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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”

#81

Post by danharaj »

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?

You have to separate the word from the underlying concept(s). They're not the same thing. If they were the same thing, I could conjure of invisible pink unicorns with an utterance and make all the world utopia by having everyone recite "I am a good person and I won't do anything bad". Words can fail and everyone acknowledges that at least tacitly. Hypocrisy is the purest form of words failing. Let's put it that way: Even if you call yourself a meritocracy you can still be a hypocrite. On the other hand being a meritocracy without calling yourself one is no problem. If you call your organization of 300 people a meritocracy, there will be 300 notions of merit. What benefit is there to calling yourself one if the word itself has no concrete, actionable content and doesn't unify people's vision?

This sort of trickery is easier to see when you are part of the management of an organization. The bulk of my relevant personal experience is as a software consultant where I have been embedded in many organizations, all of which considered themselves "good thing"ocracies, but usually fell far short of the mark. We are all hypocrites like that. Words are tricky devils. If you don't treat them with a healthy suspicion you can get in trouble. You have to make them servants of your goal, not arbiters of what your goal is.

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

#82

Post by _csoz »

malvosenior wrote: post #34

As someone who comes from a minority group, I absolutely want to be judged on the technical merit of my contributions and not my skin color, gender or genetic background. Implying that people who aren't white males can't succeed in a meritocratic environment is racist and condescending. I don't see how this helps diversity one bit.

I think it has been proven that oppressed people cannot judge their oppression

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

#83

Post by moduspol »

ggggtez wrote: post #23
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…

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…

I get the idea, but Mozilla is building things.

If I want the best engineer to build my bridge, I don't want to give bonus points for skin color or private parts. It's not like the trucks going over it will be any lighter or have smoother tires because the person building it grew up in a single parent household or something. When the rubber meets the road, some engineers are better than others and it affects the end product.

My fundamental concern is that the moment that the deciding factor isn't how good someone is at what you need them to do, you're driving a wedge through "the world as it is (cold hard reality)" and "the world as you want it to be (equal outcomes, diverse, empathetic)". The deeper that wedge gets, the tougher of a time you'll have meeting goals in the real world, where whether or not that bridge holds during a tornado is completely independent of the background of those who built it.

I think employees should be judged on how well they can deliver toward the company's goals, and for the most part, I think that happens. Actions like these are more about virtue signaling than anything else.

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

#84

Post by guitarbill »

bluecalm wrote: post #57
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…

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…

Who gets to define merit? Say a certain style was more likely to pass code review. And that style was more often associated with people with CS degrees, vs self-taught programmers. Even though it's a stylistic choice, functionally equivalent, one is "better" than the other and is introducing bias.

It's very easy to do, especially because consistency is important for legibility, but a stylistic choice nonetheless. I think a decent, practical solution to some degree are prettifiers/code-formatters and linters. Because the style is codified, and trivial for anybody to apply.

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

#85

Post by trgv »

It seems that some people view the term "meritocracy" negatively because they believe it implies that everyone has the same opportunities. I don't see that implication, but if enough other people do, maybe it's worth re-wording their governance docs.

At the same time, the proposed replacement seems off the target:

> "Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."

What's wrong with something innocuous, like: "We strive to encourage contributions/engagement/participation from diverse communities"?

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

#86

Post by sanxiyn »

wtfstatists wrote: post #78

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.

It is especially relevant that it is not influenced by your ancestry.

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

#87

Post by malvosenior »

_csoz wrote: post #82
malvosenior wrote: post #34

As someone who comes from a minority group, I absolutely want to be judged on the technical merit of my contributions and not my skin color, gender or genetic background. Implying that people who aren't white males can't succeed in a meritocratic environment is racist and condescending. I don't see how this helps diversity one bit.

I think it has been proven that oppressed people cannot judge their oppression

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.

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

#88

Post by sanxiyn »

guitarbill wrote: post #84
bluecalm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who gets to define merit? Say a certain style was more likely to pass code review. And that style was more often associated with people with CS degrees, vs self-taught programmers. Even though it's a stylistic choice, functionally equivalent, one is "better" than the other and is introducing bias. It's very easy to do, especially because consistency is important for legibility, but a stylistic choice nonetheless. I t…

You should follow the project's style when you start contributing. If style is pointed out in code review, fix it.

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

#89

Post by cucumberferity »

wtfstatists wrote: post #78

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 radical group pushing these language changes are explicitly opposed to meritocracy.

They don't think they should have to justify their positions or their influence, they get it by having the 'right' politics.

They are committed to advancing their own personal and political power and influence by language enforcement, then use of secret code of conduct proceedings, all of which are subject to abuse.

Even where open source has failed to be inclusive and diverse empowering a fringe minority and instituting authoritarian language policing and secret proceedings will not advance inclusion or diversity.

They make no substantive contribution to diversity or the project.

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

#90

Post by danharaj »

wtfstatists wrote: post #78

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, visions, dreams to fill a graveyard. That should serve as a warning that it's not so clear.

And anyway, does the mission really have to say "We are a 'help the mission'ocracy"?

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