>The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally, but that's where game theory is taking us.
Has it ever occurred to you that if people are willing to burn it to the ground, the "modern world" might not be quite as good for them as it is for you?
What we are seeing today are people who have long felt grievances talking to each other and discovering that they're not alone, and that the civil institutions which are supposed to address those grievances systematically do not do so.
And when people are given no other options to correct injustice, conflict is all that's left to them.
If you want to stop the world from burning, don't blame the people for fighting, blame the system for making it necessary.
Except the actual left has been complaining about centralised capitalist control of the media for decades. Indeed, it's precisely because of that control that you've apparently never heard anything other than liberal centrists talking about access to speech.
>This new political "anything goes" trend is going to be awful for anyone not already in the Fortune 500. But I guess that's the point, isn't it?
Yes of course. Welcome to Capitalism.
When the system starts to break down from the inevitable inequality it causes, capitalists turn to fascism to maintain control. It happened in the Weimar Republic, and it's happening again now. We're seeing business news outlets openly talking about the "investment opportunities" in Brazil as a result of the election of an overt fascist.
>And all for a petty, temporary victory over a fringe political group!
The left celebrates this, not because the control is good, but because the threat of fascism has become so overt that this is the best we can hope for right now.
Access to speech has indeed been a problem; there were plenty of court cases about it in the 2000s. What is new, at least in my awareness, is a breakdown in access to infrastructure. Many (though not all) hosts/registrars/etc were built by ideological libertarians who had an absolutist free speech bent. Sites seemed more likely to encounter resistance from the government and big corporations than from their providers. Now the providers are big corporations, and they have close ties with the government!
A prime example is rotten.com. They faced plenty of C&Ds and government lawsuits, but it looks like they weren't forced into self-hosting until 2014 based on some quick research. Rotten was 1000x worse than Infowars, Gab, or even 4chan, but it was a protest site of sorts and an important free speech canary. (It's dead now, obviously.)
Can you give some examples of leftist sites being booted from their hosts in the 2000s? Maybe I'm not aware of them. WSWS, for instance, seems to be hosted by Godaddy currently, and that's about as left as you can get. Wikileaks is an example of an (IMHO) non-partisan site that has faced troubles, but that's because they actively leaked classified intel about ongoing conflicts. Cyptome faced some government pushback in the 2000s for leaking less controversial material, but they were hosted with Network Solutions in 2012, and now with Web.com.
The sad truth is lefties are mostly irrelevant these days, shifting the overton window far to the right. When have you last heard significant people someone talking nationalizing industries?
A few hippies or blue-haired university students are no threat to any ones lives. (Near-)fascists taking over countries is. As usual, people take action not because of some principle, but because a problem got so bad it cannot be ignored anymore. And as usual, it might already be too late...
>the actual left has been complaining about centralised capitalist control of the media for decades
Cool. How does the "real" left feel about speech these days?
>The left celebrates this, not because the control is good, but because the threat of fascism has become so overt that this is the best we can hope for right now.
Oh. It's a special case because things are so bad _right now_. The same justification as in every instance of abridging speech we later come to regret.
This only makes sense if you assume the organisation's interest is only to maximise productivity in the short term.
An open source organisation may explicitly be interested in attracting marginalised people into the tech sector, to improve equality in society as a whole.
Or even from a cynical perspective, a profit-led corporation may desire to increase their ability to hire competent but undervalued (and thus cheaper) employees in future.
So looking at their methodology, they chose the "high class" black names ("Anderson" and "Thompson") (EDIT: I misread, these aren't the black names) based on census proportions, but that doesn't necessarily mean those names are actually read as "black" by most people.
Moreover, using census results ignores exposure to foreigners with these names. My own strongest association for "Thompson" is the white police officers in Tintin, and more generally for white English people. (Although I'm British so that may not be representative.)
As long as "low class" black names are more readily associated with blackness than "high class" ones, this methodology isn't really isolating anything, just doing a slightly more intersectional analysis.
You misread the paper. The surnames Anderson and Thompson have white connotations, while Jefferson and Washington have black connotations. The researchers backed up their choices with data. From page 3:
> For example, based on data from the United States Census, 90 and 75 percent of individuals with Washington and Jefferson surnames are African American, respectively. Similarly, 90 percent of individuals with a surname of either Hernandez or Garcia are Hispanic, and 70 percent of Andersons and Thompsons are white.
Ah yes, you're correct, I got confused by the first-name/surname thing.
I would still question the validity of this approach, and more generally, I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US.
They acknowledge that the names may not be strong signals, but the very reason that's the case is that people are less likely to associate black people with high socioeconomic status in the first place.
