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Comment by selllikesybok | Hacker News Reader

Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?

Because it is ambiguous goal which under any reasonable interpretation has massive consequences and major unintended side-effects. My favorite sport is basketball. What is the 'equality of outcome' in the context of the NBA? Is it that players are evenly distributed across gender lines? Across economic lines? Across national lines? Across racial or ethnic or religious lines? In our society, it would probably be understood that NBA should be proportionally represented by each identity group. So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

The other point is that in a free society, you cannot guarantee equality of outcome because people are going to make personal choices that will be magnified and influenced by whatever sub-culture they are immersed in. Professional basketball in the early days was over-represented by Jews, because it just so happened that interest in the game went viral in that sub-culture.

Tech has an over-representation of men because it grew out of a particular nerd sub-culture. There's nothing wrong with doing outreach to get non-traditional sub-groups developing an interest in programming, just like there's nothing wrong with the NBA running clinics in China to get Chinese kids into basketball. But it's not racism that the demographics are the way they are! In a free society you should expect that!

> So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.

>Arguably yes.

What do you mean "arguably yes"? What are we losing by having blacks be over-represented in the NBA?

>But there is a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.

BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.

Professional Hockey is dominated by White Canadians and Russians. Baseball is over-represented by Latino/Hispanic players. Asians, who are 5% of the US population, account for almost 25% of all Physicians. Which industry has this perfect ratio of races that should serve as a model for us all. And you conveniently side-stepped the issue of 1) why it is race/ethnicity where proportionality should be prioritized over (for example) religion, and 2) is it even reasonable to expect that such a ratio to be achievable in a society where people are free to choose and 3) what the heck is the actual gain to society if it is versus the cost of brainwashing people to want things they don't actually want.

> BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.

How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?

>How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?

How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia.

What is your point?

My point was based on personal experience. You're the one who said you don't know anyone encouraging black kids to pursue success through sports. How is that opinion supposed to carry any weight if you wouldn't be in a position to know about it even if it were happening?

This thinking is exactly the problem. "There are a lot of people with dark skin in basketball, your skin color is looking like theirs, therefore your path to success must be basketball". But the solution you seem to be implying is even worse - "ok, we succeeded in convincing you your skin color determines your path in life. Congrats to us. But now we'll close this path for you because we already have too many people looking like you there, so no success for you, sorry". Both ways of thinking are idiotic and both if followed can ruin people's lives. We need less of that, not more.

Great. Now convince all the black teenagers living in the same segregated neighborhoods black people lived in a century ago (because it was illegal for them to live in the other side of this or that road) that skin color doesn't determine their path in life.

I can't, of course. But it's not about me, is it? It's about how to fix it. And I think getting out of "race determines everything" mentality is part of fixing it, regardless of what I personally can or can't do. Yes, there was a lot of harm and injustice done to black people in the US in the past, and some of it continues even to this day. It must be fixed. I haven't seen an instance of concentrating on racial quotas fixing it though. I don't think racism can be fixed with racial quotas.

Would you support 50% gender equality of speakers at a conference?

Would you support limiting professional teams from hiring black people to allow for a certain number of Asians?

Would you support universities reducing their intake of Jewish students to stop over-representation?

Would you support hospitals hiring a maximum 5% Asian doctors?

> But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem?

It's a symptom of one.

> And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

Deal with the problems that deny so many black youth any better opportunities than the lottery-ticket of aiming for success in sports.

Because it reduces people to a set of identity classes that fill respective identity checkboxes. I.e. if it happens that on conference there is 10 good presentation submitted from class X but only 2 from class Y, and the quota is half-half, you would either reject 8 good presentations or add 8 crappy ones, just to fill identity checkboxes and achieve equality of outcome. Or cancel the conference altogether.

The true equality would be when the conference organizers see 12 good presentations, and don't even think to dig into what identity class they represent (unless the conference is specifically organized to represent identity classes). When did you last seen statistics about hair color or eye color of conference presenters? How about blood type? Maybe AB- people are underrepresented? You get the idea.

If green eyed people had been systematically oppressed until recently and still made a fraction of the money brown eyed people do as a result, you'd see statistics about eye color at conference presentations.

Define "recently. Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime, or yours, or most of the potential presenters. If you are conservative about it you can claim discrimination up until the 1960s - which is 50 years ago, hardly "recently".

> Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime

If you are ever so slightly open-minded about it you could consider black Americans to still be systematically oppressed by the criminal justice system. Read a bit about the criminalisation of marajuana, sentencing procedures, the industrial prison complex etc..

Equality of outcome as a goal is terrible because it's the enemy of equality of opportunity. "Everybody is denied their agency" would be equal, perhaps, but isn't part of any feminist vision I choose to align myself with.

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