Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought?
From my point of view, I believe diversity of thought enables groups of people to consider new ideas and positions that wouldn't be considered, i.e. thinking outside of the box, but I don't understand why this is extrapolated to different races, gender identities, immigration statuses, sexualities, etc. I am not claiming you brought them up but they tend to be common "diversity" points the modern populace loves to clamor around.
Why do any of those imply anything about how people will think? We've all seen some creative people that are of our own race, or that were also our own sexuality, etc.
All of this is of course at the expense of speed, in that greater variance in thought/ideas leads to slower movement, which I think is important in business (a solo or very tight knit organization can move much faster).
Diversity of thought isn't really something we do anymore. If you pay attention you'll notice how you always have to put things in a particular way depending on the group you talk to. You have to avoid mentioning certain other groups. You have to couch your position in friendly terms, or talk about a problem that primarily affects one group as if it affects everyone equally, or vice-versa. People have a laser-focus on whose flag they perceive you to be flying and it's almost impossible to get anything done when they decide you're playing for the wrong team.
Many (but not all) diversity advocates are looking for evidence to back up their preference for racial, gender, and other forms of non-ideological diversity, so they make the (often true) assertion that people of different backgrounds bring different perspectives. This is ideology searching for evidence (often known as 'motivated reasoning').
I remember when this was known as ‘prejudice’, in the strict sense of pre-judging aspects of a person (such as their perspective) based on e.g. their race.
It was considered to be a bad thing, so it’s been very strange to see it used as a premise by diversity advocates.
I've seen it justified as every single member of the marginalized group has some life experience that no member of the majority/powerful group has. So although it's a prejudice, it's a correct one. That's different from traditional prejudices that aren't true for every individual.
Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group. Because it's not a single experience.
It is even possible that, say, the black son of a black doctor, raised in a rich neighborhood, knows less about the plight of blacks in ghettos than the white son of a white janitor, raised in a ghetto with lots of blacks—even if the latter made no deliberate study. One could also consider Africans who immigrated to the United States as adults. They do have the experience of being a certain race, but that may not imply nearly as much as people seem to think. (In fact, I would hazard a guess that the members of "marginalized groups" that do get hired for the highly professional jobs that diversity advocates talk about, are very disproportionately likely to have come from well-off backgrounds, and to have no direct ghetto experience.)
> Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group.
This is a common fallacy. Statistics don't substitute for qualia. (much as we say the plural of anecdote is not data, it is also not firsthand experience or even necessarily understanding)
Further, "Having experience with the ghetto" isn't what people are discussing when we discuss the importance of diversity. There are still common experiences between wealthy racial minorities and poor ones, that white Americans don't experience. Try reframing this fallacy in terms of say, women and men, or gender minorities. It doesn't work.
Nor do qualia substitute for statistics, or for different qualia. Almost every woman will have the experience of menstruation, yes, but, for example, how many of them have been sexually harassed by a man? Some of them have never had that experience, others have had it dozens of times. If you have a woman in your group and you assume she knows what it's like for women in general, you may be very wrong. Yet that assumption seems pretty common—I've seen a decent number of accounts of people who belong to some group, complaining that progressives assume they speak for everyone in that group. There's an example upthread.
I'm not saying everything can be gotten vicariously through research, but a lot of things can be. And then the question becomes, which specific things do you want, and what's the best way to get them? I think the diversity discussion rarely gets that far—and if it did, strategies would end up very different.
> for example, how many of them have been sexually harassed by a man? Some of them have never had that experience, others have had it dozens of times.
How does knowing that 80% of women will be sexually harassed in their life substitute for having had that experience? Speaking for myself, a man, I've been sexually harassed before (not in the workplace), and it's absolutely not an enjoyable experience, but my qualia, and the qualia a woman who is sexually harassed has are still going to be different.
And yes not every woman has the same experience. That's obvious. But who is more likely to have qualia that are more representative of woman's experience? A man who studies women, or a random woman? There is indeed the place for expertise (and similarly: data), but neither expertise nor diversity is a substitute for the other.
> I'm not saying everything can be gotten vicariously through research
Qualia cannot be. If you entirely discount the value that qualia have, that may not matter to you, but there are good reasons to believe that that's a bad idea.
> I've seen a decent number of accounts of people who belong to some group, complaining that progressives assume they speak for everyone in that group
Indeed, but this isn't unique to progressives. It's just a problem that minorities have to deal with. And that's absolutely not a good thing (and awareness of this is good!). But again, it's not a progressive attribute (or one caused by diversity initiatives) to assume that the "other", whatever group it is, is cohesive in ways that the groups you are familiar with aren't. (e.g. When a member of a minority group commits a crime, you have reactions and narratives that minority crime is on the rise, or that this specific minority are criminals etc.)
A great way to fix this, by the way, is to interact with various people who are members of the other group, and see them disagree and debate. This can only really happen if you have a diverse enough group that you have multiple people of whatever minority to interact with. And this is good for everyone! It broadens majority perspectives and reduces microaggressions.
