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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.
I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee
The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.
On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.
On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.
It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.
Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.
Curious to know more.
Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.
Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.
Critical: this sounds like a certain sort of bait. Paging @HlynkaCG?
As for the actual content, yeah, this is obviously terrible. Do they have any reason to believe the bias was perpetuated by the classes, rather than by outside factors? If the latter, a gap to flush the racism out of the classes wouldn’t be likely to help at all.
The cost benefit for actions like this probably won’t add up without considering ass-covering. I would expect the motivators, on the school side, to have feared a lawsuit. Whether this was real or imagined I couldn’t say.
Not trying to troll, just haven’t been a part of the community for very long. Don’t know the norms and can’t reproduce the normative top-level comment yet.
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Hence why I answered it anyway.
And the question depends on who else is getting something out of it. If I were baiting the DankRationality forum into complaining about women, they might have a good time with it. If I then use screen caps to get them deplatformed or at least losing status, well, maybe it was still a loss for them.
There’s also a more pedestrian explanation where sometimes people just want their preconceptions flattered. I think the CW thread prompt makes it clear why I wouldn’t want to reward that.
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If a bait is so poorly placed on the hook that it's trivial for fish to eat it without any risk of getting caught on the hook, is it still bait?
Which means I can clearly not choose the bait that was placed in front of you!
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There’s always going to be racial disparities because there are racial disparities in academic skill as evidenced by testing. Getting rid of honor’s classes because black and latino students do poorly is like getting rid of swimming competitions because short guys do poorly or getting rid of beauty models because fat women feel offended. It is the exact wrong way of looking at the world. The black and latino students, instead of narcissistically believing they are morally harmed, should feel gratitude that they live in a nation where smarter people live and should feel blessed that they have more capable competitors to inspire them. If there is any moral harm occurring, it is that smart students will grow up to have to subsidize the problems of dumb students. In no way do the dumb students possess moral victimhood status, IMHO.
You're essentially arguing that black and Latino students should just accept the reality that they aren't as smart as white people, and be grateful that there are white people around to serve as role models.
Even if this were true, our society is not constructed such that we can assert a modern-day Great Chain of Being and expect the people born into the bottom rungs to accept it.
Are you suggesting that we join them in their denial of reality, or that we lie to them?
As I said to @The_Nybbler, I don't have suggestions. I am just pointing out that accepting the worst racial stereotypes about your people are, in fact, true, would be such an incredibly bitter pill to swallow that I don't think most people could do it.
I'm pessimistic, and I don't think there actually is an easy way forward, unless we conveniently discover either that HBD is wrong, or that the problem is easier to correct than we think.
People have ways to cope. It's always a sad day when a young man understands he doesn't have the makings of a varsity athlete, but he moves on. People typically value the things they are good at and denigrate the rest ('acting white') .
In the less politically correct accounts of white life in africa, they note that the indigenous accept the intelligence difference as a matter of course. Similarly to how an 'old-fashioned' white person might prefer a jewish lawyer.
I don't think trying to find a spooky force that keeps them down does anything but feed their resentment.
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White people pretty well accept it, though. They accept Asian representation without a wince and have a pathological belief that PoC make better musicians, comics and dancers. If some group, hypothetically, had a civilizationally-challenged level of narcissism that prevents fair and just grading, the issue is squarely on them.
They accept it because, as I said, it doesn't harm them. Even if you want to be a musician, comic, or dancer (accepting your premise for the moment, and "white men can't dance" jokes aside, I don't think anyone seriously believes white people have a genetic disadvantage in the performative arts), white people are obviously able to succeed there as well.
I see no evidence for any race having a "civilizationally-challenged level of narcissim."
So what is the specific mechanism that harms a particular mediocre black American student when American blacks are underrepresented as honor students (because they are straight up worse at academics than most others), but that doesn't harm a particular mediocre Gentile American white student even though Gentile American whites are underrepresented as honor students (because they, too, are worse at academics than Jews, Asians and many other sorts of non-American and sometimes non-white immigrants)? For any student who doesn't make the cut, the harm is obvious because it decreases this student's upward social mobility, potential access to capital, networking, happy life and levers of power. But what does race have to do with it?
If you accept the treatment of races as lobbying groups and cohesive political units (relatedly, a very apt formulation I've seen recently is: «treat individuals in the present as genetically-determined avatars for demographic dynasties») – then it must apply equally in all cases where a race is less successful relative to another. If you do not, then it must be shown and clearly argued that outcomes on the level of aggregate racial statistics have some causal adverse impact on an individual, before it starts to make sense to recognize a problem here. You cannot have it both ways, affirming racial politics of non-whites but bluntly stating whites do not have a case for symmetrical complaints. This would be just incoherent.
Impassionata does, I do too. More accurately, whites have advantages in competitive domains where requirements fit their traits well, and the same is true for any other group (duh). It so happens that what is called «dance» today is better suited to traits of black people, I guess. This is obviously true for NBA, why cannot it be true to more artistic forms of physical performance? Do you think blacks are not genetically advantaged in the context of NBA? This should be textbook stuff.
There is no mechanism that disproportionately harms an individual, assuming a race-blind meritocratic society (which is a big assumption).
Being a good NBA player requires height, strength, and speed, all traits where blacks pretty clearly have a genetic advantage.
There may be genetic traits that make one a better singer, dancer, or comedian, but I am skeptical that blacks are unusually gifted, or whites unusually disadvantaged, in these areas.
Being a good musician or comedian requires intelligence. There's the bit about scott's brother being a good pianist, jewish overrepresentation among musicians, and generally understanding the relations that make up 'good music', 'good dance', has to depend on intelligence in the same way all other complex tasks do. So, any hypothesized racial difference in intelligence should show up there too.
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Those seem like cases where thriving on attention, or extroversion, would provide an advantage. A dancer that was extremely physically gifted but also shy would be less successful, on average. Black people are stereotypically seen as having more than average swagger; this plausibly has a genetic component; and they may benefit on the margin as a result.
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Methinks it's mainly speed, or rather fast-twitch muscle fibers. Politically correct science tells me that black American men are perceived as being taller, heavier, stronger and more muscular even when they are not – and in fact they are like one inch shorter, but it's basically equal. Blacks have more skeletal muscle on average, so I guess that's why they're decent bodybuilders, but they are noticeably less impressive as pure strongmen than Germanics, Scandinavians, obviously including Icelanders, and Eastern Slavs (Poles, Ukrainians).
Btw you have already posited that there is no feeling of inferiority in masculine quality on part of white men, so that's a bit perplexing – do you think men who are perceived as «pretty clearly have a genetic advantage in height, strength and speed» are not seen as more masculine and sexually desirable on a primal level? Asians suffer a lot, and struggle to lose virginity, for their lack of those advantages – not because they're good at math.
Some ethnicities among Southern Slavs are taller and probably stronger than American whites, albeit slower than blacks. Accordingly, there are 83 international players from Yugoslavia, including 30 from Serbia (pop. 6.8 million) and 10 from Montenegro (619 thousand people). This chart tells me French Guiana contributes even more per capita, not sure what's going on there.
Anyway, this stuff is best left to Steve Sailer. My only point is that the same vector of fast-paced athleticism that makes one a good runner, jumper, dunker and boxer* can easily make one a great agile dancer, assuming you're not dancing 19th century waltz. Singers and comedians are more a matter of taste; but self-esteem, impulsivity and outgoing personality are also partly genetic, and one can see how blacks have an advantage there and how it can contribute to success at performing.
* though there, too, Slavs make a good showing by virtue of bulk, power and technique; now that Fedor's star has fallen, I'm looking forward to Sergey Pavlovich vs Curtis Blaydes. Sergei did lose to Overeem but has... changed a lot since then. I don't care for box per se, but the picture there is similar to MMA.
I didn't say no feelings of inferiority. I'm sure some white men do feel that way. I do not think it's an anxiety deeply embedded in white society, as you seem to, or one that affects most mentally healthy white men. Like, how many white men do you know who actually spend time worrying about how their dick compares to a black man's?
Some people may have genetic advantages in whatever traits make one a better dancer, and even a singer, and maybe even a comedian (seems to me IQ would be the most important one there, but maybe extroversion is also a factor, as @ApplesauceIrishCream suggested). Maybe black people have the edge there too. But if so, it's certainly less obvious, given that white people worldwide have no shortage of dancing, singing, and comedy/storytelling traditions. Any "gap" doesn't seem as impactful as an IQ gap, or even a speed/height gap.
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So whites should accept the reality that they are statistically shorter, weaker, and slower than black people? (except that US whites aren't shorter, at least.... maybe the NBA needs some diversity investigations?), but blacks cannot be expected to accept the reality that they have statistically lower IQ? This is blatant special pleading.
The reality that blacks have statistically lower IQs is an obvious fact - I don't think anyone actually disputes it. We can see the numbers.
The disputes are over whether IQ actually represents intelligence, and whether the difference is genetic.
Let's skip all the wrangling over both those questions and suppose you and I agree that the answer is yes, IQ is meaningful and genetic, and, to put it crudely, whites are smarter than blacks.
I'm not arguing that blacks "shouldn't be expected to accept reality." I am pointing out that when you have a trait that strongly determines/predicts one's outcomes and success in life (which IQ, given the premises above, does, while height and athletic ability, in today's society, does not), it is not realistic for you to blithely say "Sorry, black people, you're just not as smart, that's why you aren't ever going to achieve economic or political parity. Suck it up."
Are you factually correct in saying that? Maybe. And I don't see much utility (or nobility) in the "noble lie." So maybe saying that until everyone believes it is the only real option.
However, I don't think that will work. I don't think you will ever get everyone to believe it. And I understand why black people would not want to believe it. ("But they should just accept--" Yes, yes, if all this is true, I suppose they should. They won't. Are you absolutely sure, if you were black, you'd be able to bite that bullet?)
I do not have a solution. I am making observations, not prescriptions.
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Affirmative action certainly harms whites, as does having a low regard for whites in total.
What do you mean “white people are obviously able to succeed”? Everyone talented is obviously able to succeed.
i think what @Amadan is arguing is that affirmative action and related things is not the end all be all and has had not really that much of a disadvantaging effect on white people
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I mean there's no evidence that white people are either genetically or socially disadvantaged in those endeavors.
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We accepted that blacks are best at basketball, Koreans at starcraft and seem to be doing just fine. And averages mean nothing to individual. Nobody is saying that this kid is not suited for honors. But meritocracy is important.
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That's basically how white people relate to Asian students and it seems basically fine to me. I don't actually find it all that degrading to know that my ethnic group doesn't have the highest average IQ and I don't actually think it says much of anything about me individually.
I could agree with this in the abstract. Intelligence does not equate to moral worth, right?
Except our society very much does equate intelligence to moral worth, and more importantly, equates intelligence to success in life. As a practical matter, very few white people aspire to be professional basketball players or think that their lives are made worse because they are genetically disadvantaged in their basketball potential. But intelligence affects basically everything. And the hard HBD proponents don't just say "Well, black people have lower IQs, but that's okay."
I often see the "Well, Asians score better than whites on IQ tests and that doesn't bother me" argument, but very clearly, whites are doing fine despite perhaps not being the highest IQ race on the planet. If there is a real, genetically-determined IQ gap between whites and Asians, it's small enough as to make little or no difference, whereas the gaps between whites and blacks are stark and significant.
Note that none of this is me claiming that these gaps can't be real. I'm just saying that if you were a black person seeing how poorly your fellow black people are doing in the world and told "Sorry, it's just your bad luck to be born the race whose dump stat is Intelligence," you would probably have a problem accepting this with equanimity.
This isn't the message, though. Being born to a particular race certainly can be bad luck depending on the race and society based on the discrimination that goes on in that society. But the average IQ - and more broadly the average of any trait - of your race has no real bearing on your lot in life. It's your own personal intelligence that has the bearing on your life. And that personal intelligence isn't influenced by the average intelligence of your race - it's the other way around, where the average intelligence of your race is influenced by the personal intelligence of you and everyone else in your race, because that's literally how one would calculate that.
In theory, yes. But people aren't just individuals, they are also members of communities - familial, ethnic, racial, national, etc.
"Even if your people are naturally less intelligent, you might not be" doesn't seem like it would be much consolation. Especially if it turns out you aren't one of the lucky ones at the favorable end of the bell curve.
So, given a choice between "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because you are intellectually inferior and there isn't much that can be done about that," and "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because of historical discrimination and institutional racism, and we can fix that," which one do you think most people are going to choose? How easy would it be for you to accept option a?
See, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and have argued the same things multiple times in this space. That’s what’s so odd to me about how hostile you get towards me and other users here who have advocated a formalized geographic and/or cultural separation of blacks from other higher-performing racial groups in this country. I believe it would be a genuine act of care and would drastically improve the lived experience of most black people, for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined. Yet you continue to (usually by implication but occasionally explicitly) accuse me of having other, more malicious motives.
I understand why you might have other concerns which would stop you from carrying through the argument you’re making to (what I believe is) its most appropriate conclusion, but I ask that you take this opportunity to at least reflect on why someone would conclude from the argument you’re making that maybe the best solution is to engineer a future in which black people will not have to live every single day of their lives being forced to unfavorably compare themselves to whites and Asians.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been particularly hostile to you. Obviously I disagree with your ideology, but I don't recall ever being uncivil to you.
I accept that you are sincere in wanting a peaceful separation where we all just get along on our respective sides of the fence.
I just don't believe most white nationalists are so benevolent. Sure, they might not all want a race war if there is a less violent alternative, but they don't actually care about the well-being of black people; they just hate and resent black people because they perceive blacks to be making their own lives worse.
Let's say that's true. I think even you must know that your project of the US setting aside a chunk of the country for African-America and subsidizing them for a few generations is about as likely as AIs turning into benevolent overlords who give us Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So I don't see white nationalism leading to anything but a race war, whatever your personal intentions might be.
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Again, I don't think this is the message. There are plenty of things that can be done about lower intellect to give people better lives - just as many as can be done to effectively improve people's lives by countering historical discrimination or institutional racism, by my lights - and plenty of people specifically push for policies designed to do just that. I do think the message gets negativity attached to them because of the lionization of "intelligence" as the indicator of worth or value in a person, but then the solution is clearly to get rid of that lionization. I'm pretty sure concepts like physical strength or martial prowess used to be a far greater indicator of someone's worth as a human being (at least among males) in the past, but that association is mostly gone now in modern society. I think we can do the same for intelligence. And, frankly, I think we must if we are to create at all a functional society going forward.
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IQ gap is a very abstract concept. I doubt regular people are going around correlating how they interact with people, with what that person's race's average IQ is compared to theirs.
What isn't abstract is how often you are harrassed, abused, or otherwise victimized, and what tribe that person comes from. When you are openly discriminated against during job interviews, and what the open racial preferences of the company were. When you are in groups, and which people are openly racially hostile towards you.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life. Only the most terminally online person would resort to nonchalantly claiming that some IQ different between whites and asians doesn't bother them. Whatever the differences between whites and asians, asian people have likely never bothered him. And not in the "Ugh, that bothers me" sense but the "I think that might be a felony, or at least a misdemeanor" sense.
The same cannot be said about how many equity policies have forced me into contact with groups that hate me and seem eager to victimize my family. Or worse, have the state do it for them.
Okay. But you're grinding an entirely different axe. We're talking (based on my original response) about whether it's reasonable to expect that blacks (and Latinos) should just accept that white people are smarter and be happy.
Well, Jews and some Asian ethnicities are smarter on average than white people. I, a white person, hold no ill will towards them.
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Why shouldn’t they? You have to accept that on an individual level which is the level that really matters. I care if Terence Tao beats me on the job application, but I have to accept that just the same
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I donno man. I just don't know.
