5 ms·

It's important to remember if the goal is to undo "unfairness" that the prescription _cannot_ be "fair". If a scale is weighed down with 5lb on one side and 10

It's important to remember if the goal is to undo "unfairness" that the prescription _cannot_ be "fair". If a scale is weighed down with 5lb on one side and 10lb on the other, adding equal weights to both sides does not create equilibrium. It's ironic and potentially hypocritical (if not acknowledged) that the solution to unfairness is by creating an _explicitly_ unfair system, just with the underdogs on top for once. Note no value judgement on any of this, it's just a paradox that has been amusing my brain a bit re: social justice. Righting wrongness almost by definition involves more wrongness. "Killing a killer" might be a good summary of the paradox.

darkwater 6y ago
Your last example is a reductio ad absurdum. It is really easy to say that overcompensation for a mistake is a bad thing when you are on the side who did the initial mistake. A white man in tech, or a citizen of a 1st world industrialized country which grew as an economic behemoth by polluting the world without thinking of the consequences for 50 years. People gets easily, really easily used to their good conditions and privileges, especially if their real cost is somehow hidden and at the expense of others. It is part of the human nature in the end, but that doesn't mean it is "right".
- bawolff 6y ago
  > reductio ad absurdum How? I can see a reasonable argument that its not a fiting metaphor, but i don't see how you can say its absurd, since there clearly exist countries that use capital punishment for homocide. Edit: Also to be clear, reductio ad absurdum is a positive thing to say about someone's argument. It is not a fallacy.
  - darkwater 6y ago
    Well it's an ad absurdum in my opinion because the moral judgement applied to capital punishment it's radically different from the one used to judge overcompensation in other scenarios. Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life. Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      > Well it's an ad absurdum in my opinion because the moral judgement applied to capital punishment it's radically different from the one used to judge overcompensation in other scenarios. That's not what reductio ad absurdum (fancy latin for basically proof by contradiction) means. You're claiming that the comparison is inapropriate. reductio ad absurdum means that the comparison is good, but the thing being compared to is rediculous, and since the rediculous thing is the same as the main thing, the main thing must also be rediculous, and therefor false. > Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life. Why not? I don't see anything inherently contradictory in doing so. Whether or not the comparison is compelling is a separate question. > Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime. Yes you could. Lots of people do. I don't support the death penalty myself, but there certainly exist people who do and its a practise that is still extant in some parts of the world.
      - darkwater 6y ago
        > That's not what reductio ad absurdum (fancy latin for basically proof by contradiction) means. You're claiming that the comparison is inapropriate. reductio ad absurdum means that the comparison is good, but the thing being compared to is rediculous, and since the rediculous thing is the same as the main thing, the main thing must also be rediculous, and therefor false. Claiming that overcompensation can be brought to the extreme of justifying death penalty to me is absurd, that's why I said that. But I understand that I may be wrong so, definitions a part, to me it's still comparing apples to oranges. And while oranges may be acceptable, apples definitely are not.
- gkwbenton 6y ago
  Since this seems to be the majority opinion among Google millionaires, the solution seems really simple: Give away your money and live on the same wages as the oppressed classes. They don't? Well, then they are hypocrites who want other people to subsidize their fantasies.
luckylion 6y ago
That's why you can't have social justice and individual justice, you have to choose. And it boils down to "what's unfair", doesn't it? Is a different life expectancy a signal of unfairness? A different wealth or education level? A different rate of depression, mental illness, or suicide? There's a lot of picking and choosing when it comes to picking the data to consider when evaluating unfairness, I believe.
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  There are some coherent approaches without picking and choosing, though. For example, according to luck egalitarianism any major (dis-)advantage that someone has in life that is given by sheer coincidence is not deserved. The policy of the state should then be to make society more equal by reducing advantages and disadvantages that stem from pure luck. To address your examples, the state should try to help people with abnormally low life expectancy achieve higher life expectancy, try to equalize different wealth and education levels by making education available/affordable to everyone, by severely limiting wealth distribution by inheritance, and so on, and help people with mental illness to lead a normal life as others (which could include all kinds of measures from tax-funded mental health care to changes in work law). I don't really want to defend luck egalitarianism here, although I personally consider it a reasonable position. It's an example to point out that relative to a theory of fairness the solutions can be fairly clear. The "picking and choosing" is rather the result of disagreement about the respective theory of justice.
