It’s 2024 and that means smart people are circling back to age-old common sense ideas, and it’s becoming “new.”
Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI in 2016, is making new friends and gaining praise for his tech company’s vision statement where he coined a new term to combat DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Wang’s phrase is DEI’s new nemesis: MEI, for Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence:
Alexandr Wang’s company has come far in its six years. It’s worth $14 billion, has won government contracts with the Department of Defense, and has partnered with OpenAI. This is something he attributes to having a quality team not based on color, gender, or any other stereotype.
“There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree,” Wang wrote. “No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.”
R&I ~ MJM
Thurston Howell III