> And then the question becomes, which specific things do you want, and what's the best way to get them? I think the diversity discussion rarely gets that far—and if it did, strategies would end up very different.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Whose goals'? The business? The employees? The minority's? To explain why I'm dubious of the whole "data can solve the problem", someone has to drive the research to gather the data. By and large, if you want this to be done reasonably, you need to have input from the group under discussion. There's tons of hilarious-if-they-weren't-horrible examples of this if you're willing to look. The ML community is full of them (Gender Shades is perhaps the seminal example).
That is, with relatively few exceptions, for research to be done correctly, or in many cases, to be done at all, you need someone who is like the people being researched in important ways to be able to champion, contextualize and guide the research. Without that, a culturally unaware researcher is, if history is a guide, more likely than not to misconstrue cultural signals or make harmful and long lasting mistakes.
but on the other extreme you have a different common fallacy: Here meet Person A! Person A shares a couple of macrodemographics traits with Person B so they are automatically and authority on B's experience (and probably already friends)
something to consider is that in most demographic groups there is a similar internal diversity than the entire population. so yes there are many experiences shares mostly by only women and also by most women, but this does not mean that many will be completely alien to that experience.
in my opinion any kind of diversity effort needs to be based on our shared humanity and a belief that we can learn from each other (without treating the other neither as a saint nor an enemy)
I find that claim very implausible. I would also be very concerned as an anti-racist if I found myself sharing a premise (e.g. black people just have a different perspective to white people) with racists, no matter what the rationalisation. Particularly since it would legitimise discrimination in contexts where that perspective was seen as undesirable.
Also, the act of prejudice was seen as wrong, not particular prejudices.
They invoked experience to support a claim about perspectives.
I consider racism morally wrong and therefore people who act in a racist way are acting in a way that is morally wrong. This is a valid inference, not prejudice. Prejudice might be if my inference was not valid, e.g. that racist people are sexist. That would be wrong.
> I consider racism morally wrong and therefore people who act in a racist way are acting in a way that is morally wrong.
But note you are now projecting a belief to an act. Are you claiming that someone who believes that "people of different backgrounds will provide different perspectives" (I chose this intentionally here) will undertake racist acts 100% of the time?
Otherwise as far as I can tell, you're being equally prejudicial. You believe that there is a high likelihood that these people will act in a specific way based on a belief they hold. That's no different than believing that people will with a high likelihood act in a specific way (or more precisely, a nonspecific, but different way) based on differences in their experience.
Perhaps I misunderstand you here. Let me instead ask a different question: Why do you believe that "black people have a different perspective than white people" is a premise shared with racists?
Usually, at least from what I've seen, racism is rooted in a belief that the other group is lesser in some way, or occasionally that the group is dangerous, etc.
The idea that a white person and a black person could, theoretically, have exactly the same life experience is probably true, but do you really think it's possible for that to happen in (presumably) the United States? Can a white child and a black child come out of a class on slavery with the same perspective on it? One of those people has the perspective of "I would have been the oppressed" and one does not. Those are different. And I don't see how one can say otherwise, nor do I see how recognizing that is a concern.
> They invoked experience to support a claim about perspectives.
And? It's not possible, a-priori to construct a group of people who will have different perspectives on a problem. Selecting for diversity of experiences as a proxy seems reasonable, but I'm open to other suggestions.
To jump back a bit, I think there's a bit of a mismatch here:
> Particularly since it would legitimise discrimination in contexts where that perspective was seen as undesirable.
I'm not suggesting that there is one black perspective on things, much as there isn't one white perspective on things, that would be reductive. Perspectives are more complicated than that. So the idea that "the black perspective" could be labelled undesirable doesn't really make sense to me. I certainly would find it suspicious if someone labelled all of the minority perspectives as undesirable though.
> Perhaps I misunderstand you here. Let me instead ask a different question: Why do you believe that "black people have a different perspective than white people" is a premise shared with racists?
You've misunderstood me. My concern is that a premise held by diversity advocates ('people of different races have different perspectives') could be used justify racist acts (e.g. not hiring a person from a given background). Assuming that people who want to justify racist acts could be referred to as racists, this would mean that diversity activists share a premise with racists - which would be a concern for me. Nowhere in there is a claim that certain people will undertake racist acts 100% of the time.
> Usually, at least from what I've seen, racism is rooted in a belief that the other group is lesser in some way
If we are suggesting that different races have different perspectives, then this becomes an easy belief to support. Presumably perspectives differ in some ways which can make some more valuable than others in some contexts.
> I'm not suggesting that there is one black perspective on things, much as there isn't one white perspective on things, that would be reductive
You may not be suggesting this, but it often seems to be put this way, including by the comment I replied to, which stated that:
> every single member of the marginalized group has some life experience that no member of the majority/powerful group has. So although it's a prejudice, it's a correct one
If 'perspective' here is understood as the thing arising from the single life experience shared by a social group, then it seems like a natural reading to see it as a single thing. But part of the problem with this discussion is that the claim that 'people of x race have a different perspective' is assumed rather than argued for. I am not at all clear on what is shared by black people from all walks of life all over the world and not shared by white people from all walks of life all over the world (who have their own version of it) - and how that thing is relevant to hiring an intern at BigCorp so it would be nice to see the idea expounded on a little more.
