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Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

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Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#71

Post by danharaj »

vanderZwan wrote: post #41
danharaj wrote: post #30

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…

Very nice way to put it. What do you think of Google's "don't be evil" clause and that it was recently removed? Same thing, or subtly different? Not trying to be inflammatory, I don't know what to think myself: rationally I think it should feel the same, yet somehow it feels different.

I think it feels different, at least to me, because "don't be evil" doesn't signal any value about how I would be treated if I worked at Google. We often evaluate such value statements by empathizing with the people affected. Everyone here wants to be evaluated on their merit. Everyone thinks they're meritorious.

So it's easy to see opposition to the word "meritocracy" and, putting oneself in the shoes of a member of the Mozilla org, feeling mistreated. On the other hand removing "don't be evil" doesn't feel like Google is going to start mistreating people I empathize with^.

^ I feel that way for different reasons :^)

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#72

Post by [deleted] »

sanxiyn wrote: post #42
ggggtez wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you get "a" tries to succeed. You'd expect equally talented candidates x, and y, to have Pr(x|a) == Pr(y|a). But what if y only had "b" tries, where b And that's all there is to it. If you no longer assume everyone has an equal chance to show their skills, then the meritocracy isn't actually working as intended. Good "y" candidates are getting ignored for worse "x" candidates, just because "x" candidates ha…

This assumes meritocracy we want is based on skills. I think "working as intended" is actually based on "shown skills", not "skills"; people with mad skills which didn't show it in the project don't have merit. I've seen "do-ocracy" used instead for this reason. Do-ocracy does not assume equal opportunity.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#73

Post by didgeoridoo »

cucumberferity wrote: post #39
bluecalm wrote: post #10

Can someone explain how striving for meritocracy stems from assumption of equal opportunity? I want projects I am part of or benefit from to be guided by meritocracy. It means some people have better chances to contribute or gain influence there than others. Those are more competent people who often got better opportunities through life. I want that because I care about those projects. I don't see how chances not bei…

The movement pushing this worldview do not believe oppressed groups can ever meaningful participate in society without their help. They advance their 'help' to these groups and rely on the cooperation of people who want 'do the right thing' when they go about forcing their agenda on everyone. It is about cementing their own personal and political power, it does little to actually improve diversity, and has nothing to…

I agree with almost all of your substantive points, yet I find this post tremendously unhelpful.

If you cared about communicating effectively and changing minds, you would watch out for overheated language. It seems like you’re falling into the same trap of self-satisfied browbeating that you are accusing others of.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#74

Post by djajshgsjja »

tjpnz wrote: post #24

Why exactly do people contend that meritocracy somehow clashes with diversity? The implications being made by suggesting the two be mutually exclusive are frightening.

Suppose:

1. There exist some quality “merit” with a random uniform distribution across the population.

2. Some systems used to measure merit are biased for and against different subgroups of the population.

3. People obtain power and wealth based these biased measurements.

4. Subgroups with more power and wealth expend resources optimizing their performance on the tests, further biasing the results.

5. The winners in this system label it a “meritocracy”.

This story rings true to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean merit-based systems are all bad. They can still provide lots of opportunity to the poor who have enough aptitude they can still beat the test despite the bias. Other systems may have worse problems.

In practice, organizations like Mozilla still have a competitive merit-based hiring process even if they say they oppose meritocracy. They might attempt to apply a correction to unbias the merit measurement. Getting rid of the trappings of meritocracy might make it a more welcoming place to work for everyone and raise the total merit (even if there’s no way to measure it).

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#75

Post by [deleted] »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #55
danharaj wrote: post #30

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…

> "good thing" words to describe values are kind of bad. This makes no sense to me. Values are principles or standards of behavior. If I try to keep good values, this makes me evil somehow? Why would common standards of behavior for a group with a common goal be bad? Wouldn't it help the group continue in the same direction?

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#76

Post by _dps »

vanderZwan wrote: post #33
autarch wrote: post #12

I think this bit from the email is the most important: > To sum up: > -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project. > -The word “meritocracy” itself has become a bone of contention which is unhelpful to us. > -Meritocractic principles remain highly desirable and should be explicit. > -We should also acknowledge the importance of measures we take…

> 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 obliviousness to one's own advantages are certainly present in the community. But I have not seen anyone express such supremacist ideas before.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#77

Post by cucumberferity »

plantain wrote: post #62

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 diversity.

This will actually have the opposite effect of reducing diversity and only serves to empower the people with the correct views.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#78

Post by wtfstatists »

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.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#79

Post by sanxiyn »

hrktb wrote: post #49
CapacitorSet wrote: post #18

>The first line of Mozilla’s governance[0] states, “Mozilla is an open source project governed as a meritocracy.” >The use of the term “meritocracy” to describe communities that suffer from a lack of diverse representation is increasingly seen as problematic: it proceeds from an assumption of equality of opportunity. Is there evidence that the assumption of equal opportunities does not hold for Mozilla? It seems to m…

I don’t usually follow Mozilla, what efforts do they make that for instance effectively offsets issues of access to education or social discrimination outside of just Mozilla ?

They don't; it's not their problem.

I think addressing social discrimination is a great mission. But organization needs to focus, and can't address every great mission. Social discrimination is just not the focus of Mozilla's mission.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#80

Post by 21 »

nostalgeek wrote: post #36

Interesting, just when the "post-meritocracy" manifesto was published, Mozilla changes sides on meritocracy : https://postmeritocracy.org/ authored by Coraline Ada Ehmke who is already well known for their activism in IT and open source with the contributor convenant https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ . Coincidence? or consequence?

Quote from the covenant link:

> People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions.

Watch out, they are coming for Linus :)

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