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Comment by Kristine1975 | Hacker News Reader

Kristine1975

>Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws.

I don't think that actually follows:

1. People are perfectly capable of caring for injustices they don't experience personally. E.g. men being interested in pay-equity laws not because it would benefit them, but because of a belief that they are necessary for a just society.

2. People are also perfectly capable of acting against their best interests. E.g. women being against pay-equity laws because <insert reason why women "deserve" to be paid less>.

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> I don't think that actually follows

Which is why I said statistically and empirically. As to men caring about this too, this is obviously possible, but even if they care, they are less affected, so they may prioritize it less. Like the joke about the chicken and the pig vis-a-vis breakfast: The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed!

I am quite affected by pay equality. The presence of it with my current employers means that we have much better demographic representation here. We're able to retain a lot of good engineers/scientists that happen to be women or minorities, that at a previous employer would have left due to the pay disparity (or silently or loudly suffered, affecting work performance and morale).

What does "statistically and empirically" mean to you, because it seems a lot like you are using it to mean logic is optional.

I simply mean that some time between 300 BC and 2016 AD somebody figured out that the human mind is great at explaining pretty much anything, so between bouts of solemn cogitation we might want to check out what's really going on in the real world just to make sure that we're on the right track.

Logic is obviously necessary, but as today we know that our universe is not a logical tautology, just one of many possible-Kripke-worlds, different models for the logic can lead to different results, so opening the window from time to time to see which of the possible worlds we actually live in is a good idea.

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