cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
I think I found this more interesting than the original biography review by Scott. There is a lot of distilled wisdom in these posts.
However, there is one area that always rubs me the wrong way. It is smart people who don't know dumb people talking about intelligence.
Where I am now in life I interact almost exclusively with smart people. Not just high IQ wiz kids with no experience. But people that have both the raw brain power, and the life experience to be sharp and wicked smaht. I'm in a rich neighborhood, and wealth has a noticeable correlation with IQ. I currently work for an institution that employs academics who must explain their work to the media (so they can't just sit in an ivory tower and write illegible crap). I use to work at a tech company that for quite a few years basically gave people an IQ test before they could join, and they were willing to fire people who didn't work out (the selection effects weren't perfect but they were certainly noticeable). My college friends were mostly from an "honors" section that got scholarships and accolades for academic achievements.
This was not always the case.
I went to highschool in a nice-ish area. The highschool was pretty decent for where I lived, but it still had noticeable rates of teenage pregnancy, drunk driving fatalities, minor gang fights (no more than temporary hospitalizations), about a fifth of the school below the poverty line, and a racial mix that actually came pretty close to matching America's general racial mix.
This highschool had dumb-dumbs. Probably something close to an average amount of dumb-dumbs. But at the time it was painful how many of them there were. I am smart for the general population, but a bit of a dumb-dumb when I get into smart people circles. 95th percentile on SATs. 1 in 20 seems only ok, but in a random class of ~30 kids I was likely to be the smartest or 2nd smartest. And its not the academic under performance that ever bothered me. I wasn't in any position to judge, I did well on standardized tests, but I was solidly a B student at best. Most of the material seemed dumb and stupid. We were all often doing equally bad at it. It was the everything else that bothered me about interacting with chronically stupid people.
I often heard people brag growing up that they were "street smart" while some academic achiever was "book-smart". This gave me the false impression that there were two kinds of people out there and there was just a trade off between the two. That was badly wrong. Some people are just dumb. They can fail to learn how to read, and fail at not walking into oncoming traffic, and fail at not picking a fight with a group of kids that will kick their ass. There are people that just seem to make repeatedly bad decisions in all areas of their life. I grew to hate these people, because loving and caring about them was too painful. To watch them make terrible decisions again and again, no matter how you advise them, no matter how much you try its like they seem determined to make their own lives a living hell by refusing to understand the world around them.
Bringing this back around to Elon Musk:
Yes he is smart. He is very smart. If he doesn't seem that smart compared to the people around you, then congratulations you live in a smart person bubble. I live in one too, its great! No one is ever making terrible decisions that might casually endanger me. No one is starting physical fights, because words hurt their brain too much. They know all the latest social norms, and when to violate the silly ones to make a joke. I can have deep conversations with them about nearly any topic, they might not know the details, but if I make it interesting they will pick it up and participate. The people around me know how to manage their money, so they aren't ever begging me for handouts, or trying to nickle and dime me on shared expenses.
The phrase "check your privilege" comes to mind, but the tone that people normally use feels very wrong. Just imagine me saying it in the same way a surfer says "kowabunga dude!" while offering a high five.
The Case for Ignoring Race
There are two arguments I want to push forward. The first is about ignoring race in your personal life. Ignoring your own race, and ignoring the race of others around you. And the second argument is to ignore race in the policy space. Ignoring race in college admissions, immigration, crime, etc. I also don't want to make the case that only white people should ignore race. I think it is generally beneficial for everyone to ignore race, but I'm guessing that most of the racial identitarians (people who place great importance on racial identity) that are here on themotte are white racial identitarians.
Ignoring Race in Your Personal Life
This is perhaps the less culture war loaded argument so I'll start with it first. I consider this section mostly good advice, and none of the advice is what I'd call "original". Smarter people than me have provided free advice to the masses, and this just feels like a synthesis of that advice.
