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you shouldn't get credit for genetics Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed b

you shouldn't get credit for genetics Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on? Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics? How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?

rayiner 12y ago
You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion. I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over. That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  The only difference? If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?
  - rayiner 12y ago
    I'd rather be with a group of backwoods rednecks to be perfectly honest. But I digress. The economy isn't about heros fighting nature to save the day. Its about everyone working together to make an environment where creation is possible. You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? No, he's useless without being plugged into the larger economy. That larger economy is made up of ordinary people. They are poorly compensated not because their contribution doesn't matter, collectively, but because they are fungible. Is fungsbility a fair criterion for structuring an economy?
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      >You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? If I were to bet on it, I'd bet very heavily on him creating wealth under those circumstances. As measured by creating a system for survival. Obviously not as well as someone trained in such things (as implied by your dodge), but better than someone who lacked his intelligence, and more importantly, his drive. Ordinary people are compensated ordinarily because their contributions to the economy are ordinary. That actually does seem quite fair to me. I appreciate the work cleaners do, but their jobs simply don't contribute to the economy as much as building a large company like Facebook does. That's not to say everyone who is highly compensated contributes highly to society, we all know that isn't true. But that's also not really what we're discussing.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Maybe it only seems ordinary to you, because it doesn't interest you. Its upper-middle-class arrogance showing, that nobody's job is as important as jobs like mine. What makes cleaning 'ordinary'? Try firing your cleaner/garbage man/street sweeper for a month and see how that impacts you. And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? That's pretty circular reasoning. I'd argue that the esoteric jobs of building web gadgets are the fluff and foam of our economy, unimportant to real health and welfare, and way, way overcompensated.
        waterlesscloud 12y ago
        >And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? I have no idea where that came from or what it means, so I can't respond to it. I made a point of saying that I respect the importance of ordinary workers. I've spent most my life in ordinary jobs, your assumptions about me aside. However, the fact remains that individually their contribution to the economy is much, much less than the individual contribution of someone who founds and directs the construction and growth of a large company.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people? The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness, and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      I knew someone would likely make that response. Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness. Of course it's possible to imagine a scenario of puny or fat nerds vs gorgeous athletes, but that's adding in things that don't necessarily relate and it's pretty clearly avoiding the intent of the scenario.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness. Sure, and if you have free reign to choose on any traits you want, you'd probably not consider attractiveness directly, but instead consider a balance of general health, physical fitness, survival experience (and specific context if the expected survival situation was known in more detail), and general intelligence (though the latter wouldn't necessarily be very high on the list of priorities.) If all you have is intelligence and attractiveness, though, given that attractiveness has a correlation with (even though it isn't identical to) important things other than general intelligence that the hypothetical has prevented you from considering directly, you'd be ill advised to neglect it in favor of intelligence alone. In fact, the whole reason attractiveness evolved is is exactly about choosing who to be stuck in a long-term survival situation with (which is why it is linked to both general health and physical fitness.)
      - cpwright 12y ago
        There are studies that claim attractiveness is also correlated with intelligence. (And others claim that it is not). It is one of this science "just-so-stories", but the idea being that other attributes being equal more intelligence would allow you to more successfully mate with attractive people.
- spindritf 12y ago
  the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into The choices you make are heavily influenced by factors you lucked into, like intelligence, family, culture. And the choices you are presented with are even more influenced by your country of origin. It's not just outliers. What do you do at 90th or 50th percentile of intelligence? Those two people can make the same choices, say majoring in CS, with very different outcomes. How do you reward choices under those conditions? You could pay only for the results you like. But we pretty much already do that. What else is there? This is like a just world fallacy episode 2: the world may not be fair but surely we can make it so.
- orwhat 12y ago
  What would you think if I said there were indications that most conscious decision making isn't fully conscious at all? That, to a degree, free will is an illusory shadow of subconscious processes and that by the time you choose something, you've really already chosen it? And that genetics, prenatal development, and cultural influences all have a great say in those subconscious processes? For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion? I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    It often leads to the same conclusions. If people have free will, then we punish those who harm others. If people are finite state automatons, then we punish those who harm others, because that's how you change inputs into the finite state automatons.
    - orwhat 12y ago
      Hmm... I don't know about that. Justice is wildly different than reconditioning.
      - danielweber 12y ago
        Not necessarily fixing those who are caught, but pour encourager les autres. There are no morals here, since we are all just machines, and we're just trying to get the machines to do what we want.
        orwhat 12y ago
        Okay, sure. We have evidence that certain behaviors are predictable, but that doesn't eliminate free will entirely, it just limits it. It's also worth making a distinction between our subconscious and conscious choices, even if they are both more or less deterministic. At least we are aware of our conscious choices, and probably identify more strongly with them. The original discussion was about when someone deserves credit for their actions. And if there are two poles of always and never, can we land somewhere in between? And where?