  - gkwbenton 6y ago
    The groups selected as help-worthy are often arbitrary. The largest inequality I see in real life is between first-born women and their younger siblings. First-born women are often hyper competitive and earn way more than their siblings, including brothers. Should we discriminate against first-borns in university admissions?
    - jonathanstrange 6y ago
      I see no evidence for the claim that the selection of help-worthy is often arbitrary. Anyway, I'll accept your example for the sake of the argument. Of course, why shouldn't we help people who are second, third, or fourth born if they are at a systematic disadvantage according to robust data? AFAIK, many societies have changed hereditary law over the past centuries to compensate for former advantages of first-borns in favour of other family members.
bawolff 6y ago
Im not sure i like the framing of "undo"-ing. It has a lot of connotations to getting revenge for past sins, etc. I more like the idea of "reseting" than "undoing" The general premise i have usually heard is something along the lines that selection in the work environment often involves nepotism, networking, "cultural fit" and other under-handed ways of biasing the results. This is both unfair and a self-perpetuating prophecy. The explicit action of forcing a selection criteria will hopefully break the cycle and "reset" the system to an equal playing field.
- jkoudys 6y ago
  Yes the bias is huge, and doubly bothersome because even attempts at inclusion are framed from the perspective of the currently powerful. I look at how many big-name white male devs on my twitter feed make a big show of trying to raise up others. Yet it's a wildly disproportionate group of conventionally attractive women in their early 20s making corny 5-second comedy clips that are getting all the attention. That, or pushing model minority stereotypes that are more about making the man sharing them look good. Heaven forbid they include a woman with the same 5-pack of hoodies wardrobe and under-the-chin, poorly lit selfie they have, just because she's actually a good dev. While I can understand the resistance to selection criteria if it removes more nuanced decisions necessary in building a team, I can't think of a better way to offset those biases you describe. Those biases are extreme and clearly, left to our own devices, we do a bad job addressing or recognizing them.
jonathanstrange 6y ago
It's important to emphasize that this unfairness is only temporary, and it temporarily disadvantages mostly only people who have an advantage by sheer coincidence and not because of their abilities or achievements. There is a similar issue in the theory of just resource distribution, where it can be shown that a more egalitarian resource distribution can sometimes only be achieved by temporarily allowing transfers that are not Pareto optimal. In other words, to make a society juster in terms of overall resource distribution you might sometimes have to make everyone worse off for some time. (If you don't allow such transfers, you'll be forced to call a society with a Gini index close to 1 "just", which would be absurd.) On a side note, since that was mentioned by others, there is no such thing as "personal justice". Justice always concerns society as a whole, since it concerns the effects that the actions of members of society have on each other.
- WatchDog 6y ago
  In what way is this push for group identity based discrimination temporary? If anything it seems to be growing in scope and prevalence. Take for example, the New York times calling to end blind orchestra auditions, and take race into account for making hiring decisions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
- LunaSea 6y ago
  > It's important to emphasize that this unfairness is only temporary, and it temporarily disadvantages mostly only people who have an advantage by sheer coincidence and not because of their abilities or achievements. [Citation needed]
- blub 6y ago
  First of all, I don't believe it's temporary. At least in the EU we have at least a decade of positive discrimination and no plan to get rid of these policies. In fact more of them are under discussion. Secondly, it (not-)temporarily disadvantages everyone of a specific gender or race, no matter if they were advantaged in the first place.
- haihaibye 6y ago
vertis 6y ago
Adding 1000lb on each side makes the initial values a rounding error. If you correct your hiring practices to be equal, eventually you do have equal as people churn through the workforce. (Note: Not disagreeing with bringing it into balance quicker, or making statements that it should be done this way)