I mean, going back to my previously mentioned, white suburban, not a minority in sight, upbringing, dumb white kids were just dumb. And they often grumbled that life wasn't fair. The speeding tickets they got for going 100 in a 45 weren't fair. The F's they got on tests weren't fair. Getting fired from the jobs they struggled to show up for wasn't fair. And no amount of pointing out them that these things were the consequences of their actions made a dent in their conviction. Even that they were the easily foreseeable consequence! Well, maybe for normal people. Not for them.
I'm not sure how many of them ever articulated that they even perceived it to be an IQ problem. I mean, naturally everyone around them knew they were dumb as a box of rocks. But they always thought they were as smart as everyone else, and that life wasn't fair.
Luckily nobody gave a fuck, because they were all white. There was no "Dumb ass white person" political action group. There was no equity program for those utterly incapable of not making a bad decision.
If IQ test data between Blacks and Whites is accurate, you've got a truly staggering proportion of the African American population that are just dumb. And if they are like the dumb white people I've known, they don't think they are. They will never believe they are. And, like the dumb white people around me growing up, society serves itself best when it doesn't take their complaints about "fairness" seriously.
As for how they cope with it, ideally, that would be on them. Alas...
Agreed - dumb people are dumb, and one characteristic of dumb people is an inability to accept cause and effect, that actions have consequences, to take responsibility, etc. As well as suffering from Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. (I've known a few dumb people who knew they were less than bright and more or less accepted it, but most... don't.) Obviously this is equally true of dumb white people and dumb black people.
Yeah, that is the crux of it. My argument is not that IQ tests imply unfortunate things so we should not believe them, or that we should pretend things that aren't true because it makes dumb people feel bad. My argument is a purely practical one: given that dumb people demonstrably can't accept this, then if it's true that blacks and Latinos are dumb at much higher rates, why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.
What is the solution? I don't know.
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Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life.
It's not commonly noted, but these things do happen in small ways. The self-segregation of asian students from white ones does happen in some schools - particularly at ones with large asian populations like Cal. Also, I've seen cases of anti-white discrimination crop up in professional contexts; cases of Indian caste-bias, or of the marginalization of whites in some east-asian companies operating branches in CA.
People keeping to themselves doesn't bother me. But RE: Indians hiring discriminately, I really wasn't talking about Indians. I know they are technically Asian, but the Indian Subcontinent is it's own thing for a reason. My wife was actually told point blank during an interview she wasn't going to get the job because she wasn't Indian once. She has an ethnic sounding last name (nobody knows why), so maybe they didn't realize she was white when they offered to interview her.
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Which society? TheMotte?
Adolescent Self-Esteem: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age
How likely do you suppose it is that in a society where intelligence is equated to moral worth, the stereotypically most intelligent and most socially conformist, and objectively the highest-scoring major group has the lowest self-esteem, and vice versa?
Insofar as we define whites on the planet in a convenient enough manner. Ukrainians aren't white, I guess – and Appalachians should be proud that Episcopalans and Judeo-Hapas in private schools of New York and New England who hate them and politically oppose them have a skin tone close to theirs and get honors on their behalf.
Not to be crass, but it's not just basketball.
Social media, porn sites, ads and all sorts of American, and now not only American entertainment are bursting with black-male-white-female content, with «muh BBC» mockery of «white boys», «once you go black» memes, with even Effective Altruists wringing their hands that they treat black men as irresistible «sex toys» in their polyamorous rings (what racism!) in the wake of Bostromgate. You really don't need to look hard for it. American society is very conscious about interracial stuff and in denial about fetishizing it (e.g. here's a 8chan board). It's an elephant in the room, don't even try to snarkily spin this into a me issue, as is the custom. I guess I've first realized this when reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! book one, the uncomfortable chapter dedicated to, I assume, nursing insecurities of intelligent elderly Jews:
Granted, the trilogy including this chapter is replete with all other sorts of sex – sign of the times. And I know that accurate tinder/dating/marriage statistics do not support the implied pattern. The question is of social impressions and beliefs.
Sex is right at the foundation of human sociality. Do you suppose there are very few white people who think their lives are made worse because they are not seen as impressively masculine?
Yes, I do suppose that.
+1 for citing one of my favorite books, though.
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I think you’re not quite getting at how white versus black masculinity is seen. Yes, blacks are viewed as bigger, stronger, tougher, and sexually bolder, but Americans do still have a concept of men needing to do the right thing, which black men are very definitely not stereotyped as doing.
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Isn't this, without the slant, the relationship between a walmart greeter / janitor and a well paid lawyer or software dev? The former are much poorer and less-well-regarded than the latter - much moreso than the difference between a 'median black' and 'median white' - but they 'accept' that, whether by skill or maybe social class, their place is lower. At least in the same sense a black student's is.
Of course it's justified by merit - and if a poor smart person can ace leetcode problems (most can't, even if they try and learn), they have a shot at being richer. But that doesn't make them any less unequal. What makes "I'm (white) not as smart as someone who makes $150k/year (white)" THAT much better (fundamentally, not as a matter of political feasibility) than "I'm (14% black / 60% white) not as smart as someone who makes $150k/year (7% black / 60% white)"?
How does it harm a poor black person much moreso than it does a poor white person?
I don’t know anyone that thinks highly of lawyers or software developers, for one.
Second, this status-seeking fetish of the petit bourgeois is in direct opposition to the American mythology of the rugged individual. A Wal-Mart greeter isn’t acknowledging your superiority by saying hello to you. They’re doing a job that they may or may not enjoy (you forget that many Wal-Mart greeters are bored retirees, who have the luxury of not needing to work, which places them well above the lawyers and software developers who do).
Third, “merit” is not the reason your software developer or lawyer has a bloated salary. These are two jobs that currently pay very well because they have corporate backing. And judging by the recent high amount of FAANG layoffs, that backing isn’t unconditional.
Then why doesn't the software guy just get a Walmart job then and cut his expenses accordingly? Hmmm . Maybe making 7 figures by 30-40 is more fun than living hand to mouth your whole life.
You could’ve read the text you quoted and gotten your answer. Also, no software engineer makes 7 figures unless they’re in management or counting “total compensation” in a bid to make themselves sound higher status than they actually are.
7 figures in accumulated savings and by investing your income in the stock market and or real estate, which is doable.
And not at all what you claimed.
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It's a comparison. The way in which a black person, whether by racism or merit, scores poorly on a test, gets into a less prestigious school, or a lower-income occupation, is exactly the same way in which a less-well-off white person does. The claim is this happens disproportionately to black people, not that anything specific happens to black people that isn't ålso common among poor whites.
There's never been an america, or anywhere, where people didn't seek status, wealth, power, social approval, etc
... you type into your laptop/phone's meticulously designed user interface, which is transmitted over dozens of layers of well-optimized abstraction to a dozen others on random parts of the globe, as a billion people do the same thing. Software engineering is hard, and as its products are integrated into every area of human activity, it remains valuable. It has "corporate backing" because corporations using it make billions. FAANG layoffs are returns to the status quo of 1.5 years ago - in part, they overestimated how much of COVID internet demand would be permanent, in part general overhiring. But genuinely talented developers are still hard to find, and expensive.
Yes, petit bourgeois status chasers have always existed. All the same, they are tumors whose existence is harshly ignored in the American mythology of the self made man. You can feel however you want about said tumors.
And software engineering isn’t harder than chemical, petroleum, electrical, or nuclear engineering, all fields that pay peanuts compared to software. As professed by my many acquaintances who jumped engineering ship to the laptop class. Your money comes from corporate marketing.
Oh, and this piece of shit in my hand that you’re fetishizing as the peak of human technology can barely copy and paste properly, hence the lack of quotations in my reply.
Is this actually true? I'd always heard that petroleum engineering is one of the top careers one can go into right out of school in terms of income, whereas software engineering has become saturated to the point that making 6 figures without extensive experience or working for a FAANG company is unusual. The industry in which I work employs a lot of electrical engineers, and I know that they're compensated very well as well, at least within my field.
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All mythologies aren't particularly accurate! But social climbing or hwatever has been integral to the american experience since the revolution, just like every other human society everywhere
... yeah, because those fields aren't in the process of transforming all niches of economic activity. software pays a lot because it's difficult AND in demand.
"that car you're fetishizing as the peak of human technology? its sound system flickers sometimes. cars are irrelevant"
I genuinely don't think we disagree on anything material, you just seem mad at the elite laptop class or something
This is all a very fluffy way to say “yes, most revenue in software development comes from marketing.”
So I’m glad we agree. Though calling the laptop class “elite” is always funny wish fulfillment from rationalists whose greatest achievement in life is becoming middle managers for a tech company. The “elite” don’t work.
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Black children in families making 200K have the same SAT scores as those born in families making 20K. A child born in the top 1% who is Black (a very rare thing), has the same criminality rate as a 40 percentile who is white. The bottom 50% of Blacks have the same criminality rate as the bottom 1% of Whites by income (again using global not intra-race percentiles). With this in mind let's address your following question.
In an entirely fair society, it is concievable that a poor white janitor or his children might one day have the potential to become something more. The same cannot be said for a black Janitor, and in fact his job might actually merit taking by a black secretary or nurse.
Even unsourced graphs from racist blogs show that, at any IQ level, the number of blacks at it is either less than or decently close to the number of whites. This doesn't demonstrate 'categorical' differences. Sure, regression to the mean means a 90IQ black's probably a bit 'genetically' worse than a 90IQ white, but not that much. A white and black that've sorted into similar skill brackets don't have that much difference in potential. And compared to someone who makes 300k/year, the difference is difficult to notice. I don't see what your stats add to that picture.
To the original points, being a 'low-IQ black' isn't worse than being a low-IQ white, of which there are many.
And, if you (speaking generally) are a 130IQ white talking to a bunch of 125IQ whites, isn't there something odd about drawing a line between a 90IQ black and a 100IQ white?
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I disagree with this view.
In my opinion, a great deal of harm was caused to Africans when the wheel was introduced to their continent then combustion engines, electricity and telecommunications.
Being forced to compete in an artificial capitalist economy is unfair when you are biologically less suited than others to that competition, but well-suited to your natural environment that is displaced by the capitalists.
There is a lot of talk about the harm caused to the enslaved people that were transported in state-of-the-art (at the time) boats across the seas and the centuries, and their descendants.
Clearly their suffering matters a lot more (in terms of how many people care about it) than the suffering of their cousins who were just as enslaved, murdered and brutalized but on their original continent.
The difference is that one side had a glimpse of 'what could be'.
Non-African capitalists have been dangling the carrot of civilization in front of Africans for centuries now, never to quite reach it.
Imagine if aliens came to Earth and showed everybody what fully automated luxury communism is but only slightly different people than you got to partake in it, everybody else only getting 30% of the utopia. Wouldn't that be a form of harm? Wouldn't you have been happier if you hadn't had a glimpse of paradise on Earth, without getting told that you specifically does not get to have it?
This is essentially the black experience in the West.
The movie Elysium touches on this, I believe, it is no surprise that the director is a white South-African.
Africans are biologically less suitable to capitalism than non-Africans? Unpack that one for me.
At least for the ones forcibly brought overseas.
We see them do a lot worse in metrics that are relevant to success in capitalism such as time preference, literacy, numeracy, civility or manners, almost any metric one can imagine relevant to commercial success, and these metrics have strong biological underpinnings.
Usually whatever gene variant is associated with the worse outcome in phenotype for a capitalist society (ie increased violence or reduced intellectual function) will be more prevalent in Subsaharian African in studies, but these are controversial and not that common.
Some studies related to that can be found here, mostly from the 2010s, I haven't really kept up to date with the most relevant science.
This article from 22 seems to claim that using geographical categorization makes for bad science and leads to violence, continuously referring to a single shooting that happened that year.
While I don't know whether or not it makes for bad science, I think using the fragments of science that are still being published using geographical denominations would probably decrease violence, if one were to believe the FBI crime statistics.
Indeed, they quote one of the scientists:
Regarding the issue with maladaptation to capitalist societies, which some people call 'structural racism':
The few that manage to attain success and status in our capitalist society happen almost by accident.
If there was no audience for their brawling, their singing and dancing or their running and throwing, most of them would not be successful, and these are people that are outliers of their group already.
While these top sportsmen and entertainers do command a certain amount of luxury and status, they are still employees, or even commodities, traded by powerful capitalist owners.
Who's to say what life they would have on the continent? Would they not make impressive warlords? Powerful tribes chiefs?
Out of the few African-American distinguished for some level of legitimate intellectual achievement, I can't help but notice that they usually show significant non-African admixture. Some people question if Obama is African at all, or Indonesian, MLK is another example.
NASA recently named a moon mountain for Melba Mouton. I'd be surprised if she were more than 50% African.
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The article is behind a paywall for me, but I can say that, in general, this is a difficult question. I taught high school for many years, and in my experience non-honors students learn less in homogeneous classrooms in which honors students have been taken out, in part because in such classrooms teachers are stretched thinner -- there are more students who need individual attention, for example, so each student who needs individual attention is going to get less. And, if the average non-honors student learns, say, 10 pct less each year, that is going to add up to a whole lot less learning over 12 years.
OTOH, honors-level students will learn less in heterogenous classes (i.e., in a school without honors classes) than in homogenous classes.
Hence, there is no "right" answer. There is a choice that has to be made about which group you want to prioritize. Note also that, if African-American students are overrepresented among non-honors students, then choosing to have honors classes de facto means that African American students will learn less than they otherwise would in a school without honors classes. That is true regardless of the cause of African American student's lower propensity to learn -- it is true if the cause is cultural, or genetic, or because of "systemic racism" or whatever.
So, if the district decides that is it more important to maximize outcomes for African American students (or for non-honors students), then it indeed makes sense to eliminate honors classes. If the district decides it is more important to maximize outcomes for high-skill students, then it does not make sense to eliminate honors classes. But, again, that is a genuine policy dilemma.
Nonsense. Of course there is a right answer, which is to not do these things. It's not like this is the first time it's ever been tried. Schemes like this have been tried over and over and over for 50 years or more. It always results in ruin and devastation for the school system. Even the stated goal of "Well, kids that need more individual attention learn more when you have classes of smart kids that need less individual attention because there is more individual attention freed up for them" fails to materialize. Because these policies are rarely pursued in isolation. And "equity first" batch of policies, in addition to scrapping achievement, usually also scraps discipline. If parents of achieving kids were frustrated that their kids no longer had access to higher maths or proper AP classes, they become terrified at how increasingly violent the schools become. Seemingly just daycares for felons in training.
Sure, not all the parents will pull their kids out. But I can promise you families that care about their kids will stop moving there. Then things really start going south as the tax base for schools begins to decrease. Now you have schools full of dumb, violent, out of control kids, and no money to deal with the problem.
On a side note, needs individual attention is the best euphemism for fetal alcohol syndrome I've ever heard. I look back on my public school days, with a mix of well off suburbs and trailer parks funneling into the same school district, and the need to keep those groups separate was paramount. Woe betide you if you were a kid who wanted to learn, and were stuck in a class with even 2 or 3 kids who would spring from their desk every 3 minutes and begin smacking people or singing loudly and off key or jumping on their desk. You could go an entire year and not learn one single thing over the teacher's ineffectual shouting. Getting away from them was the singular reason I worked hard in school. Because otherwise I could give a shit about memorizing dates in history, or doing sentence diagrams until my hands cramped.
At least back then, everybody was white, so nobody cared.
You are not really addressing my argument, as is evidenced by this:
Leaving aside that that is absolutely wrong -- you have clearly never taught high school economics -- if a school indeed has students with fetal alcohol syndrome, it has to figure out how to serve their needs, and how to balance serving their needs with serving the needs of other students, because there are always tradeoffs. As I said, it really doesn't matter what the cause of low ability is.
