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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

More to the point, “procedural fairness” or “equality of opportunity” (if I understand it correctly) is directly opposed to “representative fairness” or “equality of outcome”. In many situations, prioritising one will compromise the other. As an example, Harvard admission of Asian students.

Perspectives differ on which one is more important. Personally, I’m absolutely for the former, but it increasingly seems I’m a part of the minority (or the silent majority).

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I think the most useful way to think about this is that unequal outcomes almost always lead us to unequal opportunity upstream.

If, for example, you made admission to elite colleges(which is a whole other can of worms) ignore ethnic backgrounds, you'd get a result where far fewer applicants of certain ethnicities would be accepted. In an arbitrary sense, this could represent "equal opportunity" if you believed that these people materialized from the ether the day they submit their application. But if you take into account their lives leading up to submitting their application, "equal opportunity" requires counteracting powerful structural factors that make it harder for people of some backgrounds to get into college.

The reason Harvard admission of Asian students is cited to such a tiresome degree is that it's a rare case where there isn't a clear upstream justification. That's why there's a big lawsuit and Harvard is getting tons of awful press about it. But it also lines up with the fundamental problem we're trying to fix with affirmative action. Harvard and its admissions systems were invented by white people, and they have proven to relentlessly favor white people, who then have easier lives and more money they can use to pay SAT tutors to help the next generation of white kids get into Harvard. It's not surprising that Harvard would warp the affirmative action system away from its original purpose, to correct for historical oppression, in order to... help white people get into Harvard. The fact that Harvard is discriminating against Asians is not a reason to implement a fake-fair system that has the end result of discriminating against all other non-white people.

It's theoretically possible that there are some other cases somewhere that show large inequality of outcome but have no unfairness upstream. But I'd rather have the task of discovering and fixing those rare cases than the present system, in which being born with a certain background gives you radical advantages or disadvantages on the basis of, basically, ancestral violence.

Can you please explain how Obama’s daughters are disadvantaged based on ancestral violence?

The point is, racist discrimination, even if “positive”, produces unfair outcomes. Obama’s daughter don’t need even more advantages. If you want to help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds (and I think that’s a worthy cause, even if you ignore “fairness”, simply because it increases the odds of finding the next Ramanujan and improves the well-being of the society), you should help people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Admitting them to degrees they don’t deserve isn’t actually helping them - it’s mainly just fixing superficial statistics and perpetuating harmful stereotypes (e.g. people not wanting black doctors because they suspect they’re worse because they weren’t subject to as strict standards as white, let alone Asian, doctors). To ensure actual equality of opportunity, you need to help them when they’re young, improve their school system, help their families, etc. Everything else is just a bandaid, at best masking rhe underlying problem.

We are talking about large, diverse groups and their median or average.

That said, usually the correct approach is not discriminating based on race, but discriminating on the actual "disadvantegedness" of the path taken by the applicant.

Accidentally that's how it's done around here for university (you get points for being disabled, poor, living far from the campus, and so on).

Oh wow!

Yes, that's very easy! Let me count the ways. First of all, Obama's daughters are much more likely to be murdered, abused or falsely accused by police than they would be if they were white. Even iconically famous black people are sometimes mistreated by police officers who don't recognize them. I'd say being at a high risk of murder counts as a disadvantage! I don't even need to draw a line back to ancestral violence for that one—that's just regular old present day violence.

Second, although the Obama sisters enjoy substantial family wealth due to their parents' incredible achievements, the fact that they were born black means that, statistically speaking, they would have been far wealthier if they'd been born to a comparably wealthy white family. For example, if the Obama's are the X richest African American family, they'd be far richer if they were the X richest white American family. Bingo! Disadvantage! Why does that wealth gap exist? There are many recent crimes, many tied to violence, that exacerbated the situation. But we can start by looking at the fact that Black people, including Obama ancestors, were violently forced to build wealth for white people without any compensation.

