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0 pointsyummyfajitas11y ago0 comments

I'm asking about this because my views are very confused. I don't have a good normative principle to appeal to.

On the one hand, I lean towards "you shouldn't make racially biased decisions". On the other hand, while I'm intuitively disliking the criteria for these scholarships, I impose more or less the exact same criteria when deciding if a woman is worth dating.

Unlike most of the people here, I'm completely willing to admit that my views are rather confused. And I don't understand the resulting hostility - why does asking questions make me a villain?

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3 comments · 2 top-level

DanBC11y ago· 1 in thread

> why does asking questions make me a villain?

You ask the same questions every single time. You make exactly the same confused bigoted points each time this subject comes up.

You don't create as much discussion going the other way - there are no posts from you askng why society accepts most corporate boards having no women or asking why society accepts discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. All your questions are about why it's okay to discriminate against white males in these kinds of programmes.

Can you see how that skews perception of you?

yummyfajitasOP11y ago

No one on HN is defending discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. If they did I'd probably ask similar questions, particularly if this viewpoint seemed common among intelligent people.

There is only one other case where people on HN will defend such discrimination - when the person being discriminated against is from Haiti or India. I do tend to ask the exact same question in that case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856315

Interestingly, I did get a rather surprising response - the nation state is more important than humanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5533155#up_5533791

As for society "accepting" some statistical fact, I can very easily recognize principles to explain that view - the normative premise is basically individual rights (if no individual has been discriminated against due to their gender, nothing is wrong). I don't think that normative premise is unreasonable, so I don't mind attributing it to people who seem to be implicitly using it. The normative conclusion logically follows from that premise plus an empirical point. I'm fully capable of reproducing the reasoning.

I simply cannot cook up a logical chain in favor of discrimination by hacker school except by using uncharitable normative premises (e.g., "black people are the master race and deserve special treatment" or "sins of the great great grandfather shall be repaid by the son and anyone who looks like him"). I don't think anyone defending hacker school's discriminatory practices will actually endorse these normative premises, so I'm curious what normative premises the defenders do use in their reasoning.

I ask the same questions because I'm attempting to be charitable. When a viewpoint is widespread among intelligent people I go to great efforts to try to understand it - this is the "Chesterton's Fence" principle. Given the complete vacuousness of the responses I receive, I am already leaning towards the view that most defenders of such practices are simply being emotional and tribal.

Now you can call me a bigot if you want. But that's very confusing - in the one case where I do make racially biased decisions (sex) my decisions are almost exactly the same as those of hacker school scholarships (4/9 African, 1/9 White, over the past year). (Note that I live in a country which is approximately 99% Asian.) I truly do not understand how you draw this conclusion.

antics11y ago

Let's take this to email.

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