If you don't agree with that concept, you shouldn't cede the linguistic territory by using the term coined by the people who invented that concept

I do wish these definitions were still used.

Calling them privilege, focuses attention on the wrong area and away from the real problem. It implies that to improve equity the solution is taking away these "privileges". It also implies some level of moral corruption for those enjoying the "privileges".

It is a race to the bottom where we punish everyone until their experience matches those with the most unjust treatment in society.

Originally it was a word used to describe what I mentioned in the other branch, social privilege, a general set of rules that affect you which enable concentration of means and power. It is not a result of these rules which was the main point of confusion.

It's not an original sin then, the rules can be changed to be more equitable. (Though some changes done under this name are either ineffective or wrong in principle.)

Then someone rightly decided to call whiteness a privilege (a complex of rules pertinent to people declared by society as white, by contrast with the opposite of them), and then somehow it was conflated with immutable characteristics. Yes, a person with light skin color might not actually be or act "white".

Another example: age cannot be changed (at least without), but ageism can. Age is not a privilege, set of rules pertinent to may be. (Some positive, others negative, protective or harmful.)

The opposite of privilege as sum total (which is beneficial rules) is mostly kyriarchy (set of oppressive rules, mostly hierarchies). Perhaps that is a better focus, at least for now.

Given the thread we are in and current strides in gene therapy, we might be there sooner than we expect.

I've recently discovered Thomas Sowell and I'm really itching to find time to read his book on the subject: Discrimination and disparities.

Check out commentary on Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian thinking for discussion that is more intellectual and less emotional.

Example: https://www.hoover.org/research/what-does-created-equal-mean

All of those things are absolutely giving my kids unequal chances above some of the kids in their school whose parents may be working several jobs an even then just barely making ends meet.

And the fact that my parents could provide much of what I am providing my kids to me was a big contributor to setting me up with the chances that allowed me the path I had to this successful career. Certainly I worked along the way, but others who worked just as hard (and were just as talented) did not active the finial stability that I now enjoy. And there is every reason to believe that the chances I am giving my children will wind up paying off in enhanced chances for their children.

On a statical basis (there are always outliers) wealth creates wealth. And the slaves that were released 150-odd years ago were released with nothing. Then we spent most of the time since that trying to make sure they had no voice (clear voting suppression), no property rights, no way to buy a house (redlining), inferior schools, and so many other hurdles and outright barriers to their advancement. Not to mention clearly unequal policing.

Looking at this pattern, how can I not credit, in some way, that my family is white? That in the 1950's and onwards they benefitted from the GI bill that help guarantee their mortgages, where black veterans were almost completely denied those same benefits? Because my family immigrated to the midwest initially, we were not one of the few families that directly benefited from slavery, but surely we benefited in aggregate from the work that was the only work available to black people at unequal pay.

We have made great strides in making the letter of the law more equal. On painting a patina of equality across our society. But the moment you scratch that surface and look at the outcomes it becomes very obvious that the real work of making a just society is far from done.

The one that always gets me the most are the repeated studies where they send the same resumes to companies, but change out the names from white sounding ones to black sounding ones, and suddenly the call-backs on them drop precipitously.

I'm also curious to what your own personal definitions of equity and equality are,

It is like seeing a red spot on a table. Is it strawberry jam? Is it blood? Is it result of someone injecting insulin? Is it the only evidence of a murder?

But all opinions under the sun are available at our fingertips, so if we judge those who disagree with us by the most extreme of their similars, we’re not going to throw much light on these issues.

To me, equity should mean that (for example) a paraplegic can still access most or all of the spaces that a person who can walk can access, which means making sure they have access to a wheelchair and public spaces have wide enough unobstructed aisles for those in wheelchairs to get through. This requires us to examine outcomes, not impartially treat all people the same (since the vast majority of people with the ability to walk wouldn't need the same assistance a paraplegic would).

In a society like ours this also means some people have to make sacrifices - the owner of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant may face difficulties because their current capacity comes at the cost of having narrow aisles, and making their shop accessible would reduce capacity. In some countries (like the US) this is illegal and they can get sued for it. For the owner this is very bad, but the alternative (society is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs) is worse.

It might be easier to think of it as a evolutionary process. Adding in things like (enforced) laws around making space for wheelchair clients for a business will select against those that don't do it. That will inevitably result in churn (and cycle of life death/rebirth and associated pain and loss), but as long as there is sufficient presence of the 'species' (to extend the analogy) that does what you want, then it's the equivalent of weeding a garden. Sucks to be the weed, but if no one does it, it turns into a giant mess of bad stuff and everyone loses.

