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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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There Are No Amendments In Islam

Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:

Similar scuffles are taking place in Canada, and around the world conservative Christians are locking arms with Muslims in their opposition to the inclusion of gender and orientation in classroom materials. Some are applauding this new brotherhood of Abraham, and hoping that this heralds a change in the winds.

There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).

Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):

If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.

I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:

By a decree from God, sexual relations are permitted within the bounds of marriage, and marriage can only occur between a man and a woman. In the Quran, God explicitly condemns sexual relations with the same sex (see, e.g., Quran, al-Nisā': 16, al-A'rāf: 80–83, and al-Naml: 55–58). Moreover, premarital and extramarital sexual acts are prohibited in Islam. As God explains, "Do not go near fornication. It is truly an immoral deed and a terrible way [to behave]" (Quran, al-Isrā': 32). These aspects of Islam are unambiguously established in the Quran, the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and a chain of scholarly tradition spanning fourteen centuries. As a result, they have gained the status of religious consensus (ijmā') and are recognized as integral components of the faith known to the general body of Muslims.

As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.

In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.

The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.

To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.

The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.

The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.

Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.

I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.

I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.

As an exmoose myself, I think this is an ironic thing in Islam because, despite how much Islamic apologists hammer on this, Islam is paradoxically destroyed by this more than Christianity is.

For one: the Qur'an almost never indisputably says that the Torah and Gospel are lost. It often means that the book was covered up or misinterpreted (Gabriel Reynolds has some work on this). It does however say that Jews and Christians should judge by those books (e.g. Q5:47, Q5:68). Which implies they're extant. The doctrine of total corruption was a later necessary apologetic tactic once it was absolutely clear to everyone (there probably wasn't a written Arabic Bible to compare in Mohammed's time) that the Bible and Qur'an couldn't be reconciled (see Q7:157).

So either way, Islam is false. The Quran is the direct speech - not word - of God. And it tells Christians and Jews to either judge by a book that doesn't or never existed (the Qur'an doesn't seem to know what the Gospel is, or much about Jesus) or Christians and Jews should judge by a book that disprove Islam and/or is false.

Beyond that, the Bible is unquestionably unreliable in a dozen ways. The problem is that biblical scholarship ends up harming Islam more. We know the sources for the Qur'an and we know the ages at least of the Biblical stories. One is vastly older and more apocryphal (the story of the snake in the Garden in Islam descends from a later apocryphal story - a lot of Muslims who're ignorant of the specifics of the Bible blissfully cite similarities as proof of their faith, not knowing things like this).

As I said Muslims don't have access to the hermaneutical tactics liberal Christians have used. There's no blaming it on imperfect human messengers distorting God's message or the mores of the day that must naturally show up in any text or in the inherent, deliberate multiplicity in the viewpoints like with the Gospels. The Qur'an is said by doctrine to literally be pre-existent, an atemporal divine attribute, and to sit in heaven. It can't be gainsaid or reformed. This makes its pronouncements strong but it also makes them brittle.

Once you apply critical methods to the Qur'an (an easy trap to fall into once you see Muslims applying it to defeat the Bible) and come to the conclusion that Dhul-Qarnayn is merely the Arabized version of the Alexander Legend common at the time...there's no saving anything.

Pull on any one string...

If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.

One of the most vacuous debates I ever got into on Facebook (before I realised that debating with anyone on Facebook is almost invariably a complete waste of time) was when a friend-of-a-friend who lived in the UK shared a post on their* Facebook profile with a list of people that Pride is "for". The list included trans women, disabled people, Muslims etc. (Note that this post didn't say "LGBT Muslims" were welcome at Pride, which would certainly be commendable - just "Muslims".) Bankers and police officers, by contrast, were explicitly demarcated as persona non grata.

I pointed out, fairly politely in my view, that it seemed weird to say that Pride is "for" a particular group when half of that group think that homosexuality should be illegal - not merely societally condemned, but a criminal offense. If the point of Pride is to celebrate LGBT people, why would you make a point of inviting a specific group, a majority of which think LGBT people are sinners and should be punished for their crimes? There was certainly no concomitant effort to invite homophobic Christians.

