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by cholmon 2109 days ago
What opinions has Bob Martin expressed that are objectionable?
4 comments

From memory I think (please, someone correct me if I'm wrong) there were some articles about hiring on merit rather than promoting gender (and possibly race/culture) diversity as an ideal?
Isn't it tragic that that stands out as objectionable?
it's tragic that people think merit-based promotions and hiring actually exist. Meritocracy is flawed and extremely biased -- because people that enforce meritocracy are biased.

Martin himself shows himself to be a biased person which he shows time and time again on Twitter. What if he were to decide who got promoted or hired for companies?

There are literally studies on this.

Speaking as a minority myself, if hiring based on assessed merit is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Who isn't bias? That's what defines an individual personality. If we would remove everybody who expresses some biases you wouldn't have that much choice of people at the end.

The fact that people have bias cannot be the issue in itself, problems occur when they are ignored and not taken in account by systems.

For example a hiring process can take in account biases and have ways to correct for them, for example by avoiding to have one single interviewer having way more weight than another, by doing blind reviews, etc.

so you're saying to avoid biases, we should have a diverse and inclusive set of interviewers that can counter each others' blind spots.

And that meritocracy on its own cannot work because everyone is biased in one way or another. Got it.

I don't say the part about meritocracy, I don't believe that's a jump that makes sense, but the rest is correct, yes :)

I see meritocracy as an ideal we would like to be able to tend to, not something that has been achieved in the past or current time.

So what does exist? Oppression and power? And we should trust the people who believe that to fix the imbalances?
I'd like to invite you to come up with a strategy to counter meritocracy bias to make it "fair" for everyone. What would your strategy be?
Did you mean to reply to the parent?
https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/128266896430954496...

I object to using the notion of a "6X difference in murderer density" among Black men as a reason why police are justified in racial profiling.

But I also object to the extremely smug and faux-engineer-rationality of "This does not appear to be racism [...] It looks more like math."

If we're expecting Uncle Bob to be just some guy on Twitter I would write him off as a simple fool. If we're expecting Uncle Bob to be a thought leader in a consequential professional field requiring deep analysis and sound judgement, that's something else.

Multiple return statements in a function are acceptable.
they are, aren't they?
calling out the left in the US for promoting a cancel culture. And telling people not to remain silent or embarassed about having views other than the left.