I would like to live in a world where every child has an equal opportunity to make their own way in life.
It doesn’t seem likely that this will (or can) happen without diversity increasing - in geographic as well as socioeconomic terms.
That sounds like a complete non sequitur to me. Can you explain how Triangles will become richer by living near Squares? Or, to turn it around, how Squares will become poorer by living among Triangles?
More importantly, how does this claim relate to the example I gave? There are societies that are much more diverse than others (urban vs. rural). If diversity itself is a positive, cities should be, in some obvious sense, better societies than villages. Are they?
(Seriously though, was it implied that there was any material difference between the shapes? I thought they just looked different.)
If we go by your assumption that the squares are richer or happier, it seems obvious to me that if they are biased to only want shapes like them to live near them it’s likely they also don’t want them to associate with them at work. Associating together is surely necessary if the triangles are to better their lot in life?
I suppose you might argue that if squares and triangles are equal in talents, they could eventually form separate but equal societies, even if they did not want to associate. If they’re starting off from different baselines that seems unlikely to me though.
It also seems to me to carry an assumption that not wanting to associate is at best a morally neutral position, which I don’t believe - but I think you may?
To your more specific example: there are so many differences between urban and rural societies that I don’t believe that looking as diversity as the attribute that explains their current states is particularly illuminating, especially if you’re trying to decide which one is ‘better’.
I do believe, though, that historical bias has a hand in explaining why even diverse societies like cities are still so stratified on racial lines (so, _not_ diverse).
That sounds like you agree that diversity isn't the cause of anything. In other words, actively seeking out diversity itself (which is what the authors of the article are arguing for) is worthless.
> It also seems to me to carry an assumption that not wanting to associate is at best a morally neutral position, which I don’t believe - but I think you may?
I do indeed believe that. Can you provide an argument for why it is not morally neutral?
In a world of biased people, though, it can be a way to act against unfair bias. Biased people tend to lose their bias when they become friends with people from the groups they are biased against.
Actively _avoiding_ diversity, though, which it seems you find to be morally neutral, I find to be morally negative.
The shape (or in the real world, e.g. race) of an individual is a superficial attribute. It is extremely unfair to judge someone by it.
The same applies to access to voting booths[1][2], access to healthy grocery stores[3], and so much more.
[1]: https://civilrights.org/democracy-diverted/
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-geo...
Waiting in line to vote is unthinkable in much of Europe. And private schools with "better teachers" are a fringe phenomenon elsewhere. "Healthy" grocery stores are usually much more expensive, and people can't afford to buy from them just because they live nearby.
Of course, if you are ready to suffix the claim "diversity is good" with "...in the United States of America", that's fine. But my impression has been that people are trying to establish that diversity is good in principle. And I simply fail to see what theoretical argument supports that belief.
Your wording is very specific, so I'm quoting it here. I see some of the replies missed the subtlety though, so I'd like to emphasise that.
You are specifically pointing out the opportunity to "make their own way". You are not implying that every child has the same opportunities.
Every child is born different. To different parents. In different communities. In different countries. Those differences are material, and will shape both opportunities and abilities.
Genetics means I'll never be a pro athlete. I play sports but no one has (or ever will) give me spotting 'opportunities'. My sporty friend can't draw, and no one us offering her the opportunity of a gallery show.
This is probably a good thing as I have no desire to he an athlete and she has no desire to be an artist.
That does not negate the opportunity we both have to live in a country, and time, when we can both pursue the life we (realistically) want. 100 years ago, her, not so much.
Life is not fair. I was blessed with a good education, a brain to get value from it, and some luck to turn it into a living. In turn we give opportunities to others.
Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.
No child wants to be born into poverty, or famine, or war. Or be told their sexuality is offensive. Or be economically excluded because they're not white enough, or too white.
Life is not fair. It never will be. And I can't fix most of that. I'm ahead of fair, only because of accidents in genetics, heritage and timing. All I can strive to do is create opportunities for others, and try and play fair, overcoming some of the prejudices that got me here.
I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.
This is a very narrow and simplistic view of opportunity, both in the present and historical contexts.