> Can a white child and a black child come out of a class on slavery with the same perspective on it?
Possibly not, but would two white children or two black children come out of it with the same perspective on it? What prior judgements can we make on those individual's perspectives based on their race? It may be the case that the white children would feel tremendous empathy with their fellow man and campaign vigorously for reparations. Similarly, the black children might come out of it thinking (like another prominant black man) that 300 years of slavery sounds like a choice. In my view, there is very little we can say in advance about the views of those children based on their race, and we should wait until we have the child in front of us so we can ask them about their perspective. And when that child is older, and applying for a job at BigCorp, we should extend them the same courtesy.
> My concern is that a premise held by diversity advocates ('people of different races have different perspectives') could be used justify racist acts (e.g. not hiring a person from a given background).
I don't really see how this follows without some other premises. Let me illustrate:
Two people, equally qualified, differ in race. Both apply to a job. Is it racist to choose between these people based on the algorithm "pick the one who will result in the more racially diverse group"? I don't see how it is. As far as I can tell, this is the only kind of action it is reasonable to take based on the premises "different races have different perspectives" and "we value different perspectives".
If you start switching the causality around and start saying that we value employees of a specific race more highly because we find their perspectives more valuable, that's problematic, but this doesn't follow. I do think it's easy to get the idea that there's extra murkiness here. For example if you need insight into a culture/race for business reasons (say you want to appeal to them more), I'd argue that having someone who has a lived experience does make them more qualified for that position. That's not the only thing that can make one qualified for such a position, but I don't think it makes sense to discount that value. That's a very particular case though, and not really generalizable.
> Presumably perspectives differ in some ways which can make some more valuable than others in some contexts.
Qualifying this as "in some contexts" is, I think, the undoing here. There are contexts where the perspective of someone of a specific race is more valuable. This is demonstrably true. If I'm doing a study of the experiences of people of a certain race (gathering the data), the experiences of a person of that race are contextually more valuable than the experiences of a person of another race.
Now there are contexts where presuming that racial background makes one's perspective more valuable probably is racist, but just because that is true in some contexts doesn't make it true in all contexts.
> You may not be suggesting this, but it often seems to be put this way, including by the comment I replied to, which stated that:
I read what you quoted as something like "there is a group of experiences that is exclusive to each race". Perhaps let me make the argument more clearly: "Every member of the minority group has the experience of having lived as a minority in the united states. No member of the majority group shares that experience". When stated this way, it's pretty obviously true. You can debate whether it's useful, but I don't see how recognizing that could be racist. I think this also makes more sense if you assume that the person suggesting such things assumes that systemic inequalities exist. Then you can start to see why those experiences do differ.
Even if two people experience different particular inequalities, they still experience racial systemic inequalities that the majority group doesn't.
> I am not at all clear on what is shared by black people from all walks of life all over the world and not shared by white people from all walks of life all over the world
When this kind of thing is discussed, it usually isn't a global thing. It's almost always black people in the US, or races in the US, or specific to a geographic region. A person in Uganda who never steps foot in the US probably doesn't have much in common with a black person who lives here. But, and this is the important bit, if that Ugandan person does ever come to the US for an extended period (and likely even if they come only briefly), they will share some experiences with Black Americans that I will not.
That is, the judgement isn't based on a person's race alone, but based on the person's race interacting with the locally dominant culture.
> What prior judgements can we make on those individual's perspectives based on their race? It may be the case that the white children would feel tremendous empathy with their fellow man and campaign vigorously for reparations. Similarly, the black children might come out of it thinking (like another prominant black man) that 300 years of slavery sounds like a choice. In my view, there is very little we can say in advance about the views of those children based on their race, and we should wait until we have the child in front of us so we can ask them about their perspective.
While ultimately semantics, I have a problem with this. "300 years of slavery sounds like a choice" isn't a perspective. It's a conclusion. People can reach the same conclusion from different perspectives (otherwise you'd never be able to get anything done with diverse perspectives...). And even when people reach the same conclusion, the different perspectives by which they did so is useful.
>> My concern is that a premise held by diversity advocates ('people of different races have different perspectives') could be used justify racist acts (e.g. not hiring a person from a given background).
> I don't really see how this follows without some other premises
You don't see how the idea that different races have different perspectives could be used to justify racist acts?
How about this? "We don't hire black people because a black perspective would not be a good 'culture fit' at our organisation" or "we feel that a white perspective is necessary for the kind of work we do".
Typically, racist people like to seize on the suggestion that there are intrinsic differerences between people of different races to justify racist acts, so I'm surprised you see it as a stretch that a racist would readily agree that people of different races have different perspectives and use this to justify their behaviour in much the same way that white supremacists now talk about 'incompatible cultures'.