It's also important to not starve by 'weeding out' all your crops. It's a balance.

The tricky part is, the real world can’t be quantified or modeled in a way that is tractable to humans in a larger way (near as I can tell anyway), so the people and environment get squashed into coarse buckets like skin color, education level, etc. which not only don’t reflect any individuals actual circumstances, but can be gamed in various ways.

Since individuals also respond to the pressures they are under, it makes it easier and easier to see folks who become more and more helpless and take on a victim mindset (aka there is nothing I can do to get better, hold on while I finish this liter of vodka) - because it works in very real ways, and it’s the easy path. And you can’t reliably quantify something like that, it’s usually too subtle or subjective.

This can easily lead (without very careful and mindful leadership - which doesn’t scale, and often doesn’t get selected for either) to essentially co-dependence. If they try to improve, they lose support and/or get kicked out. If they get worse, they get more help.

There are of course plenty of examples of failure and dysfunction the other direction - insisting that someone who is fundamentally screwed by the environment ‘get better’ while not providing any support and/or dishing out beatings for every minor infraction.

And if you set your metric to ‘everyone has the same outcome/rewards’ - well, it is REALLY hard to do well. Fundamentally, you’ll never get a population to all perform the same. As a species we have a wide and diverse set of skills, predispositions, upbringing/parental influences, resources, and other attributes, and there is literally no way to make everyone equally successful at everything without maybe somehow making everyone equal on all those other fronts - which plenty of dystopian novels on THAT.

So if you can’t make everyone equally successful or identical or have the same upbringing/influences or resources, you can get ‘equal outcomes’ another way - anyone who sticks up above the pack gets smacked down until everyone is equal again, or any venue or opportunity that can’t be made equal gets banned. And that does scale, and also has the benefit of being easily measurable and doable. Which is why you see it so often.

Which is also pretty dystopian, as it’s enforced ‘lowest common denominator’ by definition, and tends to destroy any innovation or improvements and slowly (or not so slowly) suffocates the society. It’s easy to go down, it’s hard to go up.

For your example, if we wanted to be 100% sure that everyone in a wheelchair had equal access to everything without some massive improvement in technology - we’d need to pave every backcountry hike (and ban the ones that we didn’t want to spend the money on), ban rock climbing, ban most skydiving, etc.

Which would essentially destroy the experience one was theoretically trying to make equally available.

The ADA requires only “reasonable accommodation” which is why you can still have rock climbing walls. Not many people are suggesting that we break everyone’s legs for equity, either.

But most insidious about the slippery slope argument is the implication that since this absurd outcome is the inevitable consequence of addressing equity issues, that we should not try.

This is, respectfully, crap. Yes, we should not ban rock climbing walls. Yes, we should reduce thresholds to help those in wheelchairs. We don’t need a framework that survives being taken to an unreasonable extreme in order to make progress. We are reasonable people who can make judgment calls, not paperclip-making universe-destroying automatons.

The reality is there are a LOT of real world examples of this going all the way to the far poles, so this isn't hypothetical - and it often gets very murderey. Authoritarians of all stripes tend to take the approach of 'if it isn't working, do it harder', and 'if they don't like it, it's because they're bad/the enemy'. And authoritarians get power when people get scared or unhappy, more often than not.

The 'evening the playing field'/'equality of outcome' approach is literally what was used to justify taking out all the intelligensia and rich folks in Russia and China during the communist revolutions, the 'punish them harder because they keep failing' approach is what is being used to punish minorities in a number of states literally right now in the US - and I could go on.

I don't know why you would assume I think the ADA is a problem. The ADA is a reasonable setup - but it also doesn't guarantee, or attempt to guarantee, equalities of outcomes. It attempts to guarantee a reasonable level of equality of ACCESS and/or accommodations. Which is fundamentally different, and inherently has a reasonability test that can help shut down the real outlier stuff (like wanting to shut down all non-wheelchair accessible climbing walls or whatever).

It's the difference between everyone getting an interview (or an internship) vs everyone being promoted to VP - or it being illegal to have someone who is a VP (in the meaning we have today)

What I am saying is that your proposed dystopia is not the inevitable result of considering equality of outcome, as you seem to be suggesting, and that one should be very careful when making slippery slope arguments for doing nothing.