darkwater 6y ago

Your last example is a reductio ad absurdum. It is really easy to say that overcompensation for a mistake is a bad thing when you are on the side who did the initial mistake. A white man in tech, or a citizen of a 1st world industrialized country which grew as an economic behemoth by polluting the world without thinking of the consequences for 50 years. People gets easily, really easily used to their good conditions and privileges, especially if their real cost is somehow hidden and at the expense of others. It is part of the human nature in the end, but that doesn't mean it is "right".

bawolff 6y ago
> reductio ad absurdum How? I can see a reasonable argument that its not a fiting metaphor, but i don't see how you can say its absurd, since there clearly exist countries that use capital punishment for homocide. Edit: Also to be clear, reductio ad absurdum is a positive thing to say about someone's argument. It is not a fallacy.
- darkwater 6y ago
  Well it's an ad absurdum in my opinion because the moral judgement applied to capital punishment it's radically different from the one used to judge overcompensation in other scenarios. Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life. Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    > Well it's an ad absurdum in my opinion because the moral judgement applied to capital punishment it's radically different from the one used to judge overcompensation in other scenarios. That's not what reductio ad absurdum (fancy latin for basically proof by contradiction) means. You're claiming that the comparison is inapropriate. reductio ad absurdum means that the comparison is good, but the thing being compared to is rediculous, and since the rediculous thing is the same as the main thing, the main thing must also be rediculous, and therefor false. > Taking away benefits cannot be compared with taking away a life. Why not? I don't see anything inherently contradictory in doing so. Whether or not the comparison is compelling is a separate question. > Otherwise you could argue that prison is not the right answer to certain crimes because there could be death penalty for a atrocious enough crime. Yes you could. Lots of people do. I don't support the death penalty myself, but there certainly exist people who do and its a practise that is still extant in some parts of the world.
    - darkwater 6y ago
      > That's not what reductio ad absurdum (fancy latin for basically proof by contradiction) means. You're claiming that the comparison is inapropriate. reductio ad absurdum means that the comparison is good, but the thing being compared to is rediculous, and since the rediculous thing is the same as the main thing, the main thing must also be rediculous, and therefor false. Claiming that overcompensation can be brought to the extreme of justifying death penalty to me is absurd, that's why I said that. But I understand that I may be wrong so, definitions a part, to me it's still comparing apples to oranges. And while oranges may be acceptable, apples definitely are not.
gkwbenton 6y ago
Since this seems to be the majority opinion among Google millionaires, the solution seems really simple: Give away your money and live on the same wages as the oppressed classes. They don't? Well, then they are hypocrites who want other people to subsidize their fantasies.

luckylion 6y ago

That's why you can't have social justice and individual justice, you have to choose. And it boils down to "what's unfair", doesn't it? Is a different life expectancy a signal of unfairness? A different wealth or education level? A different rate of depression, mental illness, or suicide? There's a lot of picking and choosing when it comes to picking the data to consider when evaluating unfairness, I believe.

