Tech's Return to Meritocracy

And some brief updates from me...

Housekeeping first:

• We’re hosting two group chats with tech libertarians and tech liberals over the next couple days. The tech libertarian chat includes Balaji Srinivasan, Eoghan McCabe, and other great people. And the tech liberal chat has Noah Smith and other worthies. Join us! And feel free to join both chats. We’re experimenting with public group chats—think Clubhouse but for group chats, with a stage and an audience. Group chats have the enormous advantage of being asynchronous. Our initial experiment worked—and now we’re opening it up to a broader group to see if it’s worth building a product around the behavior .

• The Turpentine Network is going well. We have 350 founders across 90 unicorn companies, and our exec group chats are growing as well. We have events tonight in SF for our different founder groups. If of interest in applying to the group chats for founders or execs, submit here. And stay tuned for a product launch soon.

  

• We promoted my last chief of staff so I am hiring a new one to work with me across Turpentine media, Turpentine network, and investing. DM or email me at erik@turpentine.co with why you'd be a great fit for more info. Here are great testimonials from former ones that are too flattering to copy and paste.

Ok, onto the post. I wrote this in response to Alexandr Wang’s post about meritocracy-based hiring, where he says he will no longer using race or gender as a factor in determining hiring admissions. Merit is itself a confusing term, but you can take the main idea to be companies hiring whoever they want and facing the economic consequences of their hiring decisions. Let the market decide.

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Hopefully merit-based hiring serves as a feasible alternative to DEI, and we let the market sort out which method should prosper.

Here’s the argument for why DEI, despite its intentions, can hurt the very people it purports to help:

When I first came across Diversity—I thought, oh, great! This has always been an industry built by iconoclasts and outsiders, if more women, black people, Hispanic people, gay people, etc. want to be part of it, great!

Let's create the most welcoming environments we can so everyone can be included!

Then I kept observing the funniest thing. Which is that whatever anyone did to try to do this just caused them to get attacked harder. And that happened over and over again. And I was like, wait, why is this getting worse and worse instead of better and better?

And then, among many other things, they backdoored the word Equity in. And all of a sudden D&I went to DE&I. With zero discussion whatsoever about what Equity is, and whether it's a good idea.

And I was like, well, wait, do they mean "equity" like *we* mean "equity", aka shared upside, or...

And then I was like, oh, communism, but on the level of groups (quotas), not individuals.

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We can see the problems of DEI viewed through what's happened with affirmative action, which is a more explicit version of DEI on the college level. When you have different standards to bring in more of X, the argument goes, you end up with X being the low performers in the group. Thomas Sowell points out that Harvard implementing affirmative action actually destroys the prospects of college students at all qualification levels. Harvard gets the X that would have gone to Brown. Brown gets the X that would have gone to Berkeley. Berkeley gets the X that would have gone to UC Davis. UC Davis gets the X that would have gone to Foothill, etc. So you create mismatch throughout the stack. At each level, X is then routinely in the bottom quartile of performers, more likely to get demoralized, more likely to drop out, etc.

This is why X aren’t graduating at the same rates or with the same results post-college. Well, to the extent they were artificially elevated, of course they're not performing at the same level as people who were better students than they were. But now what? The affirmative action beneficiaries feel screwed, they're not succeeding at the same rates. The other students see what's happening and get cynical. Making things worse, the other students then start to assume that all members of group X who got in are less capable. Arguably the biggest victims of all are the fully qualified members of group X who never needed the "help" and who now have the stigma when they shouldn’t. This dynamic is why tempers are so hot on college campuses, I think. You can apply this same logic to what's happened in the workplace.

Removing implicit bias is good in order to get the best people, but not when it is conflated with a goal to reduce group disparities. Even when you remove all discrimination, gaps will always exist and that's OK. Indeed, that’s what happened in classical music when they went to blind auditions, which they then stopped doing because they didn’t like the outcomes. No two groups have the same exact achievement levels. If any groups are overachieving (e.g. Asians and Indians), by definition other groups are underachieving.

We need to push back against the thinking that the reason we have inequality is because of discriminations and we need to spend trillions of dollars to equalize outcomes or reduce gaps. We tried that. It didn’t work. We've spent 50 years implementing measures intended to equalize group outcomes, and they haven't equalized. Which, to the activist mindset, is enormously enraging since the obvious explanation is much more pernicious ongoing discrimination than they even imagined. And yet, that’s the exact wrong conclusion to have.