Let’s be super clear: dystopias involving murderous authoritarian leadership claiming to act in the name of equity are a problem with murderous authoritarian leadership, not a problem with equity or desiring equitable outcomes, right?

The ADA is an outcomes-focused law, that’s why it comes up in this context. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but few people are arguing for guarantees, and that’s the straw man you’re arguing against.

And for the rest, you lost context a bit - I was replying to the comment in the parent post to mine, which asked

'What is your basis for equality of outcome being a bad thing? Can you give some examples of what you're talking about?'

My point is that fundamentally, true equality of outcome (if taken to mean 'everyone gets the same rewards/has the same success') may naively sound nice, even very fair, but is not only impossible, but undesirable when you look at what it would take to try to get there (depending on the degree of course). And when people try to quantify what they mean by 'rewards' it also tends to be obvious that most people's concrete ideas (and scale) of rewards do not line up with each other.

And then gave some examples.

A rephrasing of the idea, is the saying "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (Karl Marx), but there are a great many ways to put it.

There are many non-murderey areas that tend to be eas(ier) to balance, like education. If I've always wanted to be a mathematician, but have no knack for it, does that mean I get infinite tutoring? Most people would say no, and I can't think of anyone that has tried in practice. Many will say 'well, you can get x years of normal education, but if you fail out that's it'. Most will say 'well, you can apply, and if you have good grades, the state can cover it', etc.

Most of those fall on the spectrum of equality of opportunity (aka ability to try/take a swing). Equality of outcomes is when you say 'Everyone should be able to be a mathematician, so everyone (or x percent of everyone) must be a mathematician'. That... gets weirder. What if they don't WANT to be mathematicians? Do we make them? What if their background/interests don't line up, so they hate the studying, and keep failing the tests? Do we fake the numbers? Beat them until they comply? Fail a bunch of everyone else until the numbers match?

This is in no way to downplay very real issues with culture, racism, sexism, etc. that do happen. It's to point out the dangers of taking naive and course metric driven approaches to the problem.

When we're talking wealth, access to jobs and political leadership positions, etc. there is also a long history of it getting much, much uglier.

The particularly murdery/authoritarian examples happen because since it is fundamentally impossible for everyone to actually get the same rewards/outcomes in almost all cases and people can't all agree on what it would concretely mean to even get the same rewards/outcomes, the people in power either give up without succeeding and then get replaced (or rarely, has a coherent enough and smart enough power base that they can give a nuanced and sane answer that is not merely propaganda - looks like Sweden might have pulled that off?), or try harder. In government, try harder often means overpower resistance, purge dissenters, neutralize political opponents who don't support you - to various degrees of brutality. You see it everywhere, in the US, England, Russia, etc. In a revolution, that also usually means lining people up against a wall.

Especially if the power base/population is angry and unhappy, and particularly if it is large (since that typically means the spoils are large for the winners), and since the naive answers sound good, there is huge incentive for someone to also tell people what they want to hear while trying harder, even if they know it's bullshit, and use tools like propaganda, secret police, you name it. It also provides really effective cover to do nasty things in the name of doing the right thing.

There are some really recent historical examples of people getting all the power to try the hardest. Which tends to attract/filter for authoritarian types - probably especially the murdery ones after awhile. See Lenin vs Stalin (or really Stalin vs everyone else who could conceivably challenge his power)

Mao did multiple purges. The Khmer Rouge was.... particularly nasty. All of that was done in the name of helping the everyman and producing a just outcome for the everyday person.

All that said, the person you originally responded to gave the example of being able to go to a restaurant in a wheelchair, which is exactly what the ADA covers, and it requires taking into account outcomes: asking "can we make reasonable accommodations so that all who would like to eat a restaurant can reasonably do so?" means looking at the outcome of whether a paraplegic (as in the original post) can access the restaurant. You can think of this as opportunity instead of outcome if you like, but it's the example in the original post that you responded to, so I'm not sure your accusation that I "lost the context a bit" is fair. (If anything, it seems that you took "equality of outcome" out of context from the post you are responding to.)

Now, the rest of your post makes it super clear that you are not arguing the same thing as I am.

When I, and I think most people (maybe not Marx?) say "equality of outcome," I mean things like people are equally listened to in meetings, considered for promotions, able to enter the fields they want to enter, able to rent accommodations, etc. and crucially that these things are irrespective of irrelevant attributes like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., the issues that you note. But very few people are really arguing for ignoring relevant attributes, fewer still are arguing for entirely equal incomes, and basically no one is arguing that everyone "should be able to be a mathematician" despite having no aptitude for math.