I assume that you (a man) and your friend, a sporty woman, live in a country and time (the US?) where she enjoys some of the wins of early feminist movements in the US, namely the right to vote, to have a bank account without her husband's permission, etc etc. Life is in perfect harmony and institutional bias has been solved, hooray!
It's possibly true that women in the US have it better now than they have at any other time in history. However, the opportunities of women are still not equal to that of men. Perhaps your friend has opportunities to pursue passions in women's sports, but what if she wanted to enter the corporate world and work her way up to management, C-level, etc? She will find it more difficult to pursue this opportunity than you would. Even in women's sports she will have a different (and subjectively worse) experience than a man would have in his sporting career: to this day women in sports earn less than men and are often treated not as athletes but as sexual objects that compete for the attention of male viewers -- for example, in 2021 the European Handball Federation imposed a fine on the Norwegian women's team because they wore shorts instead of bikinis during their match, like the men's uniform.
> Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.
Children not having the right to choose their own path is not a recent development, it is a fact which has long been historically true and in the context of this history draws a throughline to reduced opportunities to this day. To give one oft-cited example, consider generational wealth disparities between white and black Americans. White families have had generations to accumulate relative wealth, comfort, and security, dating back to the founding of the United States, wealth in many cases built from slave labor, in other cases from discriminatory laws such as the Homestead Act and redlining. This wealth gives them access to opportunities, such as economic access to higher education, but also access to better (more expensive) neighborhoods with better schools and so on. Black families in the US have been historically unable to build generational wealth due specifically to this history of racism, and today a black child has significantly reduced opportunities for these reasons among others (institutional racism in other forms is still a big deal in the US). A black family has never been able to choose the same paths as a white family in the United States, now and throughout the history of the country.
> I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.
We don't really live in a progressive moment, in the US but also generally. Women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and others, are regressing right now.
You elaborated on my point about women well. Certainly there are still issues to be solved - I focused on the progress made, but your point on equality stands. However I hold up feminism (small f) as an example of how far we've come in a short time.
This progress gives me hope that we can progress across other spaces as well. LGB rights have become mainstream. TQ have a ways to go. As we add more marginalised communities there will be more fights to win.
Re-reading my example on children- my original post was unclear - I was trying to say that children choosing their own path at all is a very recent change. It's not so long ago that sons did what their fathers did (and daughters were married off.)
I concur that in this moment in history there is a revival of nationalism, barely-disguised racism, and so on. It evokes a time from 1930-1945. Regressions though are inevitable, but don't let that detract us from continuing to push forward.
Genetics means I'll never be a pro athlete. I play sports but no one has (or ever will) give me spotting 'opportunities'. My sporty friend can't draw, and no one us offering her the opportunity of a gallery show.
I do want to pick this out. I’m of the belief that a lot of political arguments are because people simply don’t understand each other. I think this highlights something.
I don’t (and I don’t think this is unusual) mean by ‘equal opportunity’ that everyone should be just e.g. allowed to be a pro athlete or artist simply because they decide to do so. I mean that they should have the same opportunities to do it if their innate talents mean that they could do it.
I don’t think that anyone means, by ‘equal opportunity’, that we should e.g. abolish qualification requirements (or entry requirements) for med schools - just that kids should all be able to become a doctor if they have the talent and do the work. Now, many people have the talent but don’t even have the opportunity to do the work.
Again, we’ve come a long way on this over the past few hundred years. To use the med school example, there are obviously thousands of good doctors nowadays that would never have even been allowed to try to be a doctor in centuries past. On the other side, I pretty much agree that differences in the circumstances of someone’s birth, family etc. probably mean we’ll never achieve equal opportunity fully. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still strive for it though.
If so, then the term "equal opportunity" is a lie. One could also claim that our world already provides equal opportunity, as long as your parents are rich enough, and it would be just as accurate.
If you hear someone say ‘every American child should have the opportunity to become a doctor,’ do you really believe they’re likely to mean regardless of capability or study?
Also, modern world-city diversity mostly perpetuates the native group vs the uber driver groups, with some exceptions that are to the detriment of the native group.
The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.
And "primitive" societies, which through evolution shaped how our social capacities operate, also have essentially zero diversity in the modern sense. They are almost by definition culturally uniform, and their members are often closely interrelated.