There are many more ways in which contemporary American society puts extra pressure and psychological burden on African Americans, yes even rich African Americans, all of which can be traced back to historical violence in our history, and all of which clearly affect the outcomes we associate with "success."

Whether you admit it or not, you're arguing that the person who "deserves" to win in our economy is the person whose ancestors perpetrated horrific crimes against his competitor's ancestors and who doesn't have to face the constant daily effects of ongoing racism in our society.

What if Obama's daughters don't find being more likely to be murdered to be a worthwhile exchange for whatever advantages you're offering them? It doesn't seem like a fair negotiation to not include them.

> First of all, Obama's daughters are much more likely to be murdered, abused or falsely accused by police than they would be if they were white.

I don't think this is true. If you compare Obama's daughters against Bush's sons, probably. But against a random white person with no media exposure, unlikely.

> they would have been far wealthier if they'd been born to a comparably wealthy white family.

Again, why are we comparing against comparably wealthy white families? The reason why Obama's daughters were brought up in the first place is because we recognize that they are incredibly privileged compared to the general population, and they don't need more advantages. We don't care whether they are privileged compared to Bill Gate's children or someone comparatively more privileged.

If you want to understand how anti-black bias affects even wealthy African Americans, you have to use methods like this. The GP was saying, basically "if the Obama's succeeded, it doesn't matter that their competitors were cheating." You can be disadvantaged and still be successful.

Why would it be useful to compare the most famous and rich African Americans against "a random white person?" Is that the way we prove that African Americans are not disadvantaged, by comparing an anomaly from one group to the average of another? We are comparing comparably wealthy people in order to eliminate other forms of difference so we can see just the effects of ethnicity...

The responses to this, articulated and expressed as downvotes, are extremely telling.

with regards to Harvard et al., they have a harder time to do positive discrimination since some court decisions in recent years. all in all, they look at extracurricular stuff to try to give extra points, because they can't discriminate - even positively - based on race, as far as I know. (the legal history of affirmative action is pretty long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unit... )

It's great to account for what structurally led to the moment of a decision. What's tricky is that it's hard to get the right level of granularity. If you don't have data on how historically disadvantaged a given person's path was, you're going to get false positives and false negatives, and you can't make the system fair across both.

Changing the discussion to be structurally fair, not just transactionally, you still have the same impossibility issues arising if you don't have an oracle model with omniscient features. It's the same issues, but with a larger scope of features and outcomes.

Equality of outcome seems like a mechanistic concept of the industrial age of standardized mass production.

Equality of opportunity seems much more organic/humanistic because it allows for the natural variation in people's values and personality

I am also interested in equality of opportunity- but how do I measure that everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve something? How do I measure the opportunity to consume nutritious food? The opportunity for access to the same healthcare?

It goes deeper than that if you go into cultural biases prevalent in poor (regardless of race) communities. Cigarettes, scratch-offs, crappy food.. what counts as opportunity?

Is being raised a certain way tantamount to having 'less opportunity' to make better micro-decisions?

The problem is equality of opportunity is it's invariably applied in a way that ignores some very racist and uneven starting conditions and the effects of the past. Consider as a small example how schools are funded in the US, which is largely by local property taxes, so poorer places have poorer schools. These areas are heavily skewed towards minority populations because of some extremely racist issues in our past like redlining which kept blacks and other minorities out of the housing boom which drove a lot of middle class wealth growth through the 60s to 00s. So we build on this cycle generation after generation where kids in poor areas go to poorly funded schools and experience poor educational outcomes.

Even if we solve the funding problem it's still not actually equal opportunity because the poorer kids don't get the same support outside of school due to parents working longer hours at lower paying jobs because they got a bad education or living in a crummy house with lead paint (because that's all your parents could afford) or living in a town with contaminated water (Flint is just the one to grab headlines cities all over the country have abysmally high lead levels). Even if you want to blame community culture for some of these issues the question becomes where do you think that culture comes from, perhaps just maybe it comes from decades of lack of opportunity and systemic abuse?