I was immediately dogpiled, with numerous white non-Muslim Brits simply denying the claim outright and insisting that the poll on which I was basing my assertion must be faulty and have poor methodology and actually Allah is queer and so on. In unrelated contexts I've seen plenty of mental gymnastics about how homophobia wasn't a thing in the Middle East until after white Europeans got there, and actually men in the Middle East hundreds of years ago used to rape little boys in addition to little girls, so how could they possibly be homophobic?

God, the lengths some people will go to in order to quell their cognitive dissonance. It was only then that I realised that Pride was no longer about "gender and sexual minorities" at all, but a general celebration of wokeness as a concept. Funny how mission drift sneaks up on you.

*Funny the amount of people who only "realise" they're "non-binary" immediately upon starting in art school.

I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying.

I don’t know anything about Islam but a fairly similar phenomenon exists in Christianity. I don’t think progressive Christians are lying. I think it’s extremely silly to believe Jesus was a pro-LGBT feminist socialist but I think people who say that aren’t lying they’re just acting in the venerable millennia-old tradition of interpreting the Bible to justify whatever you want to do right now whether it’s legalizing gay marriage or looting Mesoamerica.

Best I can tell reading the gospels for myself, a sincere attempt to follow the teachings and examples therein would not be at all compatible with any modern political philosophies of any significance, right or left. I wonder if it’s a similar deal with the Quran.

I don’t know anything about Islam but a fairly similar phenomenon exists in Christianity. I don’t think progressive Christians are lying.

As an exmoose like @ymeskhout I am willing to give the absolutely ignorant "cultural Muslims" who literally know nothing a pass but many of the more educated types I'd say are lying or at least misleading via omission.

There's one every common example that drives me crazy: anyone who knows anything about Islam and says, in a debate with the broadly Protestant audience in the Anglosphere, "that's not in the Qur'an" is lying. Whether they set out to be malicious or not, they're exploiting the sola scriptura assumptions of their audience (it's very easy to assume Islam is the same because of its elevated view of the Qur'an, but the Five Pillars are literally impossible without the Hadith) to mislead and soothe their audience. This is especially liable to go unpunished on panel shows that don't have the time to drill into Islamic jurisprudence and the Legends EU-like hierarchy of sources.

There's no way to understand basics of Islam without understanding why this is misleading.

I've seen this on both sides. I've seen crypto-conservatives do it to defend against New Atheists, and I've especially seen progressives do it. And, imo, anyone that does this without explaining that the "Sunni" in "Sunni Muslim" that makes up 90% of the Islamic world literally means "one who follows the Sunnah, the ways of the Prophet" mainly found outside the Qur'an is a liar.

What about Quranists?

They're not insincere and they're not liars. But they're like the Mormons of Islam

In what sense? To me, from a Catholic background, what stands out the most about Mormons is the addition of the Book of Mormon to the canon. Quranists, as I understand, don't add anything, they just reject the hadiths. In this sense they are very similar to sola scriptura Protestants. Did you mean that all the other Muslims think they're weird?

In the sense that, if there was a debate about core Christian doctrine, most Christians wouldn't feel good about Mormons being the ones to represent the "Christian position".

They claim the title of Christian and many Christians (not all) may be fine not fighting them over it - now. But trinitarian Christians are the overwhelming majority and differ enough from Mormons that one side's answers not only don't count or aren't representative but may be offensive at times.

While the Jesus of the gospels doesn’t come off as a Republican, he definitely does come off as a moralizing leader of a strict, high commitment religion holding non-negotiable commands for followers but not pushing broader social change. This codes right in this day and age.

I guess. But "not pushing broader social change" is a pretty big deal. The entire NT assumes either implicitly or explicitly Christians will always be a powerless minority in the world, so there's tons of advice on how to navigate an unbelieving world, but nothing about how to actually run or structure society at large, since none of the authors seemed to dream that Christianity would ever become a popular, let alone state-enforced, creed. Jesus and the earliest disciples seem to have operated on the assumption that they were just going to have to "ride it out" until God came down (very soon) and set things right himself, and the (in)famous teachings urging poverty and passivity are given in light of that. Maybe such an ethos is right-wing, but it's not very attractive or useful to right-wingers today, nor has it historically been very attractive to Christian potentates, which is why so much ink has been spilled then and now to justify what boil down to the same old pagan statecraft and social mores, but with a cross on top.

