9 ms·

This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they hist

by dcow 3y ago

This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they historically have been) then I’d have no problem continuing to fight until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the goal posts to “equality of outcome” (what people mean when they say “racial equity”) and say “look we’re still a racist society” I just can’t get behind that definition and framework. The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore. We’ve been legally equal for at least 3 generations. Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations. I have no problems with people coming together to help those communities. But we can’t let racial equity seep into our legal framework or we’ll literally be discriminating based on race all over again and all the way down. No horrors of the past justify that level of wrongness. It’s hopeless and fruitless to try and design a “racially equitable” society, and you’re going to always just be an angry person if you set out on that path. All that said, as always with these situations, I ask “what is the end goal and how can I help get there”. 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause. If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers. I would do it because there’s a clear goal (correct for the past) and path to achieve it (pay money). What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.

camgunz 3y ago
LBJ gave the commencement speech at Howard more than 50 years ago and said: That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others. But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. --- It's gonna take a very long time. Reparations are valued in the trillions. Truly insane violence has been perpetuated on racial minorities in America. It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.
- dcow 3y ago
  Then why have the goal posts moved? That’s my only challenge to the status quo. Presumably they’ve moved because moving them is the only way (or at least the only cheap/easy way) to maintain a narrative of injustice. Shouldn't we be able to pursue this vision without frivolously chasing a metric we have absolutely no understand of let alone control over? It’s subtle but the motives are very different: if you want to maintain a narrative of injustice, then you will find ways to do that. OTOH, if you want to build a narrative of equality, success, and support, then you need to be open to the outcome that racial undertones and the victim status of minorities will fade into history. Thats the entire goal, right?
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    I think the problem is obviously a racial hierarchy is motivated to pretend that minority status is already faded into history, especially if it isn't faded right now. Similar to how my boss says that his kneecapping my career is in the past now, there's a new peer review quarter and I have new opportunities so why should I be mad? Maybe sure 10 years from now it'll be whatever, but he just sabotaged me last quarter. Of course to him it's water under a boat, he has every motivation to pretend it to be so, and to say my pointing out that I'm still a harmed party to be goalpost moving or whatever nonsense he wants to come up with to say it doesn't exist anymore and therefore he doesn't even have to lift a finger to make it up to me.
    - dcow 3y ago
      It’s important for me to be very precise and clear here: I am not arguing that speaking up and pointing out that you were actively wronged is moving the goalposts. It’s literally not and I’m not trying to silence you or discourage the royal your initiative to do so! I think your boss should probably be fired and you should get a bonus. There are, however, people making the argument that we need to focus on equality of outcome as the solution (vs firing your boss and paying you damages). And followers of this idealogical doctrine have made political inroads in schooling and government. It’s this behavior specifically that I’m criticizing. Yes, part of the problem is that we’re such a binary society so these nuances get bucketed into larger issues and it’s all really hard to sort out.
EatingWithForks 3y ago
[flagged]
- carefulobserver 3y ago
  Under what moral philosophy is it acceptable to hold people responsible for things they had no part in? Other than your abstract idea that "history should be fair," do you have any justification for this idea?
  - greedo 3y ago
    I had no part in interning Americans of Japanese descent during WW2. But I believe that the country I live in is responsible for addressing that wrong. And I feel the same about addressing the wrongs of slavery and racism that continue to this day.
    - meowkit 3y ago
      > addressing that wrong How does one do that? You can't un-enslave, or un-intern, or un-commit atrocities, so your best bet is some >subjective< analog of recompense. Then who is to decide what is satisfactory compensation? You? Me? Voters? The government? Universities?
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        > Voters? The government? Yep, those two.
        dcow 3y ago
        "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury." --Alexander Fraser Tytler
        greedo 3y ago
kajecounterhack 3y ago
> 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause Is ending systemic injustice that hard to grok? Certain races in the United States face discrimination on a daily basis, and in addition to the social effects of this they are also significantly disadvantaged on education and family income. You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police? > If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers. The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete. There are a _lot_ of kinds of reparations that could happen beyond affirmative action (e.g. better investment in black-majority communities via schools, favorable loans, etc) and they don't have to come out of just white folks' pockets (just spend taxpayer money so we all share the burden). > The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore. Opportunity is a function of preparation and people taking chances on you. - Preparation costs time and money and racial minorities have measurably less time and money on average. - People taking chances on you requires network. Folks from historically disadvantaged races don't have the benefit of legacy, or even role models (consider being a mexican high schooler visiting Google campus -- would you think becoming a software engineer there is attainable for you?) The psychological impact of stuff like this is profound. A black friend I met in college went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing. > What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset. As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance. More importantly, as a white person _you started with a better dice roll_ so you should compete against folks who started with similar dice rolls. Affirmative action doesn't mean black folks get guaranteed admission to harvard; they still have to compete against other high-achieving people of the same race. I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out. Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child. They have some solid advantages: they won't get killed for calling the police, they have you as their parent (you're posting multiple paragraphs on hacker news about paying $5k+ in reparations, so you're probably doing fine), they probably won't have problems booking an AirBnB or with a doctor treating them like they're 5 years older, and they probably won't do jail time for smoking marijuana or even doing coke if we're being honest.
tourmalinetaco 3y ago
I’d never pay that. Because the money would go into someone’s pockets, sure, but not the disadvantaged. Just some fat cats of the “right” color running the group collecting the money. I mean look at what happened with Black Lives Matter. > Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations. And there are poor, intensely disparaged communities in majority populations. A great example is “American Hollow”, a 1999 documentary by Rory Kennedy about an Appalachian family, their life with poverty, and making ends meet in the mountains. Generational wealth exists, and Blacks are certainly affected, but I’m not convinced that trying to “shift” wealth so unnaturally (and especially in such racist ways) really helps anything.
- dcow 3y ago
  I mean yeah it was a rhetorical device. You’re paying for people to stop making everything about race, was the point.
suresk 3y ago
I agree that the goals and means to get to them are fuzzy and it feels frustrating at times, and things like affirmative action felt like trying to make two wrongs equal a right. But it also feels shitty and callous to say "Sorry about the whole segregation thing, hopefully everything evens out in a few hundred years or so.." I think the hard part is that "Equality of Opportunity" is either so strictly defined that it is pointless, or it very quickly becomes really squishy and feels like "Equality of Outcome". Most college applicants today are going to be something like 2 - 4 generations removed from official, legally sanctioned segregation (a situation I think most people would agree doesn't count as equality of opportunity). Would you argue that the average white student and average black student have equality of opportunity today?
strstr 3y ago
Is attending a prestigious college an outcome or an opportunity?
somewhereoutth 3y ago
If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing - which I'm sure we can agree is not the case. We should not force equality of outcome, but we should observe it and use it as a guide to whether or not we are being successful in providing equality of opportunity.
- soundnote 3y ago
  For population level differences to be proof of discrimination, you'd have to presume the sameness of background/culture, spread of abilities and spread of interests, which is absurd on its face.
- dcow 3y ago
  This only holds under a homogenous monoculture. What if some population doesn't value success the same way as another? You’ll see variance of outcomes for completely normal and acceptable reasons.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  That’s just false. One doesn’t follow from the other.
- huuman1212 3y ago
  [dead]
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  > If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing Do Indian people massively disproportionately own hotels because other ethnic groups don't have the same opportunities? Is there something fundamentally wrong with non hotel owning ethnic groups? It's not systemic Indian supremacy, it's just historical accidents compounded through network effects. Noticeable differences between populations frequently occur by random chance, they're usually evidence of nothing at all.
achenet 3y ago
the problem with chasing "equality of opportunity" is that it's basically impossible to quantify. And when you do quantify it, you end up usually looking at something that is an outcome. Example: assume that a) whether or not your parents are married when you are born and b) how rich your parents are affect your opportunities for success. These assumptions seem reasonable to me, but please tell me if you disagree with them. In order to equalize opportunity for a new generation across different groups of people, you need to equalize outcomes amongst the current generation. More generally, drastically unequal outcomes can often point to unequal opportunities earlier in the pipeline. Assuming intelligence and conscientiousness, the two traits most correlated with success, are more or less equally distributed across all gene pools, then it does seem likely that if some groups tend to be less successful than others, it may be a cultural thing, because as a far amount of data has shown, having rich parents greatly increases the chances that you end up rich. See for example all the legacy admissions at Harvard. Of course, if you can reasonably show that, much like say the genes that make for good sprinters (lots of fast twitch muscle fibers), the genes for intelligence are not evenly distributed, then you could argue that a an imbalance of outcomes does not necessarily imply an imbalance of opportunities. In practice, however, I do no think that American society is equal opportunity. I'm a heterosexual white male, and honestly I think I've had an easier life as a result of it than I would have with pretty much any other set of gender/skin color/orientation.

