121–130 of 152 posts
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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
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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…
> 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/ for no merit based reason. Lets do something a…
Meritocracy, 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 to…
Do you believe organisations should remove all claims of valuing such things?
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> 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…
> ... 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 ob…
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.
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 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,…
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.
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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
Being a conspiracy theorist means you believe someone else is conspiring against you.
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 cust…
> 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 diver…
Meritocracy perpetuates the status quo, which is just a local maximum and not the overall maximum.
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> 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…
> ... 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 ob…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
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.