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Comment by wonnage | Hacker News Reader

1. This is kind of a founding principle of the country, so...

2. This follows from #1, if we rule out nature then it must be nurture. Also, you must not be a parent if you'll accept "some kids are just dumb" as an excuse

3,4. Replace "oppression" with "competition". I think it might sound better to you. But the conclusion is the same.

You want to prevent winners from accumulating an advantage, eliminating all others (which sounds vaguely genocidal in this context), then you have to handicap winners and support the others. And the fact that the wealth distribution in America is so uneven certainly suggests that the initial premise is true (i.e, winning allows you to accumulate and compound advantages with repeated victories).

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1. This is kind of a founding principle of the country, so...

Is it? Saying "all mean are created equal" has a lot of interpretations, of which many valid ones do not include "all men are born of equal ability in every regard." Given that some people are born to grow up to be 5'4 and weigh 100lbs and others are born to grow up to 6'7 and 320lbs, it should be clear that not everyone is "equal" at least in terms of their physical abilities. I'm pretty sure the Founders were aware of this, making it highly unlikely that their version of "created equal" meant "exactly equal in all terms of ability."

a founding principle is not everyone is of equal ability. The founding principle equality of opportunity. The government won't hold you back because you are a (peasant|lower caste|other arbitrary decision). i.e. Everyone gets to go to school, but not everyone learns the same (qualitatively or quantitatively).

Don't you think the government deciding you're not fit for going to college would fall into this problem?

The government wouldn’t prevent you from going to college, it just wouldn’t voluntarily pay for you to go if you didn’t test well. You could pay your own way, seek external scholarships, etc.

As of now we effectively underwrite anyone who wants to go, often at the expense of the student racking up debt for a useless degree and later the taxpayer who will inevitably have to subsidize them.

When I went to public school in a privileged neighborhood, the "honors" track was opt-in for the parents and students. I don't think you have to go straight from "the government shouldn't decide whether you are fit for college" (which I agree with) to "there should only be one curriculum for everyone."

'Equal opportunity' is not a 'founding principle'.

Just that they are 'equal' i.e. before God, or before the Law.

That one man is not from some superior lineage, that makes him a superior being.

I would be the founding fathers would have no problem if one man decided to 'discriminate' among others for some arbitrary reason - even if they were landholding men of high status etc..

> 1. [All humans are of equal ability] is a founding principle of the country, so...

curious to learn how you arrived at this conclusion?

1. So the country is founded on a lie or you misread that founding principle.

Those compound advantages you're talking about are good things that we want people to have because they help them do more good for society. You seem to want to handicap them in the name of fairness. Where does that thinking end when you realize that the founding assumption (1. above) is false? Disfiguring beautiful people to prevent them accumulating the compounding advantages that come with beauty? Brain damaging intelligent people?

I thought the OP was being sarcastic.

“ 1. Blank slate - All humans are of equal ability”

“ 1. This is kind of a founding principle of the country, so...”

yes those slave owning people really thought their slaves were the same as them, totally dude

Yeah I heard we tried to end the slavery part somewhere along the way and have been somewhat successful, but we definitely kept the first one.

The founding fathers almost all believed slavery was wrong but they were born into a society where it was a core institution and it wasn't obvious how exactly to reform it.

Entitlement principles are why the West was the 1st place in the world to abolish slavery and then went about and abolished it throughout the world.

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