On Committing Suicide
austingwalters.com
austingwalters.com
Our consulting consortium is, not by design, a freakin UN assemblage of engineers. About 1/3 are female and includes two Indians, one Iranian, one Canadian, one Irish, two Mexicans, one Brazilian, one Polish, and the token Texan. With the exception of the guy from Texas, we are all the offspring of immigrants. The guy from Texas talks a bit funny, but being from a distant and strange land, that is to be expected; and his great grandmother was born into an enslaved family in the Carolinas. All except three have served in the military.
The one rule we have is there will be no sexual, political, racial, or religious discussions once at the client's site; that is, we only talk about solving the customer's problem. We do not have lunch or take breaks with clients, we do not accept invitations to any client's social functions, and we have 'physical protection' clauses in each contract.
During the last five months, all members have seen clients' technicians, engineers, or managers either sent home or fired for sexual, political, racial, or religious comments. The workplace has become a very hostile environment, which probably reflects the generally polarized and intransigent American environment. We have decided to give the U.S. another 10 to 15 months to see if America is lost (not my words); otherwise, were splitting up and heading to other places. Also, one of our Indian engineers was being recruited last year by a political committee to run for a local position, but decided the risk to the family was not insignificant.
I work for a company with employees around the globe. The Americans are polarized-- on the left, they mostly seem to support 'cancelling' people that don't agree with them. On the right, they are mostly silent, but quite upset.
Colleagues in overseas locations are likewise polarized. Some hold liberal opinions and agree with the left-side views. I've been especially surprised by some people that come from former Soviet-block countries, though. They are mostly horrified at the statue toppling, language 'cleansing', etc. They believe it looks too familiar and is leading to worse things.
During normal times, humans behave in irrational ways. During testing times (with a pandemic, unemployment, violence, corruption), humans seem to behave irrationally and exhibit frustrations akin to taking it out on someone/some group even though the cause and the resolution (or the ability to bring a resolution) lie elsewhere. Somewhere in this mix, from well intentioned and otherwise logical or educated people, we see utterly incomprehensible support for certain non-progressive ideals, bigotry and outright violence.
I don’t know what could really help. But there seem to be some fundamental problems (in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) that have become exacerbated and are snowballing and manifesting in many other areas. To those on the fence or amenable to change their views, solving some of these problems could help bring them to the table and be willing to listen (and then change).
No they don't. This is one of the causes of many issues we see in the US today, and it seems to be infecting many "Western" countries, particularly English speaking ones.
>> Why can’t I be anti-vaccine and pro-choice?
> You would suspect everyone would agree that we “own” our bodies. If that were true, then you would effectively have to be pro-choice AND support people’s right to choose what to put in their bodies;
That's only true if you believe that ownership of something means you are the sole determiner of what can or cannot be done with it, regardless of how that affects others.
One could agree that we "own" our bodies but still be in favor of mandatory vaccination of people who do not have a medical reason to avoid it on the grounds that losing herd immunity could cause widespread harm.
Similarly, one could agree with body ownership but be anti-abortion because they believe that the fetus is a person and being aborted harms that person.
For most things short of actual slavery, the body ownership argument is pretty weak. It really just sets the default rule for cases where there are no other people involved, but once you get societies more complex than very small isolated groups of people there are almost always other people involved.
I would argue that Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, Trump 2016, and the latest social unrest are all symptoms of an unresponsive political system. People are angry, and looking for someone to blame. With social media amplifying the anger, the whole situation may get out of control and damage the US for years to come.
That is not a box others want you to be put in. People want a justification for their views. There are the nazis and the people that think they are better than nazis (hint: not hard) and build their raison d'être around that. Well, nazis are quite unpleasant. Still, anything that might convince them of being wrong, which a position that cannot put you into firmly defined groups will do, will result in hostilities. Furthermore the tactics of both opponents will become the same with time. In the end there isn't even much difference between fascists and their opponents. Again, you fight the former most effectively by ignoring them and see the rights of people protected, that are target of the mobs. Those involved will quickly loose any conscience. It is the result if you believe you were wronged because people are somehow oppressing you. That is also when you loose your believe in meritocracy/fairness.
I don't think your perception of people not working in your interest is true. You should differentiate between public statements and deeds though. Meritocracy will still prevail in the long run.
It is not a value judgement of people. If you work harder, you earn more. Some don't even want to do that and are not lesser beings for it.
freedom is incompatible with equity is a response on the same level, but there is much more truth in it.