Taking Responsibility
There is a certain mindset that treats genetics like destiny. And the mindset does not just apply on matters of race, but on broad characteristics like intelligence, athleticism, and charisma. I think this kind of mindset is harmful for the individual and those around them. Genetics does have an impact on your life, you aren't gonna be in the NBA if you were born with some short genes. You are still human, you are going to be similar to your parents in many ways. But it is most helpful to think of genetics as creating a set of boundaries around a wide field of possibilities. Where you wind up within that wide field of possibilities is up to you, and the field is probably much wider than you realize. In any field you look at you can often find surprisingly examples of standout performers that violate the expected norms. Like Stephen Curry being not very tall for the NBA, but being a star player. Or professors that are not that smart/brilliant, but still having prolific writing outputs of interesting material. The advice here is to take personal responsibility for where you end up within a large field of possibilities, and to stop blaming the often distant fences of genetics.
The restrictions placed on people by race are mostly imaginary social constructs. Somewhat facetiously: Rachel Dolezal is the story of a white girl becoming a respected black professor and NAACP member. Race has a loose relation with some of the very real limitations imposed by genetics, but most of the limitations of race come from social constraint. A person of a given race is not expected to do x, y, or z, and the person internalizes those expectations and lives up to them. What is important to remember here is that like with traffic, you are not just in a society, you are society. You are a part of creating and accepting the limitations that are merely social constructs. My simple advice is to stop doing that.
Information and Stereotyping
Our racial makeup is often one of our most visible characteristics, with the most visible characteristics often being clothes, gender, and age. I'd suggest to everyone that race is a mostly useless piece of information about people, and almost all of the information people claim to get from race is actually information that they get from other sources.
There are many variations on a joke about a race blind man refusing to cross the street as a black youth is walking towards him, he then gets mugged by the black youth. In more recent times the joke is often subverted to turn the race expectations on their head. Anyways, it is a good example for my purposes. Let us break the situation down:
- Context - Walking down a dark street at night in a bad section of town.
- Age - young, teen to late twenties. A time when humans are often physically at their peak, and a time when males are more prone to violence.
- Gender - male, as mentioned above more prone to violence and physicality.
- Clothes - You are often left to paint the picture for yourself in the joke. But imagine a dark hoody and well worn jeans.
- Demeanor - fixated at you, arrogant walk, one hand holding something in their hoody pocket.
At this point, without race ever being a factor, you can make an informed decision that interacting with this person is a bad idea. If you can't tell their race, and then are suddenly able to see it at the last moment, no result should change the informed decision you already made.
I won't make the very strong claim that Race is never a useful deciding factor. But I am making the claim that it is rarely useful. It is rarely useful because as I mentioned above it is mostly only a limitation by being an imaginary social construct. The actual correlations between race and very real limiting genetic factors are not very strong. The usefulness of race as a piece of information is proportional to the degree to which race is a commonly accepted limitation. The less people accept race as a limitation on their behavior, the less useful it is in predicting their behavior.
In general if you want to get better at reading situations with other people I would never suggest doing an in-depth reading of all the various stereotypes associated with different races. Instead I would suggest:
- Learning some biology related to human aging and gender. (I do believe gender stereotypes are very useful)
- Learning about clothing and fashion. In the above mugging example if the person you see happens to be wearing a dark Taylor Swift concert hoodie, and the jeans appear artificially aged then you might significantly downgrade the threat they pose.
- Learning to read body language. In the mugging example, maybe they are holding a phone, and maybe they are fixated on something behind you.
- Being more aware of context. Maybe before you start walking at night in the bad neighborhood of town you should realize how the situation might end up, and try to find a way to avoid it altogether. Some young people can sort of have their head in the clouds, and I'd suggest they play a sport that requires better situational and contextual awareness.
Policy
This is the more culture war laden section of this argument. I'm not going to claim this section is exhaustive or comprehensive. I simply picked two policy topics that are heavily enmeshed with racial politics. The college section will probably not be controversial to anyone on themotte. The immigration section will probably be very controversial here on themotte.
Universities
Universities and Colleges have been using race as a criteria for admission for quite some time now. I believe this is a bad policy, and doesn't accomplish their goals. One of their stated goals in doing this is to promote diversity on campus, which makes for a more interesting learning environment, and a better college experience.
I think race is a lazy selection criteria for diversity. It continues to be used because it is easily legible on a college admission form, and has somewhat of a correlation with diversity.
It is helpful to see how this approach is lazy, by imagining a stark contrast: a college that wants diversity and what approach it would take while expending the most amount of effort.
