There are words that are meant to communicate meaning, and there are words that are meant to obfuscate meaning, and I have concluded that “equality of opportunity” is almost always meant to obfuscate meaning. It uses the word ‘equality’ only because it’s a nice-sounding and popular word, not because it’s what the concept advocates. Certain political types want to argue that they’re for equality too, so they just labelled their position “equality of something”—when that has nothing actually to do with equality.
I don’t want to “equate” its use with anything else. I want to see it replaced with a phrase that actually communicates its actual meaning more clearly.
When you use it with a different meaning, that means that if someone actually advocates equality of opportunity (e.g. everyone starting in life with a specific identical sum of money, and similar education, without ability to be helped by their parents or other family connections) they don’t actually have a way to say it. You’ve usurped the phrase.
At the risk of inflaming political sentiments, I do feel I need to somewhat come out of the closet to respond to this one.
When you use it with a different meaning, that means that if someone actually advocates equality of opportunity (e.g. everyone starting in life with a specific identical sum of money, and similar education, without ability to be helped by their parents or other family connections) they don’t actually have a way to say it. You’ve usurped the phrase.
But I do advocate equality of opportunity under nearly precisely the terms you define. In a ideal world material starting conditions would be identical and access to self-enhancing technology would be trivial for everyone. Differences would be the result of inevitable differences in actions that would result from all the different kinds of values “people” would choose, and even then I’m practically imposing a cap because as I’ve clearly stated in previous posts I believe in diversity and don’t think uberefficient values or designs should be allowed to gobble up (or paper-clip so to speak) everything. I hope the universe will eventually be divided between, many patches of interesting individuals and/or societies with different values. And yes I’m perfectly ok with one patch/individual/society looking at another and not approving of what they see, but I would ideally like them to live with it.
Even in today’s world, the very very non-ideal one, you’ll find I’m quite ok with a lot of wealth distribution and some other interventions. You’ll find few objections to well thought out universal health care or free education (all levels) schemes from me.
The only real thing I can’t negotiate on is meritocracy when it comes to natural talent and culture. Natural as in genetic or very very difficult to change traits that are passed epigenetically. We don’t have the tech to change either right now, and I think redistributing research positions on considerations others than “best person for the job gets it” will clearly set us back on getting that!
And let me be perfectly clear I am generally not ok with people being forced to change their culture or genes (once the tech is there). But I do think that to prevent society from going into a caste system with no ways to change casts if one so desires, free or very cheap genetic engineering and memetic interventions will have to be made available to those who choose them. And those who don’t choose them should never be worse off in absolute sense, but they will have to accept larger relative levels of inequality as time goes on. Especially if they choose to remain unmodified humans.
Wealth redistribution in order to help those who are unfortunate enough to have lost their bet [referring to ArisKatsaris’s example of identical people betting and losing and then being in a unequal position to bet again] get another chance at betting or the below average to get intelligence enhancements/training/treatment/whatever will improve their performance is something I would firmly support however I think job distribution is a very poor way of doing this, it seems intuitively obvious that it reduces the overall amount of wealth a society has.
If everyone gets a bigger slice of the cake in absolute terms than they would otherwise, then some greater relative inequality is not problematic. Actually as long as everyone is as a result better off in absolute terms its wrong (according to my values) to slow down the growth of the cake.
However let me again emphasise that I think we are dangerously close to mind-killer territory. On second thought I already feel I’ve crossed the line and in a sense regret my previous post, but don’t feel it fair to delete it considering others have commented on it already.
Edit: Its late here and I misread your questions. I don’t think redistributing material wealth for new generations will slow “society” down people once we get to real self-improvement tech. Providing a safety net will slow us down but I think most people value risk aversion, heck I prefer not to be cut off from advancement just because the odds didn’t work out in this branch of the multi-verse too! So I consider slowdown caused by that to be acceptable.
Also natural is I think a imprecise word in this context.
OK. Thanks for replying; I’ll respect your regret and leave it there. If it helps at all, my political preferences are, I think, relatively consistent with yours.
First off let me say didn’t mean to use the word in a subversive way and apologise if I did, I hope its apparent that I’ve tried to make my view and the meaning of my words as clear as possible.
I have concluded that “equality of opportunity” is almost always meant to obfuscate meaning. It uses the word ‘equality’ only because it’s a nice-sounding and popular word, not because it’s what the concept advocates.
Equality in general is used in this fashion.
I don’t want to “equate” its use with anything else. I want to see it replaced with a phrase that actually communicates its actual meaning more clearly.
On the surface this seems reasonable, perhaps meritocracy is the natural replacement. But I think the difference in warm fuzzie income people get when they can brag about being meritocratic vs. when they can brag about being egalitarian aren’t really that big. Also the basic arguments that all the various sides use don’t really change either when one goes with the alternative terminology. Functionally it makes little difference in the political sphere and I would dare say it makes little difference in a more theoretical one where people generally precisely define the terms they use to mean what they want anyway.
Also note that I wasn’t originally commenting whether the use of the phrase was misleading or not.
