however I don’t think rigid qutas or or equating inequality of outcome with inequality of opportunity is helping anyone.
How do you distinguish between outcome and opportunity? Which states of a person’s existence do you label “opportunities” and which states do you label “outcomes”?
Or, to offer a less abstract question, how do you prevent different outcomes from becoming different levels of opportunity?
Two people start off with 10 dollar. They then both choose to spend 10 dollars on an even and fair bet. Person A wins and now has 20 dollars, Person B loses and now has 0 dollars. So far we have equal opportunity and unequal outcome. Fine so far. But then the same bet is offered again. Now person A can choose whether to bet again, and Person B doesn’t have the choice. Difference of outcome has become difference of opportunity.
Is a person’s education an opportunity which ought be equal, or an outcome of their parent’s finances, so it’s okay if it’s unequal? Is their chance at employment an opportunity which ought be equal, or an outcome of his family’s social circle, so it’s okay if it’s unequal?
I’ve seen “equality of opportunity” too often used as nothing but a smokescreen.
Different people will not do equally well on any given task. This is why we bother to select people for their positions and don’t give them out via lottery.
Overall letting people compete by choosing in any way they see fit should reward those who choose rationally. Which should help us create more “wealth” than otherwise. Yes there are cases of tragedies of the commons where government intervention might be warranted, so as to limit choice, frack that’s the whole reason government is a good idea! But such limitations of freedom need to be overwhelmingly proven not just to work against a identified tragedy of the commons situation, but to be cost effective.
Wealth redistribution in order to help those who are unfortunate enough to have lost their bet 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.
In my original post I say government should be blind on some axis or should even give positive discrimination, this is because government isn’t usually in the business of wealth creation and because there are some zero sum benefits with holding a certain position in society and in most places on the planet there is a popular bias in terms of perceiving power and prestige in favor of government.
For the time being this seems a good bias to exploit for increasing general welfare by redistributing zerosum goods (feelings of power, prestige, fame) while making as small a negative impact on the positive sum games that make everyone’s life better (the creation of material goods, information accrual, ect.).
I use equality of opportunity as a shorthand for meritocracy with a strong culture and support (be it government programs or private charity) for everyone’s self-improvement.
Other than your last sentence that was a bit longer, and a bit less on the point of my question than I would have liked—you went on a bit of a tangent there. Though I don’t disagree with most of what you said, I might weigh each element’s relative importance a bit different.
One thing: to me it seems inaccurate that you use “equality of opportunity” as your shorthand, when the word “equality” (or any synonym thereof like “identical”, “even”, “same” “balance”, etc) doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in your longhand version. You certainly seem to support increased opportunities for everyone, but where do you support equal opportunities?
So, given that, do you really think that “equality of opportunity” is the best phrase to use when communicating your ideas? Why not call it “socially-supportive meritocracy” or something like that? Wouldn’t that communicate your ideas better than “equality of opportunity”, if you don’t actually believe in people needing to have equal opportunities?
Why not call it “socially-supportive meritocracy” or something like that? Wouldn’t that communicate your ideas better than “equality of opportunity”, if you don’t actually believe in people needing to have equal opportunities?
The nearest approximation I would like to use is meritocratic social democracy or efficient welfare state but both terms (welfare state, social democracy) have come to mean basically bread and circuses for the masses rather than genuine concern for optimally increasing citizens welfare.
You certainly seem to support increased opportunities for everyone, but where do you support equal opportunities?
In a sense this comment rings true.
I don’t really care how people do compared to each other in a relative sense as long as everyone is sufficiently better off in absolute sense. I generally agree with John Rawls on this, though I do value equality in itself a bit less.
However I realize that sometimes relative inequality is important because it determines the distribution of zerosum goods like power, prestige and respect. I therefore value equality in a instrumental sense since some equality is necessary for feelings of well being.
I propose we accept less efficiency in government than in the private sector to like I previously said exploit people’s progoverment bias to redistribute zerosum goods with less impact on nonzero sum goods than is otherwise possible.
BTW Let me point out that generally people use “equality of opportunity” to mean a fair chance whatever that is and that generally a ideal of meritocracy is a about the closest reasonable approximation one can make without stretching the idea to necessarily mean equality of outcome. People generally mean the latter when they just say equality. Its quite intuitive that if you don’t get a job because you don’t belong to the right group this creates feelings of being wronged, popular notions of fairness often have elements of meritocracy interwoven. An appeal to equality of opportunity is often a appeal to such a fuzzy concept of fairness.
Why not call it “socially-supportive meritocracy” or something like that? Wouldn’t that communicate your ideas better than “equality of opportunity”, if you don’t actually believe in people needing to have equal opportunities?
Again you want to equate the use of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome by saying that if the odds aren’t literally equal this can’t be called equality. But the popular use just dosen’t match this definition, I don’t think its useful to spend effort to try and change the meaning of words or phrases to suit one’s conclusions about what they ought to mean, even if these are reasonable.
But even if you disagree on the reasonable of such effort. Let me point out that changing just LW usage of terms simply to render them synonyms with another term rather than to increase accuracy seems to be a tendency that just adds to the already rather formidable catch of data that is LWspeak which when not absolutley necessary detracts from the aim of raising the sanity waterline.
