atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
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User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
but how am I supposed to verify that?
I don't know! I agree that blindly trusting random internet posters is not reasonable, and I would really like to not have an account where I argue contentious politics to be associated with my real identity in a way that could make this actually credible. One question to answer is whether your policy preferences would change if my presentation of the facts is actually correct? I'm not talking about some p-hacked formal studies the department ran, this is just advisors noticing over and over again that all their students from whatever group were way stronger than average.
And another argument that I'd like to make as well, is that even if you want to call this (aspirational) meritocracy, you cannot call it gender- or color-blind, if you're purposefully taking account of someone's race or gender!
Also, about the affirmative action argument, yes, this is why it's a super questionable solution. Can't you imagine some world though in which the de facto violations of meritocracy are so bad that a de jure violation might actually end up improving the de facto situation? I definitely agree that it's usually not a good idea to use bad means for what you think will be good ends.
and have seen scant few progressive-minded academia-inclined posters who expressed any sort of discomfort with them
The Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith crowd is pretty prominent and denounces them all the time (It's Yglesias' sixth most popular article of all time right now). More locally, I think I'm on record here denouncing Okun and DiAngelo? By the way, powerless has only ever meant powerless compared to anti-meritocratic forces on the right---it's a choice of damnations! Voting patterns and comments here make it blatantly obvious that giving the average Motte reader/poster power would lead to much wilder violations of color-blind meritocracy than anything even extreme progressives have managed.
At the very least don't contribute to attacks on people who are saying something.
I don't contribute to attacks against people like Sokal. I contribute to attacks against the people who would replace progressive racism with even worse right-wing racism.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
Thank you for proving my original point. At this point, maybe it was correct for scientists to have been so left-leaning because they saw through that the right had this much hate for them.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
No, but the current speaker of the house is. When creationists get in that high of a position, you can't call them strawmen.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage in your crusade to punish these people as much as possible and at worst enemies just because being in the same industry makes you think that they're the same people. This is exactly what I was talking about.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
There are a lot of cultural reasons to prefer the US to the UK
- The UK is much more aristocratic and hereditarian---there's a royal family, a House of Lords, everyone is judged by the accent they developed while growing up, most politicians didn't just go to the same few universities, but literally the exact same high school, etc.
- Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
- The above two points also enforce quite a bit of social conformism. Having unusual hobbies or interests for your social class is much harder than in the US.
- Ambition and particularly hard work are looked upon much more favorably in the US.
Could you be more specific here/give some kind of link? I don't recall this conversation (this forum being reddit was a while ago).
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