On egalitarianism
"Alex: i think the problem is not egalitarianism but just that it's really fucking difficult to tell whether people are skilled/competent/able to get anything done or not."
Of course it's difficult if most of the relevant information is censored, most of the relevant techniques are banned, and the whole business is regarded as disreputable! It's also difficult to get high-quality cocaine, but it's obvious that this is not inherent to cocaine and indeed was not the case a hundred years ago.
"and widespread use of easy but (at best) very weak correlates like gender and race makes this worse if anything."
The trouble isn't, of course, not discriminating in hiring on sex/race (which seems probably good on balance), but laws which prohibit using IQ tests or any other test which the politically-favored-group-of-the-week does worse than average on.
"also it seems weird that you give an example from startup culture which surely is not egalitarian in the way you mean (inasmuch as it believes in ninja wizards, racism/sexism aside)"
Of course - the point is that it's a ridiculous hack which is needed to get around egalitarian laws and social norms.