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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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We Won

On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.

Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.

The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.

You have won a few battles, but all you have done is halt the advance. The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.

"Woke 1 was crazy" does not mean that wokeness is dead. It simply means that mistakes were made and Woke 2, when it happens, will account for the learnings of the past.

The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.

I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term. Sure, it's easily defended, but like any walled fortress, it can be starved out. And it's already showing signs of hunger. COVID and the replication crisis are ravaging its moral authority, while it is being put under increasing financial strain by both right-wing government funding rugpulls, the decreasing perceived value of the degree, and the demographic decline of the customer base. Plus, being an academic has become increasingly unglamorous over the past two decades as would-be academics have realized that there are more would-be academics than there are slots, so you spend 5 years taking classes and working as a barely-paid TA for the privilege of fighting with six or seven other people just as qualified as you over the privilege of an underpaid non-tenure-track adjunct position. Right-wing colleges and universities probably won't suffer much from the demographic decline, and neither will the Ivy Leagues, but there's a good chance it wipes out small left-by-default liberal arts colleges. There was clearly an effort to compensate for this by importing students, but Trump's actions may have put a damper on that, at least for a bit.

Culture is also going to take a hit from this effect, since the colleges are the pipeline to it. It might be less vulnerable in some ways, particularly to direct government action, but there are signs that culture is going to increasingly fragment in the future and that will substantially weaken predominately left-wing institutions like Hollywood.

I don't think these developments are set in stone but if I saw lefties telling each other "at least we still have academia" I would finger it as cope.

Right wing small liberal arts colleges are not in great financial shape right now either.

Hmm, I haven't gotten the impression that things have gotten worse for them recently. I broadly expect right-wing demographics to somewhat offset the general demographic decline that will hit schools, but I could be mistaken.

Let them die. We don't need right-wing colleges, we need to destroy college as an institution. The idea that everyone should spend one fourth of their life in school is fucking mental.

From "Against Tulip Subsidies" by Scott Alexaner:

If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.

From "You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president." by the same:

Declare War On College. Forgive all existing student loans, then refuse to give out any new ones. Prohibit the government from asking about college degree when hiring new employees, and put pressure on private industry to follow suit for any position less absolutely-requiring-of-specialized-knowledge than doctor or engineer. Increase government loans to boot camps, online courses, et cetera.

And from "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"", idem:

War On College: As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can't be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist. Your stretch goal should be to ban discrimination based on college degree status. Professions may continue to accept professional school degrees (eg hospitals can continue to require doctors have a medical school degree), and any company may test their employees' knowledge (eg mining companies can make their geologists pass a geology test) but the thing where you have to get into a good college, give them $100,000, flatter your professors a bit, and end up with a History degree before you can be a firefighter or whatever is illegal. If you can't actually make degree discrimination illegal, just make all government offices and companies that do business with the government ban degree discrimination.

This tweet is a bit mean, but I interpret it as trying to point out a sense of class entitlement. College degrees are no longer thought of as factually giving you skills which let you earn enough money to be comfortable. They’re thought of as inducting you into the class of people who deserve comfortable lives. Treating an upper-class employee the same way you would treat a working-class employee is considered morally wrong.

Stop the thing where high schools refuse to let people graduate until they promise to go to college. End draft deferment for people who go to college - hopefully there won't be a draft, but do it anyway, as a sign that studying at college isn't any more important than the many other jobs people do that don't confer draft exemptions. Make universities no longer tax-exempt - why should institutions serving primarily rich people, providing them with regattas and musical theater, and raking in billions of dollars a year, not have to pay taxes? Make the bill that does this very clearly earmark the extra tax money for things that help working-class people, like infrastructure or vocational schools or whatever."

College exists for a reason. We need higher educated people in order to run the society we choose to live in.

College nowadays is just a mechanism to take advantage of tribal nepotism and entry into higher strata of social circles and connections.

Sadly, I learned that one far too late.

No, you need this system of education because it's a jobs program (and because Boomers are obsessed with graduation rate as a proxy for how well society is doing). The purpose of college is not to teach; professors are not evaluated on knowledge retention rates and are notorious for being poor at teaching.

Ironically the problem with this system is that, because its primary objective is not education (both lower and higher), it's proof that high-IQ people will be fine no matter how garbage and wasteful the education system becomes. Which means that if you reduced a degree to the IQ test(s) for which it serves as a hyper-inefficient proxy, you could save billions upon billions of dollars and refund nearly 8 years of prime lifetime to nearly every young citizen, something worth several hundred thousand dollars at current rates.

This isn't to say that we must abolish job training, of course- that would still be required- but it's also required right now on top of education anyway. Cutting out the middleman would probably be OK, though of course, employment in academia is one of the primary contributors to the existence of the middle class as a concept.

if you reduced a degree to the IQ test(s) for which it serves as a hyper-inefficient proxy

It's not just IQ. Conscientiousness is a huge part of the story in terms of both inputs and outputs - a smart but lazy person won't necessarily be a better worker than a hard worker with lower IQ, and university outcomes will more-or-less mimic that dynamic.