> Now there are contexts where presuming that racial background makes one's perspective more valuable probably is racist, but just because that is true in some contexts doesn't make it true in all contexts.
No-one has claimed it is true in all contexts. I said that presuming (or pre-judging) someone's perspective based on their race used to be called prejudice and was seen as a bad thing. Are you disagreeing that pre-judging someone's perspective used to be called prejudice? Or are you disagreeing that prejudice used to be seen as a bad thing?
I think at a high level they are right. It probably is true that being a different race or sex or whatever results in different experiences on average which inform worldview. The problem is that any differences that might arise are largely out of scope of work. My domain knowledge, acuity, communication style, and professionalism really have nothing to do with experience relating to race, sex, orientation, or any other factor these people are concerned about.
In reality these diversity programs are basically societal anti-discrimination programs in disguise. While those types of programs aren't necessarily bad, proponents know that if they pitched them purely in this way they would never get management buy in because that's largely not work related; hence all the ill supported talk about diversity automatically yielding better teams.
I can accept ideology seeking evidence, as long as everyone is clear about that. If it results in good evidence (either way) that holds up to critical analysis, all the better.
> Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought?
Some people got fired for framing the problem exactly as you framed it:
Diversity of everything: race, age, sex, alma mater, native language...
I think the key message is: limiting your hiring to a specific race is equally as stupid as limiting it to MIT graduates or to people who grew up in Queens.
This is a motte. "Limiting your hiring to a specific race" means excluding everyone outside that race because of race. I think everyone here agrees that's stupid, and today almost no one is openly doing that. It's not the "key message" because 99% of those hearing it already agree, and the 1% who disagree probably aren't changing their minds and don't have much power anyway.
The key message (the bailey) that diversity advocates tend to push these days is that, if you just go about hiring in what you normally think is the best way, and you end up with hires of only one specific race (or of a few races, but none of a certain few other races), then you are doing something wrong and bad, and you should change your hiring process so you end up with people of more races, even if that means sacrificing some of the goals for which you originally optimized your hiring process.
> This is a motte. "Limiting your hiring to a specific race" means excluding everyone outside that race because of race. I think everyone here agrees that's stupid, and today almost no one is openly doing that.
Intentionally perhaps not, but that doesn't mean that they aren't doing so unintentionally. As a silly example, if you restrict yourself to hiring Stanford CS grads, you'll have a hard time hiring more than a few Black people each year. If you aren't offering the best possible offers, and going out of your way to court those handful of students, you may not end up with any.
> then you are doing something wrong and bad
This isn't a bailey. To continue the above example, you have a few options. You can court those specific students, maybe that's a bad idea. Alternatively, you can look in more places. Hire from other schools, like state schools especially in the southeast. You'll find a ton more candidates, many of whom are just as qualified as those from Stanford. And you'll end up with a more diverse workforce along just about any axis you could pick.
You didn't sacrifice anything except the ability to say "we only hire Stanford grads", which isn't really a sacrifice.
You seem to be talking about diversity in the hiring pool being good whereas your interlocutor was questioning whether diversity in hirings was a good.
Companies outsource work to foreign countries in a heartbeat and did so for decades and you have to search very hard to find a company that hires by race.
Your education needs to fit reality at least somehow.
In system architecture, there’s entire fields of research exploring ways to expand the space from which we pick our solutions. It is not about variety of opinions but about a variety of ways of thinking about problems. More options means more creativity, more chances of a novel approach, better chances of standing out. Having a culturally (gender, race, native language, education, age, you name it) diverse team is a really efficient way to gain that. So diversity of perspective is directly financially beneficial for certain organizations.
The issue is that many allege that one doesn't need surgery so long as they identify as their respective gender. Saying "I identify as a [gender]" is enough. There are clear differences between the biological sexes which drastically impact physical performance in athletics. Look at the texas high school wrestling champion, the under-15 boys team in dallas beating the world champion womens soccer team, etc.
The whole thing of just needing to say you identify as a woman is 1000% bullshit and in fact the pushback against such stupid things is causing a lot of problems for “real” transpeople.
When I speak of transwomen I’m referring to people who have had surgery/hormones. To me if you’re willing to get rid of your penis that’s dedication and unlikely to be a ploy to win medals in track and field.
You are still going to have a biological advantage. Bone structure, muscle mass, endurance, reaction time, oxygen capacity
These are things that persist even after chopping your penis off or taking hormones - you can't undo the changes that your body went through during the developmental phase.
Someone male who was on female hormones literally their entire life since maybe age 0-2? Ok, you have a case. Otherwise it's just incredibly unfair for women to compete against.
Yeah read my comments a little more carefully. I have stated that I 100% agree that women need a separate league to compete in. I was advising the poster I replied to originally that he will get a lot better results stating the facts without the really gross “transwomen are men that are losers” angle. It’s really hard agreeing with y’all when you are assuming I’m disagreeing and arguing against a point I didn’t make.
If you really care about women’s leagues then it’s probably best not to frame the issue as “transwomen are male losers.” You will not win support with that approach.
