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I am strongly in favor of institutional color- and gender-blindness. Give everyone the same admission test, and if half of the people with the top scores are Ashkenazim, that should be of little interest to the university.
I think that this is what MLK argued for -- let everyone compete on equal footing, and let the outcome be what it may. Racial equality before the law seems an excellent idea, but does not imply racial equality of outcomes. Nor is the latter required for peaceful coexistence.
When it became apparent that equal(ish) opportunity does not lead to equal outcomes, it was the SJ left who defected from colorblindness, and pushed for racial discrimination. This creates perverse incentives. If medical school was colorblind, then I as a not overtly racist patient would have no reason to care about the skin color of my doctor -- after all, they all competed on merit. If the schools practice affirmative action, then as a rational patient I would prefer a doctor whose racial group would be overrepresented in a meritocratic system, e.g. someone White or Asian. It is hard to overstate how fucked up this is. We have the tools to measure individual merit much better than what racial stereotyping -- even if backed up with decades of HBD research -- could ever accomplish. And then we forgo these tools, so crude racial stereotyping will be the most effective tool for the individual. (I think the reason is that SJ does not really believe in individual qualifications. High-earning careers are simply deserved.)
But that's the problem - when institutional and color-/gender-blindness happens and fail to achieve equitable outcomes, people lose their minds, because any explanation other than structural bias is unacceptable. If they resort to explanations that are Less Wrong, then everything implodes.
"What can be destroyed by the truth should be" is something that most of the world won't agree on when they are what will be destroyed in the process.
Yep.
As an Elder Millenial I can recall the colorblind world that the Gen Xers were trying to create being very close to fruition...
But the snag came because disparate outcomes were inevitable. Once you'd done everything you can to level playing fields and boost disadvantaged players, the remaining disparities are probably intractable. Whatever reasons you think cause that, its still resulting in one group seeing better performance, better outcomes on average, and your other group is still lagging and you've already skimmed the cream of the crop.
And if you sneak in an assumption that equal outcomes is the true goal, this can't be allowed to stand.
I've lived through both the realization that the actual goal was to ensure equality of outcomes, and the increasing ham-handed efforts to achieve such a goal...
AND the ultimate realization that to make things equal, they have to actively disadvantage people who would otherwise find success and contribute more to society, and they feel this disadvantaging is morally justified and right.
Even as this gnaws at the load-bearing infrastructure of your civilization in more ways than one. The colorblind world was probably possible, but it was an unstable equilibrium that required us to be okay with some groups just continuing to 'win' fair contests and certain groups hitting a ceiling that we can't guide them past.
It's because if the reasons are subject to the hard reality that there's nothing that will make a poor white kid run a marathon faster than a Kenyan, there's no point in the kid trying in the first place. And that's not something people are willing to say.
It's one thing to design society to be Gattaca, it's another thing entirely to be told that Gattaca already exists and statistically, certain things are close to impossible for you and your children. An entire generation that was told growing up that they could be President or go to space hasn't come to terms with it.
That's probably a part of it.
There was an element of inflated expectations that kids in my generation grew up with. I get the sense that Gen Z does NOT have such a core belief of "I am a being of unlimited potential I just have to choose my goal and work at it!" So they're more nihilist, whereas a lot of millenials had to learn some hard lessons about their own
I, personally internalized something like The Mewtwo Lesson. But it turns out that the "circumstances of one's birth" are pretty damn relevant to your long term outcomes, and you can either lean into your existing strengths or you'll inherently underperform and end up fighting twice as hard for half the success. And that's assuming nobody has actually stacked the deck against you.
Cold meritocracy pokes through either way. We have more ways to make people's skill differentials apparent than ever before.
The original Pokemon games were lowkey based for teaching children a lesson.
You can give your Pokemon team all the tender loving care in the world, the best socioeconomic factors, take them on bike rides, play them the Pokeflute, bring them on cruises like the SS Anne, nurture them from the time they were level 5 with careful battle experience and with the best potions, ethers, elixirs, and rare candies that money can buy.
Yet, a Mewtwo who spent half his life experimented upon in a lab and the other half of his life isolated in a cave can solo your carefully-crafted, nurture-maxxed team.
Funny anectdote on that. In the original Red, Blue, and Yellow games the early version of Effort values meant if you leveled up your Pokemon the standard way, just constant battles, its 'under the hood' stats would actually be higher than if you cheated it with rare candies to reach level 100. I chose to level my favorites by grinding the Elite 4 and Cerulean cave.
So one time I battled my cousin using the Gameboy link cable (how's that for old school) and his team of straight level 100 'mon, and me, my strongest being a level 98 Mewtwo, and it turned into a surprise stomp in my favor, although it did come down to both of our Mewtwos in a slapfight to end it. I had NO CLUE about the hidden stats, I just chose to believe that because I had raised my pokemon with more care and attention as opposed to just pumping them with chemicals, they wanted to fight harder.
So the lesson is that yeah, sometimes pure effort does win over mere pedigree and performance enhancing drugs.
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I have to correct you here- MLK was very much in favor of Affirmative Action and reparations. Yes, his ultimate goal was a "colorblind" world, but he was not in favor of institutional colorblindness until the scales were balanced. He wrote about this quite extensively.
A lot of people today, even conservatives, like to throw their arms around the shoulders of MLK's ghost and claim ideological kinship with him, but the fact is, if MLK were alive today, he'd be very much a SJ. Perhaps a more intellectual one than Ibram X Kendi, but I doubt he'd accept HBD as an explanation for why blacks aren't achieving equal outcomes.
He was in favor of AA as a temporary corrective required to rebalance the scales. It is not at all clear that 70+ years later he would still endorse it. And in a decade or so, everyone in the US will have been born after the CRA.
At the very least, consider Return of the King as the alternative view.
well were there any people who said something like "after NN years of AA, i changed opinion and don't endorse it"? Quite a lot of people only doubled down on that.
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Agreed, we can extend this to a host of other progressive thinkers and even creatives as well. See the modern-day genre re-readings of Ursula K. Le Guin, who was already ahead of her time and could be considered woke even today.
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