I did address you argument in literally the entire rest of my post. But you do you.
Let me tell you how this went in a rather high profile case near me. A kid with obvious special needs was constantly violent. Problem was, the parents refused to agree to any program the school suggested. They insisted he stay in regular class. It got so bad, the school told the parents they needed to accompany the child in school 100% of the time. I'm under the impression the school did not actually have the authority to request this, and the parents didn't bother.
Anyways, eventually this 6 year old kid gets ahold of his mother's gun and shoots his teacher. After the school was warned 4 times that day that people had seen the kid with the gun, the kid had said he'd shoot his teacher, etc. The administrators just wanted to wait it out and hope nothing happened. Their hands were practically tied because of policies getting rid of the "school to prison pipeline".
That is the terminal destination of these policies.
Is this actually true? What specific policies were there stopping them? What policies preventing them notifying Children's Protective Services? or the police? Is this a policy issue or an issue where people didn't believe a six year old would have a gun and threaten someone with it (for example) or laziness or complacency? and therefore didn't follow the policies they should have? The indication seems to have been that by policy they should have notified the police when they received the tip rather than simply just searching the kids backpack and then dropping the matter.
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No, you actually didn't. You addressed a different issue. You did not address at all the argument that there are tradeoffs between what is best for high skills students and what is best for low skills students.
Again, what does that have to do with the issue? Leaving aside that 6-yr-olds shooting teachers is not exactly a central example of the issue, the fact that this particular school made the wrong decision in this particular case does not mean that the tradeoffs that I identified do not exist.
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For anyone interested, @WhiningCoil is presumably referring to the shooting of Abby Zwerner in Virginia.
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It’s probably more important in the modern world to push up your top students. World is getting more scalable. And a countries tech development depends far more on the top. For civil society matters some to have a well educated populace that understands what’s going on.
But there’s another solution since you say lower performers need more individual attention. You could probably teach the AP at scale like intro college courses. And shift to smaller classes on the lower performers. The only issue is a lot of teachers don’t like teaching lower performing and like to have a student who they feel will go somewhere.
You could also cut teaching pay and boost number of teachers in some of the blue areas doing this. Chicagos around 100k a year for a teacher. If you pay Florida wages you could shrink class sizes.
I think most teachers would be happy teaching lower performers in a setting in which they can do so successfully (ie, in a setting in which students show actual progress). And of course in high schools, a teacher could have some classes with higher performers and some with lower performers.
Yes, there is definitely a tradeoff between salary and class sizes. Of course, there is also the problem that lower ciass sizes = more teachers = need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find all those extra teachers. OTOH, there are plenty of teachers who are not effective in large non-honors classes but who would be effective in smaller classes (eg: a teacher who is not great at classroom management). Again, it is a complex problem.
Even that has tradeoffs -- larger classes = more time grading homework (a big deal for any class which requires writing: 100 essays at 15 min per essay = 25 hours of grading), so teachers of larger classes might end up assigning less demanding work.
It is really a more complex problem than is normally assumed.
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I actually don’t think the AP would scale well at all. Think about how many people fail out of college because they don’t go to lectures or keep up with assignments. Then take away their financial skin in the game, deduct a couple years of life experience such as intro jobs, and force them to stay on “campus” all day. It’d be a bloodbath.
The staffing issue isn’t great either. I’ve never met a professor who’d rather teach freshman lectures than more selective classes. Is that because of the interest of the subject, or because monologuing to 200 people is boring and/or stressful? Either way, there’d be less desire to maximize AP class sizes.
High school also precludes the usual university staffing solution of underpaid TAs. Schedule flexibility is much lower, and there’s no carrot of scholarships or research spots. Without TAs, good luck grading the assignments of giant lecture sections.
In my opinion, one of the more valuable skills from AP is an asking-questions kind of relationship with the teacher. That’s the kind of thing which gets people going to office hours or research assistants in college. Large lectures are a hard limit to that given a high-school schedule.
Most of these problems are much, much worse if you’re simultaneously slashing wages. The market price for a teacher in Chicago accounts for cost of living, Union efforts, enjoyability of the job and the leisure time…force that to match Florida, and you’ll find people would rather be in Florida.
Cost of living isn’t much higher in Chicago/Illinois. And Florida has better academic performance when adjusting for race. It’s mostly just unions.
I’m seeing Chicago as slightly cheaper than Miami, but more expensive than all the other listed Florida cities, which are more comparable to Houston or Richmond.
But my point stands. You are paying teachers to live in Illinois rather than somewhere with a comparable cost but no snow, better beaches, and different politics. I’m sure we can model some of the difference as due to unions, and some fraction of that as self-perpetuating overhead rather than an actual service that people would pay for. How much? I think if you cut wages to Florida levels, the marginal teach would feel much better about moving to Florida. Or Albequerque, or anywhere with similar pay.
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Removing honors classes and putting the smart kids in an easy class where they don't need the teacher is comparable to just sending them home and having smaller class sizes. If they're not learning anything from the teacher because they don't need the teacher's help, then why are they even in school? It's just a way of having 20 actively learning students in a class but pretending you have class sizes of 30. I can see the appeal from a certain perspective, this combines the steps of:
Have smaller class sizes, which increases learning and costs.
Stop teaching smart kids, which reduces the costs created by step 1.
Mask the whole process so it looks less obviously unjust than doing steps 1 and 2 in isolation.
But if you're actually paying attention, you realize that step 3 doesn't actually change how just it is, merely the surface appearance. I don't see the dilemma, this is a strictly worse policy than just letting smart kids test out of school so you don't have to spend money teaching them, and then having smaller class sizes for whoever's left. Which is itself a pretty dubious proposition, but still less dubious than wasting the smart kids' time.
Except that I did not say that. I said that some students need** individual attention**. Some students learn from the teacher -- eg, from lecture -- yet do not need individual attention in the classroom.
This "teacher == lecture" equivalence was fractured by the invention of video, and is being dismantled by software.
Frankly, even "comparable to just sending them home" was overstating the equivalence. Khan Academy lectures can be played back with adjustable speed, parts can be replayed if necessary, and although the interleaved quizzes aren't as good as individual attention they're way better than lecture alone. The only added value a teacher brings is discipline and individual attention.
What if we split the difference? You could sit the honors kids in the back classroom in front of self-paced software, where they'll need even less individual attention! That would thereby give teachers even more time to spend on the kids who need it more, meeting Rawlsian goals, and it would still be shortchanging the smarter kids of resources so you'd think it would even meet envious goals. You'd think the left would be happy. But, when at the end of a few years the bulk of the class are struggling slightly less with fractions and the smarter kids are solving quadratics, somehow I don't think that will be good enough. The "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents" crowd dropped the mask when they first proposed to take the quick-witted middle schoolers out of Algebra I rather than to put the slower ones in; at that point it became too clear that "reject" meant "combat", not "disbelieve".
Note that I said "eg, lecture" rather than "ie, lecture." Also, a lecture in a k-12 classroom is usually more of a q and a than a straight lecture. Not that some students can't learn from av ideo lecture -- some can ---but the set of "students who can learn from video lectures" is definitely not the same as the set of "students who do not need individual attention." A better alternative is to 1) introduce concept; 2) ask stronger students to think about extensions ofthe concept; while 3) teacher gives individual attention to weaker students to make sure they understand the basic concept.
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This is counter-acted by the fact that you provide everyone the same content. Typically, after a teacher explained something, some of the students understood it and some didn't. Now the teacher has to make a decision: continue with the lesson and lose the kids that didn't understand, or go over the same topic again (maybe in a different or more detailed way) and lose the kids that already got it and are now getting bored and not learning anything new.
The advantage of the video at least is that the experience can be tailored to the individual's needs. Students can pause, replay or skip over parts depending on how well they understood the material. And it's not necessarily repeating content verbatim: interactive courses can include optional exercises, in-depth explanations, etc. similar to what a teacher might provide.
The fundamental limitation of group-based teaching is that it goes only at a single speed, so at best it's optimized for the average student, and doesn't cater to either the under- or over-performing student. In practice, it's optimized for the below-average student, because if kids are failing classes that's considered bad (“no child left behind”) but if smart students aren't learning as much as they could have, nobody gives a crap.
Is this something that LLMs could help with? You could get one to rephrase the same definition over and over again, with more and more examples and it wouldn't get irritated. Neural networks can reportedly already analyze which students are disengaged by reading their faces, so a robot-TA that pops up and tirelessly tries to help the student with their problem would be the next logical step.
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The parents would lose "free" daycare and the schools would lose the per-student payments from the government if they took that approach though.
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Disparate outcome doesn’t suggest biased methods; could simply suggest disparate populations (eg NBA has a disparate outcome by race but few suggest it’s primarily driven by biased methods).
Maybe there is bias but that doesn’t per se justify scraping the program. If honors program creates +10 units of utility and the bias creates less than -10 units, then the honors program is kaldor hicks efficient. Now, there should be an attempt to make that Pareto efficient by actually compensating anyone actually harmed.
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Interesting perspective, I love the idea that when there are strong "tribal" affiliations it can be a valid choice to explicitly have representation.
I'm going to have to think about that duality you mentioned-- maybe it's not just the american progressives, like the war in Afghanistan/Iraq come to mind, there's the justification for those invasions (both of which were arguably or factually bullshit) and the reality, which is taboo to mention
Someone down below mentioned "Orthopraxy" as opposed to "Orthodoxy" your point about the rabbi brings that to mind.
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This image of a cynical religious atheist seems to me an abomination.
Perhaps they're right, not Santa of course, one must attempt to orient themselves to the truth but if you don't believe in anything what spark is left in your society?
This reminds me of my recent and only visit to Europe, I'm definitely overfitting here. What I was struck by was that the whole place, at least the countries I visited, had the feel of a retirement home. A really nice retirement home with old folks who had rich histories worth visiting. But totally uninterested in doing anything new. The wise old man who knows much but none of it novel, I this is a side character with no development and is envied by no American.
If the social justice types are running unstable feature branches of the source code the "cynical religious aethiests are copy and pasting binaries to code they lost a long time ago waiting for old age or compatibility issues to consume them. I'll take fighting the woke for a better modern source, thank you.
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This is an important point. It also speaks to one of the most destructive effects of the progressive purity spiral: they know some people might recite the catechisms of progressivism ("Black Lives Matter," "Transwomen are women," etc.) without really, truly believing in every article of the faith. And they don't want to let anyone get away with that - you have to actually believe! Hence the constant policing and "unpacking privilege" and the instant dogpiling on any good progressive who accidentally reveals doctrinal impurity.
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No, the goal is not to establish representation qua representation. The goal is to prove that black people are "just as good as" everyone else; that dark skin, or "black" speech, and "black" culture really isn't worse, or even all that separate from the mainstream; that people raised in picket-fence honkey-topia aren't laughing up their sleeve at Shaniqua with the neck-swivels and the sassy-black-girl mannerisms and weave, or D'quavious who starts every sentence "naw, man, f'real..." Or that's at least what I'd bet the black people involved sometimes think (based in part on accounts like John McWhorter's). The ever-shifting demands for affirmative action, representation, equity, and all the rest of it are just a never-ending stream of metrics for this ineffable "acceptance" which inevitably fail because what's being sought isn't material - it's psychological. Your cynical approach is actually the antithesis of what these people want. Your way is just Goodhart's Law ruining their efforts permanently.
As to what the white people who actually make up the bulk and vast numerical majority of the radical-left race-activists are thinking, that's something else entirely. There, the concern isn't even necessarily with black people as people - it's often an entirely narcissistic obsession with self-criticism and self-abnegation (or at least the criticism and abnegation of things which they can safely "rebel" against). "The resistance" against "fascists" and "just being a decent person" against Jim Crow. Cynically doing redistribution wouldn't help these people at all because their focus isn't on the black people at all, except insofar as black people are a moral cudgel they can wield to make themselves look and feel better. They'll find some new way to wield the cudgel, or if it comes to it, find a new cudgel (e.g. the switch from gay rights to trans rights). The point is to rebel against what they see as an illegitimate order, not actually to solve on-the-ground issues.
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Method is theory, theory is method. If you try to raise the one without the other it will slack and bring the other with it. Tying them together prevents the existence of any avenue for criticism.
I would say it's different from similar practices in Malaysia/Nigeria or wherever solely because it's America, and thus the top; everything under the principal is hidden in its shadow and not taken publicly to be the exemplal intention of that process. Like in law, the appearance of the thing is usually taken from how it appears at its highest strata, even when the actual events underlying the appearance differ drastically across the spectrum.
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You can't do that, because of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act were not written to allow it. Equal protection under the law and nondiscrimination on the basis of race do not allow for explicit quotas, and the possibility of explicit quotas was rejected in both centuries.
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This orthodoxy, opposed to your orthopraxy (incidentally, all of Judaism is more like it) might just be the downside of individualism. Americans are descendants of people who have chosen their own destiny (except, I suppose, ADOS), the can-do nation. If your religion is bullshit with nice Chestertonian fences, then that's a bummer – why not go for the one that also has tradition but isn't bullshit? Or maybe has cooler bullshit and more rad tradition to boot – with golden icons and UFOs and other bling? Really, why not have it all? Why cope? The ultra-Orthodox (or perhaps it'd be correct to say ultra-Orthopraxic) are cognizant of the fact that they will never receive more support than in their extreme corner of the tribe, nor will they have hope of such guarantees that the society around cares about the healthy perpetuation of their bloodline. Europeans you speak of are simply selected for conformity and brokenness. Americans are builders of globe-spanning business empires that solve problems you didn't even know you could have. They take spirituality to be a matter of finding good consultancy. Surely, if my enterprise works, at least one of those must work too!
But on the other hand, I reject the framing. Americans are simply victims of professional brainwashing; they correctly believe the required consultancies exist, and are oblivious to having been engineered this way by them.
For the masters of the cult, your cynical attitude of going through the motions to reap a modest benefit is quite a problem; it's at best a necessary cope when the mappings and keys are lost, and you can no longer afford or guide zealotry, but also cannot divorce it from sincerity. Such in the late age of a dying faith. How do you know what the benefit worth seeking, while discarding the mumbo-jumbo, even is? Common sense? But common sense is the product of what one feels to be the true religion, because it is not even questioned – its truth apparent viscerally, in senses of dread, cringe, exhilaration, craving, even apathy. American betters want Americans not to accept some mere redistribution, but to desire racial equity on the fundamental level of terminal values following from basic ontology. Their racial religion is fertile and young.
And of course plausible deniability helps in the long run.
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I remember reading some time ago about how for most pre-Christian religions the focus of the religion was on practice, not belief or love or anything internal. It didn't matter if you doubted Zeus's existence (although for the most part the existence of deities was taken for granted) or thought he was a right prick, what mattered was that you performed the right rituals on the right days with the right sacrifices and said the right words.
Edit: Thanks to Ilforte, proper term for this is Orthopraxy.
And while there was a break with that tradition already with Christians in general, Protestants in particular then took it even further with the whole "sola fide" thing.
I'm not wholly sold on secular progressivism being a new religion, but I am wholly sold on it being directly downstream of Christianity (particularly Protestant Christianity) and wearing its influences on its sleeve.
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If there's an inequality, and you want equality, you can solve it by several ways. The hardest one is to lift everyone to the top - this was the official goal of communism, but by now we can be pretty sure it's not achievable. The easiest one is to bring everybody to the bottom - this is what implementing communism usually leads to (though in reality even at the bottom there's inequality - you could have slightly less moldy bread than your neighbor). You can just stop measuring and declare it to be heretical. The wokes now are trying to implement the combined 2+3 strategy - brining people as much as possible to the bottom, and declaring merit tests racist.
