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Comment by Gimpei | Hacker News Reader

Height does appear to be correlated with income[1]. So it’s entirely possible that discrimination has existed and continues to exist. People seem to think that because something is difficult to measure, it isn’t there, but that simply isn’t true. Lookism could also be a big problem, but the causal effects of being unattractive are hard to identify. Imagine trying to assemble a treatment and control group for that. Who is going to self identify as being ugly?

I understand your objection to drawing an equivalence between racial discrimination, but even if it isn’t as “bad” can’t it still recognized as a lesser form of bigotry?

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~apostlew/paper/pdf/short.pdf

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>even if it isn’t as “bad” can’t it still recognized as a lesser form of bigotry?

Yes. In fact, that's exactly what I said.

It's also worth calling out the sheer madness of equating height discrimination to racism, and pretending not to see the problem.

They are equated under the principle of injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. You could make the argument that Black people have suffered more at the hands of society, but the injustice of both are in the same class: prejudice.

>You could make the argument that Black people have suffered more at the hands of society, but the injustice of both are in the same class: prejudice.

Again, this is exactly what I am saying.

I am also saying that you go further, and engage in an intellectual slight-of-hand. This happens precisely when you say "there's really no difference [...]".

Yes there is. There are several, important differences that render irrelevant their belonging to the same category. Abraham Lincoln and Pol Pot both belong to the category of "heads of state", but it is laughably incorrect to claim that there are no differences between them. So too with your example.

What you are failing to understand that there can be "no difference" between doing things, yet there is a large difference when one of them is done a lot more and more intensely than the other.

That's the difference between anti-short and anti-Black, not the anti-ness itself.

"There's no difference between anti-shortness and anti-Blackness, except the intensity and commonality" is certainly a statement, its I guess correct in the tautological sense that "X and Y are not different if you exclude all the differences between them", but it's also not a useful statement at that point.

I'd ask in what way the point you're trying to make is useful, either analytically or rhetorically. I don't see how it is offhand.

They are not equivalent and I disagree with the OP's example. Racism is significantly worse. That doesn't mean heightism/lookism is not an injustice worth examining and discussing however

The difference here is that height is also correlated with nutrition and by proxy social class. Whatever that study says, eradicating that type of confounding from statistical associations is hard/impossible.

It's not as hard as you think, and the correlation with nutrition and social class is disappearing and even non-existent in many places.

See Japan: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/02/12/national/scienc...

There's an increase in low birth rate babies (not due to malnutrition), probably due to increased survivability of smaller more frail babies. The fact that they grow up and lead healthy lives means that their society is indeed selecting for the survivability of smaller people.

Right, but selecting for in the present tense (ie past 30 years) is going to have a negligible impact on population statistics.

Also, ruling out that kind of confounding -is- hard… as mostly practiced any measurement error in confounders reduces our ability to ‘control for’ them… but most epidemiology and all nutrition research just glosses over this.

Height and income relationship could be modest or nonexistent if you look at a genetically and socially homogenous population and consider earnings through age 65 or 75. Also, note that as you get up to the retirement age, tall people are more likely to be dead or disabled than short people.

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