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Comment by logandavis | Hacker News Reader

1) Don't you believe that equality of opportunity would lead to equality of outcome (plus or minus random variation)? If not, what alternative result would you predict would arise from equality of opportunity, and why?

2) Don't you see how taking steps to correct towards equality of outcome leads towards equality of opportunity (by increasing the networking / financial / inspiration opportunities for disadvantaged groups)? If you think that such correction has social disadvantages, why do they outweigh that social benefit?

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1) Equality of opportunity will never lead to equality of outcome. Our current politics around equality are fraudulent. Different people have different attributes. It doesn't mean one group is better. It just means people are different. For example, the NBA will never be dominated by players of Asian descent. Another: you will never see women asking for equal opportunity for jobs like working in the north sea on offshore oil rigs.

2) We can use words until the end of time to weigh the merits of state-forced equality. Same could be said about anything else that is non-scientific in nature: i.e. we could also argue about the relative merits of state-forced equality in communism vs capitalism in the same way. You can never prove anything this way in non-scientific fields, and at best all that can be done is hope to convince the other person that your reasoning is superior. However, before we got to that point, I'd even reject it on moral principle: it is immoral for government to enforce racist or sexist policies that discriminate against certain groups of people. Yes, it's in the name of moral outrage (equality), but note government-sanctioned use of force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if it is almost undeniably immoral, i.e: (America funding Jihadists in the Syrian War, Vietnam, Nazi Germany, the Opening of Japan, the Inquisition, etc., etc.).

Further on #2, one of the insights of modern economic theory has been that it can many times be actually better to make adjustments to free market outcomes ex post rather than use heavy handed regulation to force an arbitrary result ex ante. If I were king, I'd much rather see everyone with free access to healthcare, housing, transportation, and education than focus on how many women are working in male-dominated roles like offshore oil drilling in the north sea (or coding, whatever arbitrary field it happens to be).

1) You've carefully chosen two examples of jobs that depend highly on physical attributes with well-understood genetic causes (height, muscular development), and you've extrapolated this out to technical employees at Oracle, whose skills are hardly defined by such well-understood genetic markers. This is faulty logic.

2) Just so we're clear, you literally just compared affirmative action to Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition. I would call this "false equivalence", but I suppose it's useless to try to "use words until the end of time" (unless, apparently, those words are "moral principle").

>you literally just compared affirmative action to Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition.

No, I didn't. That's your misunderstanding. Go back and read what I wrote. No one is saying they're equivalent. What I did say is that government sanctioned force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if what they are doing is undeniably immoral.

I should expect more of these straw man, incorrect, borderline-troll-bait attacks. It's easy to just agree with what's politically correct. It's hard to fight for what's right and this is what you run into when you do.

Ah. My apologies for misreading. I went back and re-read what you wrote. Please correct me if the following interpretation is wrong:

First, you said that moral outrage is the motivation for "racist" policies such as Affirmative Action. Next, you said that moral outrage also motivates state-sponsored violence. (I suppose this does not constitute a comparison per se.)

I'm sorry, but I really don't see the point of bringing up the Nazis, if not to tar "state-forced equality" programs with the same brush of "moral outrage leading to moral impropriety". Can you help clear up my misunderstanding?

That's also not my intended meaning. I don't know how else to say it and feel that I'm being baited. I guess I'll quote myself:

>I'd even reject it on moral principle: it is immoral for government to enforce racist or sexist policies that discriminate against certain groups of people. Yes, it's in the name of moral outrage (equality), but note government-sanctioned use of force always comes with an argument of moral outrage, even if it is almost undeniably immoral, i.e: (America funding Jihadists in the Syrian War, Vietnam, Nazi Germany, the Opening of Japan, the Inquisition, etc., etc.).

This is not about doing what's right. This is about lawyers and political correctness. There are plenty of opportunities to make the world a better place and I don't see that many Glenn Greenwalds, Laura Poitras's, or Snowdens. In fact, the government has worked to undermine at least 2/3 of those people. We can't even provide everyone with healthcare or clean drinking water. We're funding jihadists in Syria. We have cities with murder rates higher than any country in Africa. The CIA has been caught distributing crack cocaine and the reporter who revealed it "died of suicide by 2 gunshot wounds to the head." The political correctness around equality all sounds and feels great, but the reality is that it's textbook Harrison Bergeron stuff leading us closer to that kind of dystopian future. It's hard to see that, harder yet to have the guts to say it, and much easier to just be politically correct and ignore reality.

