Comments on: Broken Symmetries

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:16:00 +0000

There’s an obvious, massive asymmetry. An employee takes orders from his employer. Yes, the employer has to “deal with” his employees, but there’s a huge difference between giving orders and taking them. If non-discrimination applied to choice of employers, then the government is telling private parties to spend large chunks of their time obeying certain particular other private parties (namely, the employers whom they would choose apart from their discriminatory practices). Bad in itself, and a dangerous precedent.

By: keddaw

keddaw — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:31:45 +0000

Interesting post, as an economist and (mostly) libertarian it seems to me people should be able to discriminate in both hiring and job selection processes. In a perfect world both these choices would show long term problems and employees using this strategy would be rewarded less and companies with the strategy would be out-competed.

In the real world there are huge differences in the two situations. Forcing a company to choose the best candidate is somewhat different to forcing someone to work against their will – we call that slavery.

There is another real-world problem; it is infinitely harder to prove why a candidate rejected a job offer than to prove systematic racism (or any -ism) by an employer simply due to the number of jobs a company offers (and number of applicants) compared to the number of jobs an individual applies for and is offered. And also the willingness of the wronged party to follow it up.

So should an employer be given the right to sue a (non-)employee for discrimination? If the (non-)employee can sue the employer then yes.

By: Alex Perrone

Alex Perrone — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:10:30 +0000

Ah man, unfortunately after more thought (I think the post is so good that it’s worth it), I realized that this critique 3 had just a funny wording for me. I took “obviously relevant in your theory T” to mean that it is obvious that it is relevant in your theory. For Haselton, it is obvious that roles are relevant, therefore critique 3 is not really devastating.

But what critique 3 is getting at I think is better shown by this re-wording:

“3. But it is not obvious why feature R is relevant in your theory T.”

By: Alex Perrone

Alex Perrone — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:17:33 +0000

After some thought, I think the problem with the fallacy, which reduces it from a fallacy to a pattern of commonly poor argumentation, is with critique 3:

“3. But your feature R is not obviously relevant in your theory T.”

should be changed to

“3. But your feature R is not obviously relevant in *my* theory T.”

Clearly the fact that roles are an important feature in equality is relevant in Haselton’s theory but not Landsburg’s. Both positions are underargued.

By: Constant

Constant — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:15:55 +0000

“most employers don’t have subjective experiences.”

Because they’re reptilian extraterrestrials. But even so, they’re also trying to lower their own costs by giving their employees a better subjective experience, which allows them to offer their employees a lower salary. Because of this, their employees’ subjective concerns are also their concerns, regardless of whether they are soulless space reptoids who only care about money.

Anyway, this looks like speculative cherry-picking of arguably relevant differences for the purpose of after-the-fact rationalization of a decision long since made, an example of confirmation bias. I could just as easily come up with the reverse. For example, employers care about the bottom line but employees care about subjective experience, and therefore employers are more liable to act in a rational way with respect to the bottom line. Racism is irrational, so employers are unlikely to be racist. Employees, however, care greatly about their subjective experience and so cannot be trusted to behave in a non-racist fashion, and so they must be regulated all the more strongly.

See how easy that is?

By: Constant

Constant — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:39:29 +0000

Yes, ben, you are missing something. You are missing this:

It does not seem to occur to Haselton to ask why the different role of employee vs. employer is relevant in our standard theories suggesting we ban ethnic discrimination. He feels he is done if he identifies any difference between the two cases.

In the case of using the cell phone, we indeed should ask why the different activity of driving or standing is relevant. We are not done if we identify just any difference. The difference needs to be relevant.

By: Alex Perrone

Alex Perrone — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:10:04 +0000

The problem with this example of is that the employer/employee relationship is supposed to be not obviously relevant, when of course the status quo is the opposite. As Landburg stated but didn’t argue for, the fact that they are playing different roles is an irrelevant circumstance. Haselton counters that it’s relevant, so in a way they aren’t disagreeing fundamentally on the principle of equality they both stand by. They simply apply their standards of relevance differently.

By: John Faben

John Faben — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:42:13 +0000

Is this supposed to be an argument for the status quo? Or an explanation of it? If the latter, I guess that makes sense, but sort of goes against the standard arguments people make it cases like this: employers just aren’t a large enough group to have any political power, so no-one stands up for their rights.

If the former, you’re just shuffling the asymmetry round. You’re saying that one employer being inconvenience 10 times is just as bad as 1 employee being inconvenienced once.

By: ben

ben — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:03:28 +0000

Please correct me if I’m missing something, but this doesn’t make any sense to me- Haselton is clearly right, and Landsburg is clearly wrong. Consider, for instance, laws against cell phone use while driving. In either case, the political process has determined that it is in the public interest to proscribe a certain action (ethnic discrimination, talking on a cell phone) under a certain set of circumstances (when hiring people, when driving). If someone doesn’t want their choice of actions restricted, they are perfectly free to avoid putting themselves in that particular circumstance. One can certainly debate whether these kinds of things really are in the public interest, but Landsburg’s implication that any law that applies only in certain circumstances is fundamentally unfair because it doesn’t apply to everyone equally is absurd,

By: Yisong

Yisong — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:50:23 +0000

The best reason that I can come up with is that the employer is representing the interests of an institution/organization that is somehow more public (since it manages the professional and commercial relationships of multiple people), while the potential employee is representing his or her personal interests only. America has always respected a person’s individual beliefs, so it’s OK when someone’s personal decisions are influenced by things like racism.