On 2018-05-28 1:04 AM, recalcitrantowl via governance wrote:
I am open to arguments that the value of meritocracy is a systemic factor and
de-prioritizing meritocracy as a value will help address under-representation
in a real way.
Let me make two.
The first starts with these assumptions: that notions of value are
arbitrary, and our knowledge as individuals is imperfect and shaped by
our experiences.
Both are, I think, self-evidently true: different people, as individuals
or groups, value different things, and none of us have perfect
knowledge, either of the past, present or future.
What that means, though, is that in any attempt to actually codify this
idea of "merit", if we get right down into the specific nuts and bolts
value judgements where the real-world decisions come from, what we're
really doing is shackling ourselves and our organization to our past
successes and present-day ignorance.
Another way to say that is that the problem we're trying to solve here -
the disaster we want to avoid - is having our blind spots engineered
right into the fabric of our organization and culture. That's what
"meritocratic" systems really are, once you dig into questions like "who
decides what merit means" and "who grants authority in this system and
how". They're completely calcified, a vision of the future that's never
much more than a chromed up repaint of some nostalgic, half-remembered
past.
Put bluntly the idea of a meritocratic system is inherently reactionary,
inherently backwards-facing, and as the saying goes past performance is
no guarantee of future results.
I worry that saying we have to abandon meritocracy as a value, given the
general understanding of that word, to promote diversity and inclusion sends
the wrong messages.
The second is that I have bad news about the general understanding of
the word.
Michael Young coined it in 1958, in a book called "Rise Of The
Meritocracy", a profoundly dystopian satire that tragically almost
nobody in tech has read. To all reports, he's angry to this day that
nobody got the joke; in 2001 he tried to salvage the situation, saying
in an interview that "It is good sense to appoint individual people to
jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to
have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without
room in it for others."
Which isn't a bad way to describe what we're trying to avoid here;
having Mozilla become a place anchored in the past, with no room in it
for others.
- mhoye
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