How do you possibly hope to close the gap in our system where wealth almost invariably builds on wealth?

tl;dr: Equality of outcome doesn't mean everyone has to have the exact same exact life, it's just acknowledging our opportunities are directly tied to the outcomes of the generation before us.

By changing the way schools are funded, and helping poor students. No racial discrimination necessary.

My point was principally about the issues with 'equality of opportunity' in the US because of the massive inequality already present.

On your note though yes with unlimited money we could do that, given limited budget though targeting the assistance to those most affected makes sense. Also a program like that also does little to nothing for people who aren't very young when it's started. Also ultimately that's an equality of outcome style solution because it's giving additional resources to some.

(this is more about things like the Harvard affirmative action program) I think there's also a meaningful distinction to draw between inclusive discrimination like affirmative action and exclusive discrimination of groups. I know it's an extremely tough line to define at a government level but they feel like very distinct categories of activities.

> meaningful distinction to draw between inclusive discrimination like affirmative action and exclusive discrimination of groups.

The only distinction I see is in the rethorical spin that people make. A preferential treatment of a set of people is exactly equal to a discriminatory treatment of the complement of that set of people (e.g. positive discrimination of black people equals negative discrimination of non-black people).

>our opportunities are directly tied to the outcomes of the generation before us

They are related, but "directly tied to" seems hyperbolic and deterministic.

Frederick Douglass is an obvious exceptional example of a human being transcending the outcomes of previous generations.

Sure he did great doesn't change the fact that individual examples like Frederick Douglass don't negate that fact that intergenerational incomes are pretty inelastic in America. It's a statistical problem across all slices of the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

> Consider as a small example how schools are funded in the US, which is largely by local property taxes, so poorer places have poorer schools.

Varies from state to state. In CA, only about 25% of K-12 funding comes from property taxes: https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays

I know of several school districts nearby that contain nothing but relatively new $1mm+ houses and abysmal school ratings. I would believe that there's some kind of complex nonlinear correlation between property values and quality of school, but it is very clearly not an easy "more expensive houses == better schools" calculation.

> perhaps just maybe it comes from decades of lack of opportunity and systemic abuse?

A fine point, and certainly not limited to any one race. I'm all in favor of helping those with fewer opportunities growing up, and I don't really care what race they are. If they happen to be mostly $RACE, it doesn't matter to me.

"The problem is equality of opportunity is it's invariably applied in a way that ignores some very racist and uneven starting conditions and the effects of the past."

Then that's where the energy ought to go. Adjusting the end result (e.g. by adjusting the college admission criteria based on race/ethnicity) doesn't really fix the root cause; it's a band-aid on America's broken leg.

If the starting conditions are unequal, then that is by definition not equal opportunity, so correcting those conditions should be Priority 1.

In order to create a situation where people have equality of opportunity, it's often necessary to ensure that the individual had an equal outcome that creates the necessary starting state.

Conflating those two inherently different concepts for the sake of convenience will not net good systems. Equality of outcome is NOT a substitute for equality of opportunity. Even if attempting to create as equal as possible of a starting state has some surface similarities with equality of outcome, it's important to maintain the distinction.

In theory I agree but in practice that often leads to racism. For example, some people support discrimination for blacks (& against whites) at e.g. college admissions, purportedly to offset their (statistically) worse family background (in terms of education and wealth). Clearly, that's a terrible and racist solution, with the better and obviously correct solution being... to support people from worse family backgrounds! Instead of targeting the proxy for the problem, you solve the problem itself.

The flaw with this argument is that if you recognize that for example, black people are generally worse off in family background than white people, then you end up back at the point where you on average offer more aid for black families than white ones which by your argument would be racist.

You're not solving the problem at all by attempting to sweep racism under the rug; quite the opposite in fact because it fails to address how race affects family background and discrimination in the first place.

Why on Earth supporting poor people regardless of their race would be racist by anyone's criteria?

It would seem you are the racist here thinking a person needs support because he is black, not because he is poor.

