6 ms·

That's equality of outcome though, which is often terrible. I want a society where everybody gets an even shot, at which point I find it highly unlikely we'd e

by mst 9y ago

That's equality of outcome though, which is often terrible. I want a society where everybody gets an even shot, at which point I find it highly unlikely we'd end up at 50/50 - given programming has been both male-majority and female-majority over time I'm damned if I know in which direction it'd fall, but 50/50 usually means "you have forced people to be here who would've been better/happier somewhere else" and my feminism involves the radical notion that women have agency too.

selllikesybok 9y ago
Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Because it is ambiguous goal which under any reasonable interpretation has massive consequences and major unintended side-effects. My favorite sport is basketball. What is the 'equality of outcome' in the context of the NBA? Is it that players are evenly distributed across gender lines? Across economic lines? Across national lines? Across racial or ethnic or religious lines? In our society, it would probably be understood that NBA should be proportionally represented by each identity group. So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it? The other point is that in a free society, you cannot guarantee equality of outcome because people are going to make personal choices that will be magnified and influenced by whatever sub-culture they are immersed in. Professional basketball in the early days was over-represented by Jews, because it just so happened that interest in the game went viral in that sub-culture. Tech has an over-representation of men because it grew out of a particular nerd sub-culture. There's nothing wrong with doing outreach to get non-traditional sub-groups developing an interest in programming, just like there's nothing wrong with the NBA running clinics in China to get Chinese kids into basketball. But it's not racism that the demographics are the way they are! In a free society you should expect that!
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it? Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.
    - macspoofing 9y ago
      >Arguably yes. What do you mean "arguably yes"? What are we losing by having blacks be over-represented in the NBA? >But there is a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits. BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person. Professional Hockey is dominated by White Canadians and Russians. Baseball is over-represented by Latino/Hispanic players. Asians, who are 5% of the US population, account for almost 25% of all Physicians. Which industry has this perfect ratio of races that should serve as a model for us all. And you conveniently side-stepped the issue of 1) why it is race/ethnicity where proportionality should be prioritized over (for example) religion, and 2) is it even reasonable to expect that such a ratio to be achievable in a society where people are free to choose and 3) what the heck is the actual gain to society if it is versus the cost of brainwashing people to want things they don't actually want.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        > BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person. How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?
        macspoofing 9y ago
        >How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers? How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia. What is your point?
- smsm42 9y ago
  Because it reduces people to a set of identity classes that fill respective identity checkboxes. I.e. if it happens that on conference there is 10 good presentation submitted from class X but only 2 from class Y, and the quota is half-half, you would either reject 8 good presentations or add 8 crappy ones, just to fill identity checkboxes and achieve equality of outcome. Or cancel the conference altogether. The true equality would be when the conference organizers see 12 good presentations, and don't even think to dig into what identity class they represent (unless the conference is specifically organized to represent identity classes). When did you last seen statistics about hair color or eye color of conference presenters? How about blood type? Maybe AB- people are underrepresented? You get the idea.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    If green eyed people had been systematically oppressed until recently and still made a fraction of the money brown eyed people do as a result, you'd see statistics about eye color at conference presentations.
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago
      Define "recently. Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime, or yours, or most of the potential presenters. If you are conservative about it you can claim discrimination up until the 1960s - which is 50 years ago, hardly "recently".
      - drjdog 9y ago
        > Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime If you are ever so slightly open-minded about it you could consider black Americans to still be systematically oppressed by the criminal justice system. Read a bit about the criminalisation of marajuana, sentencing procedures, the industrial prison complex etc..
- mst 9y ago
  Equality of outcome as a goal is terrible because it's the enemy of equality of opportunity. "Everybody is denied their agency" would be equal, perhaps, but isn't part of any feminist vision I choose to align myself with.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 9y ago
The equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity distinction is a cop-out. If you have real equality of opportunity then you should expect equality of outcome,[1] unless there is biological reason why women/black people/etc want to be left out of well-paying secure careers, or can't hack it in those careers. Maybe that's true, but it's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof. The fact that programming has been both male-majority and female-majority at different times proves my point, and undermines yours. There is nothing inherent about it that makes women select into or out of it. Society pushed women into it back when it was a low status profession and now pushes women out of it now that it's a high status profession. [1] When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that. Equality of opportunity means that's if you take a sample of say 1,000 kids, they should experience extrinsic forces over their lifetime that aren't correlated with race/gender/etc. I.e. some kids might have it easier because they have rich parents and some kids might have it harder because they have poor parents, but there shouldn't be a systematic pattern to those forces. But when people invoke "equality of opportunity" I am skeptical they mean doing something about the fact that statistically a random black kid is going to grow up in a household that only makes 60% as much as the one a random white kid would grow up in.
- newdayrising 9y ago
  Please tell me how society "pushes women out" of programming. I've only seen women being pushed toward programming. It's up to the individual woman to choose programming - just like it's up to the individual man to want a degree in, say, clinical psychology. The only pressure I've seen is that of the gender majority. Men and women tend to overlook careers where there is a majority consisting of the opposite sex. It's not society's job to equalize gender ratios and yes there are real differences between men and women. It's not true that if there's a majority gender in a field it must be because of discrimination.
- mst 9y ago
  > When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that I don't.