I like how you are so sure that not even a single woman could possibly ever want to work on an oil rig that you bring it up in two comments without first attempting to Google it. Hint, they do want to work on oil rigs, they do work on oil rigs, and they have used legal action against those who wouldn't let them work on oil rigs because of their gender.

That made up example is especially bizarre because I can't think of a reason why women, as a group, wouldn't want to work on an oil rig, other than concern about possible sexual harassment.

Women want, and have fought (and won) to have equal opportunity in even combat positions.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/24/do-military-women-want-...

Your worldview does not match the facts.

You are insane to believe just as many women as men would want to work on oil rigs. There are many other examples: auto mechanics, miners, movers, truckers, construction workers, jobs on fishing vessels. I didn't "cherry pick" one example. Any gritty, dangerous, physically demanding job that assaults your senses is going to attract more men than women.

Just citing a single lawsuit as your evidence that the opposite is true, and extrapolating that to say "the facts don't match your worldview" is an assault on logic and reason.

> You are insane

Let's not do this here, please. Also, you're discrediting yourself and your arguments before I even get to the substance of your comment.

It was not intended as an ad hominen. It's intended to be reflective of the facts available in the world.

As mentioned earlier, women do in fact protest against discrimination in the oil rig industry[1].

1.http://www.warrensiurek.com/blog/2015/04/5-women-claim-gende...

Another example http://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/07/12/A-Labrador-woman-has-...

Do you both really believe as many women as men want to work in the oil rig industry, or that it is even close? There will always be exceptions, especially when huge sums of money motivate the exceptions.

What about as auto mechanics, or plumbers? Those businesses can be very entrepreneurial, requiring no hiring decision, yet women are still underrepresented. Would you still say there are not more men than women prefer those jobs?

>Don't you believe that equality of opportunity would lead to equality of outcome (plus or minus random variation)?

Why should it? This reflects a very strong a priori position that people are exactly the same and don't systematically vary in their interests, cultural values, etc.

Where's the positive evidence for this (latent, implicit) positive claim?

I suppose I simply hold some truths to be self-evident.

Sorry, sorry, too easy :P . To more seriously and substantively address your point, variance in cultural values in part constitutes inequality of opportunity, no? A culture that values such-and-such Silicon Valley principle less offers less opportunity for development of Silicon-Valley-hirable skills. And variance in interests is caused in part by inequality of opportunity, no? I might not have been interested in computer science if my scientist parents had not encouraged me at a young age.

So in response to my asking "wouldn't equality of opportunity lead to equality of outcome?", you have challenged me to defend the assertion that equality of opportunity exists. Which is not my assertion.

I will also note that it's very easy to call someone else's claim positive and Russell's Teapot them to death. The assertion that variation in the skills that make a good Oracle employee correlates with heritage could also be called a strong positive claim. (In fact, I see that poster sidlls has done just this, about twenty posts further down.)

>you have challenged me to defend the assertion that equality of opportunity exists

No, I most definitely have not.

I challenge you to demonstrate that interests, cultural values, and other factors that influence professional qualification to be evenly distributed.

This is a sine qua non condition for the claim that "equal opportunity begets equal success" to be true.

If you want to define "equality of opportunity" as all groups being identical in:

- their culture

- their values

- their intellectual interests

- their views on education

...then I ask you: is this really what you want to argue?

Do you really want to deny the existence and legitimacy of these idiosyncrasies that minorities quite vocally cherish? If I were mean-spirited, I might even ask you why you 'hate diversity', but I won't stoop to your level.

If you're instead arguing that the hiring process should be less concerned with competence, and more concerned other things (like skin color, gender and national origin), expect people to disagree with you.

---

Edit: some empirical evidence for you to chew on [0]. It points to systematic differences in the professional interests of men and women. I suggest you dismount from your high horse and start looking at cultural differences in professional orientation, as well. Literature abounds.

