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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Almost nothing in life is actually fair, and obsessing on the unfairness of it all is impractical and self-destructive.

I just wasn't raised with that idea and I saw no reason to raise my own kids with that idea.

My father fought in the front lines of two wars and had a Purple Heart. My mother escaped East Germany in her teens with her infant niece in tow to return the baby to it's mother. Her older sister had come home with the baby to attend their mother's funeral and the East German border guard did not let her take the baby home with her.

I come from people who believed in fighting the good fight and quietly standing up to tyranny in myriad ways.

It's not about obsessing about the unfairness of it all or pursuing self-destructive behavior. It's about honoring a child's expectation for the world to live up to a lot of the high-minded claims of duty and honor and so forth that we talk about and often don't follow through on.

I did my best to follow through as a parent and I think I did the right thing. My son eventually mellowed some in certain respects as he got older and developed a more complex world view and came to understand that sometimes the simple and obvious answer isn't really the best answer. But he was never broken and that mattered to me as a parent, so I'm content with the choices I made. I don't think they were a waste of my time, nor do I think they led my son astray.

A friend of mine thought it was unfair that people were judged by the clothes they wore, and she was going to fight the good fight and wear jeans to all occasions - work, school, dates, weddings, church, everything.

Eventually, she gave up that fight.

That sounds like "bored and has nothing but first world problems and no real idea what on earth injustice actually is" not "I'm really dedicated to justice."

I run multiple websites to help the homeless. This began when I was still homeless myself.

I currently do live in t-shirts and sweat pants, in part due to dire poverty and not because I prefer to dress this way. "Ima gonna fight for my right to live in jeans even for weddings" doesn't really compare to having a Purple Heart or smuggling a baby out of an oppressive regime and returning the child to its rightful mother.

So I think I'm going to disengage here.

Ironically this view is the most destructive of them all. If people feel things are unfair they should never stop obsessing. If people just accepted injustice and unfairness slavery would exist and the Jews would be wiped out to give two salient examples.

As a parent of a seven year old who continuously upholds and measures fairness it is really tiring to explain why dad gets to have a larger glass of milk, or why dad has a larger portion of dessert. Fairness is skewed by the one judging what is fair. It is relative and trying to explain relative concepts to a child with no ability to understand relative terms is frustrating. Hence he gets absolute rules and does not understand why.

This doesn’t sound fair, to me, to the 7 year old. Just adults doing adulting by saying “do as I say.” The questions asked seem quite reasonable. There are bigger discussions on fairness we haven’t even begun to broach, racism and classism being a big one for me.

The size of milk is easily explainable. I, a 230 lbs powerlifter am roughly five times larger than you at 50 lbs. My body requires more calories, nutrients than yours does. They can easily see that I am much larger than them, so it makes sense to them. As well as being factual.

I say this because my kids used to ask this often.

Reminds me of this quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Kurt Vonnegut says it more eloquently than I ever could:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

I don't mean to take the conversational bait, but that story is explicitly not about fairness, it is about equality, and about the dangers of mixing fairness and equality.

In this story, as it is frequently discussed:

Fairness = same opportunities

Equality = same outcomes

If Fairness equals same opportunities, then that implies it would only be "fair" (Fairness) to have a Eugenics program, resulting in every child born being of identically high IQ and other character traits, physical abilities, health and talents.

I am not arguing in favor or against Eugenics - just making an observation.

To turn it around, a quote from David Foster Wallace, 'Try to let what is unfair teach you'.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/937442-try-to-let-what-is-u...

State funded mandatory education of children is an outlier in that it actually is fair, or at least it is supposed to be, which seems an important point in a discussion about children.

The fact that it isn’t is due to funding, the private sector, grant maintained etc. combined with varying management competence and, at least in England, an obsession with construing difference as hierarchy. All but that last one seem like implementation bugs in an otherwise fairly designed plan.

Thats very difficult to understand when you're young and (largely) self-centered. It definitely has to be explained with a lot of patience and some creativity.

It's stuff like this which teaches children to not fight for a better tomorrow.

Obsessing over unfairness is how you form political movements to make things fair.

> Obsessing over unfairness is how you form political movements to make things fair.

Up to a point. Often these movements succeed, and then do they retire? Nope. They turn up the microscope until they can discern ever smaller inequities.

For example, before the pandemic dominated the news, the local paper here ran endless articles on the conundrum of was it inequitable to have gifted classes in the public schools or inequitable to not have gifted classes? The two factions seemed to be about the same size, and neither was able to get an edge over the other.

That you don't care about the discussipn doesn't make it less important. Special classes take up resources so it is indeed a policy decision where to allocate funds.

It’s one of those topics that is so easy to discuss in moral sense simply because there’s nothing immoral about segregating children by their abilities and it only comes down to money.

Discussing money is boring, however. If there was too much of it we wouldn’t be asking the question; but since we don’t have the money we may as well moralise as that makes us feel useful.

That's what the government wants you to think. The fairest institution we have is the free market. There's no bullshit allowed. Because if you bullshit, you'll lose money. In a truly functioning free market, price is the mechanism by which fairness is distributed.

This isn't always true. The free market with infinite competition might settle on optimal solutions eventually, but there's almost always a gradient that appears due to time. It takes time for changes to propagate through a system and that can be taken advantage of. There's the quote by Keynes that underlines this: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

There is no free market in modern capitalism. Even Smith already warned of the dangers of accumulation of capital and the need for checks & balances to avoid oligopolies and monopolies. It's a winner take all approach (at least in the US and China) that nearly always those with the best headstart win.

Play iterated games.

Free market doesn't take time to turn into unfair markets when exploited by an anomaly. You can't have fairness with humans living in the same place as you.

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