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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are

Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.

But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.

Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.

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> it would be a natural conclusion

The counterfactual to that claim is nursing. Nursing is a very good job that has a relatively low barrier of entry yet the field is 88% female. The reason for that might be cultural but the reason is certainly self-selection, not discrimination. However, the difference may, in fact, be genetic (hormonal, more likely).

Nursing is the mirror image of programming. If the gender compositions were reversed, the campaigns for STEM would, instead, be for healthcare.

It may not be useful to look at outcomes to determine if opportunities are equal. It may be harder, but looking at opportunities to determine if opportunities are equal is really the only option.

Ironically, when it comes to nursing, no small part of the gender difference is because of discrimination against male nurses by doctors, nurses, and patients.

Until that's addressed, we can't even begin to assert that Nursing is inherently a field dominated by a single gender. Ditto teaching, writing, and so forth.

"discrimination of men in nursing" returns some great resources for looking into this further.

Likewise, there's discrimination against women doctors by doctors, nurses and patients. These are two sides of the same shitty coin.

Nursing may be 88% female, but outcomes in nursing show a disparity based solely on race.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4799908/#:~:tex....

> Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.

But why divide things along skin color? There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.

> But why divide things along skin color?

Because that is the basis on which people are being discriminated against? If people suddenly started beating up people with red hair, why wouldn't we try to help the group "people with red hair"?

> There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.

The same people who care about race-based discrimination are also trying to create equal outcomes for those groupings. Why do you think they don't?

Why do we only care about inequality due to racial discrimination?

Who is only caring about inequality due to racial discrimination? I specifically replied to this point in the comment you replied to.

Affirmative action as we know it only works along race lines. There is no affirmative action based on other criteria. Whenever I hear about affirmative action it’s always about race, race, race, …

Have you never heard of affirmative action based on gender?

"Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion" - no, there's always endogenous interactions. Protected class identity isn't randomized.

"There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity." The word "inherently" is doing all the work here by making acknowledgement of endogeneity look bigoted. But whether any of the thousands of factors that produce an outcome are "inherent," whatever that means, is irrelevant. You should always expect endogenous interactions if you haven't used a methodology that prevents it, like randomized blind experiments, difference in difference, instrumental variables, etc.

You’re saying you want to encourage 85 year olds with arthritis and glaucoma to keep working until they keel over? Why put them through that?

No, I'm not saying that - and it's rather disingenuous to even infer that statement from my post.

However, if an 85 year old with arthritis and glaucoma wants or needs to join the workforce, they should have the opportunity and the tools available to them. Many from the Baby Boomer generation are finding themselves in the "needs" category, for example.

Additionally WRT disabilities we actually need disabled people (i.e. pregnancy) in order for society to continue!

> if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion

It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.

This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.

Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.

Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.

So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?

> So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society.

Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.

To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.

This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.

And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".

Can you take the smallest slice, "people who are literally exactly you" and find no preferences that can't be attributed to discriminatory experiences?

To have complete equality of outcome between ethnic groups would surely involve homogenisation of their cultures. That sounds totalitarian as hell if you ask me.

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