atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1d ago
This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.
I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.
The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.
Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.
If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:
Again, it wasn’t just me or my lab. It was everybody in the field having the same type of practices and not exactly thinking through...
I was teaching a new course that became a first-year course for the MBA students. So it’s over a 1000s of them on inclusive leadership, and so it was a lot of work to create the materials. I was also chosen as the course head. That means that you’re managing eight professors. Eight or more professors were teaching different sections of the course. So it was a very intensive period, from a teaching perspective.
The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!
This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.
What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
There's a general argument pattern that goes like this: "here's a problem, look how bad it is, we need to do something!" and then "this is something! I'm doing this to solve the problem, how can you oppose what I'm doing? Do you think the problem is actually good?" Finding a problem in the world does not give you a blank check to do whatever you want as long as you can write some words arguing its related to solving the problem.
So the answer here is they should do nothing until they find an action that's actually effective and doesn't have much worse side effects than the actual problem. This is same thing anyone trying to fix any other problem in the world should do.
You are giving the impression that the culture war is so important to you that it's worth burning the world to make sure your side wins. There are other things in the world that are important besides the culture war and once you start destroying those other things as part of some sloppily-targeted crusade, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to say that you shouldn't have power.
I don't consider these costs acceptable; as always, I consider them the least bad option. The alternative seems to be to not have scientific research happen in the US to anywhere near the same efficacy and scale as right now, thereby destroying the biggest engine of human progress and flourishing existing in the current world all because of some people's irrational focus on people's ancestry over all else.
It's also telling that your two most concrete costs aren't really that large on the scale of a country. Billions in property destruction is the same order-of-magnitude as badly-written liability laws letting oil drillers think they can get away with too-lax safety standard and causing some medium-sized spills, and one or two orders of magnitude less than a large-city government not taking disaster scenarios seriously and building good flood protection before a major hurricane. Thousands of extra murders is the same order-of-magnitude as making the wrong decision for whether to intervene in some standard once-per-year foreign conflict or the effect over a decade of not regulating lead well enough in one large state. These are not the order-of-magnitude that deserves such a national policy freak-out and not even close to the percents of GDP growth you lose from the kneecapping of the country's research infrastructure and skilled-immigration pipeline (and really, it is this big when a single skilled-immigrant's company is somewhere between 5-10% of the entire SAP500).
The other two are so fuzzy. How bad they are is so hidden in all these imprecise words like "acceptable", "tiers of justice", "explicit discrimination" that can be interpreted as anywhere from a nothingburger to one of the worst things that's happened in the last decades. Again, please try to be more concrete---it's impossible to reason accurately about this otherwise. I personally think you have such a skewed view of the relative impacts because you have never tried to be concrete about this before and are instead getting distracted by the exciting, culture-warry nature of the fuzzy words you can say instead.
No I don't disagree, that's within the realm of plausibility as far as I know so I won't argue against it very confidently.
There are two reasons why I'll say "so what?" to this however. First, the charge you're making is just about speech and recruitment. Having opinions you disagree with is not a reason to destroy something---rather you should focus on the people acting on those opinions. This is why I really think it's important to focus on concrete material impacts, like the example of researchers fleeing the US and the subsequent significant hit to research output and therefore general economic productivity in the US. In the long run, scientific and technological development is and has always been the single most important thing for making people's lives better, so hindering it is a really big deal.
The second issue is treating academia as a monolith---you might as well say that the San Francisco Bay Area is dominated by Leftism, etc. etc. so when the next big earthquake hit we shouldn't disburse federal disaster aid. Sure, there might be specific parts of academia that are organs of the far Left, and these parts may be the most loud and visible. However, the vast majority of it is not. The current US administration's response seems particularly insane since it's targeted at exactly these parts that aren't. This really pushes me to the conspiracy theory of "well, that's the part that has the most people with glasses so of course that's the part they'll target" from the analogy---that the damage is exactly motivated by ancestry-over-meritocracy and not any good-faith attempt to fix the problems with academia.
