Mitch Kapor’s Posterous:

Being meritocratic is a really worthy aspiration, but will require active mitigation of individual and organizational bias. The operation of hidden bias in our cognitive apparatus is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience. We may think we are acting rationally and objectively, but our brains deceive us.

Lotus Development Corp. and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder Mitch Kapor is responding to a new installment of “Black in America” airing on CNN in which TechCrunch founder and high tech investor Michael Arrington is quoted as saying that he didn’t know any black entrepreneurs. Kapor posits that while overt 1950’s-era racism against blacks isn’t apparent in Silicon Valley, there does appear to be a bias in investors that makes them favor people like themselves:

If “young, white, geeky, and Stanford/Harvard/MIT dropout”, then “invest”, is a kind of mental shortcut that is anything but objective. This is mirror-tocracy not meritocracy.