And that’s a pretty big difference between Christianity and Islam- the Bible has a lot about how to be ruled, but next to nothing about ruling.

This is Sam Harris' point about "render unto Caesar" having no Qur'anic equivalent.

Mohammed was Caesar

Well, the old testament has more, but that's not enormously applicable.

The entire NT assumes either implicitly or explicitly Christians will always be a powerless minority in the world, so there's tons of advice on how to navigate an unbelieving world, but nothing about how to actually run or structure society at large, since none of the authors seemed to dream that Christianity would ever become a popular, let alone state-enforced, creed.

Strongly disagree with this. Everything from the assertion that there's no advice on how to run a large society, to the implication that the authors were incorrect to assume that Christianity would never be popular.

As far as advice on how to run a large society, there was plenty of direction regarding church organization throughout the book. Heck, Jesus seems to spend more time criticizing the existing leadership, and showing them a better path by example, than he does doing anything else.

As far as the church never being popular:

  • Much of the advice Christ was giving was contemporary advice to missionaries, who were encouraged to keep their heads down because they were currently in an unbelieving world. At other points people were encouraged to take up swords etc. Luke 22:35-36:

35 And he said unto them, When I sent you without apurse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing.

36 Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

  • It's easy to interpret essentially all of those teachings as more metaphorical, and I think doing so is more accurate than not. "The world" can be against Christianity even if Christianity is the dominant religion, simply by virtue of the world being worldly, or most Christians not yet being truly converted.

  • Also very easy to (and plenty of people do) consider Catholicism a sort of co-opted Christianity, one which at some point lost its way. Hard to argue that Christianity is a popular world religion if its two largest champion institutions (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) are not Christian.

As far as advice on how to run a large society, there was plenty of direction regarding church organization throughout the book.

That's very different. Most of this advice is given as just that, how to run the church as an insular community, and always defined against the larger unbelieving world. The Old Testament is full of laws, punishments, and rewards, but there's almost none of that in the NT.

Much of the advice Christ was giving was contemporary advice to missionaries, who were encouraged to keep their heads down because they were currently in an unbelieving world.

This is true, but there's no indication that Jesus or anyone else thought they would ever not be in an unbelieving world, at least until the eschaton. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head I don't believe there's a single place in the NT where it's even suggested that one day Christians might be kings, or generals, or even public magistrates. That verse in Luke is, as far as I'm aware, the only spot in the whole NT that even comes close to a suggestion that Christians should ever do violence against anyone else, so it naturally comes up a lot in discussions about this. But just a few verses later when the priests and the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, and the disciples try to defend him by force, he tells them to put the swords away. Why Luke included this bit, who knows for sure, but to me it looks more like Jesus in this story wanted to make a point that swords were in fact useless because what was happening was preordained.

There are plenty of places in the NT where God does violence on behalf of Christians (the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the earthquake that frees Peter from prison) but none where Christians are encouraged to do violence against anyone else, except for the episode at Gethsemane which is not approved of by the narrative of any of the gospels.

You make good points, mainly I disagree that things like "the world will hate you" referred to political power, and I especially disagree with the implication that this means that the later political power wielded by Christianity contradicts the Bible.

I think most of the "the world will hate you" referred to spiritual hatred etc., including the hatred each of us has towards our own higher impulses. Even in very Christian society, such as Christian Rome, there were plenty of high-level leaders who weren't sold on the religion. They were wolves in sheep's clothing, so to speak. That's not to say Christianity was not politically powerful, but spiritually it had much less power than "the world" i.e. all influences other than Christianity.

I generally read the NT as an amendment to the Old Testament. If the NT doesn't contradict the OT, then the teachings of the OT are still in force. With that in mind, I think it makes sense that the NT was more focused on the higher law--the lower law (all the laws etc.) had all been given and now Jesus was attempting to teach the next step. So yes, there was very little focus on laws etc. because that had already been covered. Kings, priests, etc. already had political power in Israel and now the next step was to take some of that away from them because they were misusing it.