> Educational injustice enabled people to preserve their illusions, while inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality.
To get a glimpse at true justice, please consider the following thought experiment, which leads to what I call "algorithmic justice." There is a traditional game that children play where there are two children and a cake. The first child cuts the cake, and the second child selects which piece goes to whom. Let us do the same, but more broadly. Take the resources of our society, the raw inputs and the processed goods and the man-hours of labor, and apportion them to each person as seems fair and just, by asking each person to apportion them amongst each other, and going to the iterated minimization of disagreement and regret.
This is a game that many political ideologies have attempted, but they have all failed because they chose to take a shortcut and use some sort of heuristic rule for judging people. However, it turns out that people are too unique to be judged as a single collective group fairly by any single metric.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
How the author formulates the critique is specifically not how it is understood by adherents from my experience. Not only for justice, imagine access for disabled people in public services like extra ramps or similar facilities which society provides. Do they have "merit" under natural law? Perhaps not. Does that mean adherents want to just ignore them? No, on the contrary. There are different a priori assumptions by people that like meritocracy and its critics.
What about social justice? Which metric do you use here to judge people. By frequency of occurrence by immutable characteristics? You can take both terms to mean the exact same thing. Doesn't mean you cannot have two groups endlessly fighting about who is correct about it.
It is not a political ideology. Maybe it is now, but that is more reactionary. But normally it would get some laughs if propped up that much.
What it certainly never meant is that you somehow need to earn your keep to receive justice and be treated fairly. But I understand the critique if it is conceived this way.
edit: We currently need to earn our keep in society for economic survival. I think working towards changing that is preferable.
> Justice, in its broadest sense is the principle that people receive that which they deserve
Which contradicts pretty harshly with your concept of it. In fact, one may pretty much get to the opposite conclusion, Meritocracy is Justice.
> Rising wealth disparity increasingly undermines faith in the existence of meritocracy, as beliefs in equal opportunity and social equality lose credibility among lower classes who recognize the preexisting reality of limited class mobility as a feature of the neoliberal version of capitalism. At the same time, the elite use their comparatively greater wealth, power, and influence to unequally benefit themselves and ensure their continued upper class status at the expense of lower classes, which further undermines beliefs in the existence of meritocracy. The myth of meritocracy has been identified by scholars as a tool of the elite of a society to uphold and justify the reproduction of existing economic, social, and political hierarchies.
In "Equal opportunity" [1]:
> Equality of opportunity is often seen as a major aspect of a meritocracy. One view was that equality of opportunity was more focused on what happens before the race begins while meritocracy is more focused on fairness at the competition stage.
> There is general agreement that programs to bring about certain types of equality of opportunity can be difficult and that efforts to cause one result often have unintended consequences or cause other problems.
> Efforts to achieve equal opportunity along one dimension can exacerbate unfairness in other dimensions.
> Another difficulty is that it is hard for a society to bring substantive equality of opportunity to every type of position or industry.
> The consensus view is that trying to measure equality of opportunity is difficult whether examining a single hiring decision or looking at groups over time.
Better people become judges, not buddies.
Meritocracy doesn’t mean “winners take all”. It means the best person for the job gets the job.
If the best people for the job have the job, especially in gov by definition justice will prevail because people who know how to address injustice will have the job.
Humans are broadly similar to each other, and minor athletic differences usually do not matter to job performance, so do we really want to structure our society around such trivialities?
Experience and/or accomplishments for the vast majority of jobs.
Under what circumstances do you believe it is not possible to select among candidates based on merit?
* Blood type
* Immune system mismatch
* Organ size
* Distance donated organ must travel
* Urgency of donation
The closest we come to considering life experience is in two time-related criteria: Children and adults are different (relates to organ size), and time spent on waitlists is taken into account (relates to urgency).
Certainly, a merit-based organ transplant system is possible. In China, there are reports of (involuntary) organ harvesting from political and religious undesirables [2]; these people have been deemed meritless. China continues to work to deploy a single system for measuring merit, the Social Credit System [1].
For hiring and jobs, we might imagine hiring people based on skill sets and job duties; we would consider people based on their ability to carry out the tasks required of the position. Just like with organ transplants, this is a pragmatic approach, rather than one based on celebrity or subtlety.
[0] https://unos.org/transplant/frequently-asked-questions/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...