Editor’s note: Guest contributor Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup.  Follow him @ericries.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every discussion of diversity and meritocracy in this town, it turned ugly fast. One side says: “All I see is white men. Therefore, people like Michael Arrington must be racist.” The other responds, “Silicon Valley is a colorblind meritocracy. If there were qualified women or minority candidates, we’d welcome them.”

I’d like to say a few words about this, but I want to do so under special ground rules.

I want to make an argument, step by step, that I hope will convince you to care about this issue, but that doesn’t presuppose that you already agree that diversity is important. And it will explain how it is possible for both sides to be mostly correct – and that we still have a problem.

So the rules are:

1. No political correctness. Let’s speak the truth no matter where it leads.
2. You don’t have to believe that diversity is an end in itself. In fact, I will argue that is important as a means to an end.
3. Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
4. We should use science, whenever possible, rather than anecdotal evidence.
5. No hand-wringing. There’s no point discussing this problem if we can’t do anything about it.

So – no hippies, no whiners, no name-calling, and no BS. If you want to make Silicon Valley – and startup hubs like it – as awesome as possible, pay attention.

What accounts for the decidedly non-diverse results in places like Silicon Valley? We have two competing theories. One is that deliberate racisms keeps people out. Another is that white men are simply the ones that show