I suppose I'm nitpicking, especially if that implication was unintentional. I agree with your point that Jesus taught poverty and passivity which is not very appealing in today's political climate.

I could be wrong, but off the top of my head I don't believe there's a single place in the NT where it's even suggested that one day Christians might be kings, or generals, or even public magistrates.

1 Timothy 2:4 does:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Pauls' asking them to pray for the kings, since kings too are part of God's plan of salvation.

You're right that that is fairly implicit, and I'm not really recalling any other such passage. I suppose there were Roman centurions, if we're counting low level offices.

Romans 13 describes violence being done by men favorably, but doesn't explicitly instruct Christians to do so. In revelation, martyrs wish for violence, but no Christians are doing it, I believe.

On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?

They do this with Christianity, too, and they just love them some "former/ex-Evangelical/Fundamentalist" who is now out there saying "it ain't necessarily so" (sorry, Bart Ehrman, but you're the poster child for this as far as I'm concerned).

If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely.

I don't know. From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.

I think it works both ways; for the liberals who have discarded religious tradition but aren't out-and-out declared atheists (they'd probably mumble something about being agnostic if pushed on it), the liberal Christians/Muslims/Jews give them that aura of authority by association, too, by coming out with "Yes, guys, you're in good with God because Godself never said nothing about contraception/polyamory/queer trans IVF babies" and propping them up that way. It's a two-way transaction: the religious liberals get the acceptance and support of the mainstream liberals, and the mainstream liberals accept them as weapons to use against the redneck knuckledraggers: "Oh, A is educated and knows the history and theology, unlike Bubba-Joe the Southern Babtist".

a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts

laughs in Catholic Er, maybe you heard about a little thing called the Reformation? Very big on this, that the True Pure Gospel Message had been corrupted and infiltrated by human interpolations and interpretations and that you had to go back to the Source. All through the history of Protestantism, there have been new denominations created over "No, we have the One True Pure version" - not to be picking on the Baptists, they just have the most accessible example for this in the Trail of Blood. 'Our church is the One True Church which survived in secret down the centuries despite the corruption and falling-away of others' (usually it's we Catholics who get it for this). The insistence about the KJV translation is just one attempt at the preservation of inerrancy, a complex topic of its own, but comparable for the necessity of adding in "in the original manuscripts" to cover this problem.

I think most of them, heart of heart don’t actually believe but don’t want to admit it to themselves. They like the trappings, the music, the friends they see at church, and the idea of helping their fellow man. It just boggles the imagination that someone could legitimately believe that the God who created the heavens and the earth says that something is wrong and you given the equivalent of a “yeah, but i want it to be okay so it is okay.” Ideals, especially ideals that you hold dear always have consequences. And to me, the absolute hallmark of a person believing a given set of propositions is whether they change their behavior in light of that.

Most people really use religion as a security blanket or insurance policy.

I disagree that most churchgoers don't believe in a way that would be hard to admit to themselves.

There are so many degrees of belief, especially about confusing things on which one is not an expert, that it only takes a small amount of rationalization to deal with any discrepancy. All you have to do is consider doctrinal disputes to be above your pay grade and defer to the theological experts, who assure you there is a complicated answer.

E.g. you might believe in quantum physics, without being bothered by the fact that different physicists subscribe to different interpretations of superposition.

I don’t think we’re talking about an obscure concept here. What the Bible says is more or less “gays, among others cannot inherit the Kingdom.” That’s not “well I’m not an expert so…” it’s plain text, and plainer if you read Leviticus.

But even so, if a person says they believe something and try to wiggle away when the rubber meets the road, I don’t think it’s a belief they hold that strongly. If I thought that quantum theory allowed for faster computers, I might well invest in a company trying to build one. If I thought there were martians on Mars, I’d send a signal if I could. If I think history is a process then I’d be looking to find patterns that allow me to predict the future in the past.

I'm no Bible expert, but I claim that even if it's relatively starkly written, that's still not a real problem for most people. Again I think quantum mechanics is a good analogy, with all sorts of intuitively-wrong-sounding claims made by supposed experts with tons of social proof.

I agree that if you start looking for patterns on your own it's pretty clear, but I think most people are (mostly rightly) in a state of learned epistemic helplessness on most topics.

Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”

55% of American adults believe that the bible is inerrant, so that is the most common belief, and is usually taken as pretty important—Protestants tend to have a high view of scripture, and Catholics also affirm that the scriptures are infallible, I belief. (Officially speaking, of course. That doesn't mean every layman knows every thing.)

Ah, you're referring to 1 Corinthians 7:12.

Here's the passage:

10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife.

12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?

I've seen some take this as talking about Jesus' own teachings on divorce, and still affirm that Paul is infallible. Some others think that Paul is fallible in that passages, since he recognizes it as from himself, even if he's infallible in general. In any case, Paul goes on to say at the end of the same chapter:

I think I too have the Spirit of God.

This reads to me as that it might be defending or affirming his authority, in some sense, at least. He does so more strongly in other places. Paul says in the same book (1 Cor 14:37),

If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.

In 2 Peter, it says

15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

So there, at least, Paul's writings were considered to be scripture.

Thank you for your explanation of 1 Corinthians 7. I’d probably respect it more if it did make a distinction between inspiration and personal best judgment, but I can see how the text supports your interpretation. Agnostically speaking, I probably shouldn’t hold it against Paul in the event that he either truly always speaks with inspiration or honestly believes that he does.

I’m having trouble squaring some of the statistics in your link with broader statistics in the USA. In particular, their survey would have it that 71% of Americans, in 2021, believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God in some sense (even if it might contain errors). But in 2021, only 63% of Americans said they were Christian.

So is the discrepancy all made up of Jews and Muslims? Are there “unaffiliated” people who nevertheless believe the Bible to be inspired by God? It would be helpful to know how the responses in the American Bible Society survey split up by stated religious affiliation, honestly.

In any case, this certainly supports the idea that a large percentage of Christians think the Bible “has no errors” (even if many say some of it is “symbolic and not literal.”) Still, as an outsider, I think I’m still most inclined to define “Christian” to mean people who believe in the divinity of Christ. I don’t think that someone who believes that Paul believed in an imminent apocalypse and writes with reference to that view is somehow “not Christian” if they still think that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and will someday return to judge us all, for example.

To be clear, I gave two differing interpretations of 1 Corinthians 7 that could be consistent with asserting the infallibility of Paul in his letters.

As to the surveys, that's a good point. Here's another poll with a number higher than 63%, which is odd as well: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx

It's less clear in the options than the American Bible Society survey, but it does have a number higher.

I wonder if these have different sampling mechanisms, and ones unrepresentative of the general public?

Pew research appears to be depending on data from here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/religious-projections-appendix-a/ Gallup appears to be using telephone calls: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/394616/220706ViewsofBible.pdf

American bible society also had theirs from online surveys, but its number was higher than Pew's, so it's not just surveys vs. telephone.

But 55% is barely better than half. And for those who consider it to have errors, I think you’d have to figure out what they don’t buy for the thing to make sense. 63% of Americans call themselves Christians, and 55% of Americans hold the Bible as inerrant. Which gives almost 10% who don’t. But “has errors can mean anything from very minor typographical errors to “oops we have the wrong books”.

I personally think the Jesus of history is best reflected by the Ebionites’ tradition, which would be a fairly strong “yes there are errors” thing. But then again, I don’t think anyone else would call Ebionites Christian in the modern sense.

laughs in Catholic Er, maybe you heard about a little thing called the Reformation?

Unless you're some weird flavor of Greek-Catholic I've never heard of... You know that there were various latin translations, and the current one (the vulgate) wasn't finalized until St Jerome, several hundred years into the A.D., right? That's an awful long time for errors to creep in before we get into the translation stuff.

Maybe that's why the Catholic church has the reputation for changing quicker than the Orthodox churches (probably the only groups for which that comparison is valid).

Oh, I know about St. Jerome and the Vulgate and the Septaguint.

But the "real Holy Book has been perverted by corruptions over the years so we have to go back to the original texts in the original language" isn't unique to Moslems, is what I'm saying.

Right, the Protestant Reformers (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc.), following Erasmus, were going back to the actual Greek and Hebrew, so the "translations are the problem" take doesn't apply here.

