cucumberferity's comments

Gotcha.

It also adds language about debias.

So it doesn't simply remove meritocracy to appease the far-left activists.

It specifically inserts language to appear them, reaffirm their world view.

Is it really necessary to create a safe space for fringe political activists to create substantive diversity? No.

It's also promoted by high-level Mozilla employees in response to a recent anti-meritocracy movement.

After what happened to FreeBSD's CoC you can hardly claim this is happening in a vacuum, it's a cause now.

They are proposing removing meritocracy based on their political view that certain classes of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.

They are the ones advancing a narrative of exclusion, telling individuals in whole swaths that they can never compete in open source projects.

They have no evidence to support this of course, just what they were taught in their sociology classes at uni.

In reality though they are the ones pushing outdated bias.

The evidence cited for meritocracy being an inappropriate word, a study on GitHub pull requests, has been widely debunked.

Meritocracy is only an inappropriate word if you believe that certain groups of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.

That notion is of course incredibly condescending towards members of those groups.

The goal should be to advance everyone in the meritocracy through outreach and training, not to abandon the value of meritocracy.

The proposal itself makes it clear the change is merely for cosmetic purposes, to make certain people feel better, not actually increase diversity.

If you care about diversity you should oppose the notion that certain groups of people are incapable of participating on their own terms.

This is about empowering a small but loud group of political activists who want to remake a software project to fit their fringe world view.

Do you care more about affirming their politics or the quality of software?

No.

Eliminating meritocracy as a value doesn't discriminate against cis white males.

Nor does meritocracy as a value discriminate against non-cis non-white people.

This effort is a power-grab by a small group of people based on their radical political views, couched in feel-good words like inclusion.

They seek to have their political views reflected in language choice, to advance their specific political agenda over the project.

It has nothing to do with race, gender, or skin color, nor does it have anything to do with diversity.

They rely on the cooperation who want to 'do something' but it is about control.

> Instead of abandoning a meritocracy because it has implementation issues, why don’t they just fix the problems?

Because the small group of people pushing these changes don't want meritocracy, they want power and influence merely for having the correct political opinions.

They rely on the cooperation of well-meaning people who support diversity but don't see it's ploy for control and power.

This is about changing the very nature of how open source projects work for people with radical political views to 'feel included', specifically to have their political views validated.

It is not about improving actual diversity, Mozilla already has those efforts. Mozilla should welcome and support contributions by everyone, I even recognize the systematic barriers that some people face, but I don't think we should be altering how key open source software projects function to affirm the believes of a small but loud group of radicals, particularly when their solutions for diversity don't actually increase diversity, they just increase the power of that loud group.

It's strange this has so many points and comments but almost instantly disappeared from the front page of HN.

The people pushing this radical view on diversity and equality tend to paint all people they see as marginalized as unable to compete on a level playing field.

> an acknowledgement that “this person is valuable insofar as they are like me.”

Yeah, when evaluating PRs I rarely even look at the person making the contribution, I look at the code.

> The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority

Because this is not about the governance documents of an open source software project, it is about affirming the radical worldview of a small but loud fringe group in the name of diversity.

Except the only diversity is creates is diversity for people with the correct political opinions. It has nothing to do with the actual diversity that benefits an open source project.

It is time we stop listening to this fringe group about how to achieve diversity, they clearly only want power and control for themselves.

We should not let them bully pragmatic moderates who generally support diversity and inclusion into ceding them more authority and dictatorial control.

The radical group pushing these language changes are explicitly opposed to meritocracy.

They don't think they should have to justify their positions or their influence, they get it by having the 'right' politics.

They are committed to advancing their own personal and political power and influence by language enforcement, then use of secret code of conduct proceedings, all of which are subject to abuse.

Even where open source has failed to be inclusive and diverse empowering a fringe minority and instituting authoritarian language policing and secret proceedings will not advance inclusion or diversity.

They make no substantive contribution to diversity or the project.

> At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome.

The proposal is not to make Mozilla more diverse, nor would it accomplish that.

The proposal is to change the language to make Mozilla seem more diverse to people with very explicit radical views on diversity.

This will actually have the opposite effect of reducing diversity and only serves to empower the people with the correct views.

These people thing changing the code of our institutions works, specifically by giving them more power, that we can rid our institutions of the worst aspects of human nature: racism, sexism, xenophobia.

We can and should combat those aspects for sure, but we are also giving into another aspect of human nature: unchecked power and control, which will almost certainly lead to abuse. There is also no evidence that this will improve diversity.

It's just to make people feel good and put a few radicals in charge who want to dictate everything.

The problems in FreeBSD CoC were widely discussed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16406946

When people approached some of the FreeBSD Core Team with their concerns about vague language that could be subject to abuse, they were basically told they were all racist transphobes who weren't welcome to contribute to FreeBSD anyways.

So it was a pretty obvious politically-motivated power-grab.

They are already attempting to control use of language and the foundational view of how open source works, based on their world view that equality is an illusion and only through use of selective discrimination against unpopular groups, as dictated by them, can equality be achieved.

The governance documents of a open source software project are not being used to shut down debates about sexism and racism.

The Mozilla and Rust communities are by far the most inclusive communities on the web and more inclusive all the time.

What about it is fake? A senior-level employee and strategist for Mozilla made this proposal to the governance listserv. It's up for serious discussion.

Patrick Finch is a high-level strategist for Mozilla, has been there 8 years.

Words are important. Diversity is important. Changing words like "meritocracy" does not improve diversity. It is the illusion of diversity, a feel-good opportunity for well-intentioned bystanders. The true intent is for a small group of highly politically motivated people to gain more control. The governance documents are about control and changing those documents means a shift in control. The movement we are seeing here opposes meritocracy on political principle, as part of their worldview. It does not stop there though. They believe the only answer for "diversity" to put them in charge, beginning with government documents that reflect their radical worldview, see FreeBSD Code of Conduct. Even if you support diversity, you have to realize these people do not care about diversity or inclusion, they are little authoritarians who want more power to dictate what people say and whose opinion matters more/less based on immutable characteristics. We cannot allow authoritarians with such warped views of the world to seize control of key open source projects.