The Dehumanizing Myth of the Meritocracy

Yes. Because we aren't sexists or racists that give people's code inherent value based on someone's gender or race. How the irony is lost on these people, I will never understand.

If you wish to be racist/sexist and judge people based on their race and gender instead of their code, feel free to start your own project. It doesn't even have to be open source and you can even deny all code contributions from cis-white males if you wish.

>In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts.

Not even sexist [0]. Speakers were chosen without name or gender released (a blind-pick system). Introducing discrimination into such a system is...well... discriminatory. I thought the point of diversity was to not discriminate based on race and gender?

If there were more 'minority' Ruby devs there would be more submissions for speakers by 'minority' Ruby devs, meaning a higher chance of being selected in a blind-pick. The lack of diversity is more due to statistics than an intentional lack of diversity. A blind-pick system also reduces any biases that may occur for picking person A over person B.

I find all this political garbage mixing into OSS to be hilarious. I've contributed a number of (small) fixes and changes to open source projects. The funny thing is that my name, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and even my religion didn't matter at all. In fact, it was never even brought up! Nobody asked me if I was even human, as my avatar was a fish. They simply reviewed my code, had me fix a few formatting errors (I have a habit of hitting space after the last sentence of a paragraph, which carries over into my code), and they accepted the pull requests. No questions asked.

Not sure how you can get any more diverse than "anyone who wishes to contribute code, can contribute code". Is it by discriminating against who can contribute code? Seems counter-intuitive.

[0] https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz/status/380394450746216448

The rewards of coding are not the highest society has to offer.

I think of the Ellen Pao affair and the idea that VC partners are supposed to be "Meritocratically" chosen. Well, if you look at say, Mark Andressen, there is no doubt he is able and worked hard, but he was also in the right place at the right time.

Thus there is an element of luck and privilege to success and if you are humble you will recognize this, but if you are in a culture that believes it is meritocratic, you might convince yourself you are many more standards north of the mean than you really are.