It would honestly be really cool to encounter this (or something like it) unexpectedly in some fantasy type movie. One of my favorite things of the new Westworld series was the Player piano openings of more recent hits.
Nah, they're not. In the undocumented economy, there are lots of things you do that don't show up. It's not like you're filing taxes when you drive up to Lowe's and ask the guys waiting in the parking lot to help you with some construction. That shit is going straight cash-to-cash.
Those jobs are shittier (that's why people drive instead of doing them) but they will still exist.
Just go to upwork or similar sites and see how people are refusing to hire workers (including programmers) in CA because of AB5. This affected way more people than just drivers.
Hahaha, that's a really funny reply considering this comment I made a couple of hours ago¹. I guess you're right. I didn't think other people were also doing this.
> Upwork sent around a "Don't worry about AB5" email but I'm not taking chances. Just ended everything with Cali contractors.
The funny thing is that he's replying to me, one of the people who has stopped using California contractors except among trusted relationships (which is non-Upwork).
I don't know what your experience is with contractors (I use Upwork - which is an awesome platform - extensively) but that's not it. The savings come from the fact that you don't need 100% of their time, you don't need to recruit, and you can slide easily along the performance vs. price on the scale.
One is when you want an expert: for instance, we don't retain in-house counsel. We don't need it 100% of the time, but for the short periods we need it, we need the 99th percentile guy. And we can't afford the 99th percentile guy 100% of the time.
And then it's when you want drudge work but it's spiky: like you need things labelled or whatever. Upwork is like AWS for people and it's really, really good for all the reasons AWS is good.
If I suddenly have to work out payroll and benefits and all that shit, that's instantly non-viable. It's all right, the world is a big place, and things I can contract out I can just as well contract out outside of California and eventually outside the US. 90% of the time I'm doing Anglophone-adjacent nations anyway. Americans are too expensive for this work and they're equivalent performance anyway.
And for the stuff like law? Well, there I'll go with the 99th percentile guy. I know he's powerful enough to get his carve-out (as he has).
I’m not familiar with the proposition, but lets say that you are right for the sake of argument:
Now we have two possibilities:
a) We could fight against it and try to get it revoked. Go back to the status quo where those workers keep working—potentially underpaid—without getting any of the benefits full-time workers rely on.
b) We could ask for a new proposal that would give gig workers these benefits and guarantee them a minimum wage.
I don't disagree, the current politicians need to find a solution to provide people with meaningful opportunities to protect them from the fallout of these changes. I think the danger of allowing this exploitation to continue, if we examine the precedent of the previous decades, is too large though and we need to act before the erosion continues.
"Laws like this exist to protect the weakest from exploitation."
maybe that was the intent but, in reality, you just destroyed your poorest citizen by taking what little they did have away. I get it, passing a law was the easiest thing for you to do because it shifts all responsibility but don't think too high of yourself.
Giving someone a job they want is not exploitation. If gig workers wanted to be unemployed they could easily do that instead, but they chose to look for a job, someone offered them a job, and they took it. Why should the state interfere in that arrangement and take that job away?
The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything. You aren't de facto entitled to receiving money for any services you may or may not provide, regardless of whether you're skilled or not, just because you exist. A company exists because one or more people risked wealth in order to create a net positive system - their existence is not as riskless as one would believe.
Companies aren't inherently "entitled to" anything either, including "personhood," avoidance of personal liability of shareholders for company actions, patents and trademark protection for inventions, rights to use public infrastructure, etc. You can't pretend like society hasn't granted corporations their own reasonable entitlements while arguing that workers shouldn't have their own.
That's true. Companies are just collections of people. They are not entitled to anything either. I don't think they should have any entitlements. No entitlement is "reasonable" if none are owed to anyone or anything to begin with.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
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You can either give people unemployment (wage without work)[as per 22 or 23(3)] by taxing the companies you mention, or you can make the companies to give money directly to the people in return for work. There is no third way. You can't deprive people of a dignified life by ignoring them.
Positive and Negative Rights or Coercion and Non-Coercion Rights
"Negative and positive rights are rights that oblige either inaction (negative rights) or action (positive rights). These obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. The notion of positive and negative rights may also be applied to liberty rights."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
Rights are either (1) liberties that are stipulated to not be infringed by the government (Saying "Dear Leader is a bad leader" is protected speech and taxes/government cannot be used to prosecute someone for saying it) or (2) The ability to demand services to be rendered by the government so one's desires are fulfilled (I demand the ability to take from you via taxes to pay police so that I can have protective forces / police to defend me saying "Dear Leader is a bad leader")
Organizing political unions around negative rights (1) is socially scalable and recursible: "who among us agrees we will never kill our fellow man? of those in the subset, who will agree to never assault someone unless if and only if the person who is to be assaulted, has already assaulted someone" (2) is not socially scalable "Who agrees we should coerce person/group x if some of you feel person/group y wants what person/group x has"
If you think it's possible to write laws the subsidize the well-being of the destitute, Please let me know who I should sue for landing on a desert island and starving to death. Reality isn't fortunate nor charitable -- consensual, opt-in unions can be.