While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels
This has been debated before---look up the o-ring model of economic development. One of the conclusions you can draw from this is that it does matter to have a very deep pool of talent to draw from. Again, people have a general bias towards underestimating just how hard most jobs are, especially jobs with technical content to them.
Even beyond that, the measured outcome of letting the side that's seemingly ancestry-over-all-else have power is to not even have meritocracy at the top: Terry Tao also appears to be getting his grants cut (though this is recent news so take it with a large grain of salt. EDIT: confirmation).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Yes, I can see how people with low reading comprehension might interpret it that way. We know otherwise however---much of the value provided by this place is that I don't have to write for people with low reading comprehension. I am not in fact optimizing for how it comes off to libsoftiktok readers and I don't think I should be?
Here's a better analogy: there are two conflicting gangs D and R that sometimes go over and graffiti/smash windows in each other's territory. There's a hospital in gang D's territory that pays its protection money. Once, one of of gang D's members runs and hides in the hospital after smashing a window (with the support of the hospital director and staff---though it's unclear how much of this is actual sympathy to gang D). Gang R dramatically escalates the conflict and blows up the hospital in response.
In addition, many of the hospital employees wear glasses and there's a vocal contingent of gang R that keeps talking about how much they hate people who wear glasses. Once the hospital is blown up, the responses from gang R are basically "ha, good! down with people who wear glasses" and "that'll teach those D-sympathizers".
I think I'm correct in judging gang R as by far the more evil side here. Either, they massively escalated the fight and targeted pretty uninvolved parties just doing good or they let their irrational hatred of glasses overwhelm much more important values in their decision making. If I had to choose between gang D and gang R to rule, the choice is obvious (we don't have the option of no gang).
Even more, gang D might be saying "see, we warned about R and their hatred of glasses, you told us that it was 'just a few fringe voices' and even treated their chief chemist for food poisoning. Look what they do when they have the chance", and it seems that maybe they actually have a point.
I assume some kind of "yes, good" thing? Otherwise, do you care to explain? I know that there exist people with incompatible values to me, so what---I mean someone was complaining that my post was condemning the average poster here as ideologically degenerate. I wasn't doing that, but if you're saying that this is the response I'll get then maybe I should have been?
I'm replying to someone who I thought cared about scientific progress and meritocracy (as defined in the OP) more than any kind of ancestral/racial purity however. Now that I think about it more, I guess this might be a better concrete example to focus on than JD Vance's quote. What are you willing to sacrifice to keep foreigners out of the country?
Indeed, irreconcilable differences of opinion here
I'm sorry, do you have any real-world experience with the impacts of this administration's policies or are you just judging this based on what you hear from the internet. Because if you did have actual real-world contact, making a judgement that the damage is solely at the level of the FAA scandal and some awkward interviews and media quotes is completely absurd.
Do you have any idea how many grad students are deciding to only apply to postdocs outside of the US? How many people from outside who would've a year ago loved to come here deciding not to apply to any schools in the US? How many people are leaving research because of 60-70% funding cuts to hard sciences and the subsequent hiring freezes? The rumors in my field are that young people shouldn't even try applying to Canada because all the openings are going to be taken by senior researchers leaving the US. From anecdotes on the ground, literally hearing what people are saying at conferences, the destruction of the scientific research infrastructure in the US is unmatched by any event in a western country since Nazi Germany.
Yes, I don't give a damn about whatever stupid ultimately superficial nonsense you can pin on the woke if the other choice is this! Seriously, most of you're examples are quotes and words, it's obnoxious how much you're ignoring actual material impacts.
EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?
The moderators are allowed to run the site however they want---they managed to make something providing significant value that's hard to find anywhere else. It's only frustrating when they continuously claim that the site is something that it isn't.
