atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
....an internationally acclaimed piece of contemporary German art (something I've previously claimed barely exists, to my chargin)
This depends on your idiosyncratic personal preferences about what counts as art, meaningful, or beautiful. As far as I'm concerned, Germany contains arguable the world's premier center for producing beauty and meaning. I personally think it's crazy to judge a country producing ideas like these as not producing internationally acclaimed contemporary art just on the basis of video games, paintings, or music (even this example is questionable since this German produces quite a bit of internationally acclaimed music).
This is the general problem with basing your morality too heavily aesthetic preferences. These vary too much from person to person, are really hard to reconcile, and therefore produce unresolvable differences in judging which places are successful/which policies work/etc. It just leads to an all-against-all war between 100,000,000 orthogonal value systems.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?
Is this supposed to be a trap? I would definitely recognize any accurate judgement like this as fair! Race can't mean you refuse to judge people as bad in certain ways the exact same way it can't mean you refuse to judge people as good in certain ways. Now, the way the human brain works, there's a very strong bias towards seeing more of a stereotypical negative trait in a member of another racial group than actually exists. Therefore, for this judgement to actually be accurate, some care needs to taken to account for this bias in the exact same way you account for any other cognitive bias if you actually want to be right about the world.
Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.
Goodhart's law isn't an overwhelming force that overwhelms everything else. We still accept legible measures in deciding who gets positions in every other aspect of life and, while obviously not perfect since nothing is in the real world, they work far better than just deciding based on race. Your argument here seems to be a generalized counterargument to any kind of meritocracy at all. Even if you accept some worst-case, all-powerful Goodhart, you can just change the measure when you notice it's turned into something harmful---make it a moving target to keep ahead of Goodhart.
Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.
You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else? I'm very curious to hear what possibly gave you the impression that I'm particularly good at manipulating bureaucracies. Is this just your "vague prior" based on perceived race?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion
This is not too hard to fix---just do the salary sorting independently for each position after you've decided how much of each you want. Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race. Again, saying the first thing that comes to my head just to emphasize how close it comes and how easy the problem is, even just English proficiency might suffice. Knowing nothing else, would you prefer a natively English-proficient Christian Nigerians over random Muslim Indonesian? Seriously trying to come up with a filter would do dramatically better than just looking at race. Immigration officials have so much more information about prospectives and this completely overwhelms any evidence provided by race.
Saying this another way, filtering by race doesn't make sense unless you can somehow argue that race is actually a strong proxy for merit/cultural compatibility/whatever you want from immigrants. Even the most extreme HBD positions don't deny a huge overlap in distributions of whichever characteristic you care about, so such a position would seem ridiculous.
You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100. What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.
I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa.
(Edited) This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else. I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Arghhhh!!! The entire point is that it's not justified. If I needed to choose 1000000 workers I wouldn't arbitrarily straitjacket myself into needing all of then be from the same country/race---I would just pick the million best from everywhere the best way I can. There are so many other much more useful ways to distinguish people from each other. I am completely dumbfounded why this point is so hard for people to grasp.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).
This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Ok, I think we have two different standards for what assimilation means. To me, assimilation is just adapting well enough to the host country that you provide more benefits than harms. If I'm not mistaken, you seem to require something more: a level of conformity to the culture that's already there in as many ways as possible---dress, food, religion, etc.
Benefiting more than harming of course does not mean completely ignoring whatever the native culture is at the time. There's a good example brought up on SSC here.
(one more hypothetical, to clarify what I’m talking about – imagine a culture where the color of someone’s clothes tells you a lot of things about them – for example, anyone wearing red is a prostitute. This may work well as long as everyone follows the culture. If you mix it 50-50 with another culture that doesn’t have this norm, then things go downhill quickly; you proposition a lady wearing red, only to get pepper sprayed in the eye. Eventually the first culture gives up and stops trying to communicate messages through clothing color.)
I do count immigration breaking a norm like this as causing harm. Similarly, I would usually only count immigrants who learn English as fully assimilated.
