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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

> We change and abandon words all of the time. Why are you so invested in putting up blinders to ignore that?

The genesis story of meritocracy as told by its enemies is that it was used satirically (eg. Wikipedia: "It was used pejoratively by British politician and sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy").

Why are they so invested in putting up blinders to ignore that "meritocracy" in the context of open source development doesn't carry that demeaning connotation, because people changed the word's meaning within their subculture sometimes in the 1980's? We change and abandon words all of the time.

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> Why are they so invested in putting up blinders to ignore that "meritocracy" in the context of open source development doesn't carry that demeaning connotation

They aren't. They are arguing that it should be because, as arguably is part of the subtext of the original usage, what “meritocracy” used non-ironically denotes is very much something which humans fundamentally do not do, or even approximate, without deliberate and active correction for social and cultural biases of the exact type that the description of “meritocracy” is generally, and specifically in the case of those who apply the term non-ironically to the open source community, used to deny the need for.

> what “meritocracy” used non-ironically denotes is very much something which humans fundamentally do not do

... when applied to a situation where people are ranked.

The meritocracy of open source wasn't about "who gets promoted", but about the merit of the code being contributed.

It's the code that was ranked, not its authors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_... and all that.

...I can’t answer that because I’m not one those people saying that.

Also answering a question with a question is an evasion technique. Just say what you believe, and don’t drill me on stuff other people said.

I believe your "question" is loaded, misleading and missing the point:

It's not the OSS folks complaining about a change in meaning, but those who wish to retire meritocracy because they're too inflexible to accept that other people make a word mean something else.

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