Anyone can make any arbitrary decision and call it a human right, it does not make it so. Watch:
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Article 6753
Everyone has the right to play video games 24 hours a day.
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Nobody is entitled to life, nor dignity. Simply because someone else exists on the planet doesn't mean their livelihood is now my burden. Me existing doesn't mean you ought to be enslaved to provide for me.
If no one is entitled to anything why did humankind abolish slavery? Child workers? Indentured servitude?
Think about it. Indentured servitude is nothing but a contract between two people. By your ideology it should be of no one else's concern. Yet, it is considered slavery and is illegal. Why?
Because it turns out life isn't as simple as "you're not entitled to anything". This same sentence has been uttered by people throughout the ages who profited by the status quo until the commoners got their heads, literally or figuratively.
Every law we have, including the ones that allow you to have private property, private land and virtual property such as copyrights and patents are man-made and arbitrary.
Yes, the one thing we can all agree on is the right to self. Nobody other than themselves can control their body - by that I mean that no matter what you do, nobody can tell you what to think. You can be brainwashed by force, or conditioned to react a certain way to escape force, but you can never really know what another person thinks.
Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property. More explicitly, any individual intelligent agent that exists takes up some physical space and that space they occupy at any point in time to continue their existence is theirs only. Property can be given up voluntarily or if nobody else has a claim to it - in this case it extends that clearly rape is wrong, but prostitution is okay, as it's voluntary on both sides. Seizing someone's house is wrong, but exploring space and building new structures in the middle of nowhere is not.
Whether laws exist regarding private property (or the lack thereof), we can define a set of natural rights that any person has regardless of any local, regional, or global laws, constructs, or ideologies. We can all agree murder is wrong, rape is wrong, stealing is wrong, slavery is wrong, and the clearest and most concise way of setting this forward is by understanding that nobody is entitled to anything other than their body and any property they have gained which was either unclaimed or voluntarily from another agent.
Certain schools of thought disagree on unclaimed property, e.g. if one settles a piece of land and the landowner doesn't notice, but after a decade or so has passed and the resident has worked the land and only then the landowner notices, who really owns it? I am not in a position to answer this but I don't think it's "arbitrary" or "man-made" to expect natural rights over your body and property. Everything else, indeed, is abstract.
>Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property.
To what extent? Does this principle apply to indentured servitude? How about work related accidents, should a company be legally required to prevent them? Should a mining company pay compensation for the lung damage sustained by their miners, even though that was not in their contract? How about the environment, does this principle imply I have a right to breathe fresh air? How about drinking water?
>Whether laws exist regarding private property (or the lack thereof), we can define a set of natural rights that any person has regardless of any local, regional, or global laws, constructs, or ideologies.
You can, but it doesn't mean I or anyone else will agree to them.
>We can all agree murder is wrong, rape is wrong, stealing is wrong, slavery is wrong
No, we can't. People used to think slavery was ethical. What changed? Raping and plundering used to be ethical for a victorious army. What changed? Today the majority of the world eats meat, and it is very possible that in a century we will be seen as primitive carnivores.
You are also not defining what constitutes these crimes. Is capital punishment murder? Is it murder to kill an enemy soldier? How about an enemy civilian? How about collateral damage? Is it slavery if a company destroys all your other options, forcing you to work for them on their terms?
Is it unethical for companies to collude and fix prices or wages? Is it unethical when workers do the same? Is it unethical when a company pays the local police to break a strike?
The thought that "you only own your body, and you have to earn everything else" falls down pretty quickly once you look outside that idealistic bubble and see historical or ongoing issues.
There's an even more powerful counterargument to the facetious notion that "we all agree that murder/rape/slavery is wrong" than "people used to think it was right".
People today still think those crimes are right, as evidenced by the fact that there are many people who still do them. That's why we have laws against those crimes: to punish the many thousands of people who still attempt to carry them out, and in many cases succeed.
If we could "all agree that they were wrong", then we wouldn't need laws against those crimes, because no one would ever commit them.
> The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything.
That's an ideological statement. You may subscribe to it, but not everyone has to. Society is fundamentally based on the notion of shared rights and duties, what these rights and duties entail can be up for debate, but if you don't want to owe anyone, you will have to live a pretty lonely, primitive existance in Siberia or Alaska.
Nowadays with the internet one does not need to be lonely even if they are away from society.
In addition others might decide to follow them.
> primitive existance in Siberia or Alaska.
This does not make much sense. Why would living somewhere else automatically give them any duties?
Anyway, I do not see the point of this argument. It is like saying to a gay person "if you don't want to be discriminated by anyone, you will have to live a pretty lonely, primitive existance in Siberia or Alaska."
> Nowadays with the internet one does not need to be lonely even if they are away from society.
How are you going to pay for the internet? If you want to operate with state currency, you need to abide by the rules of the state. Render unto Caesar ...
Edit: I suppose you could try doing it with bitcoin. Best of luck if you try!