Why do I think my standard for assimilation is better? The short answer is first that western countries, in particular and even more so the US, haven't had a homogenous culture to conform to for a very long time. Talking again about clothing, people aggressively refusing to conform through fashion is one of the most central things in American society---like how much do you remember from high school? Why does it matter whether they stand out by wearing all black and spiking their hair or by wearing traditional East African clothing?
I really think the article linked above is the right way to think about it---"western" culture is just a bunch of the most compelling parts of all cultures in the world mashed together into one plus some overarching "Noahide laws" to optimize it for assimilating others. I would in addition claim that this culture is superior to all others because it's the best we have for promoting technological and scientific development. Therefore it's good that this is what dominates the country and we shouldn't return to whatever there was before.
More specifically, extreme tolerance for non-conformity and diversity is one of the most important part of the Noahide laws that make it work. You need a broad spectrum of weird and unexpected, and possibly even threatening ideas for there to be innovative breakthroughs---simply put, innovation can't occur unless there are enough people that are actually thinking differently. I don't think it's a coincidence that Silicon Valley grew out of the most non-conformist part of the US. Any requirement that immigrants assimilate by conforming breaks this important part of the greatness of western culture.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Can you be more specific about what exact differences you see between East Africans in San Diego and the general population? The one example you gave---dress---is pretty superficial and doesn't really seem relevant unless you have some very strong and idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences. I'm also not going to count examples where East Africans do better than the general population since these would be examples of successful assimilation.
What are the non-superficial/non-appearance-based points where East Africans immigrants in San Diego are significantly worse than the general population?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I think the more interesting comparison is between MENA immigrants in France and Mexican/Central American immigrants in the US. The US also has significantly poorer, more violent, and less stable countries to the south that send a large inflow of unfiltered, not always legal immigration. However, these immigrant populations assimilate well and do not cause nearly the same problems as MENA immigrants in France. Clearly something is working with the American system that is not working in France. Even other places in Europe do better than France---Vienna seems to assimilate immigrants just fine for example.
One possible explanation is that the French idea that you can just by law declare that everyone is the same and then forget about race is hopelessly naïve. However much you claim everyone is equally French, some people are going to just look dramatically different. The way human nature is, unless you take serious effort to educate people about the reality of race and discrimination and actively pass explicitly race-based policies to counteract it, de facto, social discrimination is going to make it impossible for immigrants to assimilate no matter what the laws from up high actually say. However well the law treats them, civil society is not going to treat them well. Who cares if you have the same access to welfare and schooling if no one will hire you or rent you an apartment in a nice neighborhood? If the teachers are horribly biased against you when grading?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate, or at least be good citizens in Latin immigrants to the US versus the ones going to the EU. Latin America is still far more stable than Africa or the ME is at any rate.
Are you certain that this is an intrinsic quality of the populations? You can just as well argue that this is because the US is better at making immigrants want to be good citizens and assimilate because of the differences between the way it deals with race and the way France does. I also don't think it's that obvious that Mexico/Central America are more stable than the Middle East and North Africa. Murder rates are way higher for example. I'm not saying there isn't a difference in populations, but I've never really heard a convincing argument that there was. I have on the other hand seen many arguments and plausible theoretical justifications for why the US method of assimilation is better.
I struggle to see how it's even possible to falsify this
There's a sort of meta point here. This is sociology, not science and you can't really ask for rigorous things like falsifiability. Talking way outside my field here, but from whatever classes I took, it always seemed the best you can do is try to fit a bunch of examples into a narrative and just argue about which one is most compelling, maybe using whatever it is sociologists call "theory".
The "US is better at assimilating" narrative is consistent with all the examples (the claim I made above was that the ADOS example doesn't contradict it). It also has theoretical justifications---the whole thing about immigrants in the US actually being given a fair chance since the country isn't blind to unfair biases against them, for example. The "populations are different" narrative still needs some sort of justification why Mexican/Central American immigrant populations in the US are actually meaningfully, intrinsically different from MENA immigrant populations in Europe beyond just "I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.
I never really bought this argument. The US has also had a pretty big inflow of unfiltered immigration from Mexico/Central America recently. Previously, the US had an even larger (proportionally) unfiltered flow from Ireland/Italy/Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups seem to be doing pretty fine---definitely much better than MENA immigrants in France.