Though I think the point of evolution is to avoid uniformity. So perhaps a uniform culture is evolutionarily unfit.
From this brief list of recently evolved traits [1] (which I can't narrow by geographic region), I honestly can't say that any characterize the zeitgeist of a modern improved homo sapiens.
What modern biological traits do you think were evolved in Africa?
No evolutionary reason, that is.
On the other hand, if your descendents are born into such deep disadvantage without hope of redemption, that's another evolutionary black hole. The best hope would be to band together with others of similar circumstances and burn it all down.
It's in everyone's best interest for this not to happen. Which leads me to wonder if there is some optimal equilibrium between advantage and disadvantage.
And interesting corollary is that society has basically trumped evolution. There are so many competing contradictory forces that only the most basic changes have a hope of surviving.
Edit:
In hindsight I somewhat disagree with this. Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions. Status and additional allocation of societal-level resources then depends on the outcomes. So for some definition of opportunity I think it is theoretically possible to afford everyone equal opportunity.
So, no reason that would stick a couple of generations down.
>The best hope would be to band together with others of similar circumstances and burn it all down.
They are trying, last seen on 7 Oct 2023. I'd say long odds.
>It's in everyone's best interest for this not to happen. Which leads me to wonder if there is some optimal equilibrium between advantage and disadvantage.
It's indeed undesirable that the evolutionary black hole is in your own group, therefore various safety nets. That's still just the lower bound, removing the higher bound is Harrison-Bergeron-style societal suicide.
>And interesting corollary is that society has basically trumped evolution. There are so many competing contradictory forces that only the most basic changes have a hope of surviving.
It's just the first time that we know of when the fittest don't want to breed. There's plenty of arguments out there to the effect that it sucks.
>In hindsight I somewhat disagree with this. Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions. Status and additional allocation of societal-level resources then depends on the outcomes. So for some definition of opportunity I think it is theoretically possible to afford everyone equal opportunity.
If the parents' success have no bearing on the children the best strategy is to push out as many kids as you can. Something of commons, can't put my finger on it.
Hmm that's an interesting thought. You think that a post-scarcity society is impossible because the evolutionary urge to further one's genes will always outstrip the capacity to produce resources. That there can never be any equilibrium? Very Malthusian. Hopefully we can apply lessons from this article - that subtle social nudges can have outsized and hopefully beneficial effects.
The whole demographic catastrophe unfolding in the West is to do with how hard and expensive it is to raise even 1-2 kids to have good chances at life, and people largely choosing scarce commodities over having kids.
There are no lessons in this article other than that made-up preferences lead to silly outcomes.
Electronics and factory farm tomatoes are cheap, and near nobody lacks food or a phone.
Good teachers, black caviar, decent real estate away from poor people (lol) are inherently scarce. As for social economics enquiries, they always seem to require people to give up fruits of their labour for no compensation. As much as I like free stuff, I very much find this undersirable.
The price of tomatoes has inflated at a rate of about 3.55% per year, up a total of 1,049% since 1953. In that same period, minimum wage rose from $0.75 to $7.25. In 1953, an hour's work would have bought you one tomato with a bit left over, today an hour's work leaves you short. Tomatoes have not become cheaper.
Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Tomatoes/price-inflation
Or don't bother with canned tomatoes from your link - things like flour, butter, milk and meat all got cheaper relative to the minimum wage.
Fresh tomatoes went from 25-30 cents per pound to 1-2 dollars per pound, i.e. got cheaper too.
Which, as GP pointed out, is a social dead end.
If your opportunities don't depend on your parents' achievements, then your children's opportunities don't depend on your achievements. Even in a positive sense.
Which means that probably the most important motivation to achieve anything is gone.
Such a society would crumble to dust really quickly.
And, of course, equal "opportunity" just means discrimination based on factors such as innate ability, rather than inherited wealth. Which means that talent takes the place that wealth has in our society, but the basic mechanisms of power (and the resulting inequalities) remain the same.
Of course there are still achievements to strive towards. There are personal goals. There is the appreciation of your peers. There is social capital to convince others.
I think the countless grassroots movements stand as tribute to this. And not just open-source software, but countless online forums and communities dedicated to making the world a better place.
