Hacker News Reader

Comment by CincinnatiMan | Hacker News Reader

The age-old question of whether we want equal opportunity or equal outcome...

There has never been equal opportunity. This is clear. The reasons why opportunity has not been equal is becoming more clear, regardless which side of the nature versus nurture debate you fall on. Equal outcome should not be the goal (test scores and grades are not the best nor only indicator the likelihood of success). The goal should be equal access.

Do you want equal opportunity for everyone? Is "equal access" a synonym for equal opportunity or do you have something else in mind?

In that case, we simply need to publish all lectures online free of charge.

I don't think online lectures is the opportunity that plaintiffs in this case felt they were deprived of.

Do you think that "we simply need to publish all lectures online free of charge" is a good answer for the plaintiffs?

People don't benefit from Yale from the lectures. They benefit from the brand name and alumni you get to be associated with. Which is because Yale restricts admission to people who have high probability of being influential.

So it's really just an exclusive club and not about education and knowledge building at all? Okay, you simply reenforce my point. It's a signalling mechanism for cargo cult employers who would rather simply hire from Yale than do the work of actually assessing people's capabilities. It needs to go the way of the dodo.

> The goal should be equal access.

You mean equal opportunity then.

For me, access implies the right, opportunity reflects the demonstration of those rights.

There are a lot of examples of equal access to programs in this country, by the letter of the law, but in practice locally, folks were unable to access these opportunities.

The FHA most immediately comes to mind. The letter of the law of FHA versus local implementation by local banks, bank executives, realtors, mortgage brokers, even home sellers were able deny opportunity though technically these programs were accessible to all.

Your argument is a misnomer, equal access is just a restatement of belief in equal rights. Equal opportunity is the belief that everyone should be given a level playing field.

Truly equal access would not result in equal graduation rates or equal outcomes.

I don't think "equal access" is really what the crowd most ardently pushing this would accept.

Is Yale an outcome or an opportunity?

Equality of outcome would mean that the race/ethnicity/etc proportion of people admitted to Yale would be similar to the appropriate proportion in the general community instead of being wildly different.

Equality of opportunity would mean that if two equally qualified persons of different races/ethnicities/etc have the same chance of getting admitted.

The big issue is that you can't have both, mostly due to various family and childhood circumstances that mean that different groups have different rates of "getting to X years old with qualifications/skills/preparations Y".

For Yale admissions, you can have one, or the other, or a compromise in the middle. You can have a situation that's unfair/unequal according to both criteria, but you can't get both "types of equality" at the same time, as increasing one generally requires to trade off or sacrifice the other.

Harrison Bergeron is the logical conclusion to fundamentally equal outcome. Is that a society anyone really wants to live in?

Show me any evidence that this isn't literally what the far left wants? CA is moving to remove hiring anti-discrimination protections, as if nothing could go wrong with that line of reasoning...

The far left wants power, not equality.

Even as someone who identifies as a liberal, I 100% agree with your sentiment here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blind to the obvious narrative or too simple to acknowledge basic tenants of human behavior.

My belief is that this is a compromise of convenience rather than want. It appears to be easy to achieve equality by hampering the best, but much harder work to achieve equality by raising the worst off up.

Not for me. But I don't thinks its' A or B, but some blend and it's always been some blend. House of Commons and House of Lords. Representatives and Senators, Electoral College, etc.

I believe the right discussion to have is where do we as society want to be between the two outcomes. Not do we want A, or do we want B.

I wouldn't use Congress as an example, as both houses have been elected by popular vote since the seventeenth amendment. Slippery slope in action...

I was referring the the balance of power between large states (House) and small states (Senate) as a metaphor for not wholly espousing the binary outcome equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.

Man, I've been frustrated when I see that story recently; it reads like a bad caricature of what a lot of good movements are trying to accomplish. In reality the goal (though not always perfectly executed of course) is always about raising people up, not tearing people down (like the handicaps in the story)

As an aside, I find it interesting how Harrison Bergeron is so commonly misinterpreted as a satire of the left. When one considers Vonnegut's personal beliefs and the strawman portrayal of communism in the story, it really should become clear that it is actually a critique of Cold War/anticommunist hysteria. A satire of anticommunist satire, if you will.

In context, it was written at a time when the ideological and intellectual opposition to communism hadn't been very well-articulated yet, and hadn't become "obvious" to onlookers.

It might be a little on-the-nose, but I think it is a sincere takedown of the authleft (and moreso: crab mentality). These views can and do come from within the left - like Orwell, most notably.

...In the same way that cannibalism is the logical conclusion of capitalism.

Don't get me wrong - the impulse is there and some people think that way. Just like are absolutely people who would peddle filet of Steve.

But amplifying the marginal to discredit the general is fundamentally dishonest, and we won't do that here, right?

I don't see how you draw that path, but maybe you could try explaining it. It seems the story is clearly an extreme form of "equality of outcome," but there's no clear linguistic or conceptual path from capitalism to cannibalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com