
The Dehumanizing Myth of the Meritocracy - rbanffy
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of-the-meritocracy
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Nadya
_> Software development is historically driven by a population that values
intelligence above all else._

Yes. Because we aren't sexists or racists that give people's code inherent
value based on someone's gender or race. How the irony is lost on these
people, I will never understand.

If you wish to be racist/sexist and judge people based on their race and
gender instead of their code, feel free to start your own project. It doesn't
even have to be open source and you can even deny all code contributions from
cis-white males if you wish.

> _In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,”
> ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach
> efforts._

Not even sexist [0]. Speakers were chosen _without name or gender released_ (a
blind-pick system). _Introducing discrimination_ into such a system
is...well... discriminatory. I thought the point of diversity was to not
discriminate based on race and gender?

If there were more 'minority' Ruby devs there would be more submissions for
speakers by 'minority' Ruby devs, meaning a higher chance of being selected in
a blind-pick. The lack of diversity is more due to statistics than an
intentional lack of diversity. A blind-pick system also reduces any biases
that may occur for picking person A over person B.

I find all this political garbage mixing into OSS to be hilarious. I've
contributed a number of (small) fixes and changes to open source projects. The
funny thing is that my name, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and even
my religion _didn 't matter at all_. In fact, it was never even brought up!
Nobody asked me if I was even human, as my avatar was a fish. They simply
reviewed my code, had me fix a few formatting errors (I have a habit of
hitting space after the last sentence of a paragraph, which carries over into
my code), and they accepted the pull requests. No questions asked.

Not sure how you can get any more diverse than "anyone who wishes to
contribute code, can contribute code". Is it by discriminating against who can
contribute code? Seems counter-intuitive.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz/status/380394450746216448](https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz/status/380394450746216448)

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PaulHoule
Interesting but I think misses the real point.

The rewards of coding are not the highest society has to offer.

I think of the Ellen Pao affair and the idea that VC partners are supposed to
be "Meritocratically" chosen. Well, if you look at say, Mark Andressen, there
is no doubt he is able and worked hard, but he was also in the right place at
the right time.

Thus there is an element of luck and privilege to success and if you are
humble you will recognize this, but if you are in a culture that believes it
is meritocratic, you might convince yourself you are many more standards north
of the mean than you really are.

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olgeni
It is a very efficient process: you can basically guess the full content just
by looking at the url.

