>empiricism >I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause When your body of data is so large, it is easy to mistake cherry picking

>empiricism >I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause When your body of data is so large, it is easy to mistake cherry picking and associated fallacies for empiricism. >if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs...we can't ignore that We can if these policies create more good than harm. Furthermore, even in this example, whether the issue is classism or collateral effects, although people would be quick to scream racism if we replaced "rural" with black, without sufficient evidence of racist intent. The biggest problem I see with a mindset like this is that the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome leads to policies which forgo merit to correct imagined racism. And we end up with less competent firefighters, law officers, doctors, lawyers, etc; and by lowering standards to attempt to force equity, all of society is worse off.