Monday, December 31, 2018

Until bad luck is randomly distributed

In a YouTube panel discussion, titled "A Day of Reckoning - 4 - Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein, Maajid Nawaz, Douglas Murray", one of the Weinstein brothers says:
Until bad luck is randomly distributed, we really do have to err in the direction of
taking seriously claims of structural oppression and what we do about them. [1:37:50]
This is a peculiarly left-wing view. It is nearly incomprehensible to a right-winger.

First, all bad luck is randomly distributed. The words "luck" and "random" mean the same thing here. Presumably he means that the bad luck should be uniformly randomly distributed, so that everyone has the same chances of incurring bad luck.

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician who surely understands that the concept is still not well-defined. There is no way to say how much of someone's ill fortune is due to bad luck, and how much is due to more acceptable causes, and no way to say how that luck should be distributed.

Second, why should we even have a goal of redistributing the luck? If you think that way you will eventually wonder if it was just luck that you were born a human instead of a cockroach. Once you get to that point, there is just no way to say that luck is unfair, and no way to resolve the unfairness.

Right-wingers accept the fact that many things are beyond our control. They have no grand plans to redistribute luck, most of which is unknowable and unchangeable anyway.

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