Advertising a place like this as purely a place
for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
is basically a sneaky way to wage the culture war by sanewashing a lot of very sketchy racist arguments through giving them a very tilted playing field and a sort of "controlled opposition" (for this and many other reasons).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Rat races are only an issue when being at the bottom is so horrible that people are desperate to avoid it. In this case, any way you set up society is going to be horrible---what's the alternative to the rat race? Most people are just screwed because of the circumstances of their brith and can never have a reasonable life no matter what they do? If we actually do as you say and make chicken farming less miserable, then the rat race would also weaken.
I think this is a little bit of a distraction though since you aren't supposed to try to justify meritocracy by fairness. Someone has to be the surgeon hypothetically operating on me and I would much rather they were chosen by meritocracy---it's not about the person who gets the position but an instrumental goal to make things best for everyone else. Like many more things than people realize, surgery is really hard and it does actually matter to have the 0.1th percentile performer instead of just the 10th percentile one. Being "competent enough" is beyond humanly possible---medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US according to this.
Finally, while the Korean educational rat-race has gone way over into Goodhart territory, a little bit of rat race is great for motivation and helping everyone become the best version of themselves. I am very happy for the extra motivation this gave me to study for math contests since that made me a much better technical problem solver. I am even more happy for the extra motivation it gave me to do the much less fun writing practice for English class.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Part of the problem with just opening a discussion on "individualism and meritocracy" is that these are very fuzzy and connotationally charged words. It's therefore best to talk about specific examples as much as possible---this was just a relevant one that's somewhat timely. Any specific example is going to have a billion imperfections and distractions, but I really think it's still better to be concrete. If your quibble is that I picked a bad example, maybe you have a better one in mind?
I also think there's an huge difference between saying "most posters here are ideologically degenerate" in some absolute sense and saying "I have the impression that most posters here have values that are incompatible with my own for these reasons, am I right or wrong about this?".
(@OracleOutlook had a similar response so I hope this works as a reply to both)
First, since citizenship in certain countries has such a huge material impact, it is a "reward" whether people want to think of it that way or not. I think your argument boils down to saying that citizenship has some extra, special qualities that make thinking of it as a reward misleading word games.
The special quality you're focusing on is an analogy to family membership. There are two reasons why I think family membership is special
- An ideal family is supposed to provide unconditional love and support---it's an insurance policy in the world that no matter how much you screw up, you'll always have something. In particular, you should never worry about being completely disconnected from other people.
- Families are very small sets of people. Due to Dunbar-number effects, morality in small groups (that our instincts are perfectly optimized to handle and where you actually personally know everyone you're interacting with) is very different than morality applied to broader society. Tons of things are ok in family settings that would be horrible corruption in a corporation---since our instincts are so finely tuned in the small-group case, we just feel the exact cases when its ok and when it's dangerous.
Of these two, only the first really applies to citizenship---that's easily resolved by rules against making someone stateless. So with that one exception, it should be fine to reason about citizenship as other rewards, particularly positions in other sorts of large organizations. Sacrifices happen in these too!
Are there other important special qualities of citizenship over other material rewards that would change this?
P.S. I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that genetic similarity is the best way to judge if you can relate to someone. Here, education, values, and interests seem to matter much more. It's way easier for me to relate to a random mathematician of any race than a random person of the same race as me. I don't think this is that unusual---at the very least, having a college degree is probably more relevant to relatability for you than race.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Right, so the comparison to the woke needs more justification (I'm sorry for the repetitiveness I've made this point before to you in the past, but I think there's some new aspects).
Most people I talk to in person who would describe themselves as woke seem to actually agree with me on at least the thing I called "individualism". Their belief is rather that the world is so far from achieving this that we have to do extremely drastic things in response. When they make mistakes, their mistakes are factual---that their extreme remedy is going to make the situation better than the status quo. These mistakes are not that hard to correct---no getting rid of standardized tests won't help because every other measure is even more skewed towards the rich, etc. In everyday life, I've found it very easy to argue/convince very woke people on most concrete policy issues relating to "individualism".
