Python is an Equal Opportunity Programming Language

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 12:43 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 8 May 2016 04:40 am, Random832 wrote:
>
>> On Sat, May 7, 2016, at 11:16, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> > Indian and Chinese H1B holders are getting screwed, which is of course
>>> > the whole objective of the country limits.
>>>
>>> The *whole* objective? You don't think that *part* of the objective may
>>> be
>>> to ensure that citizens of countries other than India and China can get
>>> green cards too?
>>
>> If not for the quotas, a citizen of some other country would have an
>> equal chance to get a green card as a citizen of India or China.
>
> If you have a big hat with 5,000,000 tickets marked "Indian", and 500
> tickets marked "Finish", and you stick your hand in the hat and rummage
> around and pick a random ticket, do you really think that you have an equal
> chance of selecting an Indian ticket and a Finish ticket?

So the question is: Do we care about country equality or individual
equality? You can't have both. As soon as you divide a population up
into unequal parts, you have to figure out what you actually mean by
"equality". For instance, should the states in a country have equal
representation in federal government, or should their sway be affected
by the number of people in each state? In a Wikipedia article, how
much space should be given to a narrowly-held view compared to a
widely-held one? In a summary of a thousand people's comments, how
many favorable ones and how many unfavorable ones should be quoted? In
an extreme case of the latter, suppose you have room to post ten
comments, and of the thousand, only four were against. Do you post all
four, and restrict the other side to four to be "fair", or do you post
one of them against nine "yea" comments, or do you pick randomly from
the entire pool of questions (which would give you a 4% chance of
drawing even a single negative comment)? Which is "fairest"?

If two people both want to enter the country, it's *obviously* right
that they should have equal chance as individuals. And it's equally
obvious that it's not fair to let one highly populous country push out
every other country. Somewhere in there you need math and decisions.

ChrisA