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Comment by jraines | Hacker News Reader

The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired.

The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead".

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the valley, and if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection. However, if they're getting money for things that you don't think have merit, like the Nth photo sharing app, then I think it stands.

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> if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection

That's exactly what happens. You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley. Now, you can hand-wave about connections, and entrepreneurial culture or what have you, but at some level, that just reinforces the point.

There are hugely disproportionately more Indians and East-Asians than there are whites in the Silicon Valley. Why do you think that is?

So where is your data showing that?

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...

According to that report, 87% of funded founders are white; 92% of funded founders are male.

You said: You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley.

Your data does not show this. You'd need the denominators as well, you have only the numerators.

But what percentage of applicants were neither white or male? Without knowing that your statement is essentially propaganda dressed up as statistics.

Likewise, can we get some data providing (e.g.) negative indicators that race is a factor? A lack of correlation between gender/race and achievement would be useful.

As I said upthread, I don't think the burden of proof should rest solely on people who're questioning whether SV is basically a meritocracy. Either it's relatively easy to demonstrate that the claim is sound, or we have a lot more discussion ahead of us.

The important piece is not even so much to say categorically that "it's not a meritocracy," but to make the claim for data reciprocal. Ideally both positions should supply data, and in general I don't believe people expect data from folks who say "SV is meritocratic." People will rush to poke holes in people's arguments who claim the contrary, but I see a dearth of data & skepticism supporting the affirmative case.

If we're all supposed to be skeptical nerds, maybe we should apply a little more skepticism towards positions that, to skeptics like ourselves, would seem self-serving (i.e. it's basically is a meritocracy and therefore we needn't worry or take action).

What percentage of black female CS grads from Berkeley can't get their startups funded? It would surprise me to hear there were many, because the CS grads I've known from Berkeley are very good

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