You keep using that word "meritocracy"

I am glad you made this post, because recently I've been having similar thoughts. I don't know if it's just because I visit sites that occupy a singular cluster in webpage-space [1], but it seems like the evidence of increased conflict between the social justice community and the hacker community is popping up everywhere. Is this because the social justice community has finally reached critical mass on the web (a traditional hacker domain) and is speaking up, or did something in one of the communities recently change to trigger this? And is this collision / conflict something that we'll see more of in the future, or will the fervor on each side die down?

Either way, I think the hacker community's long term response will be really interesting. When looking for historical examples, I can really only see one clear path -- the path taken by industries whose employees already consider themselves privileged, namely those in finance and banking. They've had ongoing conflicts with the social justice community for a while now, and we've seen their response. Will the hacker community respond similarly? Hackers seem to value non-conformity and despise credentialism, so I doubt it.

So, I think the long term path of the hacker community will probably be unique. Suppose the hackers recognize that they might be privileged in some ways (e.g. high IQ). Will we see a restored sense of noblesse oblige? I doubt the social justice community let that stand. Maybe the hackers will undergo a cultural transform that satisfies them? Though I'd like to believe this is possible, no examples come to mind that give me any confidence.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspa...

> A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

So the whole argument seems to be centered around this idea, but it seems horribly flawed.

Let's assume for the moment that this theory is true. There really is an implicit homogeneous conspiracy that's in charge of distributing "merit", and they only give it to people who are "like" the existing members. Even if that's true, why in the world would you assume that this conspiracy is defining similarity by skin color or sex?

It's very easy for somebody whose self-identity is defined by a certain characteristic to assume that others see the world the same way. That since I define myself primarily by being an X and secondarily by being a Y, others are treating me primarily as a member of groups X and Y. Which is clearly absurd since there are so many ways to categorize people, and since people are perfectly capable of building an identity around each of them. It could well be religion, sexual orientation, nationality, language, politics, age, occupation, school, sports team, a hobby, etc. And many of these categories have fractal complexity.

AFAIK, my sense of identity isn't really tied up in race or gender. So why would I as an extremely prejudiced gatekeeper of meritocracy make decisions based on whether somebody is male of female, rather than whether they're a Java programmer (eew) or a CL hacker (yay!).

The question isn't if the dropout rate of minorities is higher, the question is, do more minorities graduate than if there wasn't AA? If so, then AA is having some positive effect.

I'm all for fixing problems at the local level, but the problems are huge. On a micro level, within school districts there are issues of gerrymandering and even absent gerrymandering there is a terrible positive feedback loop where properties within the boundaries of good schools increase in value, putting them out-of-reach of lower income families.

Also, consider the range of things the child of an engineer is exposed to regularly by the age of 7 to the range of things the child of someone working 60 hours a week in a non-skilled service industry job.

The obviously wrong on so many levels solution would be to shuffle all children to random parents in. That would give you true equality of opportunity. Things like big brother/sister and other mentorship programs fix this in a more sane manner, and I can recommend those to anyone on HN who wants to make a difference.

Somebody decides how to measure merit and certifies who has it. Then you have regulatory capture[1].

That's why you have all the white guys deciding who will be doctors, business executives, lawyers, engineers, etc. And people like people they can relate to, no individual maliciousness or racism needed. It's inherent in the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Then we go back and make sure they get adequate algebra education. We have to trace the problem back and fix it before the trajectory becomes irreparably set in stone.

Math takes time and lots of practice to learn. Trying to cram it all in at the college level via AA is just Not Going To Work.

As a side note, I really wish we'd had AP Calc at my high school. We only had two english APs, alas. (got 5s on 'em, though)