- lmm 12y ago
  > You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion. It's not well-defined at all. If person A is "smarter" than person B, how can you tell whether that's the result of A working harder than B or A having lucked into greater intelligence? Measure how much time each spent studying in college? If person C "chooses" to be an alcoholic and is therefore unproductive, how much of that is "free will" (what does that even mean?) and how much is bad luck?
- ancap 12y ago
  > the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do The economy is an inanimate abstract. It does not strive for anything. It is not interested in anyone's perception of what is fair any more than my phone is interested in vulgar language. The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". To try to force some idea of justice, morality, fairness, equality, etc. into this equation is to say individuals do not have the right of free association; that they, the simpletons they surely are, are not smart enough to choose for themselves and judgement must be deferred to some all-knowing third-party. Please, just don't.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    > The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". No. It consists of that against the background understanding that parties cannot say " well I don't want to pay y, so I will kill you and take x." And in every extant example of a sophisticated economy, that understanding is enforced by a government that has guns. One can imagine scenarios in which that "all-knowing third party" does not exist, but I imagine if it were such a good idea it'd exist somewhere. Once the people come together to create that third party that has the guns that creates the background understandings that allow economies to exist, then they are entitled to say: "well what else do we want?"
    - ancap 12y ago
      > the people come together to create that third party that has the guns Can you cite me one example of this happening?
    - mattchew 12y ago
      That understanding doesn't come from the people with guns. Else the US would not need to spend $billions on guns to fight the drug trade. I don't say the folks with guns can't do constructive things to improve trade. They can. But they don't create that understanding you're talking about.
      - 12y ago
- mcelroyian 12y ago
  I choose how wealth is distributed every time I make a purchase. As do you.
  - foolrush 12y ago
    Except not quite. The invisible forces at work here are in the nature of your “choices” and your agency to participate within that value system. Few here may be able to participate in the distribution of wealth within the high end of the luxury car market via their purchases, and fewer still via their purchasing or selling of energy market entities. Along this path, we can also be critical of the options available and the hegemonic / power forces at work that birthed them. All in all, it is a questionable suggestion that buys into (no pun intended) a cascading wall of myth.

rayiner 12y ago

You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion. I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over. That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
The only difference? If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?
- rayiner 12y ago
  I'd rather be with a group of backwoods rednecks to be perfectly honest. But I digress. The economy isn't about heros fighting nature to save the day. Its about everyone working together to make an environment where creation is possible. You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? No, he's useless without being plugged into the larger economy. That larger economy is made up of ordinary people. They are poorly compensated not because their contribution doesn't matter, collectively, but because they are fungible. Is fungsbility a fair criterion for structuring an economy?
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    >You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? If I were to bet on it, I'd bet very heavily on him creating wealth under those circumstances. As measured by creating a system for survival. Obviously not as well as someone trained in such things (as implied by your dodge), but better than someone who lacked his intelligence, and more importantly, his drive. Ordinary people are compensated ordinarily because their contributions to the economy are ordinary. That actually does seem quite fair to me. I appreciate the work cleaners do, but their jobs simply don't contribute to the economy as much as building a large company like Facebook does. That's not to say everyone who is highly compensated contributes highly to society, we all know that isn't true. But that's also not really what we're discussing.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Maybe it only seems ordinary to you, because it doesn't interest you. Its upper-middle-class arrogance showing, that nobody's job is as important as jobs like mine. What makes cleaning 'ordinary'? Try firing your cleaner/garbage man/street sweeper for a month and see how that impacts you. And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? That's pretty circular reasoning. I'd argue that the esoteric jobs of building web gadgets are the fluff and foam of our economy, unimportant to real health and welfare, and way, way overcompensated.
      - waterlesscloud 12y ago
        >And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? I have no idea where that came from or what it means, so I can't respond to it. I made a point of saying that I respect the importance of ordinary workers. I've spent most my life in ordinary jobs, your assumptions about me aside. However, the fact remains that individually their contribution to the economy is much, much less than the individual contribution of someone who founds and directs the construction and growth of a large company.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people? The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness, and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    I knew someone would likely make that response. Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness. Of course it's possible to imagine a scenario of puny or fat nerds vs gorgeous athletes, but that's adding in things that don't necessarily relate and it's pretty clearly avoiding the intent of the scenario.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness. Sure, and if you have free reign to choose on any traits you want, you'd probably not consider attractiveness directly, but instead consider a balance of general health, physical fitness, survival experience (and specific context if the expected survival situation was known in more detail), and general intelligence (though the latter wouldn't necessarily be very high on the list of priorities.) If all you have is intelligence and attractiveness, though, given that attractiveness has a correlation with (even though it isn't identical to) important things other than general intelligence that the hypothetical has prevented you from considering directly, you'd be ill advised to neglect it in favor of intelligence alone. In fact, the whole reason attractiveness evolved is is exactly about choosing who to be stuck in a long-term survival situation with (which is why it is linked to both general health and physical fitness.)
