Meritocracy != Quotas

Eric Ries has written a piece about the recent brouhaha over the question of whether there is enough "racial diversity" in Silicon Valley. As I read Ries' piece, the phrases that kept coming to mind were "mealy-mouthed" and "fence sitting." Here is someone who obviously has been thoroughly cowed by the diversity police and shakedown artists.

Ries attempts to dress up his argument in scientific clothing. He writes:

"We should use science, whenever possible, rather than anecdotal evidence. ... Picture those two bell curves. ... There is some research on the differences between men and women, ... If you’d like to examine the math involved, check out this excellent slide deck courtesy of Terri Oda. ... There’s plenty of good research on the subject of team performance that shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many different kinds of tasks. ... The whole premise of Moneyball was the triumph of science, data, and reason over the gut feelings and beauty contests of baseball scouts."

And yet, after spouting all this scientistic nonsense, Ries falls back on the favorite tool of the diversity police, the quota:

"For example, I have been a mentor for several years in the Founder Labs program, which was originally created by Women 2.0. It’s a pre-incubator program, that helps potential founders figure out if they should become entrepreneurs. They created it as a way of encouraging women to apply to startup schools and create companies. But they took a novel approach to this problem. They did not advertise the program as being about diversity. Instead, they adopted a minimal rule: each founding team had to have at least one woman. ... I believe this is why certain programs, like Founder Labs and 500 Startups, that boast of their meritocratic “moneyball” approach to admissions have more diverse applicants – and participants. [emphasis added]

How it is possible to be meritocratic at the same time you adopt a quota requiring that at least one person on each founding team be a woman is a non sequitur that Ries, despite all his protestations about being guided by reason, does not feel needs to be explained. Ries praises the protagonists of Michael Lewis' book Moneyball for using science, data, and reason instead of depending on gut feelings. He mocks the baseball scouts who were looking for the "right look" in players. And yet, if Ries is intent on using quotas, he has missed the point of Moneyball entirely.

The reason why Billy Beane uses spreadsheets and other analytical tools to measure baseball performance is to eliminate inessential characteristics, such as "the right look" (or "race," "gender," and "sexual orientation") from consideration in the selection of talent. Ries, on the other hand, apparently believes that the correct approach is to do precisely the opposite; namely, to reintroduce consideration of inessential characteristics back into the evaluation process through a quota requiring that there be at least one woman on each team. This is just mealy-mouthed nonsense.

A meritocracy is a meritocracy. You cannot have a meritocracy and quotas at the same time. Silicon Valley has thrived for decades because it is a meritocratic environment. If we ever lose that robust spirit, entrepreneurs won't kowtow to the diversity police or care if they offend equivocaters like Eric Ries, they will simply up and silently leave.