College may be mostly signaling, but there's a real signal there beyond what can be measured in a quick IQ test.

Nearly eight years? College only lasts four to five. Most people don't go to grad school.

I am pretty strongly in agreement that the expansion of higher education was mostly bad, that things like sending nursing students back to community college would be very good. But every first world society has near-universal high school education. I'm not sure about that chesterton's fence being avoidable.

What proportion of the "highly educated" population is "highly educated" in the ways actually needed to run our society? Why is this system specifically necessary to educate them?

Realistically we only need college for engineering, medicine, and a small amount of trained scholars to write books.

Other countries do not do credentialism and you end up randomly meeting people who end up having an international surgeon as an uncle (so likely some inherited IQ) and talk perfectly fine upper middle class socialization but never went to college.

From what I know most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact. We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.

Orthodox Jews also often have normal upper middle class people without a college education. There network perhaps helps them navigate American society without an expensive credential.

From what I know most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact. We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.

Oh please. I've been IQ tested for jobs before in a field that everyone wants to get more blacks into and in which hiring managers will straight up tell people 'yeah, we'll give a black guy a chance, but they're lazy and don't learn, so we wind up having to fire them'.

Well, man, don't hold out; what field was this? I'm sure there are plenty of us here that would love to hear about a career where an IQ test is the major barrier to entry!

i'm sure there's some lawyers around that might see a big juicy steak if they could get slightly more solid evidence than that too

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Undergraduate is a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, so replacing it with pure IQ loses something.

most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact.

In theory hiring based on IQ tests is not necessarily illegal, since if you can prove the IQ test is a "reasonable measure of job performance" then you're in the clear, and a priori the expected correlation is something like "between 0.2 and 0.5 but it's complicated" so that might be doable. But in practice, are you going to run the study to make sure that that correlation really applies to the job you're hiring for, in a way that's not too complicated to explain to a judge? No.

We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.

It's worse than a proxy for IQ, because it's a proxy for IQ and SES. Employers don't care if you were the sort of person who could take 4 years out of the workforce while your family and/or your creditors paid tuition and room and board for you, but if you want a good college degree that's who you need to be, and the disparate impact of that might be more significant than a test of IQ alone.

Realistically we only need college for engineering, medicine

Ironically the disciplines that are important enough that we really need college for them are also the ones that are important enough that we don't trust college for them; even if you're a straight-A student in one of those fields, you're still going to be taking your PE or USMLE tests.

It would be nice if someday grade inflation just gets so ridiculous that we realize this is a general principle: proper mechanism design concludes that the institutions getting paid to teach you should not be the same institutions in charge of evaluating how well you've been taught. Creating effective and robust general tests is a big problem, but perhaps not as much of a problem as not creating them has been.

We don’t need college as it exists today, but it fills certain niches that need replacement:

  • Undergrad: specialized education beyond what school teaches. Although we could probably have online learning with online/LLM lessons, small in-person groups, and tutors for milestones and edge cases; a more decentralized college-like system without the bureaucratic overhead and tuition costs of today’s colleges. Honestly, I think this is the future: it has only been possible recently (last 20 years without the assistance of reliable LLMs, last 4 months with them), so although traditional college has existed for so long, maybe now it’s obsolete and only persists by inertia.

  • Postgrad, lowercase-a academia: projects too experimental and unprofitable for industry, too expensive long and collaborative for hobbyists. We have a system to fund those projects (grants), understand (papers) and verify (peer review) their results, have experienced people (PIs / advisors) plan them and manage inexperienced ones (labs) and pass tacit knowledge to their successors (PhD students); feel free to propose a better alternative, or figure out how to create a parallel academic system.

Postgrad, lowercase-a academia

Kill it with fire. This system is entirely broken. The grants are politically or ideologically written, peer review is largely logrolling, papers are nonsense (Replication Crisis). The PIs are there to take in money and build fiefdoms, the PhD students are highly-educated grunts to actually write the papers.

The grants are politically or ideologically written, peer review is largely logrolling, papers are nonsense (Replication Crisis).

How many engineering/math grant proposals or papers have you read? Peer review is broken, though.

How many engineering/math grant proposals or papers have you read?

Enough to see the ideology. When supposedly pure math grant proposals contain various DEI goals, it's pretty clear the system is broken.

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You’re not wrong about uppercase-A Academia, but it will be sought and kept alive unless there’s another institution to replace the type of projects it handles. It’s the worst system except for industry, independent research, and everything else.

It's occupying the niche while not satisfying it. It has to be burned down for another institution to arise.

I am directionally pro-removing college from its entitled position as a signifier of talent, but I think (specifically for the right wing) that it still retains a lot of merit for elite formation purposes. Part of elite formation is enculturation, and part of it is networking.

What I think isn't needed is for college to be the bottleneck through which job privileges are awarded. Most professions would likely be better off with something like a guild system that does on the job training. Colleges in some professions can slot easily into this, of course.

If you don't like unions, credentialism, and regulatory capture now I have some bad news for you about guilds...

Perhaps that's a bad word given the historical use. What I really mean is "job preparatory training," which can look like certification, a college degree, or just on-the-job training.

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