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To me, the purpose of quotas or affirmative action is to undo a previous distortion. In my experience, if you look at young kids, no matter the gender, ethnici
by captainmuon 5y ago
To me, the purpose of quotas or affirmative action is to undo a previous distortion.
In my experience, if you look at young kids, no matter the gender, ethnicity or class, they are all equally interested in science. But as they grow older, they start to move apart. Many boys who want to study but don't know what choose physics or computer science as a "default" (like I did). Girls are more likely to default to humanities or a teaching career. The really passionate kids are less affected by this, and choose what they want, but I know a bunch of people who chose the supposed "safe default" and were miserable or dropped out. It is not just bad for them, but also for society, if we are training some additional mediocre men, and missing some talented women in a field.
Same applies to other categories. When I look at my kid's classmates, you can tell unfortunately who's parents have the time and money and energy (and habit from their own upbringing) to support them properly in school, to read to them, and so on. The difference is minimal in Kindergarten, but kids drift apart quickly.
What I'm trying to say is there is a funnel in life. People who are not as priviliged as maybe I am, often "play in hard mode". To me, quotas etc. are not exactly about achiving justice or fairness or equality (you could do that by disadvantaging the priviliged, so that everybody is equally bad off. I think that is what many people fear when they think of affirmative action!). It is about righting a systematic wrong.
And it is not like AA means we will be giving stupid people scholarships. Right now we are often accidentially prefering less qualified people just because they are white or men. Trying to steer against that can only be a net win for society.
- raxxorrax 5y agoNeither study is a safe default as that would mean there would be an abundance of people that actually finished studying physics or computer science. The internet might heavily distorts reality here. The standard academic career of today is still economics and chosen by men and women in rather similar amounts. I heard some guys saying they chose economics for the girls, but I think this is an edge case... It is true that few men go into teaching and few women into computer science. But I don't think you should force people or even worse, attest discrimination. Surprisingly mostly men get implicated, so much about sexism, so I also would dispute this comment: > Right now we are often accidentially prefering less qualified people just because they are white or men I don't believe being white nets you anything, on the contrary. Educated parents are indeed a huge advantage but that certainly isn't for the "system" to fix, even if it could do that somehow.
- tanko_sarton 5y agoHey, saw some posts of yours about Urbit. Someone very close to me is getting sucked in and I'm worried, Partially because I don't understand it. Could we please get in touch so I can learn about this? It's very scary and this person has been saying a lot of strange offputting things for some time. They went to the urbit conference that just happened. Now that I'm looking into Urbit and its ideology as well as Yarvin's I see what's going on. I'm familiar with Yarvin and Land as well as Land's serious philosophical predecessors for a long time, but the technological side escapes me. Please let me know if you can help me with this, and if so how we can get in contact.