And the end result is the lack of a right to life. For life requires sustenance. And if there's too few with all the resources, you are denied the right to life.
As a result, I can consider a libertarian to be genocidal. For they would be mostly fine with a Holodomor.
...and because workers show up to make it run, and because everybody pays taxes for the roads and electricity, and on and on.
We could have a dog-eat-dog society like Mad Max or something. Or we could set simple rules and live a decent life. Its kind of what Democracy is about.
You don't need taxes for roads or electricity. In the same way we don't need taxes for grocery shopping, or education.
Workers indeed show up and make things run, but only because they voluntarily chose to agree to a contract where that is their duty. If they don't like the terms of their contract, they can not take it, renegotiate their current one, find a new one, or take on risk and start your own income. You can't "accidentally" fall into a job.
About the "don't need taxes" thing: That's a laughable fallacy. In this modern world of interrelated dependencies, the days of "somebody will probably build a road just when its needed, Libertarianism could work. Really! Just let random people run the whole society at random, that'd work great"
We have to grow up, and recognize that as our country grew from 10M to 450M people, certain processes and activities have to be streamlined and organized. You don't run the company by letting folks show up for shifts at random and hope for the best. You don't run a country's infrastructure that way either.
Risk is a strong word, often there's little risk involved, it's often more about who you know, which entitlements your birth gave you and what parachute mummy and daddy can give you (especially if you're white, male and privately educated).
There's no inherent entitlement or human right to give your children your money, or to not be simply turfed off what ever land you are using when society decided there's a better use for it, for a competitor simply stealing your inventory, expecting protection from thugs taking your business etc., etc.
Because wealth begats wealth, there needs to be certain checks and balances, minimum wages are one of them, inheritance taxes and capital gains taxes are others.
For that, you get the protection of strong laws, an infrastructure you paid almost nothing towards, legal protections for your property, protection from foreign governments, access to skilled trained workers you didn't pay to educate, etc.
Your argument is circular, Fred is wealthy and can afford to speculate, therefore Fred deserves more wealth.
But Fred is only wealthy when everyone else buys into the system, otherwise Fred would soon be Dead Fred.
There is risk in any action taken due to the fundamental lack of information regarding events occurring in the future. I agree with you that much of it is luck, this at the same time does not mean because one is born lucky that they now need to suffer to bring someone else to their level. I disagree that it is meaningless, I believe that since no one person is entitled to anything from anyone else (to think otherwise would be to support slavery), the only morally correct form of interaction is through consensual voluntary action.
I do not think we need checks and balances. Minimum wage actually harms those who are most disadvantaged - if I am hiring two people and I must pay them the same amount, there's no reason I would take the socially less valuable person. At the very least, eliminating the floor would allow the disadvantaged to compete and make racists pay for their prejudice, i.e. "Do I really want to pay $10.00 for a white straight privileged [whatever insert here] or $5.00 for a black trans [etc]".
Inheritance tax is violence against those who pass on their wealth. If you have indeed earned so much that you would like to ensure your lineage, what right does anyone else have to stop you? Why is it wrong for you pass on wealth to your children? Whose business is it? What if instead, you simply lived a thousand years and kept your wealth?
If you want to donate money because you are very rich and have a lot of money to spare and truly believe this, then by all means, you can even pay more in taxes nowadays and never file a return. Nobody will stop you.
The problem with no inheritance tax is that it destroys individual merit. In an ideal free and liberal society everyone would start from the same point and achieve the things they achieve in life based on their individual merit. Such a scenario driven to its extremes would be a dystopian Brave New World-like horror, but we can certain level the playing field somewhat by ensuring that some don't start with millions in their pocket whereas others start with 0.
There is an absolute mountain of evidence that the economic status of your parents is a strong influencer of your own economic status. This is the cause of a great many problems, including things like the problems with the black community in the US for example.
Your entire argument on this is a contradiction; no one is entitled to anything yet you are entitled to the money from your parents? What right do your children have on the money someone else earned with their merit? Let them prove their own worth.
The argument goes both sides. No company is entitled to receive profits on the products it creates or the money it invests, just because it exists. There is no reason to believe or accept that companies and investors should have more protections from losses than workers.
The parent said "no one is entitled to anything". I take that to mean "neither capital nor labor is entitled to a return". It's probably also useful to scope this conversation to a certain context: "in a free market, no one is entitled to anything". This is a sort of hypothetical scenario since there are no perfectly free markets, and a completely unregulated market is very likely not a desirable thing (evolutionary forces aren't stable and stability is a prerequisite for sustained prosperity, security, etc); however, it's still a useful concept to guide discussion.
They didn't explicitly say that capital is entitled to a return, but the comment pretty clearly indicated an asymmetry between capital and labor. You could invert the wording to the following
> You aren't de facto entitled to receiving a return on any capital you may provide, regardless of whether that capital is put to productive use or not. A company exists because one or more people provided their labor in order to create a net positive system.
and the tone clearly changes from the original. I agree that neither capital nor labor is entitled to a return, but I don't think that's what the parent comment was suggesting.
