unbiased? I do agree with that, however, what is this diversity thing, fighting over biases or preferences (sides)? I do not understand how one side is bigotry, and the other is equality. It seems like it is just a matter of POV. When you are steering to the left, the right is in service of bigotry, and when you are steering to the right, the left is in service of bigotry. Additionally, according to your analogy, it seems like that everyone - including the people who say they prefer "equality" - is actually not steering straight, just to a different side.

It would be great if the people who preach we should not discriminate based on ethnicity, religion, and so forth would actually stop doing that, and start paying more attention to skills, which is actually more relevant to the job. It seems like that they do not wish (or at the very least do not, regardless of intent) to stop discriminating, they just steer to a different side.

Because one side attempts to ease societal bias by including folks often overlooked. The other attempts to perpetuate this system, keeping an underclass.

The old tired argument that "It's just another sort of bias!" is bankrupt. Its a sort of bias that seeks to repair real problems, not keep them.

And the solution to not having enough qualified minority candidates is to increase their level of qualification.

But the problem isn't necessarily just that there are not enough qualified minority candidates, but that qualified minority candidates are often passed over by less qualified majority candidates. Often simply because they look the part.

Maybe a straw man? Citation?

No, the line is that "there's less qualified candidates of X minority".

Which is completely true - SV companies employee percentages fairly accurately mimic CS graduates percentages. So the majority of bias isn't in hiring... In other words, by the time you're picking the most qualified candidate it's already too late to correct for any cultural/societal bias (you should start in primary school or even earlier).

And in doing so, forced Asians and Asian-Americans to attain higher test scores than a comparable white person to get into their programs. Diversity in action.

So, minorities must remain minorities lest the currently-successful classes are affected at all? The logical conclusion is, the USA needs a poor underclass to remain fair and functional? Please tell me where I misconstrued that remark?

Of course not. The assumption is that there is other factors involved.

Here is statements I wish people would honestly try to argue against: A person like to be in a environment where they feel safe (claim 1) and people feel safer being in a majority than in a minority (claim 2).

Why would minority candidates seek to be in an environment at the same rather as majority candidates, if everything else is equal?

> "A lack of diversity isn't in and of itself a sign of a lack of meritocracy"

I disagree. At least for the majority of cases. It's possible that there are skills or jobs where the talent to excel is extremely rare in certain demographic groups, but I think those cases are extremely rare. For the vast majority of cases, a lack of representation of certain demographic groups would be very strong indication that something is preventing those groups from participating on an equal basis.

> "nor is simply increasing diversity a sign of meritocracy."

That is absolutely true. There are definitely wrong ways to increase diversity that are contrary to meritocracy, but there are also correct ways to do it.

> "uplifting poor families through things like training or scholarship programs so their kids have a better shot at life."

An excellent example of what should be done more.

But even if merely increasing diversity for its own sake does not improve meritocracy, it can actually help meritocracy indirectly: research has shown that people hiring for a job are inclined to hire people who look like the people already in that job. So if a certain industry is dominated by white men, they are inclined to hire more white men for that job. Even if the person hiring for that job is not a white man, and even if they are aware of this issue. So simply increasing diversity can make it easier for talent from minority groups to get recognised for their merit and get hired.

But I think anyone who has any amount of work experience will be under no illusions about the meritocracy in the corporate world. There are plenty of incompetent people getting hired or promoted over more competent people, and that's certainly not a new development. Meritocracy is mostly a fantasy, and I think people who consider diversity a threat to meritocracy are confusing it with aristocracy: the old aristocracy would also claim that they were obviously inherently more suited to rule. They may have claimed to have merit, but the whole point of meritocracy is that it opposed that, and that anyone should be able to rise to the top. Meritocracy and diversity should be going hand in hand. If they're not, you're probably confusing something else for meritocracy.

NBA is about 75% black players. There is a clear lack of diversity. Does that mean there is a lack of meritocracy in the NBA? Why not mandate 60% of the players be white and only allow about 12% of the players be black to match with the US population?