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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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Following along in your thought experiment, I don't see why that's so bad. My perception is that as a matter of actual fact we are not currently in a position where we have successfully equalized "outgoing" kind of measures of equality, the "disparate treatment" in and of itself. I guess my general train of thought is, there's every incentive to vigorously explore and work on explanations other than HBD and if we do pretty well on outgoing, treatment measures and at that point there's still some unexplained gap, sure let's go there, fine. Until then, we have tools that work just as well that are less controversial and can theoretically do the same thing, so let's pursue those. So sure, at some point maybe we do get in a situation where we are faced with only gaps-based bashing our head against a wall, or the HBD stuff. That's fine! I have faith if that were to happen we would in fact seriously consider HBD stuff, certainly more so than now. I simply don't think we've reached the point of "we've done enough" to merit having the discussion yet. I realize reasonable people might disagree.

That's why I'm actually quite curious downthread to if the other user answers my honest question about when they think we already reached a tipping point where we've "done enough" for racial equality and it's time to throw in the towel, so to speak.

I elaborated also downthread about the dark street thought experiment, but more specifically, the "potential cost" I was referring to was actually "how does the group young blacks feel if someone crosses the road to avoid them". I don't think they would be that broken up about it, and I don't think it would make them feel particularly victimized (and even if they did the material impact on their life is approximately zero). So in that sense, it's a stupid example because both the overall societal cost and the impact on the discrimination recipient are low and also the potential cost to the discriminator is very high. This is, by all accounts, an abnormal rendering of a typical discrimination moral dilemma.

I guess that’s where I disagree. We’ve done a lot to try to remedy disparate treatment. In fact we have de facto discrimination in favor of blacks.