Early AI koan:
Unfortunately, is is much harder to enlighten people that imagine if they rebuild something with their biases instead of somebody else's, they'd get an unbiased result.
Right, I am imagining that rather than having an explicit inequality (honors classes vs non-honors classes) you end up with a gray area where some teachers are better than others and then skillful/determined parents are the only ones that can get their kids in the right classes.
Love the koan, thanks for the thoughts.
The effect of it would be that parents with a lot of resources and good ability to hustle would get their kids into good schools to good teachers, using various proxy methods (paying for more expensive house, driving the kid longer, hiring tutors, using private schools) while parents of a bright kid that have little resources would have no options, since there's no formal "honors" framework they could lean on for support. Which is diametrically opposite to the stated goal of the "equality" system. But that's how it usually works.
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We have to distinguish between positive-sum and zero-sum activities. If I'm hiring someone for the first kind of job, e.g. a contractor to build my house, then it's in my interest to do so meritocratically and without political favoritism, because I actually care about the result i.e. the house getting built. And by extension, if I delegate to you the task of finding me a contractor, but you recommend your cousin's firm as a personal favor to him, then I have a right to take issue with that because you (my agent) did not act according to the interest of me (the principal). The same is true if I'm a taxpayer and you're a government bureaucrat in charge of hiring a contractor to fix up the roads in my city, etc.
On the other hand, for the second kind of job (e.g. politicians, pundits, public intellectuals), there is no question of "merit" because the whole point of the job is to take stuff from one group and give it to another. The sole qualification for the job is "are you on my side or not". I may equally object to so-called "meritocracy" in this case, because it's a betrayal of the social contract by which I can focus my efforts on positive-sum value creation on the understanding that my interests will still be represented in the zero-sum arena. Without this understanding, we're left with a stagnant, materially impoverished society like the classic third-world oil dictatorship.
Where do honors classes fit into this dichotomy? It's hard to say, which is why this is such a difficult issue. Students taking honors classes may be doing so with the goal of going into a career of value-creation or a career of value-reallocation, or (more likely) they haven't even decided yet. Furthermore, there is an almost inevitable tendency (which classically-liberal society tries to stamp out, but lately without much success) for people to parlay status and wealth gained through the value-creation track into influence on value-reallocation. When society's direction is being shaped by a handful of tech billionaires, people may rightly see STEM education as a zero-sum game, even though it isn't inherently.
Obvious troll solution: keep the honors and AP classes, but remove the bonus grade point. That eliminates the incentives to take those classes to get a better position on the value-reallocation ladder while still leaving the classes available for the 4 students who want to take them to learn better.
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I think you need to reevaluate the position that the primary cause of differences in capacity for learning between students is primarily due to students self-selecting how much schoolwork they'd like to do. While that preference surely does have some impact, an important determinant of the level of work that a given student can handle will be the student's general intelligence. Removing honors classes is (in my opinion) a deliberate attempt to hold back intelligent children for the sake of "equity".
Sure, I’ll admit that general intelligence is a factor for some students when they choose to take honors classes.
I’d argue that for most students (middle of the Bell curve) the choice is related to other factors like signaling to colleges, their work ethic, their family dynamics (pressure from family, support from family), and their desire to challenge themselves and not be bored.
Edit: I forgot to add that which class a students’ cohort takes is probably a huge driver as well
If a student in the middle of the bell curve in intelligence, I'm not sure they have much of a choice in this. A student in the middle of the bell curve in baseball ability doesn't have much of a choice in whether or not they play on the varsity baseball team. And if by some weird confluence of events they end up playing on the team anyway, then if the coach is at all competent, that student will find themselves riding the bench more often than not.
I don’t think that high schools sports is a good analogy for honors classes. And I meant middle of the bell curve within students who take honors classes. The smartest kids will need educational experiences tailored to their needs (arguably honors classes might not be the best for the smartest kids). But for most kids in honors classes I would guess that their motivation is not “I’m so smart I need honors classes.”
Aren’t honors classes purely opt-in (no analogy for tryouts and selection)?
I would guess that more students pick honors classes because their friends are taking them than any other (explicit) reason, which you can’t always say for someone who makes the varsity baseball team.
I can't speak for the general case, but in my experience, honors classes did have some analog for tryouts, in the sense that the teachers had to be convinced that the student was qualified for the honors class. And in my experience, I couldn't think of a single case where students picked honors classes due to any sort of peer influence. The causality was always reversed, if there was any friendship at all; they were friends because they took the same honors classes together. And the reason for taking those honors classes was generally explicitly because of the additional advantage in education (or more cynically education qualifications as they appear to colleges - which can only work if the student also has the intelligence to actually get good grades there - it was generally considered common knowledge that a B in an honors class was worse than an A in a regular one) those honors classes (theoretically) provided them.
Oh, I see, the clarification about the bell curve makes sense. Either way, the effect of filtering - again, students couldn't just arbitrarily choose to take honors classes, in my experience, and had to actually be deemed qualified - would make intelligence a pretty important factor. Though obviously teachers' judgments are imperfect. And basically no student is going to think "I'm so smart I need honors classes;" rather, it's more "I'm smart/good at academics enough to take honors classes and excel which is better for my college prospects than taking regular classes and excelling (and I'm smart enough that the risk of taking honors classes and being mediocre is very low)."
This is fair, but I have anecdata to the contrary-- let's call it a draw on that one.
I like your characterization of a hypothetical student's motivation better here, it seems more plausible.
If I'm understanding your position correctly, you're saying that the primary driver for students taking honors classes is their general intelligence? I still think I disagree, and would argue that social factors are a bigger driver (when you take into account the whole distribution of intelligence in a given honors class). I'd be curious to know if there's relevant research.
Edit: singular possessive
No, you understand incorrectly. I'm not making any statement about the primary driver. I'm not sure if it's even possible to do the research to figure out what the primary driver is, so I'm not sure how you're concluding that social factors rather than general intelligence or something else altogether is a bigger driver. I'm just saying that, due to the filtering effect of honors classes, they're generally going to consist of students who are higher in general intelligence than the broader student population at the given school and grade. Teachers aren't perfect at gauging a student's potential ability to make use of honors classes, but I believe they're better than chance.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I appreciate your points. All I have is my intuitive sense of why people choose honors classes. It sounds like my intuitive model of those people is different than yours. That's fine.
Edit: actually this wasn't your initial post, it was someone else. Apologies.
I went and re-read your initial post. My claim was that:
I went to American (US) public high school, and my recollection is that the main differentiator for the honors classes was that there was more schoolwork (more note-taking in english, more books to read) and the kids who took the classes were "better." Maybe that's not true across all high schools. I think that maybe International Baccalaureate (IB) or Advanced Placement (AP) would be better examples of places where true high-performers go.
I'm inclined to agree, as long as you're saying that the average intelligence is higher. Maybe that's too much of a nitpick, but certainly there would be overlap in the distributions of general intelligence in honors and regular classes.
I'd rather use standardized tests for this, wouldn't you? Or a combination of standardized tests and nomination by teachers of students with merit? Teachers have all kinds of biases, and some teachers are terrible (many teachers awesome).
Edit: clarification in last paragraph
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I can't be the only person who was a little bit confused whether the "effort" the parent Schaenman (who is a Harvard-educated UCLA medical professor) spearheaded is pro- or anti-honors classes. Her quote in the article could unironically be said by someone who wants to get rid of honors classes but sees it as not taking any opportunities away (we're just making all the classes rigorous, not holding anyone back!), or someone who doesn't want to get rid of honors classes because they see doing that as taking away opportunities.
It seems she's in favor of retaining honors classes, but I wasn't sure until I read the paragraph further down in the article about her going to a school board meeting with the Cuban father.
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Civilization will adapt and those who have a need to identify high-potential children will find ways to do so. It's a shame to throw away what used to be a pretty useful nationwide institutionalized way to do this, be we'll find other ways.
And what if we don't? What if those whose ostensible goal is to erase the difference keep holding onto enough power to deny this ability long enough for our civilization to become yet more dysfunctional?
Then everything that can eventually breaks down and after some period of chaos a new civilization emerges presumably made by at least some people who know how to identify talent and use it for civilizational goals. The open question is how much ruin is in the system (probably still quite a lot).
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Why do you think it seems effective? Let alone super. The racial composition of those classes is mix of economic and cultural factors. Do you expect those to change in a generation? Why?
It makes sense to me that by integrating the honors classes with the regular classes the regular classes will then more closely approximate baseline racial makeup. Like if your goal is to reduce (explicit) racial biases, this seems like an effective strategy. Isn’t it? Like, if we ignore the side-effects, this does accomplish that goal, right? How would you steel-man the policy change?
I hope that our biases have evolved by that point to be around things like how much money you have, or how you score on tests. It’s certainly not guaranteed to happen, but I think it’s more likely than not that we will change our biases away from skin color/narrowly-defined race in like 20-40 years (maybe this is wishful thinking)
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Hey, welcome to TheMotte.
Can you elaborate on why you think that removing honors classes will be super-effective? Can you point to a similar strategy in history that worked well?
Because I think of the original affirmative action policies put in place to limit the number of Jews from higher education at elite universities around the turn of the 20th century, and I note that Jewish advantage in higher education remained durable through those policies.
I think you might want to start by proving that the difference in racial make-up in higher-education in cognitively difficult classes, like math and physics and so on, is actually based in bias, and not in accurately reflecting racial differences in intelligence. You can do this by finding a measure of capacity in these topics that isn't biased, like double-blinded standardized tests or even just lifetime achievement of a racial group in a field across history, and seeing if that measure is reflected uniformly across racial groups.
Let's get some consensus on where north actually is before we call the compass pointing not where we expected it to biased.
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Diana Moon Glampers is, inarguably, 'super effective'! Does the International Math Olympiad's disproportionate asianness (and lack of blacks) indicate 'bias', and should that be retired until equity is ensured? But eh, we've been over this a ton. And it reads like bait, where is HIynka?
Anyway, why think / post so much about "whatever the media wrote about yesterday"? Is (recent headline #5) really that relevant to the real problem of 'educating / teaching your kid'? How much value does "Honors Compare And Contrast The Use Of Vocabulary In Chaucer And Shakespeare" really provide over the standard course? Both are inferior to "reading whatever you feel like on wikipedia", tbh. If you, or your 16yo kid, want to be a great writer, should you fight to preserve Honors English, or ... (for you or the kid) have a blog, debate topics you care about on the internet?. Even if those alternatives seem 'meh', the political simulacra wastes away whatever scraps remain of your will to actually cause better writing - so instead of reading Old Books with your kid, you end up fighting for (R) control of your school board while your kid writes furry fanfics.
Love the short story (hadn't read that one), but it seems like the most relevant criticism it presents would be that this policy change (no honors classes) limits competition. I'm wondering if the opposite is true (this policy change increases opportunities for competition).
If you agree that social/cultural factors end up filtering (in part) who takes honors classes, wouldn't removing that filter allow for more "honest" competition within the regular classes?
Is there also, like, an anarcho-capitalist (or maybe just capitalist?) argument for this kind of policy? Where each teacher gets to make their class as awesome or distinct as possible and then market-like forces dictate which classes kids take and which teachers/classes parents hold in high regard?
Yes, it indicates bias (could argue about whether it's bad or not). No, because there's no "regular" Olympiad to integrate with.
So, this is a reasonable question to ask, but this is the culture war roundup, and this is clearly a culture-war issue, right? I certainly found it to be a thought-provoking idea (maybe it's not). I was (and still am) excited about all of the responses I've gotten thus far. Maybe what you're alluding to is that the culture war doesn't matter and that we should phase out the roundup? It doesn't seem futile to argue about the right way to educate kids, although maybe what you are expressing is fatigue at rehashing this topic (I get the sense it may have been discussed before). I'll admit that maybe too many resources (time/money) are spent on political endeavors rather than "real" endeavors. One thing that honors classes can give (that can't be provided by you or I reading with our kids) would be opportunities to critique literary works amongst peers (or the filtered "smart kids" in honors classes).
Should we only post about what our favorite blogger wrote about yesterday?
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This is meta, but I wonder if our prohibition on "low-effort" top level posts has had a negative side effect. It seems that, more and more, it is low information or low conscientiousness users who post at the top level. Other users recognize that the standards for a top level post are supposed to be high, and don't want to spend an hour writing up something nice, doing research, etc... There are things I've considered posting which would serve as a jumping off point for discussion. I haven't posted them because I didn't have the time to write a long, researched, personal take.
@prof_xi_o I apologize since you asked us to be nice, but in my opinion, this is not a high quality top level post. What's more, since you haven't engaged with the responses, you pattern match to me a personal who is not sincere in actually "learning more" but just trying to troll. I hope this isn't the case.
I'm continually surprised by the people who are willing to write novels in response to this type of top-level content. I think we can do much better. Perhaps the rules for top-level posts can be loosened so that a good faith user can submit a top-level comment without needing to spend a large amount of time doing so. DSL seems to have a much broader number of topics to discuss. This site is much better designed so it would be nice to have similar discussions here.
I wouldn't say this site is better designed, and especially not better implemented. You can start a thread anywhere on DSL and see it from the main page. Here we have... The culture war thread (and I guess the silly Sundays or whatever thread). That's hugely limiting for visibility of top level posts.
I've been enjoying DSL much more because people actually write effortposts about topics they're familiar with, or even just games they're playing. That kind of thing doesn't get much traction here; there were more replies to my throwaway remarks on heat pumps in the CW thread than to the front page post on them.
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It does not have to be a novel.
link to the post
quote excerpt or passage
short summary explaining the importance of the article and your opinion
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No need to apologize, appreciate the criticism.
Not trying to troll, just looking to flesh out my own knowledge. Seems reasonable to expect more effort out of top-level posts, but what does that look like?
A timebox for research beforehand (you must spend 10 min researching and 10 min writing about the topic before posting)?
What are the characteristics of a good top-level post? Do you have some examples of your favorite top-level posts?
What is DSL?
DSL = Data Secrets Lox, another discussion forum in the same cultural sphere.
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Funny, just the other day someone was arguing with me that if a bad post generates good content, we should consider it a good post and not mod it.
I agree there are some tells that hint at possible "JAQ" trolling - it's not like this isn't a well-trodden subject - but we do occasionally get new posters who really haven't been through every past iteration on a topic.
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube (and by extension twitch), and this idea (that bad content can generate good content) certainly fits the meta there.
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I've been saying the rules for top level posts are terrible for years. The mods like them, they ain't going to change. I imagine at some point all the top-level posts will be either from sacrificial accounts or people who don't mind an occasional ban, and every top-level poster will be banned for their post.
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I miss the pinned 'low effort thread' mod comments that we had on reddit for a while, it was a good way to collect current happenings and smaller topics that don't necessarily need a 5 paragraph write up.
I was hoping that the culture war roundup would be that place (where current happenings get a little bit more wiggle room), but based on the feedback I’m getting it sounds like the community expects more effort out of top-level posts.
If you have any specific suggestions or some top-level posts you really like I’d love to hear/see them
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There isn't a rule that you need to make a huge effort post for a top level post. Plenty of top level posts are something like this:
(link)
This article talks about (thing). I find it interesting for (reasons). I thought that some good points were (xyz) but felt that (xyz) were weak points of the article. I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts on (topic).
Basically, have a modicum of something to say to get an interesting discussion going and it's good enough as far as the rules go. I've only seen people get told off for not putting enough effort into a top level post when they literally throw out a "check out this link, discuss" one-liner or they are dropping some really spicy topic (which generally requires proportionally more effort). But most of the time, it seems to me like people get in their own heads and think that they aren't good enough to make a top level post. It isn't actually in the rules though.
