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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values because these two qualities work in tandem with intelligence to produce meritorious results. I doubt Alex Berenson was the smartest person at Yale by testing, but his temperament enabled him to confront the establishment on COVID, making him more valuable than his peers. The reporter who pressed on the Epstein story, Julie Brown, is an old woman and attended Temple University, but for some reason was the only one of her journalistic peers to pursue something which many of them hid. Edward Snowden went to community college. Andrew Norfolk, who uncovered the grooming gang scandal, went to Durham University.

With every job there are moral decisions that require certain values and temperamental qualities. If these are lacking then there are huge civilizational costs. I don’t know if a Vivek Ramaswamy has these optimal qualities. I don’t know if Asian students are temperamentally or culturally disposed to risk their reputation to fight against a corrupt power structure or official. I would argue that their culture is too credential-oriented, results-oriented, and conformist for that. There should be more studies so that we are absolutely sure that “relatively new” immigrant groups have the inner qualities that are required for influential positions in society. Maybe the studies will show that Asian students are actually more likely to have these qualities, I have no idea, but I’m sure the SAT doesn’t measure them.

A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values

That is by definition not a meritocracy.

Nothing in the definition of meritocracy says that the only merit to be considered is standardized test scores.

No, of course not. But temperament and cultural values are not part of academic merit, and therefore have no place in a meritocracy for academia.

Standardized test scores are also not really a part of academic merit, they are just a proxy for academic merit. The only actual metric for academic merit would be one that measures the extent to which someone produces actual academic results like innovating new historical approaches or proving a math theorem, etc.

At the undergraduate level, academic merit is about learning, not developing new stuff.

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