You need to reread my argument if that's what you came out of it with.

Think of it like this. If you wanted to support all individual poor people in America equally, you'll end up helping a disproportionate number of black people, because black people are disproportionately poor. So it's actually reasonable to say "black people need a disproportionate amount of help" if you're trying to help poverty in an unbiased way.

That is imprecise to the point of being unreasonable.

In your example help isn't given to all black people, only to the poor ones.

If you consider help given to poor black people vs. help given to poor white people, it becomes proportional.

> which by your argument would be racist.

You seem to have misunderstood my argument; maybe I wasn’t really clear in that part. I think a policy that helps lots of poor black people, some poor white people, and doesn’t help Obama’s daughters (because they don’t need help), is a good, fair, and most importantly effective policy. A policy that doesn’t help poor white people is racist. A policy that helps Obama’s daughters is ineffective (and I don’t want my tax money to go to that cause).

A policy that affects one group of people more than others by racial lines sounds like a racist policy, don't you think? Which was my entire point. You're in effect, arguing for a policy that is racist by your own prior argument.

We have affirmative action policies and the like because we admit that some groups of people are disadvantaged due to a multitude of circumstances and we attempt to do things in such a way as to ensure that they can mitigate those circumstances.

I think you're conflating the two different definitions of racism here. In one, something is racist if it has different impacts on people of different races - not due to their race, but due to some correlated variable. In another definition of racism, something is racist if it uses race as a determining factor in behavior or treatment.

Providing aid to low-income families is racist by the first definition, but not by the second. But (damn near) everything is racist by the first definition.

Why? There are many, if not the majority, of examples of mobility across outcomes. People don’t have to be born rich to become rich. Nor poor to remain poor. So many millions of people have taken advantage of equal or even unequal opportunities to create better outcomes for themselves and their descendants, why now are those successes all invalid and only by shoveling equality of outcome onto the “disadvantaged” are we able to make things fair?

Doesn't this mean Harvard should accept everyone? If equality of outcome is important - and I'd argue that it is to a much greater extent than most people would consider acceptable - doesn't it stand to reason that we should care about it at the level of individuals, not merely populations? What's strange to me is that people seem to think that equality is only important when talking about small differences across arbitrary social constructs, while entirely ignoring much larger gaps in individuals.

Do you believe getting rid of accessible parking spots makes things more fair...?

Are you saying that black people are disabled in a way just because they are black?

...what? No. I'm asking about the equality of opportunity vs. outcome. Parent said he's for equality of opportunity rather than which accessible parking is most definitely not. I'm suggesting we need more nuance than just categorizing one as desirable and one as undesirable.

I mostly disagree with what “gdy” said but he might have a kind of a point. We, the society, choose to unfairly advantage disabled people, recognising that even with all their advantages, their lives are still pretty shitty. On the other hand, there’s plenty of black people who can, and do, raise to the top of whatever success hierarchy you want, so they don’t need to be treated better; they just need fo be treated the same. (As a thought experiment, would you rather be black like Obama or Kanye, or some disabled guy like Hawking or Roosevelt?)

I don't think this contradicts what I wrote. Like I wrote in the previous comment, all I'm saying we need more nuance on whether equal opportunity or equal outcome is better, because it's situation-dependent, and often some combination of both. On this point you guys are agreeing and then analyzing the situation which is... exactly what I've been saying.

You got my point correctly and I'm interested to know what you disagree with.

That's a fair point I agree with.

Take heart, you're in the silent majority.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

Contrary to what you read online, very few people should discuss those concepts in contrast with each other. Almost all of the public debate is contained in the former. Therefor being for the former doesn't really say much, at all, and any encyclopedia will tell you why.

Edit: I will make it easier for you. If you do not understand most of this page[0] you are ignorant of one of the most fundamental debates in society. If you do you would understand my position. The wikipedia version might do as well [1]. It is ironic how people who don't "believe in outcome" are often ignorant.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equal-opportunity/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity#Theory

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