[antjanus]

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.

[ThrowawayR2]

Speaking as a minority myself, if hiring based on assessed merit is wrong, I don't want to be right.

[dgellow]

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.

[antjanus]

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.

[dgellow]

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.

[zarkov99]

So what does exist? Oppression and power? And we should trust the people who believe that to fix the imbalances?

[antjanus]

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?

[zarkov99]

Did you mean to reply to the parent?

[antjanus]

No? maybe I misunderstood your comment. Everyone seems to default to "if it's not meritocracy, then what?" or they default to "this meritocracy alternative you're proposing is worse". Well, then, what's better for you? What would you prefer knowing that meritocracy is inherently full of biases?

Meritocracy is full of flaws.

I do believe putting more diverse set of people into power makes a difference. Having racial diversity, gender diversity, cultural diversity, financial diversity etc. is important for having fair and fruitful leadership at companies, in gov't, and whatever other places.

[zarkov99]

No, I guess I misunderstood yours.There is nothing better than meritocracy, in my view, because meritocracy, which I believe is routinely used successfully in all sorts of domains, ensures the best people are incentivized to do the best work they can, for the benefit of the entire tribe..

[antjanus]

I guess that's where we disagree. I don't think it's been used successfully and by design, meritocracy isn't for the benefit of everyone -- it encourages actions only for the benefit of the power-wielders because they're the ones who judge merit.