I think I mostly do the latter when I’m trying to see other peoples opinions in an area I’m only beginning to develop a view on. Longer well researched post seem to be of the type where someone has formed an opinion and is trying to sell it.
If I see a weakness in this post it’s that it’s a subject that be talked about elsewhere and have reasonable conversations. Neoliberal or moderatepolitics could perfectly well handle the topic and have a fine discussion. And it’s been well covered.
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Okay, good to know.
I suppose we just need to encourage people more then. We're sort of in the "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" type scenario right now. I might make a couple lower effort (but still hopefully much better than this) posts later. It's been a bit of a desert in here this week.
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It is important to note that the honors classes did not have a "clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline." First, there was no suggestion of any "bias," there was only the observed result that the racial makeup of students in the honors classes did not match the racial makeup of the general student body. That "bias" was the first (and only) reason the school considered is a failure. Second, the disparity was laughably small. The school is 15% black and the honors class was 14% black. That's a rounding error.
There's a quote from one of the teachers saying that she looked at the class photograph and wondered where all the black kids were. That's the level of logic on which this school is operating.
Oh, hell. I can’t help but wonder if statistics was taught there.
I think it's more of a question of whether or not statistics was learned there rather than whether or not it was taught there. I'm reminded of the saying that you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
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Here's the quote from the article, it seems like you're misrepresenting it (or being flippant, maybe I am misunderstanding?):
If you're quibbling with the word choice of "bias" that's fine, what I meant to say was:
There was a clear disparity in the racial makeup of honors classes relative to baseline (student body) (according to the article)
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Well, it will be super effective at achieving aesthetic goals of certain people who desire their classrooms to have the right racial admixture of students. Of achieving anything else, it won't be, including changing preferences for some future honors class opt in.
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Wait why is this an effective plan? It doesn’t seem like it will do anything except be bad for some high performing kids.
If the target metric is racial makeup of classes relative to baseline, integrating honors and regular classes seems like an effective strategy, no?
From that frame of reference it being bad for the high-performing kids would be a side-effect, right?
Couldn't you argue that the high-performing kids would be incentivized to move towards private education, which would lead to more market forces being present in education? Could policy changes like this bring public school closer to its socialist roots and accelerate the adoption of private, market-driven education?
Yes, if you completely ignore the point of having honors classes in the first point.
The reason why honors classes exist is to teach the more advanced students at a level commensurate with their ability. If you just abandon this, then it's not an honors class anymore, and it doesn't serve the purpose for which they were intended.
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That this seems trivially obvious should bring consideration to whether that's the goal. Based on personal experience with school administrators, I would suggest that many of them are perfectly happy to make a policy change that's bad for high performing kids, applying the attitude that they'll be fine anyway.
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Because the stated goal is not to "improve outcomes", it's to "increase equity", and pulling down high performers is just as equitable and easier than boosting up low performers.
You can only increase equity by transferring ownership. That's what equity means.
Although 'increasing equity' is as Orwellian a phrase as I've ever heard.
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Whether we judge something as "effective" requires establishing a goal or ideal state to measure against. If the entire goal is to remove racial disparity in honors classes, then this will work. By all means throw out the baby and keep the bathwater. The actual effects of these actions are: parents that can afford it remove their kids from the district and send them to private school or move the entire family to a new district. These kids were always going to be fine. The poorer kids, and especially the (inequitable) number of racial minorities who did manage to get into these programs are back with the dumb and disruptive kids, the opportunity to imagine a better like, or at least a life around a smarter class of people, is likely gone for these kids forever. In short this program provided better outcomes for some, but not enough, of members of the desired groups, so now it helps none of them at all. To be fair to the kids.
I’m inclined to agree, but do you also agree that having a different racial makeup of these honors classes relative to baseline is a problem? If so, how do other ideologies (non-woke) solve it in a productive way?
Yes, it also occurred to me that motivated/resourced parents will get their kids in with better teachers at the same school (even though they are all non-honors now).
Why is this a problem? Is the disparate makeup of the school basketball team a problem? Have we measured the representation of people with attached earlobes? Are stupid people adequately represented in honors classes? “Stupid” seems like a much more salient category than race if we are seeking diversity of thought, perspective or life experience.
Even if it is a problem, is it a higher concern than the quality of the honors classes? Perhaps increasing equity cannot be done without degrading class quality to near non-honors levels, is that worth it?
It's a problem if there is a causal link to historical events in the United States, right (redlining, slavery, Jim Crow, etc)?
I think that a stupid person could be successful in an honors class, they would just need to put in more work relative to their genius classmates. The honors class might even be better for it, as the stupid person might have different perspectives on the literature during discussions (in an honors English class, for example). I could see a stupid person in a math class being disruptive though, depending on what we mean by stupid.
What is the optimal distribution of stupidity amongst students for learning rate in a school classroom (this is a flippant question, it just occurred to me and sounded funny)? Is the intelligence distribution of a class the most important factor for learning rate? Or is it things like class size, teacher goodness, school funding, and student social support? Maybe we should filter out kids with poor resourcing so that the well-resourced kids can learn faster?
edit: comma
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Our struggle with China is racial
There are aspects of human civilization which would, with enough time be understood and adapted by any sexually reproducing species of sufficient intelligence, simply because they are instrumentally valuable with regards to the instincts that all biologically similar animals share. Animal likes food too. Animal likes sex too. Animal plays games too. Animal fights enemies and wages war for resources too. Many animals beat few animals, so animals have incentives to form alliance structures or be outcompeted and exterminated. Yet wouldn't it be surprising if they valued the same things, or felt the same ways, where instrumental necessities didn't require it? Shouldn't we then expect to see, dramatic differences in what are superficially institutions, even amongst intellectually comparable animals?
Consider the family. Every functional civilization has been patriarchal at least until recently; and the physical and cognitive differences explaining this are seen in the animal world as well. Woman needs man, and man must find his mate. It'd be great if she were loyal though. Yes you could punish disloyalty after the fact but that's not exactly foolproof. Hey what if she literally couldn't run away? If every couple breaks the feet of every daughter then she'll make a perfectly suitable mate! The logic here is of course unimpeachable; and yet is there any reason to believe Nero himself wouldn't react with a similar disgust to it as modern (non-anthropologist) man?
Where unimaginable cruelty naturally pervades even the closest family bonds between the strong and the weak; concern for outsiders may be expected to be similarly lacking. A toddler bleeding out in plain view to the complete indifference of most passers by is not at all surprising when you remember what their close genetic ancestors did, nor are the countless similar videos you can find on the Chinese interwebs: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECeC4R-Gjtc.
I don't need to mention that where humans cannot expect compassion, the fate of man's best friend is not at all uncertain.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
A people with innately different instincts in one field, might also be odd in other ways, like committing mass cannibalism against political enemies in the absence of famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre .
Their literature might include bizzare scenes, like a inferior man demonstrating his pious hospitality to his superior by secretly killing and cooking his own wife to feed him. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghmx4v/what_can_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_liu_an/
Different from birth
Someone covers your nose or lays you face first against the bed. What do you do? Seemingly every non-disabled European American newborn that isn't cognitively impaired has the same reaction; to move, struggle and fight against this horrifying imposition. Nearly every Chinese American baby has a different reaction; complete non-reactivity.
Isn't this precisely the kind of difference common stereotypes, a history of slavish behaviour, and the above section would suggest? Can you think of a more elemental test of innately different instincts than a newborn's reaction when you screw with his breathing? Have you noticed that basically everyone still wearing a mask is Asian?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
** The necessity of racism **
What does it mean to allow members of a high IQ species of alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts to increase their power in our institutions?
What does it mean, for an entire nation of them to become the dominant power on the planet?
I was trying to follow the path of sino friendship advocated by the Anglin fellow and some others, in the face of eternal militaristic Americans, but Guangxi Massacre hits hard.
I knew that Western travelers in China reported them having elaborate cookbooks for human flesh but that was centuries ago...
Now the White Man is a frog in a boiling pot, must it stay in there and have its kids turned gay, mutilated and sterilized, lobotomized, propagandized, or jump in the actual boiling pot and literally be boiled and eaten?
A priori the White liberal is still a more direct, mortal enemy than the Chinese, but clearly Asian dominance is not sustainable in the long run.
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So, this is certainly a valid and understandable interpretation of the phenomena you’re referencing. However, I want to offer an alternative interpretation.
Perhaps rather than seeing the European and Asiatic peoples as headed for conflict due to their differences, perhaps what is needed instead is a sort of biological Hegelian synthesis: a recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the two races, and the ways in which they are actually complementary. Perhaps the creation of a Hapa race, occupying a healthy middle point between the excessive individualism, sentimentality and recklessness of Europeans (the acute failure modes of which we are witnessing all around us) and the excessive communitarianism, coldness and safetyism of Asians, is the key to unlocking a superhuman race of people who alone will be worthy of the task of making humanity an interplanetary species. When I imagine a race whose women all look like Mina Kimes playing beautiful symphonic music in a Tokyo-like super-metropolis on Mars with Greco-Roman-Japanese fusion architecture, I admit I find very little to quibble with.
Wait what?
This reminds me of Russia fetishism among the Trad-right. Oh here look a 'traditional" society with a third our church attendance, higher abortion rates, higher divorce rates, lower fertility, extreme alcoholism and spousal abuse... But look at manly Army ad they have. Yes, and what does traditional comradery mean in a nation with Russia's history of de-facto slave armies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
You can't just use words, and assume that the versions of them that exist in other societies have anything to do with what you are envisionining. What does communitarianism mean here?
Well, even in the most atomized White American neighbourhood, If I have an accident and am dying in public view, I can be 100% certain that someone, who i've never met will stop and try to help me within seconds. Can you say the same in China? Why not?
And how, in the wake of our covid response do you feel like describing Americans as reckless and asians as safetyist, with the ideal somewhere in between, is reasonable. I mean, I know there are some Whites who feel we didn't mask enough, but you might be the first White nationalist sympathetic person I've found expressing that view.
To be clear, I am not talking about Covid at all here; I’m as vociferously anti-mask as any right-wing poster here and was from pretty much the second I saw the early IFR estimates for Covid. I’ve never felt more in-sync with the Red Tribe than I did during Covid. However, all that is contingent on the fact that Covid was not remotely as dangerous as it was advertised to be. I do think there is a persuasive case that if it had been the kind of super-pandemic it was initially purported to be, there probably would have been untold millions of working-class white people who would have died like flies from not taking precautionary measures, due to apathy or generalized (justified) distrust of the government or pig-headed “if I want to get sick and die that’s my God-given right”. It happened in this case that those traits were adaptive to the reality of the actual disease, which was a nothingburger; there’s no guarantee that the next pandemic will be as fake and gay, and in that scenario it may very well make sense to talk about whites as reckless.
No, what I actually had in mind were things like the massive disparities in tragic fatalities, firearm accidents, concussions from bar fights, and all the other sorts of mayhem you can encounter in the ER at any major hospital in the U.S., versus what you’ll find at an equivalent hospital in Asia. Yes, I’m aware that the 13% are contributing far more than their fair share to these phenomena, but if all the ADOS got teleported to Jupiter tomorrow, U.S. numbers, and European numbers more generally, would still differ markedly from Asia’s.
I do agree with you that China seems qualitatively different from other East Asian countries in some really interesting and unflattering ways. It almost seems to be simultaneously very communitarian - in the sense of high conformity, willingness of the population to follow orders and to not make trouble, and a general low-agency environment - and also low-trust and low-altruism. The worst of both worlds, in a way; all the bad parts of communitarianism without any of the good parts.
However, your post wasn’t just about China; your argument is that this battle is racial; that there’s something about the Asian race generally that makes it fundamentally incompatible with the European race. And what I’m pointing out is that many of the failure modes you’re pointing to appear pretty much specific to China and not generalizable among East Asians as a whole, or even Han Chinese as a whole, given that I don’t think we see some of these problems in Taiwan or in Singapore or in the communities of overseas Chinese in places like Indonesia and the Philippines. So, while I agree that there are points of profound difference that present significant potential for conflict between European-derived civilization and Chinese civilization as currently constituted, I disagree that this conflict is properly a racial conflict.
And, perhaps as relevantly, US numbers would be much higher than most of Europe's, which would be higher than China's, which would be higher than Japan's.
I mean, yes, obviously there's overlap between the US murder rate and Europe's, but the white homicide rate, firearms death rate, etc is still noticeably higher than, say, France or England or Germany.
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What about in an Asian American neighborhood? Do you think they would let you die on the street? If yes, why? If not, what is different between Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Chinese?
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Congrats, you invented Russia. Beautiful women, not sure about the Japanese-Roman metropolises though.
Haha, believe me, this has occurred to me before. Although sadly Russia seems to take more culturally, on the Asian side of its origins, from the rather more brutal Mongolic/Turkic substrate rather than from a more refined Japanese-Korean-Sinitic element.
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I thought Russia was where they achieve excessive individualism, sentimentality, recklessness, communitarianism (perhaps at gunpoint), and coldness all at the same time.
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Michael Angelo, you say? But the real question is: How does their art compare with that of Leo Nardo? Or Carol Vaggio?
"Da Vinky?"
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China really is not so different from the West. There are weird practices and different paths taken, but they're basically in the same category of great civilizations. There are no fundamental qualitative differences.
For some reason the US has a practice of commonly mutilating the penis of babies. This doesn't cause so much harm as foot-binding yet it's bizarre and hostile. If you walked up to someone on the street and offered to cut off parts of their penis, a rude rebuff is the best you can expect. The Chinese thought small feet were attractive and high-status (and a part of it got mixed into resistance to Manchu rule when they tried to outlaw it), so what? Cultures do strange things from time to time. Weird foot fetishes are not unheard of. Right now, there is an emerging school of thought that non-heterosexuals are high status - thus LGBT parades, Pride events and so on. This is also very strange. A Chinese scholar might well say 'we selected eunuchs to run institutions for strategic reasons so they couldn't build dynasties or interfere with the imperial harem, why are you glamorizing it for the whole population, creating such perverse rituals?'
If you study Chinese history more deeply, you get the sense of a civilization which went down a different path at the beginning. Back in the era of Aristotle and Plato, the Chinese also had a period of division and many schools of philosophical thought. They had people who were interested in formal logic and mathematics, just as in the West. They had proto-utilitarianism too, in Mohism.
But in the end, Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism won out. These are more on the 'social science' end of philosophy, they're not concerned with whether something is true, logical sense but upon how society runs. Confucianism is about ritual, about stable relations between people (there's even an element of social contract in the mandate of heaven). Daoism is very abstract and consciously opposed to defining itself (it's a little bit like a cope-religion where terrible things happen but if you're a true galaxy-brain/sage you can just ignore the difference between good and bad so you're never hurt and eventually ascend to the astral plane). Legalism is about putting boots on the ground and cutting off heads, on min-maxxing your agricultural power base and conquering the world with blood and iron.
I think it's useful to think about China as a civilization that was more based on politics than technology. They were very good at the social end of things, running a gargantuan empire, organizing massive irrigation works. Of course they'll be better at moulding people and making them more disciplined. Their mainstream civilizational philosophy of Confucianism/Legalism was all about moulding people. There just wasn't so much emphasis on technology, mathematics and so on. They definitely had good mathematics and technology but it wasn't emphasized. As far as they were concerned, moving wealth around and administration was more important than growing the pie.
Whatever backwardness there was in the social end of things was due to the Qing government maintaining an ideological small-government stance for a few centuries, refusing to raise taxes and increase the size of the administration even as the country's population tripled. Obviously this caused administrative issues and corruption, it inhibited statebuilding and military efficiency when the Europeans showed up. The weakness of the Chinese state in the 19th and 20th centuries was fundamentally due to choice and then bad luck as they kept getting pummelled by outsiders and didn't have time to build up or modernize.
