Well, the OP is describing a case where you might meaningfully have more or less opportunity depending on your expressed stance in matters unrelated to actual job duties - viz., your expressing support for diversity ideology, as evidenced in a "diversity impact statement". So this is basically compelled speech and/or discrimination based on ideology, which is a very real kind of oppression.

Oh, maybe I misinterpreted. I have much less interest in that argument given that there are tons of pre-existing ideologies that could be discriminated against for a job. Right? If your ideology is "I think it's important to work as little as possible to maintain a job." I'd assume many employers would discriminate against hiring someone with that ideology, no? Apologies if I'm missing the key point again.

> Oh, maybe I misinterpreted.

No worries. It's easy to misinterpret these things because there are facets of job performance in this area that wouldn't be out of place at all in a "diversity impact statement" (such as a proven, developed ability to teach and work with people from a high variety of backgrounds - which doesn't even correlate all that much with political stance per se). Nevertheless, the very notion of requiring that kind of statement is sure to introduce a sort of very real bias in hiring.

You fail to consider here that the persons so "oppressed" are actually those who would be in positions of power.

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?

As a white man who grew up with a single mother, this is exactly what affirmative action appears to be. Why? Because I already had a rough start, and saw opportunities broadcast and given out to others that I didn't qualify for simply because I wasn't non-white.

I understand the on-paper intents and purposes perfectly well, but the reality is these programs are racist to the core.

I get your point and maybe the solution to fixing historic oppression against race is hard to get perfect. And your financial problem or lack of opportunity sucks but but isn’t it a little silly to say that a program is racist when it’s trying to help a certain race who was oppressed because of their skin color.

If we stole 100 dollars from all black people and then 20 years later decided to give black people their money back, you’d say that repayment program is racist against non-blacks?

What do you tell an Indian or Lebanese immigrant who arrived 5 years ago and whose taxes are going to be increased to finance this?

Also, what if the benefit goes mostly to recent immigrants, not descendants of slaves? This is the case for affirmative action at elite schools:

> the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. [1]

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with

Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do.

Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly people that share X characteristics in Y field that’s fine as long as they’re the best people for the job.

That's not what parent said. Do you want to live in a world where you could be the best basketball player in the world but you are don't get drafted because your eyes are blue?

Some people don't get opportunities because of their skin color, their name or their religion.

It's about becoming a NBA player if you can't play basketball

I would generally agree that any instance of discrimination by characteristics orthogonal to the performance of a given task is undesirable (if we're striving to optimize total societal benefit / output / productivity).

Attractiveness is another axis of discrimination which is frequently orthogonal to job performance (unless we're talking about jobs as a model, etc).

I never understand this argument. Wouldn't market forces, i.e. capitalism, gekko's greed-is-good argument fix this?

If there were a group of basketball players with blue eyes (that were the best in the world), wouldn't someone see the huge money potential and create a team full of blue-eyes and win the title/cup/trophy?

Maybe in many decades after the anti-blue-eye bias had been successfully mitigated such a team would be formed. But until then, money and winning is not enough.

Bias is stronger than capitalism. Some people willingly give up money to not serve gay people, for example.

Exactly, people don't act always rationally, they sometimes even act against their own interests.

Homo oeconomicus is a myth.

Sure, if a minority is a small percentage and it wont hurt you financially (much), plus you can milk it to get press (and most likely increase your profit), then I can understand that. (I think you're referring to the cake shop if I remember correctly).

However setting up shop and not serving cakes to a vast majority of your customers who are a minority is just asking for bankruptcy.

I also find it really hard to believe that there isn't one greedy capitalist that will take advantage of this situation. e.g. Huge talent shortage of tech workers. Assume that there is a cohort minority who are probably price themselves cheaper (becz they are having it harder to find a job), then there's not one person who will seize this opportunity in America?

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?

Stop for a second and think about what this question implies. First, there are genetic characteristics which affect opportunity and can't be smoothed out. But even environmental characteristics are intractable. Factors like whether your parents read to you, make you do your homework, or make you go to school can't be corrected by social policy. Equal opportunity isn't a realizable goal.

The focus should be on preventing discrimination. But, while there is plenty of discrimination, discrimination explains a smaller share of unequal outcomes than unequal opportunity, which can't be fixed.

Short of genetic modification, we are always going to live in a world where your opportunities depend on the characteristics you were born with. We can smooth it out somewhat, but not remove it completely.