I'm going to say it one more time, because you keep not responding to my point: as a society, we can favor equality of outcomes as in the examples above without also "purging dissenters", "neutralizing political opponents", or doing so "to various degrees of brutality".

Murderous authoritarianism simply does not inevitably follow from considering equality of outcomes. Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and the Khmer Rouge are not the inevitable result of considering equality of outcomes, and the argument that "equality of outcomes" is a bad metric because it's fundamentally impossible to improve it without turning into a murderous dictatorship is false, and you've provided zero evidence for it.

You obviously haven’t been listening to the same news, or were in the same corporate meeting rooms, or have dealt with the HR realities I have.

There are numerous large players right now making it very clear that equality for them is x percent of your workforce is female, or black, or white, etc, and they need to be paid on exactly a specific curve - or else. I’ve had friends who were told (for leadership positions at very well known companies) that they were more than qualified, but weren’t the right color or gender - just in the last year.

It has been made clear that compliance with expected distributions is required [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201]

And this isn’t a exaggeration. I’ve literally had very senior managers at a FAANG say to me (in diversity training!) ‘well, we have too many white guys here, so let’s start figuring this out’

What you are referring to is equal treatment - which is great! It is not equality of outcome by any definition I’ve seen used. I’ve always seen ‘x percent of workforce is y’ and ‘pay for x workers is z’. And that is exactly the coarse metric I am referring to. And it is, very clearly, being used in the real world right now to do the things you are saying no one is doing. My wife has endless complaints about it, as she is a female engineer and gets bombarded with recruiters that leave no shadow of a doubt they they are talking to her because she is a woman (and they only are interested in woman), and her actual skills are secondary - which pisses her off to no end.

And if you think you can go into any big tech company right now and complain if you notice this happening without being fired - then I have bad news for you. At least the brutality here is low though, and we don’t have to worry about getting shot over it! I’ll take that any day of the week. If you think a lot of the back and forth harassment going on politically isn’t to neutralize political opponents, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

And if you read it, I never, ever, said it was inevitable you would end up with a Mao or a Stalin. I said they tend to grow in conditions where the population is unhappy or scared, and is willing to listen to things that sound good but don’t work - and need people to ‘try harder’.

My (admittedly shitty) take on it is that these professors benefited tremendously from race-based affirmative action policies, and gradually a set of ideas that were immune from attack and questioning evolved to justify it. The "equity" concept came from that. My favorite memory from these classes was being shouted at by a famous Black poet who was a guest speaker because I questioned her view that poor whites shouldn't be treated any differently than rich whites when it came to admissions. The level of instantaneous emotional reaction was something I had only previously seen when arguing with Biblical creationists. This was when I realized this was quasi-religious ideology that was so firmly attached to the identity of it's adherents that it rendered them incapable of properly assessing reality.

I joke here, ultimately all society is a form of altruism. Equity is not equality and never has been. Equity in life means making it less likely that random events are liable to make it impossible to live a life. The other word for it is fairness.

We don't achieve that. We have many rules that are obviously stacked for some group or another, and these synergize with each other. The simplest one that is technically available to everyone is inheritance - but of course poor have nothing to leave to their children. Nations make rules that stack the deck for their citizens. Social roles, jobs and their interactions with status are often easily stacked too. And so on.

Genetics are often relatively weak compared to these rules - it mostly comes into play when comparing people from roughly similar backgrounds.

That's a great question and a lot more philosophical than I'm going to get into in HN comments. I was trying to emphasize how framing is important - focusing on reducing privilege is much different than helping those who are starving. Making LeBron James wear ankle weights will further equity in the NBA, but I don't think anyone wants that.

> The other word for it is fairness

Fairness in opportunity, or fairness in outcome?

Neither is possible with the randomness of the world. The only way to reduce the effect of randomness is to make us all exactly equivalent - I can't think of any good ways to do that.

> We have many rules that are obviously stacked for some group or another

Life is inherently stacked for some group or another. Even if we manage to make perfectly "fair" rules (which I don't believe is possible), there will still be disparities between however you want to define groups.

> Genetics are often relatively weak compared to these rules

Depending on the implementation of the rule, I somewhat agree. I don't think our science is advanced enough on the genetic side to determine how much of an impact these rules have.