This imaginary college admissions would want to know as much as possible about their prospective students, and they would not want the students themselves to be the sole providers of that information. The admissions process might look more like the security clearance process. The student would fill out an exhaustive set of forms about their past life circumstances. Every sport, social group, vacation, and major life event would all be fair game. The university would assign a case worker for each student, who would then go interview the family and friends of that student to build an exhaustive profile of who they are. Then the students would be evaluated for their personalities, political beliefs, and viewpoints. With tens of thousands of profiles in hand the university would then run an exhaustive set of statistics and winnowing on the student profiles. Any prospective students with rare experiences or backgrounds would get additional weight. In this imaginary admissions process race would be almost a useless criteria, because there would be multiple other criteria that would make it obsolete or redundant.
Back to the real world. There are obvious problems with race based admissions when it comes to producing a diverse campus. As I said in the personal section, race is not actually a hard and fast genetic restriction, it is only loosely correlated with those genetic restrictions. So it is quite easily possible that you could have two suburban candidates that are next door neighbors and nearly identical in every category except race. Taking both of these students would not make the campus more diverse, except in the most superficial and meaningless sense of a skin color diversity. Imagine the opposite scenario of two identical twins separated at birth. One into a rich family of doctors in a big city, and another into a poor farming family in a small town. Admitting both of these students would not alter the racial diversity of campus at all, but it would make for a more interesting and diverse student body.
A lazy solution for colleges that want diversity and don't want to use race: create categories that you want to fill. For example, "person that has lived in a different country", or "person from a rough neighborhood", or "person from a big city", or "person from a small town", or "person that has lived in both". Then get students to fill in which categories they fit into. Then try to fill out the incoming class with a range of diverse experiences and backgrounds. This would be a slightly superficial take on 'diversity', but it would still be way better than a race based admission criteria. (some universities already do minor versions of this for other purposes, like asking if they are alumni / military child / etc.)
Immigration
If you have read the rest of my post some of what I'm about to say will be unsurprising. Race is generally an indirect sorting mechanism for the things we care about from immigrants, and more direct sorting mechanisms exist. I'd claim that the main things we care about in immigrants are: Intelligence, hard-work, cultural fit, criminality, and "buy in". Most of those are self-explanatory. I'd consider language skills under cultural fit. The "buy in" is how willing any immigrant is willing to engage in joining a country.
I think the easiest way to determine an immigrant's fit is to just look at their country or citizenship of origin, and ask for their reason for immigrating. Which is generally what the US immigration policy already does. Certain countries are better fits, and though Race correlates highly with country of origin it is not the same thing. And although there could be potential gaming of the system by asking people why they want to come to the country, some reasons are transparently obvious. For example, marriage into the country is an obvious reason for immigration, as well as a decent signal of some degree of "buy in".
Some quick thought experiment that suggests Race is a bad proxy measurement:
Imagine two immigration candidates. From two hypothetical nations. Candidate 1 is of the green race, but coming from redstan. Candidate 2 is of the red race, but coming from greenstan. They have both been in their countries for a full generation. Redstan is a war torn mess it has a failed government and the streets are regularly the sight of sectarian violence. Redstan is also ideological enemies with your country, Tealstan. Greenstan is your country's fatherland. Tealstan used to be a colony of Greenstan, but they peacefully split apart. They share a people, a culture, and are on friendly terms with one another. I would think Candidate 2 from Greenstan is clearly the better candidate.
Imagine two other immigration candidates. One is of your exact race. In fact they are your distant ancestor frozen in ice and revived in the modern era, but they have a cultural mindset from 200 years ago, they hate what the nation has become, and their lack of modern skills makes them highly likely to resort to crime. The other candidate is your neighbor, but a race very different from yours. They have been living next to you for five years, they had planned to just stay here a bit for work and then leave to their home country. But they fell in love and the prospect of marriage and starting a family has made them want to stay. I would think the second candidate is clearly the better choice.
Summary
Race is clearly a thing that exists. Genetic differences exist across races. The simplest proof is in people's skin pigmentation. However, genetics doesn't have to dictate anyone's destiny. Genetics can be barriers to unlimited possibilities, but your final place within a large set of possibilities is up to you.
And because race and genetics do not fully dictate who a person is, those characteristics do not provide good information about an individual that isn't obtainable in a myriad of other more reliable ways.