3 ms·

Perhaps a naive idea, but: wouldn't it be better and simpler to simply state that you can only discriminate on factors of actual relevance? Ancestry or sexualit

Perhaps a naive idea, but: wouldn't it be better and simpler to simply state that you can only discriminate on factors of actual relevance? Ancestry or sexuality would not be relevant to a rental contract, but both could be relevant to a medical study. Level of income would not be relevant to your right to take a taxi (as long as you can pay the bill), but could be relevant for a rental contract. Trying to list all possible factors is a never-ending task. Caste? Gender? Income? Eye color? Medical history? Height? Favorite color? Any or all of those could be relevant in some circumstances, and not in others.

hef19898 3y ago
Even simpler, you are not llowed to discriminate at all for whatever reason.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  So, you'd be happy for it to be illegal for you to choose somebody to marry? Would need to be a lottery system.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Me selecting a spouse is not me discriminating again all the other women... Strange way to understand my comment. There is certain subset of HN users so, that seems to be very fine with discrimination.
    - jtbayly 3y ago
      Then the person that chooses who to rent their apartment to is not discriminating against anybody either, right?
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. But I assume you are not that ignorant to not see difference, are you? Edit: Come to think of it, aren't Indians totally fine with arranged marriages?
    - semanticist 3y ago
      Discrimination just means "making a choice" and it's not a bad thing. The problem is "unfair discrimination", where you take factors into consideration that aren't relevant. If you were to ban all discrimination, then you couldn't choose who you hire for a job - after all, you couldn't discriminate against people without relevant experience, or skills, or abilities, could you? Relevant discrimination is not only okay, it's essential! So the problem then becomes trying to define laws in such a way as to disallow the unfair discrimination while also allowing reasonable discrimination. People who are determined to be, eg, racist or homophobic will try and use the very edges of the anti-unfair-discrimination laws to get away with unfair discrimination that is obviously unfair but _technically legal_. And that's how you end up with complex laws and lists of protected characteristics.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Your nickname checks out. How I hate people argueing on semantics...
        semanticist 3y ago
        I was just trying to explain why "just ban all discrimination" isn't a viable strategy, but I guess it's easier to just ignore complexity and pretend that these complex social issues are left to exist because of... people are just dumber than you?
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  If I'm hiring a programmer can I discriminate based on skill and experience?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Of course not, you do that based on leet code, don't you?
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      What? No we don’t. My point is that removing all discrimination would remove any flexibility to chose one person over another.
logicchains 3y ago
>Level of income would not be relevant to your right to take a taxi (as long as you can pay the bill), but could be relevant for a rental contract How do you define relevant? If statistically ethnicity was shown to strongly predict the chance of someone not paying their rent, would that count as "relevant"? Statistically race is predictive of many things, but in the west people have decided that racial discrimination is inherently bad because it punishes individuals for things they have no control over (their race), so the discrimination is not allowed even when justified in a statistical sense.
jandrese 3y ago
The problem is that it assumes everybody is being reasonable, but if that were the case these laws wouldn't be necessary in the first place. They have to be fully spelled out because otherwise the assholes that these laws were written for would try to claim that they shouldn't apply for any number of reasons. "Oh no we couldn't hire a woman as an advertising executive, we hold one of our conferences in a men only resort."
autoexec 3y ago
We're certainly heading into a digital caste system where anything about you can be used to discriminate against you in everyday transactions where they have no place.
hprotagonist 3y ago
it’s a nice thought but it is indeed so naive an idea that, for example, it took less than a year for the explicit enumeration of certain rights to be amended into the Constitution. (originally it was hoped that much of the bill of rights would be implicitly understood from the original text; turns out, it was not). Like it or not we do seem to need a (known to be non-exhaustive) list of categories to point at and occasionally update and say “these are things about persons that you cannot use against them”. In the context of modern discrimination law, these are called “protected classes”, and it seems wise to add caste to the list: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protected-employment-discrimination https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte... You could well argue that caste is implicit in either religion or race, but it’s a lot simpler to just enumerate it again and be clear at the cost of a little redundancy, especially when we know that these words are going to be sliced and diced as carefully as possible by adversarially-minded legal experts to their advantage.
qez2 3y ago
[dead]
didibus 3y ago
Then you'd need a test for relevancy. Otherwise people could show correlation studies or data, or even stereotypes could be considered relevant.
FuckButtons 3y ago
Just because there are infinitely many categories does not mean there are infinitely many ways people are discriminated against, this is a silly argument. There is a concrete and long established form of discrimination here, we don’t need to generalize the principle.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Broadly speaking, it seems society is best served by these laws being bright lines both in terms of category of the aggrieved and category of participation in society. Otherwise, we leave much open to court and enforcement interpretation. In this example, I'm reluctant to hand either the executive or the court as much leeway as "actual relevance" would hand them. Trying to list all possible factors is a never-ending task, but these are issues society itself tends to be contentious on; given that people don't fully agree on the underlying philosophy of why we pass these laws, and the laws carry the threat of government force with them, it's probably wise to make them clear.
SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
Better to forbid discrimination based on factors the individual did not choose. Anything they were taught before they became a legally able to make their own choices (religion), physical characteristics like genetics, historical characteristics like heritage or caste, etc.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Perhaps a naive idea, but: wouldn't it be better and simpler to simply state that you can only discriminate on factors of actual relevance? No, that would be much more complicated, because it would make literally every decision in the subject domain presumptively invalid, because every decision discriminates on some grounds. And relevance is highly subjective, where its applicable as an exception to laws otherwise liniting discrimination on particular bases, the relevance analysis is the complicated part of applying the law, the identified categories which narrow where that even needs to be done are the simple part. Note that for government discrimination, it kind of works that way, but different bases of discrimination have different relevance tests.

