5 ms·

While noble in its intentions, if flipping the roles is seen as discrimination (no all female boards), it’s discrimination.

jeromebaek 8y ago
Nope, you're confusing the syntactic definition of discrimination with the semantic definition of discrimination.
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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- maxander 8y ago
  I get what you’re trying to say, but I’m not sure there’s such a thing as the “syntactic definition” of a word.
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  No. Reverse discrimination is just that: discrimination
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    All law is discrimination. Some is impermissible discrimination, but the test for that isn't “would it be impermissible if reversed”, and not only because that would produce infinite regress with no answer, but because mirroring policy without mirroring social context does not result in mirror policies necessarily falling on the same side of the legal tests of impermissible discrimination.
    - torstenvl 8y ago
      But see Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        Sure, the standard is the same in either direction.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
I hope they'll not mind someone identifying as trans to get on a board. You get what you measure, and you can hack around all sorts of discrimination. Edit: To be clear, I do not support, encourage, or condone discrimination of any protected class. You should be able to discriminate by skill level, of course.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  You know, for all the worry about people "identifying as trans in order to do X" it seems to happen very infrequently.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I'm not taking issue with it (ever, really, live your best life), especially when used to obviate quotas. I take issue with "good" discrimination efforts, never how someone identifies or their biological attributes.
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
      Gotcha, I'm sorry I misinterpreted your position! I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but I am (genuinely!) curious as to how we can actively prevent "bad" discrimination without using "good" discrimination. Board seats are a zero-sum game, far more men have them than women, so how can we give more to women without taking some from men?
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        > so how can we give more to women without taking some from men? We don't, just like we don't have quotas for roles and say, "This role is being held open for a woman, person of color, or other non-white, non-male person". If it's an all male board, it's an all male board. If it's an all female board, same. You don't legislate discrimination because you feel like it's helpful. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome. No mandated quotas. If evidence is uncovered that discrimination is occurring (against any protected class), you pursue legal action against the corporation and its officers.
jakelazaroff 8y ago
This is pretty easy to word neutrally: "No boards where every member has the same gender." Is this really a problem, though? Do we really expect a situation in which men are systemically prevented from being board members?
- FakeComments 8y ago
  How about we just don’t pass sexist laws because we’ve somehow told ourselves that this particular instance of institutional sexism is okay? We’re already having enough trouble getting people to accept Title IX protects male students, after 40 years of females being the majority in student populations. I’m not nearly as optimistic about the outcome of intentional sexism as you.
  - adamsea 8y ago
    Intentional sexism has worked quite well for the patriarchy.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    I'm not sure we could enact any policies that don't look like institutionalized sexism, though. As the Parable of the Polygons [1] shows, merely removing bias from a system isn't enough to break down structures that are already in place. We need to actively de-bias. Board seats are a zero-sum game, so that means we have to take some seats from men to give to women. This is a good faith question! It doesn't seem to me that there's any real way to remove bias against women without adding bias against men, but I'm genuinely curious as to how we might do so. [1] https://ncase.me/polygons/ https://ncase.me/polygons/
    - FakeComments 8y ago
      Board seats are literally not a zero sum game: we can make more in any of several ways. It troubles me that you’re factually mistaken on basic things like that — new board seats come into existence literally daily, to which every indication shows women are free to compete — but expect me to take your arguments seriously that we should institute bigotry at the highest levels. No, get your facts straight first. You’re also trying to respond to empiric failures in the real world with parables and abstract highly simplified models, which is somewhat silly: the decayed state of gender and race relations in the US and elsewhere is due to the sexist and racist policies enacted to “fix” things, and somewhere between 1990 and 2000 started stepping backwards decades of progress, with the situation the worst it’s been in a generation by 2020. Forcing the final steps of integration has been shown time and again to foster generation-scale resentment and undermine healing, particularly through forcing every interaction to be viewed through the lens of base racial or gender tribes. It literally teaches people to be bigots all over again. A rotten tree bears rotten fruits: I don’t believe you can cause a good outcome through institutional bigotry, and I challenge you to show me it works. It’s certainly been tried enough it should have produced positive results — show me those, and not a cheap game. Also, yes, merely removing bias in a dynamic system that shows a strong reversion to the mean on generational scales is enough to remove historical bias within just a few generations — a fact that comes directly from analysis of system dynamics and differential equations. Notice that if you drop the bias below 10%, there’s absolutely no problem — it just sort of wanders over long time periods. To me, you merely seem a fiddler: someone who knows very well that debiasing works on the 3-4 generation scale, you’re just not willing to wait a century because you believe you’re smart enough to use evil for good, and are willing to risk sure progress based on that belief. I think that’s reckless and immoral. Reckless because you’re endangering something important — the fixing of gender and race relations in society; and immoral because you’re knowingly doing harm and discriminating, out of some very strange logic that’s making the world “better”. Your model also has massive failures as a mechanism to explain social situations: it doesn’t, for instance, explain why Asian immigrants have thrived. Were the interned and destitute Japanese incomparably better off than other groups? If not, how does your model explain their recovery and integration compared to other groups? What the puzzle actually seems to say is that if people have a preference you don’t like, you feel entitled to overrule them because you know better, and your global vision for society is better than the emergent one from individual choices. (The conclusions really seem oriented around forcing people to integrate when their natural tendencies would have them live in more or less homogeneous clusters.) It’s tyranny gussied up with math: look at how if people have wrongthink preferences, we need to overrule them via force and targeted discrimination for the greater good!
dragonwriter 8y ago
> While noble in its intentions, if flipping the roles is seen as discrimination (no all female boards), it’s discrimination. You are overcomplicating things; making a legal distinction is discrimination on the basis used to make the distinction; this is overtly sex discrimination. Your mirror test isn't needed. Whether it is permissible discrimination likewise does not depend on a mirror test, but on whether (at least, from the perspective of federal Constitutional jurisprudence, using the test that applies to sex discrimination) it serves an important government purpose by means substantially related to that purpose. Which a mirror test of the type you propose doesn't help answer, both because it doesn't answer it for the mirror case and because the mirror case won't be similarly situated compared to the actual legal test unless you mirror all of society, not just the policy.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