jonathanstrange 6y ago
There are some coherent approaches without picking and choosing, though. For example, according to luck egalitarianism any major (dis-)advantage that someone has in life that is given by sheer coincidence is not deserved. The policy of the state should then be to make society more equal by reducing advantages and disadvantages that stem from pure luck. To address your examples, the state should try to help people with abnormally low life expectancy achieve higher life expectancy, try to equalize different wealth and education levels by making education available/affordable to everyone, by severely limiting wealth distribution by inheritance, and so on, and help people with mental illness to lead a normal life as others (which could include all kinds of measures from tax-funded mental health care to changes in work law). I don't really want to defend luck egalitarianism here, although I personally consider it a reasonable position. It's an example to point out that relative to a theory of fairness the solutions can be fairly clear. The "picking and choosing" is rather the result of disagreement about the respective theory of justice.
- gkwbenton 6y ago
  The groups selected as help-worthy are often arbitrary. The largest inequality I see in real life is between first-born women and their younger siblings. First-born women are often hyper competitive and earn way more than their siblings, including brothers. Should we discriminate against first-borns in university admissions?
  - jonathanstrange 6y ago
    I see no evidence for the claim that the selection of help-worthy is often arbitrary. Anyway, I'll accept your example for the sake of the argument. Of course, why shouldn't we help people who are second, third, or fourth born if they are at a systematic disadvantage according to robust data? AFAIK, many societies have changed hereditary law over the past centuries to compensate for former advantages of first-borns in favour of other family members.

bawolff 6y ago

Im not sure i like the framing of "undo"-ing. It has a lot of connotations to getting revenge for past sins, etc. I more like the idea of "reseting" than "undoing" The general premise i have usually heard is something along the lines that selection in the work environment often involves nepotism, networking, "cultural fit" and other under-handed ways of biasing the results. This is both unfair and a self-perpetuating prophecy. The explicit action of forcing a selection criteria will hopefully break the cycle and "reset" the system to an equal playing field.

jkoudys 6y ago
Yes the bias is huge, and doubly bothersome because even attempts at inclusion are framed from the perspective of the currently powerful. I look at how many big-name white male devs on my twitter feed make a big show of trying to raise up others. Yet it's a wildly disproportionate group of conventionally attractive women in their early 20s making corny 5-second comedy clips that are getting all the attention. That, or pushing model minority stereotypes that are more about making the man sharing them look good. Heaven forbid they include a woman with the same 5-pack of hoodies wardrobe and under-the-chin, poorly lit selfie they have, just because she's actually a good dev. While I can understand the resistance to selection criteria if it removes more nuanced decisions necessary in building a team, I can't think of a better way to offset those biases you describe. Those biases are extreme and clearly, left to our own devices, we do a bad job addressing or recognizing them.

jonathanstrange 6y ago

It's important to emphasize that this unfairness is only temporary, and it temporarily disadvantages mostly only people who have an advantage by sheer coincidence and not because of their abilities or achievements. There is a similar issue in the theory of just resource distribution, where it can be shown that a more egalitarian resource distribution can sometimes only be achieved by temporarily allowing transfers that are not Pareto optimal. In other words, to make a society juster in terms of overall resource distribution you might sometimes have to make everyone worse off for some time. (If you don't allow such transfers, you'll be forced to call a society with a Gini index close to 1 "just", which would be absurd.) On a side note, since that was mentioned by others, there is no such thing as "personal justice". Justice always concerns society as a whole, since it concerns the effects that the actions of members of society have on each other.

WatchDog 6y ago
In what way is this push for group identity based discrimination temporary? If anything it seems to be growing in scope and prevalence. Take for example, the New York times calling to end blind orchestra auditions, and take race into account for making hiring decisions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
LunaSea 6y ago
> It's important to emphasize that this unfairness is only temporary, and it temporarily disadvantages mostly only people who have an advantage by sheer coincidence and not because of their abilities or achievements. [Citation needed]
blub 6y ago
First of all, I don't believe it's temporary. At least in the EU we have at least a decade of positive discrimination and no plan to get rid of these policies. In fact more of them are under discussion. Secondly, it (not-)temporarily disadvantages everyone of a specific gender or race, no matter if they were advantaged in the first place.
haihaibye 6y ago

vertis 6y ago

Adding 1000lb on each side makes the initial values a rounding error. If you correct your hiring practices to be equal, eventually you do have equal as people churn through the workforce. (Note: Not disagreeing with bringing it into balance quicker, or making statements that it should be done this way)