121–130 of 188 posts
tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.
liberals don't believe in meritocracies. They value labor and the 'effort' put into something. i.e. someone who dug ditches all day should receive more compensation than someone who wrote code for 2 hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.
So anyone who questions merit vs privilege is "Marxist"? Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see any Marxism here.
tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.
liberals don't believe in meritocracies. They value labor and the 'effort' put into something. i.e. someone who dug ditches all day should receive more compensation than someone who wrote code for 2 hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So anyone who questions merit vs privilege is "Marxist"? Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see any Marxism here.
Cultural Marxism substitutes white male oppressors for capitalist oppressors. The rest of the philosophy is strikingly similar.
Honestly, I think you're just tossing the word "Marxist" in as a form of name-calling, with no viable connection to your point.
I agree with most of what this article is saying, but the existence of YC is a perfect counter-argument. Although I've disagreed with PG regarding his opinions on "Zuckerberg-likeness" being important in founders, I know that YC selects for merit above all else. How do I know this? Because PG has stated many times that he is excited about founders from the University of Waterloo in Canada, which used to be unknown on…
Waterloo has been prestigious for at least 5 years (when I was applying it was among the hardest Canadian universities to get into, and it was already globally recognized). The only thing that has changed is more VC money, and more startup incubators, drawing the interest of progressively larger institutions. I think the whole "meritocratic" argument is stupid. But it's worth pointing out that Waterloo is a self-fulf…
Whether Waterloo is making merit, or merely distilling it out of the general population isn't really important in this case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She might be referring to the 36M African-Americans & 50M Hispanich-Americans in this country. So American still has a White majority at around 60% of the population. In the year 2010, only 36 million African-Americans in the US, is that right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... Anyway, these groups are under-represented in the Technology field. I heard one response that maybe these group…
>I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually. I'm not sure about Hispanics, but this is definitely a problem in many African-American communities. It's considered 'white' or essentially bending over for the system if you go to school and actually try.
For some reason, education does not carry the stigma of sports or the arts or business in these communities.
It is trendy to talk about Women in technology, but we need to think about Race and technology. Everyone notices it nobody wants to talk about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way to miss the point and exemplify it in the same breath. The article is about how SV thinks it's more meritocratic than it actually is and how this false pride is a problem in and of it's own. P.S. P.G. When this thread started I was almost tempted to make a snide comment saying "3.. 2.. 1.. Flagged off the front page." It actually took a bit over an hour but it's now indeed been flagged off of the front page despi…
In your mind, is it possible for someone to disagree with the article without "exemplifying the problem"? That's the issue with first-world "social-justice warriors", like the author of the linked opinion piece. If you disagree with their premises on factual grounds, you're labeled as part of the problem . It makes honest discussion impossible. For example, you completely ignored the point that PG made. You didn't ev…
By doing so he gave an almost painfully accurate example of the problem the article addressed, hence my use of the word "exemplifies."
As for the east-Asians and Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming. It's worth considering that that itself might be contributing to their disproportionate presence to some degree (i.e. in which way does causality go in this case.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SV believes so strongly that it's meritocratic, that every successful person believes they deserve it. That's a problem.
Why is that a problem? Because someone who can say with moral certainty "this is my money, I earned" is not an easy mark for the sort of people who produce nothing but demand an equal share of the work of others? Because they won't subscribe to the ridiculous notion that there is no virtue in creating wealth but only virtue in giving it away? Maybe that is precisely why those who produce nothing hate the concept of m…
If someone fails, does that necessarily mean they didn't deserve success? Or is it possible that external forces took from them something they had, "with moral certainty", earned?
The article points out that white males are overrepresented in SV success stories. Are you going to argue that they are dozens of times more productive than women, or non-white people?
Let me make the point in a way that does not pit groups of people against each other. If you do the same thing over and over, hustling and making pitches, and then one day you get someone to fund you, does that make you inherently better on that day? Do you have more "virtue" on that day than you did the day before?
Let's say someone founds a company and it fails. This person feels like they didn't deserve to fail, so they start another company and it succeeds. This person will take the success as s true measure of what they deserve, and will ignore the failure as a fluke. But they will look at failed companies around them and feel superior, even though they also failed once.
There are lots of people founding similar companies, making similar pitches to the same investors. I can't see an argument that they "deserve" wildly different valuations.
Holding wealth creation as a virtue devolves very quickly into worshiping money. Anyone with money is to be respected, and anyone who doesn't have money has nothing interesting to say.
' Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.' I don't see anything male about any of these words, I know many women who can be accurately described by these words, as well as many men who cannot. Why is the author c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way to miss the point and exemplify it in the same breath. The article is about how SV thinks it's more meritocratic than it actually is and how this false pride is a problem in and of it's own. P.S. P.G. When this thread started I was almost tempted to make a snide comment saying "3.. 2.. 1.. Flagged off the front page." It actually took a bit over an hour but it's now indeed been flagged off of the front page despi…
In your mind, is it possible for someone to disagree with the article without "exemplifying the problem"? That's the issue with first-world "social-justice warriors", like the author of the linked opinion piece. If you disagree with their premises on factual grounds, you're labeled as part of the problem . It makes honest discussion impossible. For example, you completely ignored the point that PG made. You didn't ev…
I think it's a lot more interesting to take pg's argument in a different direction. If you accept the premise that intellect is evenly distributed regardless of race or gender (for the record, I accept it), then why is mathematics dominated by white males? Because it's an observable fact.
Start applying Five Whys and see what happens.