I really hope that's true...

That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that society reserves privileged status to specific groups and denies this status to others, and that things like parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc are _markers_ of this.

In the United States, I believe the latter aligns with the facts we can observe. This is basically the argument of Isabel Wilkerson in "Caste"[0]. I'm not really up for trying to make the case for why I find this view convincing right now, in this comment I just wanted to highlight that it is a different argument than the one you made. If Wilkerson is correct, the actual markers of privilege are quite arbitrary, and phenomena such as racism arise from this rather than being themselves the root issue. The goal then is not so much ending discrimination as it is tearing down the caste system that fuels it.

[0]https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/

This is quite an extreme perspective. By this definition, the ability to read is genetic, the ability to walk is genetic, to talk, etc — these are all genetic, but nearly everyone learns these things because of the “environmental factors” you dismiss as “influence”.

We have way more in common, genetically, than we have differences. Privilege primarily comes from environmental and socially constructed factors, not genetics — unless you’re talking about the Olympic Games, and I’m not sure many are arguing for equity there with respect to genetic gifts (with perhaps the notable and wonderful exception of the Paralympics).

If you think the entire point of “equity” is to tear people down who have too much privilege, respectfully I think you arguing against a straw man and are missing the point.

When you have a genetic duplicate of yourself walking around, it starts to make you wonder about how much is genetically determined vs other factors.

One thing I've noticed is that a segment of highly educated people seem to attribute far more to genetics than they should be.

Your statement "unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will" is pretty shocking, considering that you have embraced a science-based version of Calvinist fatalism.

That being said, I agree with your broader point of helping those in need. It should be noted that the concept of "privilege" isn't the presence of something, but the absence of discrimination and barriers.

Genetics has an influence, along with many other factors, because reality is multivariate and complicated.

My twin is significantly overweight. Has been since we were 15. I'm not and haven't ever been. I always enjoyed working out, he didn't. Your univariate view of the world can't explain this.

My twin converted to Mormonism a few years ago. I'm not religious at all. Does genetics explain this?

Starting with our college years, he and I have divergent life experiences. I fathered a child at a very young age, and the child was born extremely premature, and I was subjected to a life and death medical crisis at this age. He wasn't dealing with that. My father views this as being a tremendously powerful factor in our rather potent differences today.

I don't seek to be antagonistic, but my entire life story defies your thesis. Doesn't mean you are wrong, but it certainly means that you are "overfitting" in the classic statistical modeling sense.

And to be fair and defend big chunks of your thesis, my twin and I do have a lot of similarities in our lives that are probably strongly influenced by genetics. But one thing we agree on is that a massive factor in both of us being successful is our difficult childhood. My mother was a schizophrenic who left us when we were toddlers, and doomed my father to raise 5 kids by himself. Our family's income put us below the poverty line, and we were subjected to a lot of trauma and occasional abuse when my father would relapse (alcoholism).

Coincidentally, my brother's ex-wife was a genetic determinist, and a big point of friction was her constant projection of our family history with mental illness onto every behavior she didn't like from my brother or myself. He got a small tattoo on his arm for his 35th birthday(against her wishes), for example, and she attributed this to mental illness. Because that's what univariate thinkers do: They explain reality with a univariate model, and make everything fit that. It's a shitty model, and if it was productized for data science reasons, it would fail miserably.

Yes it can. You were subject to different environmental factors. These differences can compound to produce very different results over time, but ultimately it is still genetic at the root.

I could respond to the rest of your post but I think this is the crux of your argument.

Your argument seems to be that physics is all we need.

>...Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic.

Kind of leads down a dark path, but isn't surprising.

That is what equity work focuses on? It's not about tearing down and taking away, but about ensuring equal access and opportunity. It only takes away when unfair access has existed - a common example here are "legacy admissions" for university. Inherited spots, in a nutshell.

Also, [citation needed] on your genetics claim.

Because that's how it reads.

You also built a straw man by deliberately misunderstanding the word "equity." The word has been clearly defined since the Middle Ages and means simply "share of ownership." i.e. To be equitable, a business must pay all its employees both salary and shares in the company. Same as us software devs get.

Look at it this way - how much would a rich heir pay to go from ugly and stupid to beautiful and intelligent? I can't imagine a sum large enough that they wouldn't be willing to trade it away.

We try to correct privileges given by nature all the time, especially helping disabled people.