Damn it random-ranger, here I was preparing the theory that adherence to non-racism makes Europeans into a moral mutants capable of suppressing their most basic moral instincts, and now I'm gonna have to add anti-semitism to the list. Seriously, I share a revulsion towards circumcision but let's compare the acts shall we.
Circumcision:
Brutal painful act lasting a few minutes, with additional suffering during recovery period
carried out against a creature who will not remember or know the difference,
reducing sexual fitness by (I'll just guess) 20%,
carried out by medical professionals beyond the sight of Non-Jewish parents.
Footbinding:
Several rounds of brutal painful acts distributed over several years, with additional extreme pain in between them,
carried out against a creature who will remember every moment of it, and is fully aware of the difference (she used to have fully functional feet),
permanent partial crippling into this disgusting... (I'll omit any words, you either feel it or you don't)
Carried out by the parents themselves with full knowledge and awareness of their actions as their daughter screams, over and over and over again.
/images/16772047502996655.webp
I agree that footbinding is worse than circumcision, I said it myself!
But they both belong in the category of 'really weird things that you'd surely not expect to be cultural practices'! China thought for some reason that small feet are better, that they were high-status. Then it got locked in as a cultural trait, this is what high-status women do and how you get married. As for 'extremely disgusting pseudo-medical operations carried out by parents thinking they're doing good for their child', we can hardly claim the high ground. I won't post images or testimony of gorey botched gender transition surgeries because I don't really want to see or think about the things that are happening right now, in our countries, today.
People are prepared to die for status! They'll cut off their balls for status, flagellate themselves for status, people will do anything for status.
Fundamentally both the West and the Sinosphere + Japan are great civilizations. We basically have the same problems in terms of diminishing fertility, technological anomie and so on. It's a symmetrical situation.
Edit: Chinese and North East Asians are categorized as 'white adjacent' for the purpose of getting discriminated against in our education system. There's a certain essence of whiteness that they have possessed by few others.
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This is just basic signaling theory. It's high status to have bound feet because its a credible signal that:
I don't have to work. You know this because I physically am unable to work, and yet am obviously not malnourished.
I come from a high-status household. You know this because they bound their daughter's feet instead of putting her to work.
I care about my future husband. You know this because I had my feet bound to be more appealing to him
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The Mandate of Heaven predates Confucianism, it being what the Zhou used to justify their overthrow of the Shang (at least in classical understanding).
I’m not sure that Europe was too different, at least until recently (historically speaking)? Perhaps the Chinese did go super-super-hard into what (iirc) Leibniz calls “practical science”, but I don’t get the feeling that Europe was consciously emphasizing science and technology until at least mid-modern history.
Honestly I would date it to the Ming. The Qing in many ways just continued with Ming policy, and the Ming were often a basketcase, just not so obviously; and while Ming society was undoubtedly commercial, much policy reversed previously industry- and merchant-friendly tendencies in the Song. The Qing may have simply done the best they could with the existing trajectory and the limited knowledge at the time.
Though Kangxi declaring that land taxes would never be raised after him, among other things, didn’t help.
Good post.
I was sort of thinking of people like Henry the Navigator and Leonardo da Vinci. European sovereigns would fund all kinds of technology to get ahead - they wanted to make money, thrash their enemies, obtain land. Zheng He is the obvious counterexample yet his voyages seem more political to me. They sailed around the Indian ocean showing the flag and scaring the hell out of the natives, brought back some animals but nobody was terribly interested in profit, conquest or expansion. It was more like the moon landings, a cool way to show off Chinese power rather than achieve anything substantive. Of course, they had other problems to deal with on the steppe front.
Likewise, I recall some of China's tributaries eagerly wanting to have more tribute missions because they'd actually get more in gifts than they 'paid' in gifts. It wasn't even an extractive scheme (though there were all kinds of gradations in the tributary system). They were interested in maintaining social order internationally and domestically, there were huge redistribution systems to take money from the rich agricultural regions to fund nomad defense in the harsh interior.
A better parallel may be the Song dynasty from 970-1279, then; quite a lot of innovation happened during that time, and had a serious threat in the Liao, then the Jin.
Even the Ming were happy to get their hands on superior European designs, though, after they started lagging behind - the idea of the Chinese being unaware that the frontiers of technology were passing them by isn’t really true, at least for the elite.
Surprisingly, there are examples of “military conquest” during the treasure cruises. Off the top of my head, the voyages deposed a Sinhalese king and a Samuderan usurper. Of course, while they then installed someone favourable to the Chinese, the treasure cruises largely then fucked off and left the territories alone. On the whole I think your point is well made, however - only to add that they were thought as useful to signal that China was returning to form after a century of Mongol rule, and once the voyages had made their point the balance of utility of the voyages shifted pretty dramatically for the court (new emperor being against it also did not help).
The sea ban and deconstruction of the treasure ships also meant that China went from being (iirc) the greatest naval power in the world to being almost entirely land-bound in its aspirations. A lot of shipbuilding knowledge was lost in the 15th century in China. While it might’ve made sense at the time, it was also an enormous self-own in the long run.
That might be another sort of thing to look at as for why China didn’t manage to stay ahead.
Indeed!
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I might credit the idea that Chinese culture is fucked up beyond repair - Maoism was bad, but Great Qing had it's own brand of insane cruelty. But it's not obvious to me that the cause is genetic or inherent to the Han race. Westernized Chinese are pretty normal, if not better functioning than whites. Maybe it's that higher Han IQs make them less able to resist societal trends and fashions.
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I don’t even know why i’m bothering to ask this, but have you ever been to China? I’ve only been to major cities but it’s really not that different from the US. All of the major American brands are there, they love Marvel movies and have a work ethic that goes and goes. The CCP might be “communist” but the people feel even more capitalist than Americans. Think the cultures fit well together and we could each learn a lot from each other.
No. I have not.
Please, Name one aspect of Chinese culture that you would like to see implemented here given the option between it, and the similar version of it present in Western countries before the 1960s.
One late European adoption of an old Chinese custom is that of the competitive written examination, first advocated for in Britain and trialed in India, and then spread elsewhere. It is something that has already been adopted, yes, but I find your qualifiers nonsensical, and this serves as good an example as any for a far-reaching social institution that whites felt obliged to adopt for themselves.
The reason for the qualifier was to address a prescriptive claim. @YouEssAyyy was suggesting there was something we could currently learn from the Chinese. But yes, the adoption of the competitive written examination was incrediby valuable.
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Why do you feel the need to add this qualifier? Do you think the Western culture today is what it is because of some racially inauthentic processes?
So I'll ignore your qualifier and respond with a quote from Nick Land.
While I agree with the sentiment that surrendering any part of a city to criminality us barbarous, I can think of plenty of western cities where there is little or no danger.
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I don't think that the current low crime levels of many East Asian cities can be put down to some kind of long-running national culture, much less to 'biological heredity'. Late imperial China was quite a violent place; for just one example, the problem of laoguazei murdering and robbing travellers was thought to be endemic. An assessment of actual figures is obviously impossible to arrive at, guides on travelling published in the 18th century, for instance, often included warnings such as this;
which might be helpful at times. If encountering someone unknown,
even if riding on the same boat or sleeping at the same inn, it is possible
that he has a different agenda from yours. All sorts of valuables should
be kept secret and guarded attentively. At night, be wary of theft. In
daytime, be wary of robbery.
wait until the eastern sky turns bright before setting sail or leaving the
inn. If the eastern sky is still dim without any sign of sunrise, even if
a rooster has crowed, it is still nighttime. If one hurries to unleash the
boat or set off down the road, one must be wary of the danger of being
robbed by evildoers. When the sun starts to set in the west, one should
park the boat or find an inn. As the idiom goes, rest early instead of
late, better to be delayed than to be wronged
Likewise, William T. Rowe's study of Hankow in the late Qing period found that, while again we can't assess things quantitively, the public perception was the criminals were everywhere and that they were effectively free to commit crime as they pleased, and there were certainly 'bad' parts of the city where the more respectable citizen would not wish to find himself. As one newspaper observed in the mid-19th century, 'bandit-types from all over China find it easy to engage in violent crimes... the bad freely intermingle with the good'.
I do think there is a difference in that the late Qing was a period of decreasing state power and resulting anarchy, while as far as I understand it “bad neighbourhoods” have been around in Western cities even in their high points. My understanding is that in earlier periods of stronger state power, Chinese roads and cities were relatively quite safe compared to the rest of the world (and were remarked as such by travelers and merchants).
Nevertheless, this is better explained by culture and institutions than by genetics.
Eh, sort of, but that first quote (and more generally the problem of murder and robbery of long-distance travellers) dates back to the early 18th century, so this was still some way off the real crisis of the late Qing. In fact, state officials exerted enormous effort to stamp the problem out; towns in the most affected regions were supposedly plastered with appeals for help in murder-theft cases. They weren't always very good at it, of course.
Yep, this is it really I think, institutions.
That would be the high Qing? Did you mean early 19th century?
Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if post-Qianlong the Qing was mostly completely inept at policing its cities. Tax was light enough that the bureaucracy was extremely stretched, corruption was rampant just to keep the machine going, and this was the time where rebellions just started sprouting like weeds throughout the empire.
I did mean early 18c. I only meant to say late imperial China in respect of that part, I didn't mean to imply that this was in the late Qing (well the problem did persist of course, but it didn't start then).
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This post is far too "boo outgroup" to pass muster. You may as well have written it about cardiologists; it would not have been any less on the nose.
Extraordinary claims demand meticulous evidence. While I appreciate you providing some evidence in support of your claims, it seems sufficiently cherry-picked, and your account overall insufficiently steelmanned for your outgroup, that you have failed to clear the threshold here. Furthermore, you have not written in a way that evinces a sense that you are writing for everyone and want them to be included in the conversation.
This is your third warning in about a month; keep it up, and these will start becoming bans.
Near universal participation in an activity amongst the upper classes in an activity is by definition not equivalent to selective posting regarding cardiologists. You can claim that it doesn't imply what I think it implies, but pretending it's selective is just open rank dishonesty.
A single instance of mass participation in an activity (mass cannibalism in the absence of famine) engaged in by no other modern society; is also entirely fair, in the same way it would be fair to suggest a deeper biological roblem if America was the only country where people had ever raped children.
As for the Yang Yue case or it's many counterparts, The Chinese themselves don't deny that they have a major crisis of callous indifference, they just blame it on modernity or if outside the CCP's jurisdiction, communism. Am I not allowed to interpret it differently in light of evidence of longlasting cruel tendencies?
Regardless of whether you agree that there is a meaningful link between cruelty to one's children and callousness to strangers', it's fundamentally against the spirit of this forum for you to threaten to ban me for it.
While not completely analogous, there are a few other events that are at least comparable, including several incidents in the Pacific Theater of WWII (most notably Chichijima, nearly involving future president George H. W. Bush). It's not quite as recent, but the story of Johan de Witt is undeniably Western as well.
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I'm not threatening to ban you for drawing connections, I'm telling you that if you're going to post criticism of your outgroup, the rules place a number of restrictions on how you're allowed to do that, and you have failed to meet that threshold here. In particular, the rules suggest quite strongly that you should post about specific rather than general groups whenever possible, and I don't see a lot of evidence in your post that you even realize how many different ethnic (and, arguably racial) groups might be included in sweeping reference to "the Chinese." Furthermore, similar laundry lists of objectionable practices would be possible to assemble concerning any race of people or, indeed, of the human race. Even assuming the Chinese are every bit as bad as you say, that doesn't make them special.
If you think any of this is "against the spirit of this forum" then you have failed to grasp the spirit of this forum.
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In cases like this I see a mod warning as more of a reward than a punishment. What is the OP coming here to do? Argue with a bunch of people. What are you doing? Arguing with them.
If you are willing to write up and say something it's costing you time and mental effort. 1 day bans feel like they should be a standard starting point, rather than what we apply after three warnings
That's what gets me, I have no idea if Lepidus wants to actually debate this or if they're just trolling and being weirdly dedicated to it.
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You aren’t really doing a good job of making the Chinese all that alien. They don’t have Michael Angelo but what Civilization outside Europe in a certain era does? Certainly not the US. They do have the terracotta warriors, and while not fond of eating dogs Rome had crucifixion.
Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin. As the treatment of close kin is the most basic area where base moral instincts could be expected to operate in, one could expect those who are qualitatively depraved in this area to exceed others in their quantitative depravity elsewhwere. Everything else is just window-dressing to show that the same soulless genes has not dramatically altered it's nature.
Most civilizations outside of Europe have populations of considerably lower IQs. No one has ever suggested that the problem with the Chinese was mere stupidity, with eugenicists like EA Ross (who campaigned to keep them out of the US, nonetheless agreeing that they were our intellectual equals. Thus, where people of equal or higher capacity to do something, do not in fact do that thing, inferring an absence of interest is more than reasonable.
The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for Chinamen, but you're aware that Euros sold their children into slavery for centuries?
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Do you realise what European childrearing was like before the 1950s-or-so turn against corporeal punishment? Either way, you've singled out one particular type of cruelty that your culture happened to not engage in. On the other hand, while China did have some form of slavery, to my best knowledge it has no recent history of anything resembling the Atlantic slave trade and the institutionalised slavery that waited at the end of it, or the Holocaust. Are you sure the Germanic peoples of Europe are not the ones with the "soulless genes", considering especially how the almost same memes played out conspicuously more humanely in Fascist Italy and the Hispanic Americas?
Why do you single out dogs, except because your culture just happened to put them in the "fur babies" category? Liveleak is unfortunately gone, but a few years ago it carried a number of videos from a pig slaughterhouse in Northern Europe that hinted at a completely normalised culture of wanton cruelty towards animals that are generally considerd to be more intelligent than dogs. Fox hunts and safaris also didn't exactly emerge and persist under conditions of scarcity, and I hear kosher slaughter is not the nicest thing either.
The use of "equals", rather than "superiors", in this context to me seems to hint at plain old motivated reasoning, seeking to rationalise prior disdain in the face of inconvenient absence of the most common criterion to do so (average IQ).
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Dire conditions spawn traditions that take a long time to die off.
The Swiss dog and cat eating in remote valleys doesn't mean the people there are nutritionally deprived. Merely some almost certainly old people keeping a dying tradition barely alive.
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Agamemnon, leading the great expedition to Troy, had to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds.
Herodotus tells us of an Egyptian pharaoh who, finding himself trapped in a burning room by his enemies:
The great bulwarks of Christendom in Constantinople were fond of blinding or castrating political rivals and brothers in order to render them nonthreatening. Their successors in Constantinople would take it a step further, Mehmed II would legalize fratricide:
Later, Mehmed III would murder 19(!) of his brothers upon ascending the throne.
Meanwhile in the Americas, To quote my man Douglass on the plight of the slave children fathered by slaveowners:
So either America should accept that the Chinese are people, or we should accept that Southerners weren't.
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Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic. There was the castration of church choir boys, that went on for a couple hundred years. And circumcision of infants, americans still do it. People in sicily sold their children into slavery to miners as late as the turn of the century (the last one, not this one). Corporal punishment in school was common in some places until the 70s, what's 7*6? I don't know. Hands slapped with a wood stick.
China today is not comparable to any place in europe in the last century. Some place are very rich but some places are extremely poor. How many places in europe can you find where people resort to eating rats? None, but it still happens in china.
That said, depending on how you feel about horses, I may have bad news for you.
Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.
And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...
Wait, you're telling me they whipped the shit out of children as a primitive form of court stenography???
I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...
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West Germany only outlawed eating dogs in 1985.
The Swiss steal eat dogs at times.