From wikipedia:
Equal Opportunity, sometimes known as Equality of opportunity, is a term which has differing definitions and there is no consensus as to the precise meaning.[1] In the classical sense, equality of opportunity is closely aligned with the concept of equality before the law, and ideas of meritocracy.[2]
Yes there is the legitimate dissent about the meaning, yet I think its pretty darn obvious when people use it in the classical sense. Especially considering the context of this discussion.
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.
How do you distinguish between outcome and opportunity? Which states of a person’s existence do you label “opportunities” and which states do you label “outcomes”?
Or, to offer a less abstract question, how do you prevent different outcomes from becoming different levels of opportunity?
Two people start off with 10 dollar. They then both choose to spend 10 dollars on an even and fair bet. Person A wins and now has 20 dollars, Person B loses and now has 0 dollars. So far we have equal opportunity and unequal outcome. Fine so far. But then the same bet is offered again. Now person A can choose whether to bet again, and Person B doesn’t have the choice. Difference of outcome has become difference of opportunity.
Is a person’s education an opportunity which ought be equal, or an outcome of their parent’s finances, so it’s okay if it’s unequal? Is their chance at employment an opportunity which ought be equal, or an outcome of his family’s social circle, so it’s okay if it’s unequal?
I’ve seen “equality of opportunity” too often used as nothing but a smokescreen.
Different people will not do equally well on any given task. This is why we bother to select people for their positions and don’t give them out via lottery.
Overall letting people compete by choosing in any way they see fit should reward those who choose rationally. Which should help us create more “wealth” than otherwise. Yes there are cases of tragedies of the commons where government intervention might be warranted, so as to limit choice, frack that’s the whole reason government is a good idea! But such limitations of freedom need to be overwhelmingly proven not just to work against a identified tragedy of the commons situation, but to be cost effective.
Wealth redistribution in order to help those who are unfortunate enough to have lost their bet 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.
In my original post I say government should be blind on some axis or should even give positive discrimination, this is because government isn’t usually in the business of wealth creation and because there are some zero sum benefits with holding a certain position in society and in most places on the planet there is a popular bias in terms of perceiving power and prestige in favor of government.
For the time being this seems a good bias to exploit for increasing general welfare by redistributing zerosum goods (feelings of power, prestige, fame) while making as small a negative impact on the positive sum games that make everyone’s life better (the creation of material goods, information accrual, ect.).
I use equality of opportunity as a shorthand for meritocracy with a strong culture and support (be it government programs or private charity) for everyone’s self-improvement.
Other than your last sentence that was a bit longer, and a bit less on the point of my question than I would have liked—you went on a bit of a tangent there. Though I don’t disagree with most of what you said, I might weigh each element’s relative importance a bit different.
One thing: to me it seems inaccurate that you use “equality of opportunity” as your shorthand, when the word “equality” (or any synonym thereof like “identical”, “even”, “same” “balance”, etc) doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in your longhand version. You certainly seem to support increased opportunities for everyone, but where do you support equal opportunities?
So, given that, do you really think that “equality of opportunity” is the best phrase to use when communicating your ideas? Why not call it “socially-supportive meritocracy” or something like that? Wouldn’t that communicate your ideas better than “equality of opportunity”, if you don’t actually believe in people needing to have equal opportunities?
The nearest approximation I would like to use is meritocratic social democracy or efficient welfare state but both terms (welfare state, social democracy) have come to mean basically bread and circuses for the masses rather than genuine concern for optimally increasing citizens welfare.
In a sense this comment rings true.
I don’t really care how people do compared to each other in a relative sense as long as everyone is sufficiently better off in absolute sense. I generally agree with John Rawls on this, though I do value equality in itself a bit less.
However I realize that sometimes relative inequality is important because it determines the distribution of zerosum goods like power, prestige and respect. I therefore value equality in a instrumental sense since some equality is necessary for feelings of well being.
I propose we accept less efficiency in government than in the private sector to like I previously said exploit people’s progoverment bias to redistribute zerosum goods with less impact on nonzero sum goods than is otherwise possible.
BTW Let me point out that generally people use “equality of opportunity” to mean a fair chance whatever that is and that generally a ideal of meritocracy is a about the closest reasonable approximation one can make without stretching the idea to necessarily mean equality of outcome. People generally mean the latter when they just say equality. Its quite intuitive that if you don’t get a job because you don’t belong to the right group this creates feelings of being wronged, popular notions of fairness often have elements of meritocracy interwoven. An appeal to equality of opportunity is often a appeal to such a fuzzy concept of fairness.
Again you want to equate the use of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome by saying that if the odds aren’t literally equal this can’t be called equality. But the popular use just dosen’t match this definition, I don’t think its useful to spend effort to try and change the meaning of words or phrases to suit one’s conclusions about what they ought to mean, even if these are reasonable.
But even if you disagree on the reasonable of such effort. Let me point out that changing just LW usage of terms simply to render them synonyms with another term rather than to increase accuracy seems to be a tendency that just adds to the already rather formidable catch of data that is LWspeak which when not absolutley necessary detracts from the aim of raising the sanity waterline.
From wikipedia:
Yes there is the legitimate dissent about the meaning, yet I think its pretty darn obvious when people use it in the classical sense. Especially considering the context of this discussion.
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.