[0] http://psycnet.apa.org.sci-hub.ac/journals/bul/135/6/859/

Good point, but please keep the conversation polite. It's one of HN's best qualities.

I don't think I'm being impolite.

Edit: perhaps you caught one of my earlier versions. I did indeed edit for tone. I'm quite happy with it now.

I do want to define equality of opportunity that way. As you originally asked me to consider (before editing your post), the consequence that I believe would follow would be equality of outcome, give or take random sampling variation.

To respond to your newly edited (four times! ack! I am scrambling to keep up) comment: I do not want to argue that all groups of people are the same. You have already challenged me to prove the nonexistence of such difference. I have already refused. Your new phrasing has not made your challenge any more reasonable or relevant to my original post.

I'm honestly not even sure what you want me to say here...? "Yes, there are differences between ethnic/religious/cultural/racial groups. These differences contribute to inequality of opportunity, which... exists." Does that somehow nullify the question that I asked wallace_f?

EDIT: On something like your third or fourth edit, you took out the ad hominem attack at the end of your post. I will leave my response in brackets after this note, if only so that comment-readers don't feel like they are losing their minds. [You seem very touchy about this topic. Why do you feel compelled to say such mean things about my posts? What part of them made you feel accused of being a bigot? I don't understand, but I would like to.]

>I do want to define equality of opportunity that way.

You can't have it both ways.

Either all groups are (statistically) the same in their values, preferences, etc, or the claim "equal opportunity => equal representation" does not hold.

Again, this latent assumption in your reasoning is the object of my criticism.

>You seem very touchy about this topic. Why do you feel compelled to say such mean things about my posts?

I apologize if I came off as mean. I did indeed edit my text to remain as civil as possible. The informational content has not changed significantly (it's mostly formatting and tone).

I am, indeed, touchy because it's all too easy you to insinuate bigotry where there is none. It's perfectly normal to be upset when baseless, unfair and dishonest insinuations are used to attack one's character.

But let's be honest: you know this. Frankly I find it disingenuous to act surprised at such a reaction.

With that, let's return to the matter at hand: can you demonstrate that the aforementioned factors are homogeneously distributed between, say, ethnic groups?

Again: I cannot demonstrate that "aforementioned factors" like "values" are homogeneously distributed between ethnic groups, because it is not true. I don't understand why you keep asking me to try. You have repeatedly said that this somehow disproves the assertion "equal opportunity -> equal outcomes". I do not agree.

Here is where I think we differ: we are using "opportunity" to mean two different things. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that when I'm saying "equal opportunity", you're hearing "at the point of hiring, equally qualified candidates are equally likely to be hired". I am taking a much longer view of "opportunity" - one that considers cultural context, childhood exposure, and socialized gender differences like the ones represented in the paper you linked. To me, if one candidate went to engineering camps growing up, and another did not, they did not have "equal opportunities" to develop into equally strong engineering candidates, who would eventually reach the point of hiring. The "aforementioned factors" you're talking about (e.g. cultural values, income inequality across ethnicities) are baked into my understanding of "opportunity".

This is why I haven't believed you when you've told me that the existence of cultural difference proves me wrong. To express my position in propositional logic terms, I'm saying that I believe A ("equal opportunity") implies B ("equal outcomes"). From my point of view, with how I'm meaning "opportunity" - which I don't think is how you're understanding it - you're trying to get me to admit that in the real world, "equal opportunity" is False. I have admitted that repeatedly. A is False. This does not contradict A -> B. [edited to hopefully clear up this confusing analogy]

You've told me I'm "playing with words to insinuate bigotry", but this is what I've meant by "unequal opportunity" the entire time. Because this is what I think "opportunity" means, in terms of becoming an employed engineer. I tried to explain that in my very first reply to you. I'm sorry if I didn't explain it clearly.

I can't control what you feel is disingenuous, so I won't try, but I really think our disagreement here is just a matter of verbiage.

Historically, that's not how it's happened when artificial barriers have been removed. The Jewish population in top universities in the US, for example, rose to extreme levels of over-representation within a single generation of the removal "Jewish-quota" policies. Nearly the same thing happened again with Asian populations a few decades later.

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