jeromebaek 8y ago

Nope, you're confusing the syntactic definition of discrimination with the semantic definition of discrimination.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
maxander 8y ago
I get what you’re trying to say, but I’m not sure there’s such a thing as the “syntactic definition” of a word.
colejohnson66 8y ago
No. Reverse discrimination is just that: discrimination
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  All law is discrimination. Some is impermissible discrimination, but the test for that isn't “would it be impermissible if reversed”, and not only because that would produce infinite regress with no answer, but because mirroring policy without mirroring social context does not result in mirror policies necessarily falling on the same side of the legal tests of impermissible discrimination.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    But see Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      Sure, the standard is the same in either direction.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

I hope they'll not mind someone identifying as trans to get on a board. You get what you measure, and you can hack around all sorts of discrimination. Edit: To be clear, I do not support, encourage, or condone discrimination of any protected class. You should be able to discriminate by skill level, of course.

jakelazaroff 8y ago
You know, for all the worry about people "identifying as trans in order to do X" it seems to happen very infrequently.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I'm not taking issue with it (ever, really, live your best life), especially when used to obviate quotas. I take issue with "good" discrimination efforts, never how someone identifies or their biological attributes.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Gotcha, I'm sorry I misinterpreted your position! I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but I am (genuinely!) curious as to how we can actively prevent "bad" discrimination without using "good" discrimination. Board seats are a zero-sum game, far more men have them than women, so how can we give more to women without taking some from men?
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      > so how can we give more to women without taking some from men? We don't, just like we don't have quotas for roles and say, "This role is being held open for a woman, person of color, or other non-white, non-male person". If it's an all male board, it's an all male board. If it's an all female board, same. You don't legislate discrimination because you feel like it's helpful. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome. No mandated quotas. If evidence is uncovered that discrimination is occurring (against any protected class), you pursue legal action against the corporation and its officers.

jakelazaroff 8y ago

This is pretty easy to word neutrally: "No boards where every member has the same gender." Is this really a problem, though? Do we really expect a situation in which men are systemically prevented from being board members?