Look at discrimination against unattractive people for one - it is actually more pronounced (although less overtly visible) than discrimination by race, but gets significantly less media coverage. There are also many other axes - height, intelligence, character - most of which are heavily influenced by genetics; we simply consider it acceptable to discriminate based on these attributes.

The rhetoric has shifted in recent years from “equality of opportunity” to “equity”, which is more about equality of outcome.

> Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.

https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...

Do any companies subscribe to equity of outcome? I didn't think that was the intent of the word "equity". If that were the case, we wouldn't get promoted or bonuses based on our work, it would just be a timed schedule. I don't think that is what's going on.

Thanks to ESG scores, yes they do.

I've been under extreme pressure to get my team up to 40% women/nonbinary/lgbt even if their skills are subpar. It's coming from the top down. However, I do get some leeway from HR on their paper education profile and paper experience. I say "paper", because we already fired several people for basically lying on their resume.

How do the HR people even know that if some team members are LGBT? I am a gay and I think it is my private matter and not something I would be interested sharing with for example my employer. I prefer to separate work and my private life in many other issues as well.

It sounds very odd to ask about these kind of things during employment. How often do for example LGBT persons provide this kind information in their job application and is it even legal to ask it?

And on the other hand, is there anything that prevents you pretending to be a member of some minority? For example, if you can get more easily employed by saying that you are bisexual, is there anything that would prevent you lying? If there isn't, why even bother asking about these kind of things.

On the job application, there are optional questions where you can identify various minority and special statuses.

Skin color and gender are terrible measures of "opportunities you have". Money is much more indicative

That's true. It's hard to admit that, though. The current monied class can easily blame previous, (mostly dead) generations for racism and misogyny and say "we didn't create this problem, but this is what we're trying to do to fix this". Of course, they're benefitting from the situation and remain in control per the status quo.

If we admit to the classism that currently exists, that in the US the zip code you were born in says so much about what your opportunities will be, it's going to take a lot more social reform to address it than applying pressure around university admissions or job offers. The monied class may actually have to give up some power in that situation...

It's darkly amusing to me how many well off leftie progressive types are on board when I talk about difficulties that revolve around being a lesbian or disabled but look horrified when I drop into working class speech patterns or refuse to deny the class aspect of my upbringing.

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?

How do we know that those fewer opportunities are necessarily linked to the characteristics you were born with? For example: in Britain, white working class kids are the least likely of any major racial group to go to university. But that is evidently not because they're white. Poor parenting and low levels of expectation in some schools have been cited as some of the reasons for this.

For the record, in 2021 in terms of State school students getting into universities the rates were as follows: Chinese/72%, Asian/54.9%, Mixed/48%, Black/46.8% and White (of any class)/33.3%

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...

Making the world fair would be equal opportunity. Equity is the hot topic nowadays, which is explicitly ignoring more qualified applicants for less qualified applicants because of their race, and that's what people are upset about.

Life isn't fair. Nor will it ever be.

Equal opportunity won't create fairness, as we're not all clones.

What equal opportunity can do is provide those who have been systematically discriminated against (as well as everyone else) a fair shake. What they then do with that 'fair shake' is up to them.

This is a complex topic that reaches into many areas of life, including (but not limited to) home environment, quality of schooling, societal advantages/disadvantages, economic advantages/disadvantages, stratification by class/ethnicity/melanin content and a raft of other issues.

I agree that just focusing on melanin content is a poor way to address the issues seen.

That said, claiming that failure to solve all of a society's problems via melanin content awareness in hiring decisions means that the concept of equal opportunity is a failure is supremely unconvincing IMHO.

Edit: Fixed typo (unconvicing --> unconvincing).

Finding a more commensurate representation of underrepresented groups is a laudable goal, but if it means systemically discriminating against Asians or Hispanics then it's really a tongue in cheek effort

If we assume (rightly) that american society is inherently and irredeemably racist, how exactly can we trust admissions officers or people involved in employee recruitment to make decisions that aren't racist?

Racism runs to the core of how people see each other in america, so much so that race data shouldn't be allowed into any decisions period. Or at least, people should feed inaccurate data into the system in order to subvert the white privilege that it rests apon

do you want to live in a world where your surgeon was 'brought up the opportunity curve'? (very nice euphemism, i'll be using that, thanks

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?

You mean like making it harder to get into limited college slots (requiring higher scores, etc) based on your race? You're right, that seems awful.