Even if you object to their choices of black surnames, they also ran experiments with male and female names, and with hispanic names. In those cases, resume screeners were all but certain as to the race and sex of the applicant. Still, there was almost no discrimination detected.
Honestly, I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole here. You started by claiming that there was a massive gender & race bias:
> CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias.
When I corrected that and linked to a study, you replied with an argument based on a misreading. When I corrected your misreading, you fell back to, "I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US." If that's the case, then it also refutes the conclusions of the original (flawed) studies claiming racism. After all, if your argument is true, those can be just as easily explained as classism.
I'm not sure there is anything that could convince you that you are mistaken.
>I just always have trouble imagining the end game of that kind of thinking - even in Stalinism, people with higher abilities were selected for various more demanding tasks.
Rejecting meritocracy doesn't mean not acknowledging ability, it means not structuring power hierarchies around it.
Those most able should be chosen for tasks because those involved in the work agree collectively, without the coercion of power dynamics, that it's best to assign them that task.
Meritocracy doesn't require structuring power hierarchies around merit.
Furthermore, there will never be collective or universal agreement in any remotely complex issue, which means some block of the community is inevitably being coerced into accepting a communal choice.
>The simple fact is that people who have power tend to abuse that power, but that has nothing to do with meritocracy as a concept.
Except that by definition, meritocracy creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way. Those with "merit" are trusted and respected more than those without. This means that complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. And even when bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of chasing away their "merit".
In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.
Which system do not create a power dynamic that can be abused? It seems like an shared problem, where the only reachable goal is to create safeguards so that when power dynamic create abuse there is some form of process to address it.
A democratic system based on popularity share all those problems attributed to meritocracy. Those deemed popular are trusted and respected more than those without. complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. When bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of loosing influence and power.
What I would like to know is if meritocracy has a higher risk of causing abuse compared to other systems.
In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.
Linus is an incredibly influential figure in tech, having written both Git and Linux. He has decided to work on his own behavior.
>In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.
Linus' contribution is not just the code he commits, but his ability to organize and marshall developers. That ability is tied to his communication skills.
To the extent that his discourse drives skilled developers away, it is a detriment which is presumably why he is working on it. If it were to get extreme and he became unable to lead due to his toxicity, "meritocracy" would imply that he would step down or be removed.
Life creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way. This is getting ridiculous. Have some minimal set of rules so that people, including important people, can’t be outright nasty to each other and leave it at that. There is absolutely no need for all this ideological baggage.
And such dynamics should be acknowledged and opposed wherever they exist.
Power itself can't be opposed. By definition, opposition doesn't exist without power.
Abuse can be opposed and to some extent mitigated but it's not at all a static game. When you build walls humans go around them, climb over them, dig under them, or break through them. There is no wall that one person can build that another cannot overcome.
Power itself is an imbalance. It implies the non-universal capability to do something. When we say "the president of the club has x, y, and z powers" we're not talking about the things everyone else in the club is able to do.
So to be opposed to "power dynamics" is to be opposed to non-universal capability, an extremely radical position which I am not sure you hold.
Could you expand on your definition to clarify your position?
I think the very first rule of life is to live. If someone helps you live when otherwise you're going to die, you should tolerate more of his weirdness. If someone helps you live better when otherwise you're going to be quite miserable, you should also be more tolerant. I think this is the logic of meritocracy, and the logic behind capitalism.
You either believe in capitalism and thus meritocracy as its twin, or neither. Why do capitalists get to take away so much profit, and why should we award patents to inventors, if we don't reward those with "merit"?
Humans have a sleep cycle driven by circadian rhythms, and most jobs in a country work similar clock hours in order to coordinate with other companies more easily.
So in fact, it's much easier to change what the clocks say than it is to change either of these.
There is no way to implement verifiable voting which is not vulnerable to voter coercion. If you can verify your vote, so can the person threatening you.
The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.
You're not advocating for encouraging STEM graduate immigrants, you're advocating for the exclusion of any other immigrants.
Unless you're also advocating for the deportation of non-STEM graduates, your position is explicitly discriminatory based on where someone is born. It's bigotry.
Has it ever occurred to you that if people are willing to burn it to the ground, the "modern world" might not be quite as good for them as it is for you?
What we are seeing today are people who have long felt grievances talking to each other and discovering that they're not alone, and that the civil institutions which are supposed to address those grievances systematically do not do so.
And when people are given no other options to correct injustice, conflict is all that's left to them.
If you want to stop the world from burning, don't blame the people for fighting, blame the system for making it necessary.