Via "no one is entitled to anything", the parent explicitly said that capital is not entitled to a return. No need to read between the lines here. We can all agree that no one is entitled to anything in a free market and move on to the next question, which is probably something like "to what extent does a perfectly free market deliver on our collective objectives"? I.e., "Can we balance market freedom with some amount of regulation to deliver a system that is both prosperous and stable/sustainable/equitable/etc?".
> A company exists because one or more people risked wealth in order to create a net positive system
What about companies that exist solely as rent seekers? TurboTax is a net negative on society - congress has tried repeatedly to simply mail people a bill or refund, instead of the silly song and dance we go through now, but Intuit has lobbied aggressively to prevent this.
Under the current government system, they clearly provide value - otherwise they wouldn't exist. Whether the government is complicit in their existence is another matter entirely - but they're not just making money appear out of thin air. They clearly provide value in streamlining the spaghetti nest of the tax code for average consumers.
The issue is with government enabling the monopoly.
> The issue is that nobody is entitled to anything. You aren't de facto entitled to receiving money for any services you may or may not provide, regardless of whether you're skilled or not, just because you exist.
This is a value judgment you have made, and one that seems popular in USA. It's not a priori true and it's not necessarily so popular in other parts of the world.
This is incredibly simplistic and reductionist thinking with regards to the development of society. It comes from a brutal, cold and careless place. The goal of societies should be to evolve beyond the brutality of nature, not regress backwards to a place where we're eating our young.
How many of those governments are just, however? Can you reasonably claim that all citizens consent to the policies of their government? If everyone agreed to murder you, would that make it ok? What about if everyone agreed to rob you of all of your property, your livelihood? What about only half of that? Quarter? A tenth? What's the right number? Non-consent to any degree is not morally right. In the same way, it would morally wrong for me to coerce you to pay me some arbitrary amount I come up with.
In the interest of expediency, most groups of people have decided that democracies can make decisions as a proxy for consent, and people continually work to improve that process. Larger groups of people have all found it necessary to delegate daily governance tasks to a subset of people, because the time and effort needed to govern scales with the size of the group.
> Can you reasonably claim that all citizens consent to the policies of their government?
People will disagree with each other whether they have a government or not. Those who live ungoverned tend to experience more coercion, violence, and violations of their rights than those who are governed.
The rise in autoimmune diseases is probably due to higher inflammation levels due to the trend of steadily increasing levels of sugar consumption and seed oils amongst western societies - same reason heart disease continues to be a killer.
> Plants produce many protective substances to repel or injure insects and other animals that eat them. They produce their own pesticides. The oils in seeds have this function.
> I use some of these oils (walnut oil ..) for oil painting, but I am careful to wash my hands thoroughly after..
The fats in nuts are obviously there to poison those who eat it, same as sugar in fruit.
> Cancer can't occur, unless there are unsaturated oils in the diet.
There might be an interesting connection, but I wouldn't take Mr. Peat's statements at face value.
The sugar in fruit is not poisonous and encourages you to eat it so you can carry the seeds to another location but you're not meant to chew or digest the seeds. Nuts are similar to seeds in this way.
>Cancer can't occur, unless there are unsaturated oils in the diet.
Many plants have seeds with ample sugars, fats, and/or protein, yet no nutritious or enticing exterior. Is the preferred evolutionary strategy falling to the ground and poisoning anything that dares to eat you?
Obviously spreading doesn't work if all of the seeds are eaten, but I've seen walnuts spread far and quite effectively (multiple saplings yearly) - presumably by crows failing to crack a nut, mice not eating some of their gatherings or similar methods.
BTW the fruity part of walnuts is definitely poisonous, as are the leaves and maybe even the wood, but the nuts are fine and nutritious.
To be fair, geostationary orbit is 36000km, whereas Starlink is at 550km. Geo hits, yes, roughly 400ms under perfect conditions whereas 550km would be expected to hit 9ms.
I mean - ruling should suck. It shouldn't be an attractive position. Our rulers should be those that want to do good for the people, not because it is a comfy gig with lots of fame and de facto billionaire status.
If you want rulers to be selected on the basis of ambitions to do good for the people, eliminating any form of popular approval in favour of random selection is highly unlikely to be your best choice.
And the more uncomfortable you make it not to opt-out, the more you'll select for people who've figured out a strategy to benefit from all that power despite the lack of officially sanctioned perks.
From my point of view, I believe diversity of thought enables groups of people to consider new ideas and positions that wouldn't be considered, i.e. thinking outside of the box, but I don't understand why this is extrapolated to different races, gender identities, immigration statuses, sexualities, etc. I am not claiming you brought them up but they tend to be common "diversity" points the modern populace loves to clamor around.
Why do any of those imply anything about how people will think? We've all seen some creative people that are of our own race, or that were also our own sexuality, etc.
All of this is of course at the expense of speed, in that greater variance in thought/ideas leads to slower movement, which I think is important in business (a solo or very tight knit organization can move much faster).