"Meritocracy" is harder, seemingly because the very woke that I know don't see its need---we already have enough, why do we need growth, why does it matter that jobs are done well, etc. However, in cases like medicine where you can argue that we don't already have enough you can argue in the same way. The "we already have enough" is also not so hard to argue against by just having them look up global GDP/capita and speculate on what sort of lifestyle that allows in comparison to what they're used to.
Conversely, a hypothetical group that actually accepts the ancestry-is-paramount interpretation of JD Vance's statement just disagrees on these values completely. There's no resolution to be had here.
Anyways, this is all theory. Since January, we can see how the comparison worked out in practice. I think even the worst 2020 wokeness was better for getting skilled people into positions in the US than the attacks on skilled immigrants from the Trump administration---the stories like this that keep coming out every few weeks and the chilling effect they create.
If Vance wanted to talk about the second case where the groups start with equal claims, he could've said something like (I'm trying to make this rhetorically charged in the same way) "church-going, law-abiding patriots have a hell of a lot more claim over America than ungrateful socialists who say they hate our country". Specifically focusing on "people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War" really makes it that Group R being privileged just based on their ancestry is a strong part of his statement.
Maybe this is too much psychoanalysis, or maybe I'm falling for some rhetorical game where Vance is baiting responses by purposefully saying something in a more controversial way then he needs to (I mean, focusing on the Civil war without specifying which side instead of the Revolutionary war definitely seems to be something like this), but my gut feel is that going out of the way to bring up such a specific thing as ancestry means that this is actually what he was trying to say.
So I honestly don't know anymore what's close to the modal Republican worldview (or more relevantly, what vision the current Republican party pushes for during the current and future times it has power). Figuring this out was the main reason for the post since I really think this forum gives a good sense of the intellectual arguments that eventually work their way down to driving Republican goals.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
It's very late in the time zone I'm currently in and I probably won't be replying to anything in detail until tomorrow. I don't have time to write long posts every hour of every day---like waiting 24hrs is the standard for written communication.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
I'm a liberal who's been here for a while but doesn't post very frequently. I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum. Specifically, whether this disagreement is real or just against a strawman, and if it is real, what are the best reasons why the disagreement is not serious enough to justify conclusions like "despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".
I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms
-
Individualism means people should be judged based on their own personal qualities and actions instead of based on groups that people assign them membership to. Since the groups someone belongs to often give you information about their personal qualities, this needs to be made more precise as a conditional independence statement: conditional on someone's personal qualities and choices, judgements about them, their obligations, what they deserve, etc. should be independent of the groups they belong to.
-
Meritocracy means that positions of influence and power should be given to those best able to wield them in service of society's goals. While you can get into a lot of arguments about what society's goals should be in corner cases, for most practical decisions---who should become a doctor/lawyer, who should get research funding, who should run a company---this rounds off to two soft consideration: competence, that when someone wants to do something related to their position, they actually can, and personal virtue, that people don't use their position in ways that help themselves at the the expense of others.
The first point of argument is whether these definitions are reasonable and deserve the good connotations that "meritocracy" and "individualism" have. Therefore we should discuss what the point of these terms is and why they're considered good things:
-
Individualism is important for motivation---if people know that they're life outcomes are dependent only on them and their choices, then they have the strongest possible motivation for improving themselves as much as possible. Secondly, most people are happiest when they have a sense of agency and control over their lives. Individualism maximizes this control.
-
Meritocracy is important to make society as effective as possible in achieving its goals---this is the standard "if a surgeon is operating on you, you want to surgeon to be as competent as possible" argument.
Note that neither of these justifications are about "fairness" or anything like that (even though they line up with a many widely-held intuitions about fairness); they're both just very powerful instruments for achieving whatever terminal values society actually has at the bottom.