However since you bring it up I would challenge the notion that equality before the law being an important part of a meritocracy isn’t equality in a intuitive sense of the word (this is why I even brought up the intuitive sense of fairness and how it is invoked before).
You seem to think I would be aghast at a world where everyone had access to similar or even identical material wealth or starting positions. I would not. This debate has taken a faint but quite distinct whiff of blue vs. green tone.
There are words that are meant to communicate meaning, and there are words that are meant to obfuscate meaning, and I have concluded that “equality of opportunity” is almost always meant to obfuscate meaning. It uses the word ‘equality’ only because it’s a nice-sounding and popular word, not because it’s what the concept advocates. Certain political types want to argue that they’re for equality too, so they just labelled their position “equality of something”—when that has nothing actually to do with equality.
I don’t want to “equate” its use with anything else. I want to see it replaced with a phrase that actually communicates its actual meaning more clearly.
When you use it with a different meaning, that means that if someone actually advocates equality of opportunity (e.g. everyone starting in life with a specific identical sum of money, and similar education, without ability to be helped by their parents or other family connections) they don’t actually have a way to say it. You’ve usurped the phrase.
At the risk of inflaming political sentiments, I do feel I need to somewhat come out of the closet to respond to this one.
But I do advocate equality of opportunity under nearly precisely the terms you define. In a ideal world material starting conditions would be identical and access to self-enhancing technology would be trivial for everyone. Differences would be the result of inevitable differences in actions that would result from all the different kinds of values “people” would choose, and even then I’m practically imposing a cap because as I’ve clearly stated in previous posts I believe in diversity and don’t think uberefficient values or designs should be allowed to gobble up (or paper-clip so to speak) everything. I hope the universe will eventually be divided between, many patches of interesting individuals and/or societies with different values. And yes I’m perfectly ok with one patch/individual/society looking at another and not approving of what they see, but I would ideally like them to live with it.
Even in today’s world, the very very non-ideal one, you’ll find I’m quite ok with a lot of wealth distribution and some other interventions. You’ll find few objections to well thought out universal health care or free education (all levels) schemes from me.
The only real thing I can’t negotiate on is meritocracy when it comes to natural talent and culture. Natural as in genetic or very very difficult to change traits that are passed epigenetically. We don’t have the tech to change either right now, and I think redistributing research positions on considerations others than “best person for the job gets it” will clearly set us back on getting that!
And let me be perfectly clear I am generally not ok with people being forced to change their culture or genes (once the tech is there). But I do think that to prevent society from going into a caste system with no ways to change casts if one so desires, free or very cheap genetic engineering and memetic interventions will have to be made available to those who choose them. And those who don’t choose them should never be worse off in absolute sense, but they will have to accept larger relative levels of inequality as time goes on. Especially if they choose to remain unmodified humans.
Do you think that redistributing the non-natural and non-cultural stuff won’t set us back (or, rather, slow us down)?
Or are you willing to tolerate the slowdown in one case but not the other?
Or… ?
If everyone gets a bigger slice of the cake in absolute terms than they would otherwise, then some greater relative inequality is not problematic. Actually as long as everyone is as a result better off in absolute terms its wrong (according to my values) to slow down the growth of the cake.
However let me again emphasise that I think we are dangerously close to mind-killer territory. On second thought I already feel I’ve crossed the line and in a sense regret my previous post, but don’t feel it fair to delete it considering others have commented on it already.
Edit: Its late here and I misread your questions. I don’t think redistributing material wealth for new generations will slow “society” down people once we get to real self-improvement tech. Providing a safety net will slow us down but I think most people value risk aversion, heck I prefer not to be cut off from advancement just because the odds didn’t work out in this branch of the multi-verse too! So I consider slowdown caused by that to be acceptable.
Also natural is I think a imprecise word in this context.
OK. Thanks for replying; I’ll respect your regret and leave it there. If it helps at all, my political preferences are, I think, relatively consistent with yours.
First off let me say didn’t mean to use the word in a subversive way and apologise if I did, I hope its apparent that I’ve tried to make my view and the meaning of my words as clear as possible.
Equality in general is used in this fashion.
On the surface this seems reasonable, perhaps meritocracy is the natural replacement. But I think the difference in warm fuzzie income people get when they can brag about being meritocratic vs. when they can brag about being egalitarian aren’t really that big. Also the basic arguments that all the various sides use don’t really change either when one goes with the alternative terminology. Functionally it makes little difference in the political sphere and I would dare say it makes little difference in a more theoretical one where people generally precisely define the terms they use to mean what they want anyway.
Also note that I wasn’t originally commenting whether the use of the phrase was misleading or not.
However since you bring it up I would challenge the notion that equality before the law being an important part of a meritocracy isn’t equality in a intuitive sense of the word (this is why I even brought up the intuitive sense of fairness and how it is invoked before).
You seem to think I would be aghast at a world where everyone had access to similar or even identical material wealth or starting positions. I would not. This debate has taken a faint but quite distinct whiff of blue vs. green tone.