hef19898 3y ago

Even simpler, you are not llowed to discriminate at all for whatever reason.

jtbayly 3y ago
So, you'd be happy for it to be illegal for you to choose somebody to marry? Would need to be a lottery system.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Me selecting a spouse is not me discriminating again all the other women... Strange way to understand my comment. There is certain subset of HN users so, that seems to be very fine with discrimination.
  - jtbayly 3y ago
    Then the person that chooses who to rent their apartment to is not discriminating against anybody either, right?
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. But I assume you are not that ignorant to not see difference, are you? Edit: Come to think of it, aren't Indians totally fine with arranged marriages?
  - semanticist 3y ago
    Discrimination just means "making a choice" and it's not a bad thing. The problem is "unfair discrimination", where you take factors into consideration that aren't relevant. If you were to ban all discrimination, then you couldn't choose who you hire for a job - after all, you couldn't discriminate against people without relevant experience, or skills, or abilities, could you? Relevant discrimination is not only okay, it's essential! So the problem then becomes trying to define laws in such a way as to disallow the unfair discrimination while also allowing reasonable discrimination. People who are determined to be, eg, racist or homophobic will try and use the very edges of the anti-unfair-discrimination laws to get away with unfair discrimination that is obviously unfair but _technically legal_. And that's how you end up with complex laws and lists of protected characteristics.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Your nickname checks out. How I hate people argueing on semantics...
      - semanticist 3y ago
        I was just trying to explain why "just ban all discrimination" isn't a viable strategy, but I guess it's easier to just ignore complexity and pretend that these complex social issues are left to exist because of... people are just dumber than you?
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
If I'm hiring a programmer can I discriminate based on skill and experience?
- hef19898 3y ago
  Of course not, you do that based on leet code, don't you?
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    What? No we don’t. My point is that removing all discrimination would remove any flexibility to chose one person over another.

logicchains 3y ago

>Level of income would not be relevant to your right to take a taxi (as long as you can pay the bill), but could be relevant for a rental contract How do you define relevant? If statistically ethnicity was shown to strongly predict the chance of someone not paying their rent, would that count as "relevant"? Statistically race is predictive of many things, but in the west people have decided that racial discrimination is inherently bad because it punishes individuals for things they have no control over (their race), so the discrimination is not allowed even when justified in a statistical sense.

jandrese 3y ago

The problem is that it assumes everybody is being reasonable, but if that were the case these laws wouldn't be necessary in the first place. They have to be fully spelled out because otherwise the assholes that these laws were written for would try to claim that they shouldn't apply for any number of reasons. "Oh no we couldn't hire a woman as an advertising executive, we hold one of our conferences in a men only resort."

autoexec 3y ago

We're certainly heading into a digital caste system where anything about you can be used to discriminate against you in everyday transactions where they have no place.

hprotagonist 3y ago

it’s a nice thought but it is indeed so naive an idea that, for example, it took less than a year for the explicit enumeration of certain rights to be amended into the Constitution. (originally it was hoped that much of the bill of rights would be implicitly understood from the original text; turns out, it was not). Like it or not we do seem to need a (known to be non-exhaustive) list of categories to point at and occasionally update and say “these are things about persons that you cannot use against them”. In the context of modern discrimination law, these are called “protected classes”, and it seems wise to add caste to the list: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protected-employment-discrimination https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-who-protecte... You could well argue that caste is implicit in either religion or race, but it’s a lot simpler to just enumerate it again and be clear at the cost of a little redundancy, especially when we know that these words are going to be sliced and diced as carefully as possible by adversarially-minded legal experts to their advantage.

qez2 3y ago

[dead]

didibus 3y ago

Then you'd need a test for relevancy. Otherwise people could show correlation studies or data, or even stereotypes could be considered relevant.

FuckButtons 3y ago

Just because there are infinitely many categories does not mean there are infinitely many ways people are discriminated against, this is a silly argument. There is a concrete and long established form of discrimination here, we don’t need to generalize the principle.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Broadly speaking, it seems society is best served by these laws being bright lines both in terms of category of the aggrieved and category of participation in society. Otherwise, we leave much open to court and enforcement interpretation. In this example, I'm reluctant to hand either the executive or the court as much leeway as "actual relevance" would hand them. Trying to list all possible factors is a never-ending task, but these are issues society itself tends to be contentious on; given that people don't fully agree on the underlying philosophy of why we pass these laws, and the laws carry the threat of government force with them, it's probably wise to make them clear.

SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago

Better to forbid discrimination based on factors the individual did not choose. Anything they were taught before they became a legally able to make their own choices (religion), physical characteristics like genetics, historical characteristics like heritage or caste, etc.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Perhaps a naive idea, but: wouldn't it be better and simpler to simply state that you can only discriminate on factors of actual relevance? No, that would be much more complicated, because it would make literally every decision in the subject domain presumptively invalid, because every decision discriminates on some grounds. And relevance is highly subjective, where its applicable as an exception to laws otherwise liniting discrimination on particular bases, the relevance analysis is the complicated part of applying the law, the identified categories which narrow where that even needs to be done are the simple part. Note that for government discrimination, it kind of works that way, but different bases of discrimination have different relevance tests.