The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.
This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population. Obviously this group isn't going to be assimilated very well---HBD/culture are not the only plausible explanations! Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak.
A key point you're ignoring here is that such racialized rioting doesn't happen nearly as frequently in the US. When it does happen it also never comes from any sort of immigrant group that failed to assimilate---it's not at all fair to try to fit summer 2020 in the US under the same framework and use it to make arguments about assimilation. Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
There's an alternate framing of the narrative that actually supports the liberal point of view here (I think you're aware of this?). Yes, the French method of forcing assimilation is silly and doesn't work, but this doesn't mean that assimilation is doomed and will never happen. Rather, we already have a model of assimilation---race aware and everything---that works extremely well in the US. The French should copy this instead of sticking their heads in the sand about human nature and ignoring the necessity of actively combating the insidious power of irrational bias against people that look different.
As other comments have pointed out, this is not such a painful bullet to bite and the idea isn't so novel that it hasn't already been more-or-less the thesis of a New York Times Bestseller. There's even an SCC article touching on these themes.
It's quite comforting actually---instead of stressing over confusing discussions about somehow justifying terminal values, there's an objective best morality and culture for any given environment/level of technological development. Right now, that happens to be egalitarian, individualistic, diversity-focused-melting-pot meritocracy. A modern society's most important resource is it's human talent, the more extreme-outlier the talent is---the Von Neumanns, the Einsteins, the Edisons---the more important. Therefore, the society's values should be focused as much as possible on developing this talent within and converting it from outside. Make sure it can rise from as large a percentage of the population as possible, make sure it's motivated and rewarded as much as possible, make sure that it's as attractive as possible for talent from outside to convert and join, make sure you're looking in varied enough places that you don't miss unexpected sources of talent, etc.
In the past it was different and in the future it might be different again.
That's not the way you were defending the point in the original post I replied to. If you are truly holding your personal self (regardless of what your ancestors may or may not have done) to this standard, then I don't have a disagreement along lines of meritocracy.
(For the sake of disclosure, I do however disagree that that someone deciding not to fight in a pointless war is reason to judge them poorly, but that's a different discussion.)
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Holding them to a different standard than yourself due to things completely different people did is neither individualistic nor meritocratic.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I think you should read what the founders thought about titles of nobility. They explicitly say it's bad to consider yourself any more special or claim any special privileges due to what your ancestors did.
Ignoring "all men are created equal" because of this one single word "posterity" that may not even mean literal descent is bizarre. I'm always confused by people who identify so much with being Western or American and still hold such anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic values.
Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa.
I've always been a little confused by this. I'm American and I would be pretty upset if the values that I think the American elite hold are replaced by those of the elite of other countries. To emphasize the differences, I'm going to exaggerate this a lot and focus entirely why they seem bad from an American perspective: European elites feel too far in the direction of stuffy old-money terrified of change, Chinese elites too far in the direction of stereotypical spoiled rich heirs, and Indian elites too far in the direction of clannish religious fundamentalists (for example).
I therefore think the more dynamic, meritocratic American elites would have more values in common with the average American. Maybe I'm not elite enough to know true elite values, but I think people that claim there is truly some global elite class should travel more. I also think people sometimes confuse either an anglophone elite class or a global subcultural community (e.g. a particular academic field or readers of a particular blog) with a global elite class. Even with the second example, while I definitely have more in common with a random European mathematician than a random American lay-person, I feel more of a culture-clash talking with the average (non-UK) European-born mathematician working in Europe than with the average conservative American mathematician.
Even if people are more talking about the particular values of the liberal, American elite being particularly good at spreading and taking over parts of the elite of other countries, I'm not sure the process has gone nearly as far as needed to reasonably claim that elites everywhere are homogenized (as much as I would like this to be true).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
So there are two actual justifications for affirmative action that people usually give. First, that complicated, subjective admissions systems are invariable going to be implicitly biased against certain groups so there needs to be some brute-force explicit bias to counteract this if the department is actually interested in selecting the most qualified candidates. The most popular affirmative action policies are therefore in line with something like, for example in graduate admissions: check outcomes at graduation/at prelims/at quals for these at-risk groups---women, the standard underrepresented racial minorities, etc. If these outcomes are better than average, modify the admissions policy to give those groups a leg up. Keep on calibrating the blunt modification until outcomes look about the same as an average student.