by mst 9y ago

selllikesybok 9y ago

Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
macspoofing 9y ago
Because it is ambiguous goal which under any reasonable interpretation has massive consequences and major unintended side-effects. My favorite sport is basketball. What is the 'equality of outcome' in the context of the NBA? Is it that players are evenly distributed across gender lines? Across economic lines? Across national lines? Across racial or ethnic or religious lines? In our society, it would probably be understood that NBA should be proportionally represented by each identity group. So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it? The other point is that in a free society, you cannot guarantee equality of outcome because people are going to make personal choices that will be magnified and influenced by whatever sub-culture they are immersed in. Professional basketball in the early days was over-represented by Jews, because it just so happened that interest in the game went viral in that sub-culture. Tech has an over-representation of men because it grew out of a particular nerd sub-culture. There's nothing wrong with doing outreach to get non-traditional sub-groups developing an interest in programming, just like there's nothing wrong with the NBA running clinics in China to get Chinese kids into basketball. But it's not racism that the demographics are the way they are! In a free society you should expect that!
- rayiner 9y ago
  > So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it? Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.
  - macspoofing 9y ago
    >Arguably yes. What do you mean "arguably yes"? What are we losing by having blacks be over-represented in the NBA? >But there is a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits. BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person. Professional Hockey is dominated by White Canadians and Russians. Baseball is over-represented by Latino/Hispanic players. Asians, who are 5% of the US population, account for almost 25% of all Physicians. Which industry has this perfect ratio of races that should serve as a model for us all. And you conveniently side-stepped the issue of 1) why it is race/ethnicity where proportionality should be prioritized over (for example) religion, and 2) is it even reasonable to expect that such a ratio to be achievable in a society where people are free to choose and 3) what the heck is the actual gain to society if it is versus the cost of brainwashing people to want things they don't actually want.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      > BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person. How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?
      - macspoofing 9y ago
        >How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers? How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia. What is your point?
smsm42 9y ago
Because it reduces people to a set of identity classes that fill respective identity checkboxes. I.e. if it happens that on conference there is 10 good presentation submitted from class X but only 2 from class Y, and the quota is half-half, you would either reject 8 good presentations or add 8 crappy ones, just to fill identity checkboxes and achieve equality of outcome. Or cancel the conference altogether. The true equality would be when the conference organizers see 12 good presentations, and don't even think to dig into what identity class they represent (unless the conference is specifically organized to represent identity classes). When did you last seen statistics about hair color or eye color of conference presenters? How about blood type? Maybe AB- people are underrepresented? You get the idea.
- rayiner 9y ago
  If green eyed people had been systematically oppressed until recently and still made a fraction of the money brown eyed people do as a result, you'd see statistics about eye color at conference presentations.
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    Define "recently. Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime, or yours, or most of the potential presenters. If you are conservative about it you can claim discrimination up until the 1960s - which is 50 years ago, hardly "recently".
    - drjdog 9y ago
      > Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime If you are ever so slightly open-minded about it you could consider black Americans to still be systematically oppressed by the criminal justice system. Read a bit about the criminalisation of marajuana, sentencing procedures, the industrial prison complex etc..
mst 9y ago
Equality of outcome as a goal is terrible because it's the enemy of equality of opportunity. "Everybody is denied their agency" would be equal, perhaps, but isn't part of any feminist vision I choose to align myself with.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 9y ago

The equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity distinction is a cop-out. If you have real equality of opportunity then you should expect equality of outcome,[1] unless there is biological reason why women/black people/etc want to be left out of well-paying secure careers, or can't hack it in those careers. Maybe that's true, but it's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof. The fact that programming has been both male-majority and female-majority at different times proves my point, and undermines yours. There is nothing inherent about it that makes women select into or out of it. Society pushed women into it back when it was a low status profession and now pushes women out of it now that it's a high status profession. [1] When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that. Equality of opportunity means that's if you take a sample of say 1,000 kids, they should experience extrinsic forces over their lifetime that aren't correlated with race/gender/etc. I.e. some kids might have it easier because they have rich parents and some kids might have it harder because they have poor parents, but there shouldn't be a systematic pattern to those forces. But when people invoke "equality of opportunity" I am skeptical they mean doing something about the fact that statistically a random black kid is going to grow up in a household that only makes 60% as much as the one a random white kid would grow up in.

newdayrising 9y ago
Please tell me how society "pushes women out" of programming. I've only seen women being pushed toward programming. It's up to the individual woman to choose programming - just like it's up to the individual man to want a degree in, say, clinical psychology. The only pressure I've seen is that of the gender majority. Men and women tend to overlook careers where there is a majority consisting of the opposite sex. It's not society's job to equalize gender ratios and yes there are real differences between men and women. It's not true that if there's a majority gender in a field it must be because of discrimination.
mst 9y ago
> When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that I don't.