# Inequality Incoming to think about: "Okay, so the thing I'd like to think about, I would like to give more thought to two things, some deep thinking of my own. I would like to give one to inequality. There's this idea that I always have which is like we should not have a quality of, guaranteed equality of outcome, which I obviously agree with. But what would be the steel man of the other side? Like obviously we are not all born from the starting point, the same starting point and starting position. So and I always say like, well, it's immoral to bring someone down, but what if someone was brought down by mere chance? What is the argument against that? I think there's a strong one, so that's the thing I'd like to think through." --- Interesting counter argument to the privilege and inequality example is what I don't like about it is you're saying, for instance, I heard this concept of family privilege, where if you have a family, you are therefore privileged. And while that could be correct in some proportion of the time, what I don't like about that is that is one person claiming once and for all that this is the way it is. If you don't have a family, you are disadvantaged. And it's effectively claiming it in all the ways. The same could be said about if you are short. If you are short, you are disadvantaged. And what I don't love about that is it are like a good counter argument against that would be what you're doing is you're actually taking agency and creativity out of people's hands. So, for instance, imagine you are trying to be cast for the role of Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones. Well, suddenly being short, being a dwarf is an advantage. Now, yes, if you want to play basketball, it is a disadvantage. But just because you are disadvantaged in one area does not mean that you cannot use creativity to solve problems in some other area and use your disadvantage to an advantage. Now, sure, you can make a reasonable argument that, well, at the end of the day, we really do need people. If you don't have a family, there's just no advantage. And again, that's, of course, false. You could see that as not having a family, as being something that pushes you to make deeper connections elsewhere. You could see that as a means of driving you as a fuel source to achieve great things elsewhere because you're lacking connection. So, of course, the whole idea, though, is that in many things, you could use what you have as an advantage or a disadvantage. And it is a very slippery slope the minute you start saying something is just full stop, always no matter what a disadvantage. Now, again, of course, I think that maybe one of the few exceptions to this could be like, and I'm not trying to diminish, people who go through hard things. Like literally at all. But I guess I just, I think it's absolutely inappropriate, and I claim that it is incorrect to state that if you, that there are certain things which are just abjectly a disadvantage. Now, the only exception to that, I guess I could say, is like if you have a really good argument, maybe it turns out yes. Like if you have a brain impairment that allows you to not, that allows you to not be a universal explainer, for instance, that may very well be like you could maybe call it an argument that like, fundamentally, there is just no way of spinning that to an advantage because you are in a fundamentally, your brain is in an effectively different class of what it can explain and what it can understand. It is fundamentally maybe less creative, less able to solve problems because of that. Now that, okay, that could be an argument. However, like, you know, and again, there are probably extremes. There are probably extremes such as like, well, what if you were in war-torn Syria and you were brought up and you never had, you were brought up, you know, underneath a terrorist rule and you never really had the opportunity, you were, you were captain of a cage and you never even got to see the outside. Like, of course, I don't think anyone, I don't think there is any, like, I think the minute you get to specific scenarios, it's reasonable to argue about what a, what may be just truly a disadvantage. But the minute you try to move up a level to this, these kind of laws, a set of laws governing what is a disadvantage and what is not a disadvantage, I think that is the incorrect move because there is so much context that will depend on that. So for instance, a, if you were to think about the laws that govern how a body moves, there is a, you know, finite set, most of them we well understand. So it's reasonable, first off, we frequently will ignore some of these two. So like, we frequently will say, well, just pretend friction doesn't exist, pretend, you know, basically the spherical cow example. But more than that, we frequently, we, so like, not only do we have a well defined set of rules, laws of physics, if you will, that objects follow, but we also still simplify that frequently. And those simplifying assumptions are reasonable because we understand what we're simplifying and letting go of and we know that it's just, you know, frequently it might lead to just a small approximation error. Now all of a sudden you try to do this in, you know, where you say a whole class of people, you say, ah, well, if you, if you, you know, are short, that is a disadvantage. That is not a law. And that is so context specific, it's almost meaningless. Like and you may say, ah, well, you know, if you are short 60% of the time, that is a disadvantage. And that may be, eh. That may be your claim. But it's not always true. --- Date: 20250424 Links to: Tags: References: * []()