Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You're not parsing the difference between "equality" and "identicality".

Equality is about the rights one has, and how one should be treated as an individual — equality before the law, and before society. We strive for a society where men and woman are equal, blacks and whites are equal, straights and gays are equal.

Universal equality, however, does NOT require us to believe that people are identical in personality, in intelligence, or in any of the other dimensions you've listed above. We don't even have to believe that specific groups, taken together, are identical to all other groups in mean, median, and standard deviation on these attributes.

People can be EQUAL without being THE SAME.

Edit: really bummed I missed the opportunity to make a JavaScript joke about == vs ===.

That may be what "equal" means to hard-core feminists but to everyone else it is a synonym for "identical". Wiktionary defines it as "the same in all respects".

If you are talking in non-feminist circles you probably want to use standard language, e.g. "treated equally". You'll get fewer arguments about words that have been redefined by a small group.

Edit: New accounts cannot reply so I rewrote my comment

I'm talking about equality in terms of attributes. The distribution of traits in males and the distribution of traits in females, are not equal. So I will not say males and females are equal. They do qualify as equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_relation

I believe people should be treated as individuals, if you take two distinct persons A and B, I don't believe they are equal. The only person equal to person A is person A. On this vein, you can't say Group A is equal to Group B, unless Group A and B are the same group.

You can apply equivalence relations to groups, which is basically a lower threshold for equality.

I'm not sure where "equivalent" came from, and haven't really heard it used in this context before. What do you mean by that?

Anyway, I think you've got it backwards. "Equivalent" suggests that men and women are functionally interchangeable, which neither of us believes. "Equal", on the other hand, has a long history of being used to carry social and political meaning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com