What's Wrong with Meritocracy

People tend to be less rigorous, more entrenched and less able to truly debate about these things than 95% of things we could talk about. This leads to people we may meet one day, try to give money to, try to get money from, try to make a business with, exhibiting some ideas we disagree with, with no useful or easy way to come to a synthesis.

Just like I don't get in large political discussion at work except for bills that specifically effect us in the small (i.e. the 1099 for vendors you spend $600 or more at part of the new health care legislation), I don't want to see them here, and feel they're off topic as they're not particularly any more apropos to us than members of the larger population.

Do I think the new government venture funding goes here? Yes. As it's on topic and relevant in the small to us.

Do I think a discussion of abortion law goes here, even if it has interesting tech in the article? Not in a billion years.

We're not trying to get into Harvard, so not particularly relevant.

While you may be a lurker here, and so may not have it, many of us have a "flag" button. This will delete the article from the site if a pretty small number of us click it.

Therefore, I wish, in addition to this button, I also had a button that said "has some value, just get it out of the curated HN space, and transfers it to reddit".

So if it's interesting to hackers, it's via politics (which HN tends to be flag happy about), and about a stage in life where pretty much everyone here is past (college admissions), to an institution which isn't really that common for the startupy type of person to strive for (usually preferring Stanford or MIT).

I do think it's interesting, I just would prefer to see it on a site where the politics can be discussed without the stink of political opinion interfering with the startup community.

I view sticking stuff like this on HN is akin to having heated political discussions before interviewing for a job or partnership: a universally bad idea.

I wasn't being glib. It is an interesting article, just not one I want to see change my opinion of people I discuss technical things with all the time. People tend to be more blind to assumption about politics than many other topics, so it's a good way to make yourself think less of people.

Things close to this I would think on topic for HN:

A blog post going into how the hacker community isn't like this.

The ways that scions of tech are different than other parents when the second generation comes around.

Etc.