Expounding on supremacy, bias, fairness, and meritocracy

Spawned in response to this thread by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Some choice responses:

The superiority of an entity is approximating the superiority of the cumulative impact of their actions, including the relative valuation of causal forces (drift vs adaptive advantage).

Superiority begs the questions of “in what context?” and “which actions produced the how?”. When a market makes a demographic superior, the same questions are begged.

For instance, people with legs are superior at running than those without, not because they as a person are superior (to conceive superiority that way is to elicit the crudeness considered racism), but because their varied inputs as varying sets produce different outputs against a criteria being measured; in this case the sets are the existence or nonexistence of legs, and whatever happens to constitute a measurement of running.

But how can we scale an economy to achieve a fair distribution? It begs the questions, “what would be fair?”, “why is that fairer?”, “is it fair to enforce fairness?”. These are hard questions, so let’s tackle them generously.

The goal of a fair market, would be to produce a fair distribution of outcome. Meritocracy believes that fairness is a distribution of quality to the merits of enacted ability, irrespective of quibbles over what exactly constitutes merit. Other conceptions of fairness, include believing that quality of output is irrelevant, and only the qualia of identity as a human or as a specific demographic applies.

Any application, even if ideological, in turn results in cumulative results which too eventually are faced with selection pressure to determine long-term sustainability of the action. Sustained actions become cultural conventions, and formulate a culture’s values, morals, and ethics. Historically unsustained actions become disincentivized as immoral and shameful. Currently disputed actions are where the sustainability of the action is indeterminate to the conceptions of those disputing it, regardless of the accuracy of those conceptions.

Many ideologies believe aggression for fairness is justified, causing aggressive conflicts due to an ideology’s sacred value of a particular conception of fairness – libertarianism, anarchism, and pacifism being obvious exceptions, none of which aggress for fairness, for various and different reasons. For instance, libertarianism and anarchism value fairness, but believe holding an ideal of fairness sacred (beyond question) to the point of aggression, interferes with the achievement and discovery of adaptive and sustainable fairness. This is to say, cultural disputes (conceptual indetermination at a local level) still exist in whether the use of aggression to enforce one’s own conception of fairness will ultimately harm or accomplish fairness.

Bias isn’t bad in the cases it is successful, which for an adaptive bias is most of the time. The context in which a bias becomes maladaptive, is when it is misapplied (applied beyond its sufficiency) which is an inherent issue with all generalisations. They are approximations that work (are superior) only to their utility to be so.