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NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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I agree with the necessity of making life more fair, and disagree with the connotational noble Pocahontas lecturing a sadistic western patriarch. (Note: the last three words are taken from the quote.)
Do people typically say "life isn't fair" about situations that people could choose to change?
Don't they usually say it about situations that they could choose to change, to people who don't have the choice?
I agree, it's usually used as an excuse not to try to change things.
Exactly. In my experience the people who say "life isn't fair" are the main reason that it still isn't.
How did you develop a sufficiently powerful causal model of "life" to establish this claim with such confidence?
i mean that in almost all of the situations where I've heard that phrase used, it was used by someone who was being unfair and who couldn't be bothered to make a real excuse.
Okay, but that is a very different claim. It could be true even while most sources of unfairness in life are other things, not people who bother to say "life's not fair".
Introspection tells me this statement usually gets trotted out when the cost of achieving fairness is too high to warrant serious consideration.
EDIT: Whoops, I just realised that my imagination only outputted situations involving adults. When imagining situations involving children I get the opposite of my original claim.
Could you give an example of such a situation where the cost of achieving "fairness" is indeed too high for you? Because I have a hunch that we differ not so much in our assessment of costs but in our notions of "fairness". Oh, and what is "Serious consideration"? Is a young man thinking of what route he should set his life upon and wanting to increase "fairness" doing more or less serious consideration than an adult thinking whether to give $500 to charity?
Current example: A friend of mine telling her very intelligent son that he has to do boring schoolwork because life isn't fair.
It occurs to me to ask her whether a good gifted and talented program is available.
Hmm? I know I'm no-one to tell you those things and it might sound odd coming from a stranger, but... please try persuading her to attend to the kid's special needs somehow. Ideally, I believe, he should be learning what he loves plus things useful in any career like logic and social skills, with moderate challenge and in the company of like-minded peers... but really, any improvement over either the boredom of standard "education" or the strain of a Japanese-style cram school would be fine. It pains me to see smart children burning out, because it happened to me too.
I've talked with her. Her son is already in a Gifted and Talented program, but they're still expecting too much busy work from him-- he's good at learning things that he's interested in the first time he hears them, and doesn't need drilling.
He's got two years more of high school to go.
I've convinced her that it's worthwhile to work on convincing the school that they should modify the program into something that's better for him, and also that it's good for him to learn about advocacy as well as (instead of?) accommodation. I think she cares enough that this isn't going to fall off the to do list, but I'll ask again in a couple of months.
Thanks for pushing about this.
Great. That's going to brighten up a very very shitty day I'm having, BTW. I got my father moderately angry and disappointed in me for an insubstantial reason (he's OK but kind of emotional and has annoying expectations), and then my mom phoned from work in tears to say that her cat electrocuted itself somehow. I have just got very high on coffee to numb emotion and am browsing LW right now until I can take a peek at reality again.
Me, I've burned out many times in school. Each time it happened, I was sent to psychiatrists as punishment.
I don't remember exactly what I imagined, but it was something like this:
Actually, I'd say that it could be a case where justice can assert itself... the boss is, barring unusual circumstances, going to lose out on a skilled worker and that could impact his business.
(I mean, presumably the overly high cost of achieving fairness in that case would be passing a law telling employers how to make hiring decisions... but that idiot of a boss would benefit from such a law if the heuristics in it were good; now he's free to shoot himself in the foot!)
Bob is telling Alice that life isn't fair. Bob is Alice's friend; he is not the boss. Bob seems like he has Alice's interests in mind, since it is unlikely that Alice "doing something about it" would be worth it (such as confronting the boss, suing the company, picketing on the street outside the building, etc...). She is probably better off just continuing her job search. This is independent of whether or not Alice's decision is best for society as a whole.
Oh, that makes sense.