There's the infamous cat-eating scandal where an oldster chef who saw the lean years in post-war Italy reminisced about the dishes of his youth, and was fired from a TV show..
Americans really have no idea how bad things were in densely populated civilized regions re: hunger. Allegedly, there were no rodent problems in 19th century China, just like there weren't any in Japanese POW camps, but I'm not completely sure about that.
They're not particularly combative or expansionist. Historical record suggests they'll leave you alone if you'll show then some respect and maybe tribute.
Being racist and aware their system depends on their own racial characteristics, they don't seem keen to foist it on other people, unlike liberal imperalists. Whether their communist legacy will override this insular, non-missionary tendency once they're the unquestionably the most powerful country and recognized as such - I don't know.
Personally, I'd like to fuck off from this planet into deep space as soon as it becomes possible, purely on risk reduction grounds. Hacking your brain to see airless frigid voids as comfy as misty forests is much easier than surviving whatever artificial life monstrosities will arise on this planet.
The Vietnamese, Koreans, Tibetans (I actually think China is the good guy here), and Cambodians would beg to disagree. Everyone else has been historically protected by even greater natural barriers. We have absolutely no reason to believe that a powerful China will be non-intrusive.
Yeah. All closely neighboring regions.
And contrast that with armed action by various European powers abroad. A vastly more extensive list.
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Also not sure how much of it is based on a false stereotype or not, but the old song "Johnny Verbeck" is about a Dutchman who invents a sausage making machine and grinds up all of the neighborhood's cats and dogs in it.
The Dutch have made an impact on the English language due to past enmity.
I've only see 'Dutch courage' (old books only) and 'going dutch' in use, but I feel we ought to revive the use of 'Dutch wife' just to yank the Dutch chain.
Going full Double-Dutch?
Huh.
I guess today I learned a new idiom! Double-Dutch means nonsense.
I actually didn't intend that--I thought "double-Dutch" was just a jump-rope thing.
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One still notices this in China, where people eat meats that Western cultures have long since put into dog food, sausages, or burgers. As someone who enjoys things like tripe, heart, and gizzards, this is something I like in their food, but it's symptomatic of the difference in protein supply between Europe/North America and China in living memory.
A lot of this is just fashion. In my Texas suburb grocery store tongue costs as much as steak and boudin(spicy liver paste, sold in a sausage) is reasonably popular, while farther away from mexicans or cajuns such things would have to be special ordered at non-ethnic grocery stores. Allegedly blacks still eat gizzards and tripe because they want to, not because they have to, but I've never confirmed this. And of course snails and frogs are high status in france while urban americans see them as gross. And of course I've run into several canadians who find the southern custom of eating catfish off putting, despite this being well entrenched and normal among even wealthy southerners.
And that's without getting into the rural-urban divide on squirrel consumption.
I've honestly never understood squirrel. They're so fiddly and the meat's not even worth a round of 22. At least rabbits have most of a meal on them. Is it mostly just bragging rights?
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Really? Did they say why?
Gritty or poor tasting trash fish was the usual explanation.
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I feel compelled to add that here in Italy eating liver and tripe, and to a lesser degree heart, brain, and lungs, is still quite popular, even to the point of being considered a delicacy. I can tell by personal experience that Tuscan liver paté is excellent.
Liver seems to be an exception in most places, at least because of paté.
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If the claim is "Look at this terrible thing that high-class Chinese people did to their children; they crippled their bodies for social fashion.", we can point to the whole trans-grooming brouhaha in the west as a comparison. People are social, and fucked-up societies can and will override the instincts of parents and lay their children on the offer of their particular Moloch; this does not appear to be a race-specific trait, as far as I can tell.
And we can look at a lot of other individual instances of moral atrocity in peoples who don't seem to do that sort of thing super-regularly; we've got the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War off the top of my head. And while I consider that an existence proof against people claiming that the Spanish are saints, I don't think it proves much other than that.
As for the aesthetics, I will point out the degree to which Michael Bay and James Cameron have done really well in China with their movies. I mean, I don't really like the Bayformers aesthetic, but clearly a lot of my fellow Caucasians do, and so do a lot of the Chinese, apparently.
Look, if you want to make an argument here, why not get some actual stats? What do Chinese charity rates look like, both in the mainland and across other nations? How do you see the behavior of Chinese people changing from first, second, and nth-generation immigrants? What are your thoughts on popular Chinese media? Do you have any opinions on the popularity of cultivation novels and stories?
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I do not know how much truth there is in your rant about the Chinese, but I have known enough Chinese-Americans to be able to tell you that whatever differences in behavior exist between Europeans and Chinese are not genetic, at least not more than to a trivial degree. In my experience, Chinese-Americans who were born in the United States act indistinguishably from European-Americans who were born in the United States.
Then you’re not very experienced with them. They excel at education to the point where they are 7x more representative in elite colleges than whites are, and that’s AFTER affirmative action caps their numbers, they have far less crime than whites as well. Genetics vs environment aside, it’s undeniable Their behaviour is very different from European
Some of that is affirmative action against whites, but not so much Asians.
Most studies I've seen on the subject suggest that discrimination is more significant against Asians rather than Whites. However, we have to be careful here because the White category includes Jews who generally speaking do not suffer from affirmative action. In addition, since Whites have been in the US for longer and in far larger numbers, there are simply more old money types who donate to schools on top of "legacy admits".
If those confounding factors were partialled out then I wouldn't be surprised if, say, lower-middle class Whites without rich parents, a Holocaust grandma story or legacy points were more discriminated against than Asians. However, these are exceptionally sensitive topics so getting data is very hard. Even in the lawsuits against the Ivy League schools, where data has been forcibly extracted from the institutions, the White category isn't separated from the Jewish one.
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As far as I know as an ignorant non-expert, the genetic separation between Han Chinese people and Japanese or Korean people is pretty small, small enough to make genetics not seem like an obvious explanation for things not shared between those populations. Especially if you're going to characterize it as a millennia-old difference, rather than some more recent bottleneck like who survived under Mao (or at least civil wars postdating the separation). Something like conscientiousness or conformity I could buy, those seem similar between East Asian subgroups, but dramatically lower empathy is a much harder sell. Even if you think East Asians in general harbor a lower level of empathy that the high-intelligence and conformity is compensating for in some subgroups, it means the primary driver of conflict is cultural and political rather than racial. Certainly the racial differences don't seem to have stopped Japan from rapidly becoming an ally after WW2. Even pre-WW2 Japan doesn't seem to have been particularly cruel to each other like current Chinese culture stereotypically is, especially not when compared to pre-modern cultures of any race. Even if we buy the argument that Europe's heavy use of the death penalty made the population more genetically empathetic quite recently, either Japan benefited from a similar phenomenon or the difference isn't big enough to stop them from riding their high intelligence (and possibly conscientiousness) to one of the lowest crime rates in the world anyway.
If you want to do population genetics, even speculative amateur genetics, then you should actually do population genetics. Look at when populations split off from each other, research whether it's plausible there was the appropriate genetic bottlenecks, see what work has been done of the subject. Actually try to disprove your hypothesis, don't just go looking for things that fit your story. Don't just point to some anecdotes of Chinese culture being low-empathy and assume it must be genetic. A glance at history shows quite a lot of low-empathy behavior in every population group, and meanwhile you haven't justified why they would have such a large genetic difference from other East Asians, so cultural explanations seem quite plausible. And while I share your impression that Chinese culture is unusually low-empathy, you didn't even try to establish that beyond some scattered anecdotes. Objective measures like crime rate, while worse than other East Asian countries, aren't that bad compared to white countries, especially similarly poor or low-trust countries like Russia. I don't even know how many of the "Chinese society being weirdly sociopathic" anecdotes I hear are the product of actual differences vs. it being a product of how China views itself, like how Japan is more preoccupied with low birth-rates than various other countries that have since declined until they are even lower. Or something like Chinese people playing up low-empathy explanations for their actions because being a compassionate 'sucker' is low-status, while people in other countries do the opposite.
This is particularly silly. Japan has of course been spectacularly successful at exporting anime, an art form especially focused on human beauty. There don't seem to be any notable differences between populations in the ability to appreciate either it or beauty in general, let alone between population groups as closely related as China and Japan.
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I'm pretty sure I can answer all your half-assed leading questions with "no."
No, a Gish gallop of of historical anecdotes is not a convincing argument, nor a particularly impressive one.
You need to go practice your five virtues.
The multi-century near universal practice of footbinding amongst the most educated and intellegint strata of society (but going down far lower) is definitionally not anecdotal. Footbinding represents a fundamental qualitative deviation from any widespread european practice and was continued up to the peak of independent Chinese civilizational development. Unless you reject HBD entirely, it is exceedingly stupid to claim that it cannot be cited as evidence of differing innate genetic dispositions.
Of course it's evidence. It's not convincing evidence.
You've crawled astonishingly far up your own ass. It could mean that you are innately optimized for the effort, a real ubermensch. Or there might be another explanation. Until you put in the effort to disprove competing theories, and defend against others' counterarguments to your own, you haven't proven anything.
Don't do this, please.
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Only if there was no plausible explanation in the distinctive historical features of Chinese culture.
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You cant simply cite cultural practices as evidence of genetic deviation. Statistics doesn't conform to our whims to that extent. You can cite genetic predispositions that might have given rise to that practice, not the practice itself. You must realize the illogic of trying to correlate a qualitative measurement with a quantitative one. Let alone not taking into account that culture itself is probably an independent variable if exotic enough. Or disrespect the notions of chaotic systems altogether.
With this line of reasoning I can make a convincing enough case that something about Anglophone genetics really predisposes them to get confused about their gender. If it only were that simple.
Let me indulge this theory, like a person with basic curiosity might except for German genetics:
Bordering on the Suiones are the nations of the Sitones. They resemble them in all respects but one - woman is the ruling sex. That is the measure of their decline, I will not say below freedom, but even below decent slavery. - Tacitus on a German Tribe
The dowry is brought by husband to wife, not by wife to husband. Parents and kinsmen attend and approve the gifts - not gifts chosen to please a woman's fancy or gaily deck a young bride, but oxen, a horse with its bridle, or a shield, spear, and sword. In consideration of such gifts a man gets his wife, and she in her turn brings a present of arms to her husband. This interchange of gifts typifies for them the most sacred bond of union, sanctified by mystic rites under the favour of the presiding deities of wedlock. The woman must not think that she is excluded from aspirations to manly virtues or exempt from the hazards of warfare. That is why she is reminded, in the very ceremonies which bless her marriage at its outset, that she enters her husband's home to be the partner of his toils and perils, that both in peace and in war she is to share his sufferings and adventures. That is the meaning of the team of oxen, the horse ready for its rider, and the gift of arms.
Wait, what? A society where men gift their brides swords?
But wait, there's more...
"The Naharvali proudly point out a grove associated with an ancient worship. The presiding priest dresses like a woman."
Ok, fastforward roughly 1900 years.
From Wikipedia:
[1908!] A transvestite pass (German: Transvestitenschein) was a doctor's note recognized by the governments of Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic – under the support of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld – identifying a person as a transvestite. Transvestite at this time referred to all individuals whose gender identity and preferred clothing was discordant to that associated with their assigned sex, and so included both crossdressing and transgender people.
Karl M. Baer (20 May 1885 – 26 June 1956) was a German-Israeli author, social worker, reformer, suffragist and Zionist. He came out as a trans man in 1904.[1] In December 1906, he became the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery.
1931 – In Berlin in 1931, Dora Richter became the first known transgender woman to undergo vaginoplasty.
I don't know I'm really starting to think there might be some genetic link here... Unfortunately, none of this explains the current problems of the anglosphere. It's not like we have any German DNA or anything [/sarc].
The explination for current problems, looking at the Hirschfeld, Baer and Richter examples is antisemitic.
There have been millions of Jews outside of Germany and Austria, especially in the Russian Pale of Settlement, but those did not particularly care for transgenderism. I guess an anti-Semitic explanation of jewspecialization of subversive activities per country is not hard to come up with, but the point is even then it takes two to tango. Hirschfeld, Baer, Richter, Freud and others worked in the cultural context where their ideas fell into fertile soil.
There's always a cohort ready to embrace degeneracy.
They found fertile soil right up until they fled the country.
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Enh, see, I want to agree with you. I really do. And I hate that I have to qualify this by saying that I am Chinese, because I hate that I feel the need to state my race before applying my argument, especially here. Ideas should be colorblind no matter where they originate from.
I want to tell you that you are simultaneously both spot on, and that you are overthinking it.
I think the best way to put it is that (mainland) Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do. Whether these values are inherent, or they are taught, is not my concern - nature/nurture debates do not interest me, and modern Chinese history involves enough bloodshed to justify the color of the flag. What they are is what they are, and given that a multipolar world seems very likely barring dawning American AI dominance or continued military dominance, it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism, or the standard American practice of saying (or believing!) one thing while doing another.
You may be absolutely right that your struggle with China is in fact racial. You may even be right in fearing a high-IQ species with alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts.
But at the end of the day, China is simply optimizing for its own values. Everyone does this. Your examples are entirely valid. Foot-binding conferred status and sexual market value at the time, so they did it. The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong. There are millions of Chinese people who are competition, losing the competition means you are one of the weak, so the toddler will eventually grow to be competition, so why care for it? Man's best friend is made of meat, and meat is protein, so why not eat it? Your political enemies can potentially threaten your existence, so why not eat them? You can sell a literature book by describing a scenario where the lower class gets a moment of catharsis by screwing over those more powerful, why wouldn't you?
I am entirely convinced, given the mess that America is in, that they are also subservient to perverse incentives. While they are not remotely comparable, the mechanisms behind it are the same.
It's simply more naked in China. Everywhere, the weak exist to be destroyed, or to be subservient to the strong. Losing in China is existential. The culture has a long history of genocide, either by the hard, physical method, or the soft method of cultural assimilation. Whatever chance that the weak had of affecting any kind of change was run over by tanks in the streets of Beijing as they were reminded what it meant to be weak, and what it meant to be strong.
You can't change anything about China without changing the values - or, well, as Chinese would put it - the dog-eat-dog nature of reality. If you don't wish to change the values, then there's nothing for it - nuke the bugmen, or attempt to practice isolationism. There are millions of Chinese. The preferred method of problem solving through the years by China's rulers was to throw bodies at the problem. Life is, and always has been, cheap. Winners win, and losers lose. If you can't grasp what this means, you haven't lost hard enough. Losers in China know what it is to lose.
(I lie, maybe I will bring up nurture after all - I have noticed that Chinese-Americans, especially the born-in-the-US generation, have poor comprehension of "winners win, and losers lose". Even if they lose, they assume family, community, social security, academia, the federal government, will be there for them and have managed to optimize for America in many ways. They will wear their "Chinese-ness" on their sleeves to get ahead for diversity points and wouldn't be caught dead wanting to move back to Mainland China. They know how the game is played.)
Maybe Chinese TFR being as critically damaged as it is will change some things. I'm not optimistic, because China will simply apply a top-down brutalist attempt to fix this. Or, alternatively, the opposition will become strong and eat the top, and apply their own fix that might be just as bad if not worse.
I was tempted to join the other commenters in replying directly to Lepidus about why their post was wrong and offensively misguided, but I'll just springboard off of your comment instead:
The conflict between America and China is not racial at all. It is, rather, down to culture and government. As you note, Chinese tend to be competitive, self-serving (where possible/convenient), but also subservient. Probably the biggest argument against this being a "racial" conflict is that, as you get at in your parenthetical, once you take the Chinese out of China, you pretty much also take the China out of the Chinese (to an extent). Someplace like America is still pretty damn competitive, but it's also a much more relaxed environment compared to the earlier People's Republic or the older Empire. It's in a place like America, with all the slack afforded by the general material wealth and opportunity, where you see the Chinese get ahead because the competitive spirit still persists, but also there's less consequences for failure and less holding them back.
