Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

> they feel people there are resistant to different social values and political ideologies

This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies (not to mention backgrounds and interests) here than pretty much any place I've lived. The main hostility I see is to intolerance, but that's hardly surprising given SF's long, welcoming history and the paradox of tolerance. [1]

If I were to worry about any sort of uniformity, it wouldn't be political, but in startup culture. 20 years of success has created some very well-greased rails into which most innovation has to fit: bright young founders, seed round followed quickly by A and B rounds. That can be fine as far as it goes, but it has become so orthodox that I think we're not a great place for doing anything other than a plausible Next Big Thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

The argument here is that people like you label anything you don't agree with as "intolerant" and justify social lynching of the ideas based on your likely angry or frustrated emotional assessment. This didn't start with James, although that's one of the more popular incidents. Disagreeing with operational policies that are based on politically charged ideas that we need to correct for the inequalities in outcomes rather than provide an unbiased and meritocratic foundation of opportunity is not intolerance. It's politics.

Meritocracy is incompetent. It is trust destroying because it's inherently corrupt. The privileged, the elite, control the metric by which merit is defined and judged. They create a system of self-preservation that excludes others who would dilute their control. There is no such thing as privilege, elitism, without exclusion and inferiority. Meritocracy always leads to the very thing it purports to try and avoid: incompetency. And that is why it is incompetent.