by dcow 3y ago

camgunz 3y ago

LBJ gave the commencement speech at Howard more than 50 years ago and said: That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others. But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. --- It's gonna take a very long time. Reparations are valued in the trillions. Truly insane violence has been perpetuated on racial minorities in America. It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.

dcow 3y ago
Then why have the goal posts moved? That’s my only challenge to the status quo. Presumably they’ve moved because moving them is the only way (or at least the only cheap/easy way) to maintain a narrative of injustice. Shouldn't we be able to pursue this vision without frivolously chasing a metric we have absolutely no understand of let alone control over? It’s subtle but the motives are very different: if you want to maintain a narrative of injustice, then you will find ways to do that. OTOH, if you want to build a narrative of equality, success, and support, then you need to be open to the outcome that racial undertones and the victim status of minorities will fade into history. Thats the entire goal, right?
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  I think the problem is obviously a racial hierarchy is motivated to pretend that minority status is already faded into history, especially if it isn't faded right now. Similar to how my boss says that his kneecapping my career is in the past now, there's a new peer review quarter and I have new opportunities so why should I be mad? Maybe sure 10 years from now it'll be whatever, but he just sabotaged me last quarter. Of course to him it's water under a boat, he has every motivation to pretend it to be so, and to say my pointing out that I'm still a harmed party to be goalpost moving or whatever nonsense he wants to come up with to say it doesn't exist anymore and therefore he doesn't even have to lift a finger to make it up to me.
  - dcow 3y ago
    It’s important for me to be very precise and clear here: I am not arguing that speaking up and pointing out that you were actively wronged is moving the goalposts. It’s literally not and I’m not trying to silence you or discourage the royal your initiative to do so! I think your boss should probably be fired and you should get a bonus. There are, however, people making the argument that we need to focus on equality of outcome as the solution (vs firing your boss and paying you damages). And followers of this idealogical doctrine have made political inroads in schooling and government. It’s this behavior specifically that I’m criticizing. Yes, part of the problem is that we’re such a binary society so these nuances get bucketed into larger issues and it’s all really hard to sort out.

EatingWithForks 3y ago

[flagged]

carefulobserver 3y ago
Under what moral philosophy is it acceptable to hold people responsible for things they had no part in? Other than your abstract idea that "history should be fair," do you have any justification for this idea?
- greedo 3y ago
  I had no part in interning Americans of Japanese descent during WW2. But I believe that the country I live in is responsible for addressing that wrong. And I feel the same about addressing the wrongs of slavery and racism that continue to this day.
  - meowkit 3y ago
    > addressing that wrong How does one do that? You can't un-enslave, or un-intern, or un-commit atrocities, so your best bet is some >subjective< analog of recompense. Then who is to decide what is satisfactory compensation? You? Me? Voters? The government? Universities?
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      > Voters? The government? Yep, those two.
      - dcow 3y ago
        "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury." --Alexander Fraser Tytler
        greedo 3y ago

kajecounterhack 3y ago

> 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause Is ending systemic injustice that hard to grok? Certain races in the United States face discrimination on a daily basis, and in addition to the social effects of this they are also significantly disadvantaged on education and family income. You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police? > If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers. The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete. There are a _lot_ of kinds of reparations that could happen beyond affirmative action (e.g. better investment in black-majority communities via schools, favorable loans, etc) and they don't have to come out of just white folks' pockets (just spend taxpayer money so we all share the burden). > The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore. Opportunity is a function of preparation and people taking chances on you. - Preparation costs time and money and racial minorities have measurably less time and money on average. - People taking chances on you requires network. Folks from historically disadvantaged races don't have the benefit of legacy, or even role models (consider being a mexican high schooler visiting Google campus -- would you think becoming a software engineer there is attainable for you?) The psychological impact of stuff like this is profound. A black friend I met in college went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing. > What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset. As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance. More importantly, as a white person _you started with a better dice roll_ so you should compete against folks who started with similar dice rolls. Affirmative action doesn't mean black folks get guaranteed admission to harvard; they still have to compete against other high-achieving people of the same race. I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out. Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child. They have some solid advantages: they won't get killed for calling the police, they have you as their parent (you're posting multiple paragraphs on hacker news about paying $5k+ in reparations, so you're probably doing fine), they probably won't have problems booking an AirBnB or with a doctor treating them like they're 5 years older, and they probably won't do jail time for smoking marijuana or even doing coke if we're being honest.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago

I’d never pay that. Because the money would go into someone’s pockets, sure, but not the disadvantaged. Just some fat cats of the “right” color running the group collecting the money. I mean look at what happened with Black Lives Matter. > Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations. And there are poor, intensely disparaged communities in majority populations. A great example is “American Hollow”, a 1999 documentary by Rory Kennedy about an Appalachian family, their life with poverty, and making ends meet in the mountains. Generational wealth exists, and Blacks are certainly affected, but I’m not convinced that trying to “shift” wealth so unnaturally (and especially in such racist ways) really helps anything.

dcow 3y ago
I mean yeah it was a rhetorical device. You’re paying for people to stop making everything about race, was the point.

suresk 3y ago

I agree that the goals and means to get to them are fuzzy and it feels frustrating at times, and things like affirmative action felt like trying to make two wrongs equal a right. But it also feels shitty and callous to say "Sorry about the whole segregation thing, hopefully everything evens out in a few hundred years or so.." I think the hard part is that "Equality of Opportunity" is either so strictly defined that it is pointless, or it very quickly becomes really squishy and feels like "Equality of Outcome". Most college applicants today are going to be something like 2 - 4 generations removed from official, legally sanctioned segregation (a situation I think most people would agree doesn't count as equality of opportunity). Would you argue that the average white student and average black student have equality of opportunity today?

strstr 3y ago

Is attending a prestigious college an outcome or an opportunity?

somewhereoutth 3y ago

If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing - which I'm sure we can agree is not the case. We should not force equality of outcome, but we should observe it and use it as a guide to whether or not we are being successful in providing equality of opportunity.

soundnote 3y ago
For population level differences to be proof of discrimination, you'd have to presume the sameness of background/culture, spread of abilities and spread of interests, which is absurd on its face.
dcow 3y ago
This only holds under a homogenous monoculture. What if some population doesn't value success the same way as another? You’ll see variance of outcomes for completely normal and acceptable reasons.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
That’s just false. One doesn’t follow from the other.
huuman1212 3y ago
[dead]
TexanFeller 3y ago
> If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing Do Indian people massively disproportionately own hotels because other ethnic groups don't have the same opportunities? Is there something fundamentally wrong with non hotel owning ethnic groups? It's not systemic Indian supremacy, it's just historical accidents compounded through network effects. Noticeable differences between populations frequently occur by random chance, they're usually evidence of nothing at all.

achenet 3y ago

the problem with chasing "equality of opportunity" is that it's basically impossible to quantify. And when you do quantify it, you end up usually looking at something that is an outcome. Example: assume that a) whether or not your parents are married when you are born and b) how rich your parents are affect your opportunities for success. These assumptions seem reasonable to me, but please tell me if you disagree with them. In order to equalize opportunity for a new generation across different groups of people, you need to equalize outcomes amongst the current generation. More generally, drastically unequal outcomes can often point to unequal opportunities earlier in the pipeline. Assuming intelligence and conscientiousness, the two traits most correlated with success, are more or less equally distributed across all gene pools, then it does seem likely that if some groups tend to be less successful than others, it may be a cultural thing, because as a far amount of data has shown, having rich parents greatly increases the chances that you end up rich. See for example all the legacy admissions at Harvard. Of course, if you can reasonably show that, much like say the genes that make for good sprinters (lots of fast twitch muscle fibers), the genes for intelligence are not evenly distributed, then you could argue that a an imbalance of outcomes does not necessarily imply an imbalance of opportunities. In practice, however, I do no think that American society is equal opportunity. I'm a heterosexual white male, and honestly I think I've had an easier life as a result of it than I would have with pretty much any other set of gender/skin color/orientation.