John Althouse Cohen, "Can we close the gender gap in some sciences? Should we?"
He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator - though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.
14/07/2010
Can We Call It "The Discrimination Fallacy"?
There's a certain mindset that thrives on exposing discrimination, and this naturally leads to plenty of false positives. There are innumerable disparities in the world; some of them result from discrimination, but the mere existence of a disparity doesn't prove there's discrimination. But leaping to the discrimination conclusion can feel so energizingly righteous that you can be blinded to the downsides of false positives. Pointing out real discrimination is a noble thing, of course, but I think it's wrong (in the moral and factual sense of the word) to tell a group of people that they're being discriminated against to a greater extent than they are. I don't see how this is any less wrong than telling an individual that he or she is despised or being conspired against by people around him or her, unless this is actually true.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments at posts older than 14 days will only be published after preapproval.