

Down with meritocracy (2001) - pron
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

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SwellJoe
My opinions on this have evolved a lot over the past few years, to the point
where my view matches the author's to a surprising (to me) degree. As someone
who grew up white, middle class, and male, in America, it was very easy for me
to believe that my intelligence (another front on which I was pretty lucky in
the birth lottery) and my ambition were the entirety of what led to me having
a pretty easy life, thus far.

But, over the past several years I've been involved in volunteering and
activism in areas outside my comfort zone. In that time, I've met homeless
folks who were bright and hard-working, but born into situations that
prevented them from getting care for mental illness or from getting an
education that would have helped lift them out of poverty. I've met people of
color with university credentials that make my formal education look paltry,
and who still struggle from paycheck to paycheck.

I don't have answers on how to solve the problem, but I do view it as a real
problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of our time. The stratification of
haves and have-nots is becoming more severe over time. The most disheartening
element of it is how little awareness there is among white, middle and upper
class, people about how their position in the world is as much luck of birth
as it is their hard work and intelligence. The tech industry is particularly
oblivious.

~~~
jqm
Life is not fair. And that's a fact.

But (glass half full) life is more fair than it was 100 years ago. And it was
more fair 100 years ago that it was 1000 years ago. And probably, it was more
fair 1000 years ago that it was 8000 years ago.

We should all do our part to do the right thing. We should support systems
that make sense. We should recognize that sometimes ability lies in surprising
areas. But we are never going to see life be completely fair. Not in our time.
Expecting differently I think will lead to despair, cynicism and disgust. I
believe we should do what we can in our time, and recognize how far we have
come since we first came down out of the trees....

~~~
pron
Of course. But how come the response to trying to get more women to
participate in technical fields so much more defeatist on HN than some absurd,
quasi-religious attempts such as cryonic re-animation?

~~~
jqm
Maybe some of the negativity comes from the idea that people should have to be
included in an endeavor regardless of ability?

(Of course there are also no shortage of plain old misogynists and bigots.)

~~~
SwellJoe
I think that built into that assumption is the belief that people of color or
women or whatever or someone from a poor background who have the necessary
abilities don't exist.

In other words, it's working backward from a faulty indicator: There are very
few women in tech, which proves there are very few women who are capable of
being good engineers. Likewise, there are several times more black men in
prison per capita than white people, thus black men commit crimes at a rate
much higher than white people. There is some evidence that people actually
process information this way, even though it is a logical fallacy, or at the
very least is operating on correlation as though it is causation.

In case anyone was wondering: Both of those examples are false, and are
provably false, based on research from a variety of fields.

In short: The negativity probably stems from a misogyny and bigotry, without
being aware of the misogyny or bigotry.

~~~
pron
> The negativity probably stems from a misogyny and bigotry, without being
> aware of the misogyny or bigotry.

There's a name for that unconscious discrimination: sexism.

