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:
Today we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale. We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.
This is the email I’ve shared with our @scale_AI team.
———————————————————
MERITOCRACY AT SCALE
In the wake of our fundraise, I’ve been getting a lot of questions…
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) June 13, 2024
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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.
Wang calls his company a “meritocracy,” and vows it will always stay that way. It’s silly to think that over 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement, we are having to combat an inverted, whitewashed, new type of racism and discrimination branded as “equality.” Wang puts the woke in their place and explains it in simple words that they should be able to understand.
“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.”
His announcement got the attention and praise of tech guru, Elon Musk.
Thank you Elon! This means a lot as a founder to get your support.
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) June 13, 2024
The nation is starting to wake up to the foolishness of DEI. Job listings for the positions are down 44 percent. Many places are laying off their DEI departments. What started as a response to the mobs after George Floyd’s death has now been able to slip quietly into the back. Anyone who has ever run a successful company or organization knows that the program was doomed to fail from the beginning. The problem is that we should be smart enough not to let the left “experiment” on our society with their outlandish ideas to begin with. And we shouldn’t be bullied into programs by mobs.
ScaleAI raised $1 billion in funding in May, making Wang, 27, the youngest self-made billionaire. We should listen to those like him at the top: Merit, talent, intelligence, and quality count.
We cannot be competitive in any industry when we are eliminating talented people from employment pools simply due to the color of their skin or gender. This affects us not only at home, but it affects our international standing as well. The fact that the left has fought for this program proves what Republicans have said all along: it’s not about quality for them — it’s about dominance. They don’t care about real progress for the country, they only care about getting their way.
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