FakeComments 8y ago
How about we just don’t pass sexist laws because we’ve somehow told ourselves that this particular instance of institutional sexism is okay? We’re already having enough trouble getting people to accept Title IX protects male students, after 40 years of females being the majority in student populations. I’m not nearly as optimistic about the outcome of intentional sexism as you.
- adamsea 8y ago
  Intentional sexism has worked quite well for the patriarchy.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  I'm not sure we could enact any policies that don't look like institutionalized sexism, though. As the Parable of the Polygons [1] shows, merely removing bias from a system isn't enough to break down structures that are already in place. We need to actively de-bias. Board seats are a zero-sum game, so that means we have to take some seats from men to give to women. This is a good faith question! It doesn't seem to me that there's any real way to remove bias against women without adding bias against men, but I'm genuinely curious as to how we might do so. [1] https://ncase.me/polygons/ https://ncase.me/polygons/
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    Board seats are literally not a zero sum game: we can make more in any of several ways. It troubles me that you’re factually mistaken on basic things like that — new board seats come into existence literally daily, to which every indication shows women are free to compete — but expect me to take your arguments seriously that we should institute bigotry at the highest levels. No, get your facts straight first. You’re also trying to respond to empiric failures in the real world with parables and abstract highly simplified models, which is somewhat silly: the decayed state of gender and race relations in the US and elsewhere is due to the sexist and racist policies enacted to “fix” things, and somewhere between 1990 and 2000 started stepping backwards decades of progress, with the situation the worst it’s been in a generation by 2020. Forcing the final steps of integration has been shown time and again to foster generation-scale resentment and undermine healing, particularly through forcing every interaction to be viewed through the lens of base racial or gender tribes. It literally teaches people to be bigots all over again. A rotten tree bears rotten fruits: I don’t believe you can cause a good outcome through institutional bigotry, and I challenge you to show me it works. It’s certainly been tried enough it should have produced positive results — show me those, and not a cheap game. Also, yes, merely removing bias in a dynamic system that shows a strong reversion to the mean on generational scales is enough to remove historical bias within just a few generations — a fact that comes directly from analysis of system dynamics and differential equations. Notice that if you drop the bias below 10%, there’s absolutely no problem — it just sort of wanders over long time periods. To me, you merely seem a fiddler: someone who knows very well that debiasing works on the 3-4 generation scale, you’re just not willing to wait a century because you believe you’re smart enough to use evil for good, and are willing to risk sure progress based on that belief. I think that’s reckless and immoral. Reckless because you’re endangering something important — the fixing of gender and race relations in society; and immoral because you’re knowingly doing harm and discriminating, out of some very strange logic that’s making the world “better”. Your model also has massive failures as a mechanism to explain social situations: it doesn’t, for instance, explain why Asian immigrants have thrived. Were the interned and destitute Japanese incomparably better off than other groups? If not, how does your model explain their recovery and integration compared to other groups? What the puzzle actually seems to say is that if people have a preference you don’t like, you feel entitled to overrule them because you know better, and your global vision for society is better than the emergent one from individual choices. (The conclusions really seem oriented around forcing people to integrate when their natural tendencies would have them live in more or less homogeneous clusters.) It’s tyranny gussied up with math: look at how if people have wrongthink preferences, we need to overrule them via force and targeted discrimination for the greater good!

dragonwriter 8y ago

> While noble in its intentions, if flipping the roles is seen as discrimination (no all female boards), it’s discrimination. You are overcomplicating things; making a legal distinction is discrimination on the basis used to make the distinction; this is overtly sex discrimination. Your mirror test isn't needed. Whether it is permissible discrimination likewise does not depend on a mirror test, but on whether (at least, from the perspective of federal Constitutional jurisprudence, using the test that applies to sex discrimination) it serves an important government purpose by means substantially related to that purpose. Which a mirror test of the type you propose doesn't help answer, both because it doesn't answer it for the mirror case and because the mirror case won't be similarly situated compared to the actual legal test unless you mirror all of society, not just the policy.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]