Now as for why I think this place does not follow these values, it might be most productive to focus on a very specific example instead of a billion arguments about racism, skilled immigration etc. A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists. Even those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.
I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies. Now, in the quote the the alternative is judging based on if "you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025" for rhetorical punch, but the way it's framed, he likely would also be against the alternative of e.g, "whether you agree with 1995 tolerance and colorblindness"---otherwise the entire frame of the argument wouldn't be against deciding belonging based on personal choices.
So now the specific questions:
-
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
-
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
-
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
There are less extreme versions of this: If you're a weird person with weird interests---say writing long, argumentative, and complicated posts about politics and philosophy online---I would be skeptical that a 1950's-style homogenous and culturally conservative society would be good for you. There, the most important thing is to fit in: have the same interests as the average person, be interested in people over ideas, be agreeable and value peace over truth, etc.
There's a correlation between how much a society tolerates one kind of weirdness vs. another and one that wants conformity in the culture-warry ways will also want conformity in personality and interests.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo ago
Not the OP, but I'll bite too: I am uncomfortable with any powerful enough identity group whose membership is assigned rather than chosen trying to express solidarity in a way that excludes people not of the group. This tends to lead to very anti-meritocratic outcomes. "Whites" just seems to be the most powerful such group in the current day.
I would also be uncomfortable with the concept of solidarity for following identity groups in order:
- Han Chinese,
- Muslims (even though this is pushing it with the assigned rather than chosen bit),
- Hindus,
though there's a significant drop-off in my level of worry each step down. This is also based on factual beliefs about the world that I could easily be convinced out of with the right evidence.
I would not be concerned with solidarity among Navajo. Sure this is bad in theory, but it's not really likely to have any significant material impacts to anyone so it's not worth wasting effort on. Maybe I would feel differently if I lived in northeastern Arizona however---I don't really know what the situation is like there.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
A criterion like 3/4's of your life spent in the US if you're under 18 and 3/4's of your childhood in the US if you're over 18 would be much better. On the other side of it, there are people whose parents moved when they were infants, are fully connected to the US and have no memory of living outside, and don't get citizenship.
Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?
In defense of those you would call unprincipled hypocrites, one of the main reasons people care about protecting civil liberties is that these prevent loopholes that in the long run would allow the government to become tyrannical. People just don't find the "take guns away -> tyranny that the populace otherwise would have been able to violently oppose" story that compelling.
On the other hand, they might find the slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists -> disappear without due process anyone the administration claims is illegal/a terrorist -> disappear without due process anyone the administration thinks should have their citizenship stripped -> disappear without due process anyone who opposes the administration" dramatically more plausible, especially given the administration's comments on denaturalization. You are of course free to try to convince them otherwise on the factual point, but you can't really call them a hypocrite until you do.
Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day
Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful?
Does anyone else find this morally despicable? "It's ok for me to be able to never have to work another day, but wouldn't it wonderful if we make the country so much poorer that everyone else has to spend the rest of their lives doing manual labor?"
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
But tell me, how inclined would you be to entertain this argument if we were discussing an instance of explicitly pro-white discrimination, and this is how I was trying to explain it away?
I'm very inclined to entertain the argument in that case! I think any fair affirmative action policy should include benefits for people who come from very rural areas, small religious universities, etc. and the general impression I get from conversations at conferences is that people are impressed by those backgrounds and willing to personally give others extra consideration because of them (though I don't know how much this shows up in actual admissions policies besides pushes for "geographic diversity"). There are other reasons for affirmative action that I didn't mention---the most important for science and technology specifically is that a diversity of backgrounds is necessary for the diversity of perspectives that leads to the most creative breakthroughs.
Secondly, if anything you got the relative power reversed!