Insofar as this conflict is existential, I suppose it might be a general improvement for the world if all Chinese around the world behaved more like Chinese-Americans than Mainland Chinese, but that is a memetic battle that is far from decided.
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Great post, you've made lots of interesting points, thanks for sharing your perspective.
Context, I'm a white American currently in East Asia (not China) and this exact point I think is the hugest difference between the mindset of rich countries and poor countries (or more specifically, today, rich old countries like USA and Japan and currently poor/recently poor countries like China, Thailand and South Korea.) There is more of a palpable understanding of the risks and dangers of reality in the cultures of poor countries that the US and our aging allies seem to be increasingly oblivious to. Your statement above reads as extremely low class and would probably be shocking to most people in the US but it's so blatantly true that I can't help but feel like any culture that understands it is bound to outcompete any that ignores it for political or social reasons.
Yes, that's exactly it. The west is too myopically focused on the belief that everyone is equal that they fail to even imagine that a civilization halfway around the world and thousands years older could possibly have a different set of values, for fear that they come across looking racist, when a bit of cultural pragmatism could really help steer things in a more sane direction.
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This seems pretty heavily coloured by recency bias. It was only less than 150 years ago that the modernisers in the ranks of the Qing elite were arguing that China was too frivolous and insufficiently receptive to Western efficiencies. Indeed, as the Self-strengthening movement wore on some of its greatest advocates complained that most of the Chinese bureaucracy were more or less uninterested in modernising the military at all. Chang Chih-Tung wrote in 1898 that ‘Zuo Zongtang established a shipyard near Fuzhou… Shen Baozhen set up the shipyard administration… Ding Baozhen instituted arsenals to make foreign guns and bullets… current opinion cavilled at every point’ and in consequence ‘their establishments went to waste or operated in a reduced form, none of them could achieve any expansion’, something their licking at the hands of the Japanese had proved in 1895.
Indeed, the controversial Heshang documentary, shown on Chinese television in 1988 argued that Chinese culture was entirely deficient precisely because it privileged tradition and even backwardness instead of the science and progress that they considered to be paramount in the West.
In general I think these sorts of arguments about national character are almost always overwrought and fairly meaningless.
Not to disagree with the overall point, but often the decisions made sense in context, at least in terms of securing power for an individual or tribe. Modernisation would have ceded massive amounts of power to the Han Chinese, something that the Qing were running pretty low on after the Taiping. Resistance to modernisation, iirc, was often as much fear as it was traditionalism.
Anyway, to add onto this.
I think this is understandable when you think about it. China has gone through a period of dynastic collapse, warlordism and anarchy, international war, civil war, and massive civil unrest pretty much one immediately after another, after which there was a blistering pace of market liberalisation under and after Deng Xiaoping.
In fact I would put the direct causative element of this cutthroat-ness to be the latest liberalisation under/after Deng, which is definitely something of an adaptation of Western capitalism, even if you can argue that it’s not directly a Western import. The Chinese had a lot to catch up to in the 1980s.
Perhaps, but worth noting that post-Sino-Japanese war the Guangxu emperor was generally rather reformist, and presumably many of the opponents of the reformers in the civil service were Han.
Yes (and Guangxu was a reformist even before the first sino-japanese war), but Cixi who blocked him had the bulk of the Manchu aristocracy behind her (not to mention the conservative neo-Confucians), and Cixi won. Nor was Cixi necessarily opposed to reform - she didn’t depose Guangxu until 1898, after all - but only that which threatened Manchu power. There were definitely both social and institutional factors to the ineffectiveness of reform in the late Qing era, and the Han themselves were often traditionalist, I don’t mean to downplay that. I just meant that oftentimes being conservative was a pragmatic choice for many elites at the time to try to maintain their grip on whatever power they had.
I tend to think that it was less important at this point, though. By 1898 much/most of the power was held in Han hands, simply because after the Taiping rebellion (a rebellion where the death toll of which would only be surpassed by WW2, and with the Taiping + other rebellions controlling key industrial areas like the Yangtze delta for years) the central government apparatus had bled much power to its Han officials to combat it, many of which were warlords but in name.
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I am less enthusiastic about your and OP's explanation of all this as a race struggle. In fact the Chinese are one of the few nations where there are different type of societies with arguably the same culture/history: that of Mainland China vs that of Singapore, Hongkong and especially Taiwan. Other examples of similar natural experiments are that of North/South Korea and East/West Germany.
Not everything is inevitable and racially/culturally conditioned to run in the exact same way.
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There are countless flaws in your argument, starting from the fact that Roman patriarchs considered family their literal property; to the obvious ability of the Taiwanese, majority ethnic Han and indeed many of them descendants of Han elite, the type most selected under those Han-specific civilizational pressures, to match and exceed «the white race» in humane civility and even aesthetics of their life; to the fact that the Chinese today have hundreds of millions of beloved pets. And of course there's plenty of love, loyalty and honesty in Chinese art, or found in relationships with Chinese people across the world. And we know generally that racial essentialism is a crude approximation for overlapping distributions, and that it's more sensible to speak of norms of reaction, and clearly such barbarity can be found in European history that the difference can only be said to be one of degree, not of kind... Honestly it's just trash. And your whole interpretation of foot-binding as aggression against kin to prevent running away, or whatever, is either atrociously disingenuous or so stupid as to make responding pointless. Read some interviews of surviving women from traditional families who have had that done to them, see what they think of it.
But let me put this aside. Let's grant the core of your thesis: that the Chinese civilization, with its peculiar circumstances, has created a separate human type, deficient in some aspects of humanity that the «western type» of human finds paramount. Simply put, that from your perspective the Han Chinese are less human.
Okay. This can certainly be the case, and I believe that even highly related peoples can have distinguishable genetic inclinations, like the old European racialists asserted. But, if we're dealing in extreme and stupid generalizations – then by my standard, you Hajnali goodbots are not fully human either, and far more dangerous. You personally are an apt example.
I think there is not a single perfect, fully human, race of man. Evolution is a cruel bitch and it didn't bother to create one I'd feel at home with. Certainly some groups, whites more obviously than others, have better competitiveness on the global scale, but this isn't about it. There are sparks of goodness and greatness in all major populations, but feeble, pointless and spinning into destructive attractors in separation from each other. Everyone is eager to get high on one's own group's supply, double down in natural inclinations. Asians are serious to the point of clowning themselves, thinking on the low level of optimizing the performance of inane arbitrary customs. Blacks are largely incapable of seriousness, which is why they can enjoy life more than anyone else. Arabs have a desire for epochal accomplishment, completely divorced from taste and prudence and so spilling back into their infertile sands as testaments to vanity. Russians are crazy, brilliant at finding ways to fuck themselves up. And you lot are so very marvelous at the scale of a Mannerbund or a village parish, but beyond that you can't handle psychopaths that emerge in any substantial population, and just get used, mumbling your nauseating «u can't get something outta nothing, sonny» or «u just need to believe in yourself» adages. Diversity is our strength indeed, except we're no good at really combining facets of our strengths, because we're blind and hostile to each other's Logos.
The principal mechanism of this is dehumanization. And I'd posit that whites are the worst in this department, this is one of your worst traits. You cannot suffer the heretic, the xenos, the mutant to live. You are overcome with disgust and an extermination impulse when you recognize something as genuinely alien. This fanaticism is not normal; neither are your aspirations to universal dominance of your doctrine, and therefore the fear of the Chinese is largely projection.
Following your Catholic Church programming, your futile wars of religion, and your acceptance of Jews (who are much more similar to the rest of the world, except more intelligent) into the ranks of your elites, you have devised (or have been taught) a way to cope with your tendencies. It's a primitive way: you simply insist on there being no real difference. Few notions in this world are more shallow than a Western liberal's idea of diversity; you think it's about puny cultural artifacts befitting of a theme park – garments, cuisine, language, inconsequential quirks, irrelevant myths and opinions. Even a slight deviation on a morally relevant dimension is cause to suppress the information, or explain it away with circumstances, pin the blame on some organized evil that can be vanquished. That's all just stopgaps.
You refuse to see others for what they are, because when you do, you start to hate. And in the process of not-seeing, you degrade yourself, before something finally gives. I am increasingly sympathetic to the Jewish paranoia that, if you were ever allowed to look past the «Judeo-Christian» front and once again properly notice them as a distinct race, a second Holocaust wouldn't have been out of the question. Where's Jewish Mickey Angelo, indeed?
The Chinese are not Anglo-Germans. They do not share your values. They do not share many of your weaknesses. It is harder to convince a Chinese than a White that being illiterate is «another way of reading», or hallucinating is «another way of knowing», or that economic collapse is desirable to clean our Lebensraum from the invisible poison of radiation. They are, in my impression, a bit less empathetic. But that's a form of wisdom too, which could help your race heal, if only you could see out of your ass anything that isn't either a warped mirror or the Devil himself.
天地不仁
以萬物為芻狗
聖人不仁
以百姓為芻狗
Somehow, googling returns a number of pages where straw dogs are confused with straw men.
Also, my old grand theory about the Chinese-Western difference in mental style.
I mean, what do you think it is ?
Ruthless goal orientation, lack of adherence to norms, chutzpah, etc. The tales of crying, broken down managers. (not girls)
It's fairly clear what it is. Then there is his father.
You mean sociopathy, I guess? I don't think Musk fits into the construct. Isambard Kingdom Brunel certainly does not. I also don't think low-empathy Chinese managers are lacking in this trait. And chutzpah of the SBF, Adam Neumann or Elizabeth Holmes type is not creative whatsoever, it's merely imitating the superficial aspects of a visionary to divert resources to mundane ends.
No. Faustianism is a peculiar mental type, which doesn't survive in captivity for very long, and one our feminized civilization is no good at measuring or seeing.
It's a problem of semantics, really.
There's considerable amount of evidence to believe there's a distinct human subtype (psychopaths), people who lack affective empathy, most emotions, show anomalous reactions to fearful stimuli, and have no conscience whatsoever. Also are goal oriented to the point punishment doesn't seem to work on them, supposedly. Generally, you can train people and animals to avoid doing something using electroshocks, this doesn't work on psychopaths.
He's almost certainly not a complete psychopath, but probably has a good few traits.
You'd know he was one because he'd have likely kept Amber Heard as a wife. Psychopaths love crazy women, the crazier the better.
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The chinese individuals I've met (and the descendants of chinese individuals I've met) seem to adopt western culture easily. If there was some genetic basis for chinese culture wouldn't you expect the opposite? (admittedly this is totally anecdata)
Furthermore aren't there examples of chinese-american celebrities adopting western culture? Jackie Chan? Bruce Lee?
It seems like you've cherry-picked some ideas and woven them into a nice narrative-- and while the narrative is coherent, it doesn't really do a good job of modeling reality.
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The lack of empathy you observe in mainland Chinese culture is in large part due to the cultural devastation unleashed by communism over the past century, which has created a far more atomized, materialistic, acquisitive, and sociopathic society than existed previously or that can be seen in ethnic Chinese communities that did not undergo the twin calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This extends even to minority communities such as the Uyghurs, who used to practice a syncretic form of Islam that had integrated into Chinese society before it was torn up by its roots and replaced in recent years by more extremist forms of Wahhabism.
This is not to say that premodern agricultural societies on the edge of starvation or within living memory of such won't in general be numb to human and animal suffering outside of their immediate circle of care in a way that would horrify any First Worlder, but that applies equally to India and Africa as to China, and ignores the extent to which the displacement of traditional cultures by Western ideologies in certain cases caused immense human suffering (like a virus jumping from a well-adapted host to a naïve individual, so to speak).
As for art, while I can't say it was better than what the Greeks or Renaissance masters accomplished, I don't think Chinese sculpture is quite as bad as you made it out to be.
There's not much to say on the topic of footbinding except to agree that it was one of the most horrific cultural practices ever to exist, though my ancestors would insist I point out to you that certain Chinese communities of which they were a part did not participate.
Lastly, regarding masks, I have pretty much run out of alternative explanations for why the degree of imposition they represent is seen to be so different across different populations, so I'm willing to give that one to you. Whether that means me and mine are all alien bugmen with whom the West can never have mutual understanding, time will tell, but I certainly hope not, as ethnic cleansing is really quite a hassle.
Do we have any reason to believe that this is true? People living with the shame of being part of an inescapably horrible society are not exactly going to be immune to fabricating the idea of a brighter past.
Consider this quote from, Ralph Townsend a US Consular official writing before the war and before the Communist takeover.
"Almost any veteran foreigner who has traveled up and down the rivers of China will be able to recount one or more cases where he has personally observed a man
drown without efforts to save him by other Chinese a few feet away on shore or in a boat. "
His experiences disgusted him so much that he published a book called "ways that are dark, the truth about China", and went around the U.S claiming that the Japanese were actually the good guys (getting arrested and charged with the Manafort offense - acting as an unregistered agent). That, or he was on their payroll from the start and made shit up, I guess we can never know for sure.
Having read it, I can say that the Wikipedia summary in no way understates the allegations he makes:
Through a large number of personal and second-hand anecdotes, Townsend argues that the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are completely unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude toward other people. Because the Chinese feel no empathy toward others, they behave in an unbelievably sadistic and cruel fashion toward one another, and they view altruistic foreigners as targets to be mercilessly taken advantage of.
https://ia802900.us.archive.org/29/items/waysthataredarkthetruthaboutchinabyralph_202003/Ways%20that%20are%20dark%20the%20truth%20about%20China%2C%20by%20Ralph.pdf
My two cents probably means nothing to you, but Townsend should have traveled more. There are things in a large plurality of non-western cultures that would have horrified him. Although I am willing to bet that China does it at greater scale simply on a pure numbers perspective.
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“Are Chinese actually lizardmen” is certainly a take, given the sheer amount of moralising and, well, empathy you can read out of the ample historical annals of imperial China, even just from the court records.
This is to a significant degree true, and is quite well known by most who also know about the bystander problem in Chinese affairs. Makes me curious about what source you’re getting this information from, that they take away such context.
If we are to be trading polemics, allow me to quote Bertrand Russell who has a much more mainstream take:
It must also be noted that Townsend was very high on the Japanese, who are quite closely related to the Chinese genetically; and sometimes in ways that age extremely poorly, as apparently he commended the Japanese invasion of China for how “humane” its armed forces behaved.
Interestingly, here is what Russell has to say about the Japanese, at least vis a vis the Chinese, also from The Problem of China:
Interesting how a century changes things.
Anyway.
Forget careful societal analysis, we can dismiss this out of hand through a cursory glance at Chinese literature and philosophy. Would Dreams of the Red Chamber be written by a lizardman without empathy, and would a race of sociopaths keep record of poetry in the Book of Odes for three thousand years? Would a race wholly incapable of any tenderness found philosophies like Confucianism, where the first two of the five virtues are benevolence and righteousness, and Mohism (a warring-states philosophical school that was a major school of thought at the time), which has universal love essentially as its central tenet?
————————
Let me end with quoting Russell again:
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This is a fair and honest response. I'll make sure to address it when I get the time. Thank you.
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Apparently they were quite good by medieval standards!
Some Chinese porcelain art is (…mostly?) quite beyond what other cultures have done with the same, historically. We can’t forget about funny things like the flying horse of Gansu, either. Bird-and-flower paintings, as well.
I've seen a number of traditional Chinese paintings and they are quite good. By whatever standards high art should be judged, I don't see them as lacking.
And I have toured a few Chinese palaces from centuries ago and they did not appear to lack sophistication or artistry. But I'm not an art historian.
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