If your children have the best (as discussed above) opportunities thrust upon them, why must you spit in the face of good fortune, claiming your children would be better off if other children had fewer opportunities?
In such a theoretical and hopefully future society, I think power itself becomes much less consequential. What's the point of power if you have everything you want.
Or do you think if everyone's happy, they'll gladly follow some mad power-hungry lunatic into genocide just for shits and giggles?
To those that seek power, it is an end, not a means.
And there is no limit to what people want. Indeed, it expands faster than real possibilities do. By the standards of a thousand years ago, even today's "poor" people live like kings. But that doesn't mean anything.
A "post-scarcity" society would resemble the society of today far more closely than most people realize.
Perhaps that's just a psychological condition inculcated by modern society.
> today's "poor" people live like kings.
The actual standard of living doesn't matter as relatively poor people continue to make poor short-term economic decisions even after escaping poverty. That's why it's often called a disease.
The assumption that society would "quickly crumble to dust" if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes is quite possibly the most absurd take I have heard on this website in the 10 years I have been here.
Another strawman. I wrote that society would crumble if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes, in line with the comment I replied to. That's distinct from what you are claiming.
Wow, that’s bleak.
Perhaps it’s true if you’re operating in an amoral framework.
The society I was raised in has aphorisms such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love thy neighbor” as pretty basic tenets (not that they’re often completely lived up to). Pretty much every human society has similar basic rules. I like to think they’re meaningful.
Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.
[citation needed]
> Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.
Incorrect. Citation:
If you want narratives: the introduction of agriculture to human society is a cooperative effort which generalizes labor such that some can provide for the food supply and others can pursue other forms of labor, e.g. intellectual labor. The strictly competitive approach would not favor the establishment of agriculture. Human progress is measured in cooperation; in fact our cooperative nature it is one of the distinguishing traits of humanity and is largely responsible for the establishment of complex society, which was the greatest evolutionary achievement of humanity over the rest of the animal world.
Would the device you wrote your comment on have been possible without a nigh-incomprehensible level of human cooperation?
If you wish to build a society without cooperation, you are welcome to start your potato farm on a free plot of land out west. The potatoes you grow, by the way, were a product engineered by millennia of cooperative bioengineering on the part of indigenous farmers, but feel free to disregard that in your daydreaming.
You couldn't just rock up to an ancient village and expect to be fed for you intellectual labour. That's the whole point - outsiders are not part of the village until proven otherwise.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness_in_humans
> However, independently of the emergence of inclusive fitness theory, from 1960s onwards many anthropologists themselves had reexamined the balance of findings in their own ethnographic data and had begun to reject the notion that human kinship is 'caused by' blood ties (see Kinship). Anthropologists have gathered very extensive ethnographic data on human social patterns and behaviour over a century or more, from a wide spectrum of different cultural groups. The data demonstrates that many cultures do not consider 'blood ties' (in the genealogical sense) to underlie their close social relationships and kinship bonds. Instead social bonds are often considered to be based on location-based shared circumstances including living together (co-residence), sleeping close together, working together, sharing food (commensality) and other forms of shared life together. Comparative anthropologists have shown[6] that these aspects of shared circumstances are a significant component of what influences kinship in most human cultures, notwithstanding whether or not 'blood ties' are necessarily present (see Nurture kinship, below).
I like how easy you and p-e-w are making it to debunk your argument by citing a bunch of sources that don't support you. I think you're just racist conservatives making up facts from whole cloth to support some narrative of deintegration.
I’ve been trying to discuss with them on the merits of their argument, but having thought on this overnight I agree with you.
All their big argumentation and lofty words are, at their base, seemingly trying to defend a basic position that it’s okay - perhaps even desirable - to base desire to associate with someone solely on their ‘shape’ (obviously, skin color).
Hell, even French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgians consider each other "other".
It's rather disappointing that on HN, where members regularly congratulate themselves on being able to examine viewpoints on their merits alone, you have chosen to drag this conversation into the mud with personal attacks. I will not engage in such behavior myself, and this pretty much concludes the matter for me.
[citation needed]
Which societies? Revered by whom? Successful by what metric?