    - cpwright 12y ago
      There are studies that claim attractiveness is also correlated with intelligence. (And others claim that it is not). It is one of this science "just-so-stories", but the idea being that other attributes being equal more intelligence would allow you to more successfully mate with attractive people.
spindritf 12y ago
the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into The choices you make are heavily influenced by factors you lucked into, like intelligence, family, culture. And the choices you are presented with are even more influenced by your country of origin. It's not just outliers. What do you do at 90th or 50th percentile of intelligence? Those two people can make the same choices, say majoring in CS, with very different outcomes. How do you reward choices under those conditions? You could pay only for the results you like. But we pretty much already do that. What else is there? This is like a just world fallacy episode 2: the world may not be fair but surely we can make it so.
orwhat 12y ago
What would you think if I said there were indications that most conscious decision making isn't fully conscious at all? That, to a degree, free will is an illusory shadow of subconscious processes and that by the time you choose something, you've really already chosen it? And that genetics, prenatal development, and cultural influences all have a great say in those subconscious processes? For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion? I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.
- danielweber 12y ago
  It often leads to the same conclusions. If people have free will, then we punish those who harm others. If people are finite state automatons, then we punish those who harm others, because that's how you change inputs into the finite state automatons.
  - orwhat 12y ago
    Hmm... I don't know about that. Justice is wildly different than reconditioning.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      Not necessarily fixing those who are caught, but pour encourager les autres. There are no morals here, since we are all just machines, and we're just trying to get the machines to do what we want.
      - orwhat 12y ago
        Okay, sure. We have evidence that certain behaviors are predictable, but that doesn't eliminate free will entirely, it just limits it. It's also worth making a distinction between our subconscious and conscious choices, even if they are both more or less deterministic. At least we are aware of our conscious choices, and probably identify more strongly with them. The original discussion was about when someone deserves credit for their actions. And if there are two poles of always and never, can we land somewhere in between? And where?
lmm 12y ago
> You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion. It's not well-defined at all. If person A is "smarter" than person B, how can you tell whether that's the result of A working harder than B or A having lucked into greater intelligence? Measure how much time each spent studying in college? If person C "chooses" to be an alcoholic and is therefore unproductive, how much of that is "free will" (what does that even mean?) and how much is bad luck?
ancap 12y ago
> the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do The economy is an inanimate abstract. It does not strive for anything. It is not interested in anyone's perception of what is fair any more than my phone is interested in vulgar language. The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". To try to force some idea of justice, morality, fairness, equality, etc. into this equation is to say individuals do not have the right of free association; that they, the simpletons they surely are, are not smart enough to choose for themselves and judgement must be deferred to some all-knowing third-party. Please, just don't.
- rayiner 12y ago
  > The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". No. It consists of that against the background understanding that parties cannot say " well I don't want to pay y, so I will kill you and take x." And in every extant example of a sophisticated economy, that understanding is enforced by a government that has guns. One can imagine scenarios in which that "all-knowing third party" does not exist, but I imagine if it were such a good idea it'd exist somewhere. Once the people come together to create that third party that has the guns that creates the background understandings that allow economies to exist, then they are entitled to say: "well what else do we want?"
  - ancap 12y ago
    > the people come together to create that third party that has the guns Can you cite me one example of this happening?
  - mattchew 12y ago
    That understanding doesn't come from the people with guns. Else the US would not need to spend $billions on guns to fight the drug trade. I don't say the folks with guns can't do constructive things to improve trade. They can. But they don't create that understanding you're talking about.
    - 12y ago
mcelroyian 12y ago
I choose how wealth is distributed every time I make a purchase. As do you.
- foolrush 12y ago
  Except not quite. The invisible forces at work here are in the nature of your “choices” and your agency to participate within that value system. Few here may be able to participate in the distribution of wealth within the high end of the luxury car market via their purchases, and fewer still via their purchasing or selling of energy market entities. Along this path, we can also be critical of the options available and the hegemonic / power forces at work that birthed them. All in all, it is a questionable suggestion that buys into (no pun intended) a cascading wall of myth.