Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Left handed people and vegans have not historically been the victims of institutionalized societal discrimination. Women have been (indeed still are).

View on HN

Well, not that I agree with the grandparent comment, but in many parts of the world left-handers are indeed discriminated and forcefully trained to become right-handed, which leads to all sorts of problems. This was also commmonplace in Europe until not long ago.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bias_against_left-handed_people#...

Cesare Lombroso and the pathology of left-handedness: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

A relative of mine, currently in their 50's, was forced to write right handed while growing up in New York. They still do to this day, though they do everything else left handed.

Lefthanders tend to suffer a higher rate of accidents and lower lifespan, typically attributed to having to operate machinery optimized for the right-handed.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/04/us/being-left-handed-may-...

I don't deny that, but I believe the best way to stop it, is to stop giving so much attention to gender/race of people. That's why so-called "diversity" reports of companies make me sick. If you believe that all races/genders are equally capable to achieve greatness (as I do), then you should hire the best, give awards to the best and never spend a second thinking about their biological background. If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.

If we stop making big deal of these things, it won't matter anymore.

What makes you think this?

You don't balance an unbalanced seesaw by putting the same amount of weight on both sides

Equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome.

Given how short your comment is, I am not quite certain what you are trying to say. However, in my experience, whenever somebody complains about "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome", they willfully overlook a lot of factors that would be playing into the "opportunity" part of the equation.

This is exactly the problem. You think in terms of "balancing a seesaw", but there is no reason to believe that in the complete absence of discrimination, the gender ratio will be 50:50.

Until we find any evidence that says there's something intrinsic in women that stops them from working and/or performing at the same level as men in physics research I think it's safe to assume the ratio will tend to that.

Considering the population is not 50:50 on gender... ;)

There's no need for arbitrary "balance". Let people do what they want, and make the process as fair as possible.

Anything else is just enforcing some ideaology or another.

That's been tried. The situation doesn't improve when you stop paying attention to it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/race-ec...

https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/64/2/219/3058571

> you should hire the best

That is hopelessly naive. Someone has to decide who is "the best", or, at the very least, someone has to decide on the quality metric that will be used to make this assessment. That inevitably leads to politics and gamesmanship.

Not at all naive. Asians used to face prejudice arguably as severe as that faced by blacks. Once discriminatory laws were lifted, they began a remarkable ascendancy--one that was in large part [1] due to the market re-pricing the value of Asian labor: " One explanation for rapid Asian upward mobility is, therefore, that earnings gaps driven by prejudice rather than productivity could not persist in a post-war labor market that eliminated most forms of legal discrimination against non-white workers"

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w22748

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-ramakrishnan-lee-...

Ignoring problems has not, historically, tended to make them go away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com