We should try to raise the floor instead of focusing on relative percentages (like France, we shouldn’t even be tracking), and we should take a holistic way of doing that, including encouraging everyone to study the habits that flourishing communities have adopted (e.g. Asians and test-taking) instead of just blaming disparities on discrimination. We should also accept that inequality is the natural state of the world, and any program meant to equalize outcomes is dead on arrival.

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Why didn’t DEI or AA work? Some people say it’s because we’re not doing enough of it. But as Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And it’s not just that it’s not working, it seems to be getting worse. There is data suggesting implicit bias tests make people more racist.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that a philosophy rooted on division is going to breed more division. The presence of racial quotas effectively implies that URM are not enough on their own, that they can’t achieve something unless white people let them do it—It reinforces the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Think about groups of people you have high expectations for — the marines for example. You tell them to adapt and overcome. You don’t tell them no one expects them to succeed and it’s society’s fault, and that their true role models should be criminals or victims. You are not helping someone whom you shield from obstacles or responsibility.

The other justification for diversity — that it’s better for everyone else on the team — is insulting too. You basically say that it's edifying for white people to have URM around and that’s why they’re there.

The goal should not be to look for racism everywhere and then create a multi-billion dollar industry that depends on it being there. The only way we can be less racist is to focus less on race. And yet we keep doing the opposite, or keep implying that we can only do that once we achieve equality across all groups — “close the gap” — which will never happen.

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How did we get here? There was a moment in the 60s in this country where we were wrestling between the colorblind vision and the color conscious vision. And colorblindness was written right into the laws. The way JFK and Lyndon Johnson talked about affirmative action was explicitly colorblind. The way Martin Luther King & Bayard Rustin (even Frederick Douglas) talked about race—they had a big picture humanist vision of the world, a single human race. They would have been shocked at today's identity politics, shocked to see colorblindness abandoned at the height of its success.

Some people say that the colorblind vision, the content of their character, isn’t strong enough to dismantle racism. Colorblindness is a noble dream, the logic goes, but we need the “race conscious” vision until we can get there. But history doesn’t bear that out. It’s the colorblind principle after all that was the one that activists and writers used to defeat slavery, and lynching and Jim Crow—so how could it be insufficiently powerful to deal with the less drastic examples of racism that we have today?

In this view, King’s dream of a colorblind America—where the content of our character matters more than the color of our skin—is hampered by the focus on checking privilege and stoking grievance.

King was apparently sympathetic to some socialist ideas including affirmative action, so I don’t want to make too much of King here.

But with regard to the role that racial identity should play in politics, King was unequivocal: First and foremost we are human beings, not members of races. The verbal tic of modern racial-justice activists—“As a black man . . .”—would sound foreign on his lips. Even when fighting explicitly racist policies, he deployed universal principles rather than a tribal grievance narrative.

Colorblind to be clear doesn’t mean blindness to racism. You can still see and address racism on an individual and institutional level. But it means striving to see beyond race, for race to be as insignificant as someone’s hair color.  It means solving black poverty at the level of poverty, not just black poverty. If you do solve poverty, you’ll end up solving black poverty in the process, and you won’t alienate people while you do it. If affirmative action was income-based, it would be much more palatable.

Other people say that people use colorblindness as an excuse to be racist. Some people do that, sure. However, the fact that there are some cynical people that use an ideal doesn't undermine the ideal itself. I'm not sure you can find any principle that hasn't been used cynically by someone somewhere. If that were a valid objection to the principle, then all principles would be wrong.

If MLK were alive today, he might be called all kinds of bad names by activists (let alone racists). Race consciousness has won out decisively, and colorblindness is seen as a symbol for being an Uncle Tom. But who do white rich people support? Race consciousness, largely. How many CEOs in America are willing to publicly criticize race consciousness? Until this past year, barely any.

Oh, and this shouldn’t matter (and they may loathe the implication of even mentioning it), but I picked up these ideas from black intellectuals—John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, among others. I mention these names not a disclaimer but as a recommendation to check out their work, since they've helped pave the way for something like merit-based colorblind hiring to emerge and race-conscious hiring to be challenged. Finally.