The second reason is that it's alienating to be one of very few people in a particular group in the department. Therefore, give enough of a leg up that there are at least, for example, 2 women in each graduate class. I guess this is effectively a quota by proxy, but it's never an explicit numerical target that needs to be reached, just if there were too few one year, increase the weight the next year. It's also such a low requirement that it shouldn't really ever come up unless the first point was horribly messed up.
Harvard's affirmative action on the other hand is seen as almost a complement to legacy admissions but with good publicity, at the most conspiratorial, way keep down an "uppity" new meritocratic class from competing with a hereditary elite. The whole "helping underrepresented minorities" thing, while they think is a good goal, in this case is just a Trojan horse for a true, nefarious goal.
We don't have so many examples, but on second thought maybe this is yet another example of academic experiences being dramatically different depending on which department you're in. Both you and the OP seem to mention experience with humanities departments, though I'm not sure where @Tomato is.
I'm in pure math and I've found that even with new people I can argue almost anything political as long as I tie it back to some common fundamental value and avoid saying certain poisoned words (the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time). A lot of my stated policy preferences are extremely liberal, so maybe this gives me enough trust and legitimacy that people don't think I'm secretly hiding different values when I say something not in the consensus---I can argue that standardized tests are actually good for undergrad admissions and people do think I believe so for the "right" reasons. It helps a lot with the trust issue to point out examples where something exceptional is happening that changes your belief---I'll say I don't like the general GRE but undergrad admissions are different for this and this reason.
Now for some speculation on why there might be a difference between fields, I think it's pretty important that for mathematicians, their research area isn't really expected to give them any special insight into politics. If a liberal mathematician hears about a Trump supporting colleague, there's an easy out: "well, they're my friend so I know their heart is in the right place and I know they treat everyone in the department with equal respect, but they're just confused because of so and so biases. Anyways, none of us are really that good at thinking about politics anyways, remember the last time we talked to our friend in history/philosophy/etc.? Also, remember the Unabomber? That Serge Lang was an AIDS denialist? Trump-guy isn't really messing up so badly". For a humanist who's actually supposed to be an expert in people and culture, the out isn't so easy and the assumption might become that supporting Trump is a true implication of their values which therefore must be evil.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
I will second this comment. Comparing my actual personal experiences in what was supposed to be the most extreme possible environment to what I read on the internet is what made me completely distrust the "wokeness is taking over everything" narrative in the first place.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Ahah! You are capable of replying with mostly arguments instead of mostly personal attacks, maybe there is hope for a productive response here.
Well, almost:
especially of South Asian states, where our friend hails from, currently epitomized in Hindutva ideology but also obvious e.g. in loops foreigners jump through to be allowed to stay in Thailand. To my knowledge, he has never addressed the paradox of insisting that American nativism is so incomprehensibly evil and alien to his sensibilities.
This is a pretty huge non-sequitur. Whatever other people you happen to associate me with may or may not do is completely irrelevant to this discussion. There's absolutely no paradox here any more than me saying that you talking about morality at all is a paradox because there are tribes in New Guinea that used to practice slavery and cannibalism. I'll also mention here that I'm 100% a patriotic American culturally, in the eyes of the law, and yes, even by birth if that matters so much to you, but this shouldn't really be necessary for the quoted argument to be total nonsense.
people in different tribes do have legitimate object-level policy and deep value differences, which suffices for adversarial mechanics and strategic deceit even between non-extreme subgroups;
I think there's a failure to fully understand American society that's tripping you up here. It might be educational to listen to Kevin McCarthy's acceptance speech when he was elected Speaker of the House. As far as an official, recent statement of what the mainstream right in the US believes, I think it's hard to do better than this. I find that the values he's emphasizing and glorifying align very strongly with my own even though his policy preferences might dramatically differ. As long as we're reminiscing about what happened years ago, I think even Kevin McCarthy would very much endorse my originally summary of American values.