I definitely agree that left-wing racists aren't powerless. I would say that their worst impact has been limited to a few cities, college towns, and academic disciplines, though this is still pretty significant. The biggest impact from right-wing racists has been towards US skilled immigration policy---e.g. the recent debate between Ramaswamy/Musk and Bannon/Miller. As we've discussed before, I think it's very important for human flourishing to have a place where the best and brightest from all over the world can come together, mix all their unique perspectives and ideas, and make scientific and technological breakthroughs. American cities and universities were this place, and the current administration's treatment of skilled immigrants seems somehow even more damaging for this than what the extreme left was doing.
I guess we'll see in the next few years what the racists on the right can really accomplish when their coalition is in power, and nothing would make me happier than for you to win this argument and their powerlessness to be revealed.
is not the best way of expressing that?
Given the reaction here it clearly wasn't, though I'm not exactly sure why. Just because something is bad doesn't mean that the alternative is better and in this case, the alternative coalition to vote for had some very extreme poison pills.
Then make extra sure it isn't perverted into a staging ground for fringe progressive ideology
The entire point is that this impression you have is wrong. Why do you believe this? What experience do you have with actual math/science departments? What fringe progressive ideology have you seen them pushing?
Again, you don't have to take it from me---Alex Tabarrok should be much more credible.
First, to clarify, this seems like agreeing that some idealized meritocratic sorting is actually a good thing, even though modern meritocracy as implemented in western nations isn't (and meritocracy as implemented in South Korea/China is even worse). Unless there's an unspoken justification for a claim like "any attempt to sort by merit will degenerate just as badly"? As far as the topic I was trying to have with this discussion on the "deeper" culture-war relating to cynicism about careers, I'm reading that you agree with me?---that a significant fraction of people have careers that are very positive-sum, producing lots of value for society as a whole. It matters that the people who gets these careers are as qualified as possible to maximize this societal value.
Now, on the (slightly off-topic) general discussion about meritocracy: I think I agree that there are serious problems with modern meritocracy. This is precisely because of examples like Gino---modern meritocracy has serious trouble identifying such strivers (seemingly) focused on career building and accolade collection instead of people actually wanting to accomplish the societally valuable mission of the positions they get (it's still shocking how little shame she displays in her interviews for the damage she did to progress in her field). You want your scientist to be someone good at science, not someone hyperoptimizing test-taking games.
However, there's a big gap between "this has serious problems" and "we need to throw it out" even if "we need to throw it out" comes with an additional "for this alternative". You have to justify the factual claim that the alternative is actually better. For example, while I do agree that 1 is correct, I do not think that "a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old" comes even close to fitting the hypothetical in 1. There are many arguments here, but at the very least you do agree that "You need more than raw intelligence to do good research" is a cliché for a reason? I'm less confident about 2, but I generally think people underestimate just how hard modern science and engineering is compared to what people where doing in the 50's. The sophistication of what we need to do now completely outclasses anything from back then. There's a very good recent pop-science video on EUV lithography that gives a sense of this---Apollo is nothing compared to the engineering problems people needed to solve to get this working!
I also think there are some easy fixes we can make to modern meritocracy, even staying in the framework of "grinding tests". First of all, the tests can be made much more interesting and less based on rote memorization---grinding for challenging IMO/other olympiad-style problems is much more fun then grinding for the SAT. It's also a much more accurate test of actual interest and creativity. Of course, as anyone who actually did grind for such tests can tell you, even this can both be miserable and get goodhearted if taken to an extreme. The solution there is to have a variety of "tests" in very different formats---olympiads, debate tournaments, science fairs, take-home tests, even on-the-spot jeopardy-style contests, etc.---so many that you can't grind for all of them. Meritocratic sorting could be based on performance on some sort of "top-n" of all the possible tests. The optimal strategy then is to do the ones you're most interested in and the variety of needing to be good multiple very different formats keeps it from getting too miserable. This is just some off-the-cuff speculating right now just to give a vague idea of how the details might work.
Sorry for not fully explaining all the points here, it's pretty late where I am right now---I can expand more tomorrow evening on parts that seem sketchy.
More options
Context Copy link