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Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?
It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.
I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.
One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.
Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.
And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.
(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)
Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.
I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.
I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.
I mean, this is how minorities of all kinds have eventually grown their public support, even as people opposed to it are upset - by being parts of various communities, big and small. In a world without an hierarchical society imposed on-high from either an authoritarian government or religion, it turns out continued interactions with people different from you tend to make you friendlier to that group of people.
The big jump that eventually causes the loss of widespread opposition to a minority groups isn't "I love these group of people and embrace them" grows to a majority, it's "I met x, they're a y, and they're fine, so you're weird for being so freaked out" grows to a majority.
That's why even among Trump voters, their actually less harsh on immigration than even some centrist Europeans, because they've grown in a far more multicultural society than most Europeans have.
This is a typical unsupported progressive truism. As I have spoken about many times, I have lived my entire life in one of the most racially-diverse cities in the entire world, and it has absolutely not made me friendlier to certain groups among whom I have spent quite a bit of time.
I agree that continued exposure to various groups helps you separate justified stereotypes from unjustified stereotypes; if a common wignat talking point was “Mexicans are lazy”, I would know enough to dismiss this as the ignorant prejudice of someone who hasn’t met very many Mexicans. However, the wignat talking point “blacks are, on average, lazy and hostile” has actually been borne out many times in my experience, so simply living around this particular group of “people different from me” has done the opposite of making me more friendly toward them.
I mean, sure, nothing works 100% of the time. There are still people upset over Brown vs. Board of Education out there after all.
But, I'm not talking about woke self-hating white liberals like myself celebrating the end of the white majority or whatever.
I'm talking about the fact that your median Texan exurban Trump voter in a middle class neighborhood is far less likely to freak out over non-white people moving to their neighborhood than frankly, even pretty centrist to center-left European's when it comes to Muslim's or hell, Romani people. If you look at polling, even now in a fairly anti-immigrant swing of thermostatic opinion, there's still fairly decent numbers of Trump voters about immigrants in society and such, and even now, the less/more/same numbers on immigration are still far better in the US than basically anywhere in Europe.
The same thing happened with gay people - it went from only freaks in San Francisco or whatever to oh hey, that's sad that gay people are dying to oh yeah, my cousin's daughter is a lesbian to oh, Dave in the office is gay - weird, he didn't seem it to Mary & Alice bought the Newman's house and so on.
Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about. Meanwhile, in America - show up, pay taxes, get a job, and learn to cheer or boo the Cowboys depending on where you live, and welcome to America. Pass the burger. We even threw on some veggie ones for Vivek and Priya even though I'd never eat any.
Same thing will and is already happening with trans people. At an accelerated pace, but partly because the numbers are so small, only conservatives stuck in very blue areas and grifting online right-wing entertainers care all that much in reality. Polling showed in a post-mid-2022 midterms that it was the least important issue among Republican voters.
It is very convenient to compare middle class non-white people of unspecified race and culture to specifically muslims and Roma of unspecified class. Now try comparing middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians to american acceptance of low class blacks from their own country.
I haven't encountered anything worrying about middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians.
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