Reminder: the «people's» here...
Similarly, this particular translation, even while being more a specialization to a non-central example than a translation, is not quite the convincing knockout argument you think. Sure, "immigrant" is a hopelessly corrupted word for the right, rather like "meritocracy" for the left that immediately brings to mind bad feelings due to associations with certain non-central examples. If you talk about specific immigrants however---let's say the properly assimilated doctor contributing to society---most Americans would be pretty happy giving them their "patrimony" or whatever. Similarly, "inheritance" is a much more toxic concept than you imagine. People are embarrassed here for getting things from inheritance instead of hard work and hide this as much as possible.
Of course a more fair translation would be "people" to American of all races, "egalitarian ideal" to the whole content-of-character instead of color-of-skin thing, "object-level policy" to something like desegregation, and "aliens with bad values" to white identitarians.
Surely you're joking. That NYT headline reads "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up." and you regard this as uplifting?
Check the comments and how unanimously against the rejection NYT readers are. The article is also very much not saying that these policies have already been installed in every hard science department, only that they are starting to be and facing huge amounts of pushback. There's a huge difference between these two so it's really important to be precise.
Whenever I get them to agree in arduous discussions that Lysenkoism cannot be correct, they greet me with a cheery "good thing we got rid of that bourgeois geneticism, eh comrade?" the next morning. And from this, all other injustices of progressivism flow.
I find this specific part very hard to believe. Can you give more details on the exact thing you got them to agree on that they immediately went back on? Given the imprecision in your previous paragraph, I'm suspicious that something subtly different might have happened. Which specific people in academia are you talking about? What kind of institution? Which departments?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
As more hopeful news on another topic that's also of great interest here, This NYT was published recently. The comments are even more hopeful. As an even crazier example that I realize will be very hard for people here to believe, I figured out sometime last month that a large majority of my department at a liberal university in a county that went for Biden almost 90-10 is very strongly oppposed to Harvard in the ongoing supreme court fight over affirmative action (just to qualify it's more "we're against affirmative action as Harvard is currently practicing" it instead of "we're against affirmative action period").
To get to the fight-y, culture war part, I've tried to argue over and over on the old site that certain of this places extreme, bogeyman views are usually straw-men used to tar the entire American left. These views get outsize attention because of all the standard media/clickbait reasons and were never really supported that much. If you just talk to normal people and don't raise suspicion that you're not on board with the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth, you'll probably also find this.
The standard kumbayah, everyone-should-band-together-against extremists model isn't really so bad: 80% of people on either side mostly agree with each other on values. Such normal people on different sides of the political divide nevertheless have serious factual disagreements that lead to very different policy preferences. The problem is that each side attracts a 20% of moral aliens with bizarre value systems that happen to make them want far more extreme versions of these policy preferences. To achieve their goals, the best thing the aliens can do is disguise themselves as normals to convince at least the normals on their side. As a nice bonus, this might also make the other side suspect that everyone supporting these preferences is an alien, giving them even more support out of solidarity against "unfair" accusations. For the left, this has hopelessly tarred any kind of diversity initiative, for the right, any kind of tough-on-crime thing.
The best way to fight this is to be really careful in distinguishing who you have factual disagreements with vs. who you have values disagreements with. Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions. Also, be much more cautious before concluding someone on the other side is an alien. On the other hand, be really careful to emphasize to the other side that your values aren't alien---this is really hard because there'll be a lot of enemy action from the aliens who want to keep their side extreme. I can't say I'm super successful at it here, but I try to emphasize that I care about egalitarianism at the bottom and that my disagreements with the majority of the American right are due to factual disagreements about what's necessary to actually achieve true egalitarianism.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2yr ago
Thanks! This is a much better answer.
I don't think I understand. Can you explain why that's a relevant difference instead of just no-true-Scottsmanning? Whatever the super fine details of the exact specific type of German he is, if you want to follow the tradition of dramatic, operatic German music like Wagner to the modern day, Hans Zimmer is probably the best example.
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