Bart Ehrman

I don't think Ehrman is a fair example. He's not a Christian and doesn't claim to be.

As an aside, I think it's kind of funny that Ehrman is often viewed as some kind of fire-breathing skeptic by Christian apologists (if I had a penny for every time i heard an apologist say something along the lines of "even Bart Ehrman accepts/believes/doesn't deny X") despite the fact that most of his positions are pretty middle of the road and sometimes even conservative in his field.

He's not a Christian and doesn't claim to be.

But a lot of the atheist/anti-Christian/anti-Fundamentalist places like presenting him as such. "Prominent Christian theologian says view of the Bible is bunk" goes over better than "Non-believer says view of the Bible is bunk".

Are you sure? I can't remember ever seeing Ehrman presented as a Christian. He's always been open about being an evangelical who lost his faith when he was pretty young. Though he says it had nothing to do with his study of the Bible and was instead related to his inability to reconcile the problem of evil.

From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.

Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.

I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying.

I would be surprised if this is true given the experience of the Christian equivalents.

To be clear, the Christian tradition is similarly clear and firm to the Islamic tradition on many hot-button issues. It isn't particularly the case that, say, Christianity was historically ambiguous about sexual morality in a way that Islam was not. Nonetheless many churches have been hollowed out, and I am unsurprised to see the same process going on in Islam. Catholicism, if anything, is more explicit about many of these laws than Islam, and yet most Catholics defy that.

My guess is that one of the key factors here is that for most people, religious identity is something more like cultural identity or community - for most Catholics, "I'm Catholic" means "I identify as part of the Catholic community" and not "I positively assent to all the doctrinal claims of the Catholic Church". Likewise I suspect for many Muslims, "I'm a Muslim" is a statement about which community group they're part of, rather than what they actually believe. And the beliefs can be substantially revised as long as the sense of group membership remains intact.

Put bluntly - only autistic weirdos care about their religion's actual doctrines and commandments. So it has ever been, and so it will ever be. Even in religions where rule-following is a huge part of daily life, those rules are followed as something more like a cultural habit than anything else.

Pro-gay Christians aren't lying. I think the ones who argue directly that the Bible is neutral or positive about same-sex relationships are saying something obviously false, but I don't think they know that it's false. Lying involves a sort of psychic pain - people don't like do it, and if we have to lie for a very long time, we usually trade that lie for a self-delusion. Delusions are easier and more comfortable to maintain.

The few Haider-style MINOs that exist at the moment, I feel pretty confident, are not making public claims that they privately know to be false. I doubt they are very different to the Christians or Jews who went down the same path before them.

I think the ones who argue directly that the Bible is neutral or positive about same-sex relationships are saying something obviously false, but I don't think they know that it's false.

Oh yeah. That the Pauline prescriptions only hold about what we'd call prostitution (or if they're all sex-positive and 'sex work is real work', they go for "no no what was meant is abusive relations where there is power imbalance") and not 'loving committed same-sex relationships'. Arguing over the definition of pais and that condemnation was of paederasty or paedophilia, not homosexuality. Claims that the Centurion and his servant (see pais) were same-sex lovers and Jesus blessed or at least approved of the relationship by healing the servant (seemingly the idea that the man whom the local Jewish community praised as righteous might care about a servant if he wasn't fucking him is too extreme to hold in contemplation; no, the only reason a big-wig would care about a household slave is if the slave was his bed-warmer. That's... not really helping the cause of "gay is okay and Christian too!", guys?)

David and Jonathan as gay lovers. Naomi and Ruth for the distaff side (and never mind that they were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, what's a little intergenerational technical incest against lesbian love?)

Yes. I've seen the arguments against Romans 1:26-27 as dispositive, for instance, and they seem profoundly weak to me. It is true that for Paul same-sex relationships are not the fundamental vice, but rather a symptom of the fundamental vice of idolatry - but that hardly seems a defense of those relationships, no more than the same observation is a defense of wickedness, covetousness, gossip, foolishness, or cruelty, all of which are in the same passage. It is true that the phrase Paul uses in those verses, para physin (against nature), is used in other contexts in a positive way (e.g. in Romans 11:24), but this in no way turns the negative reference in 1:26-27 into a positive one. Likewise you sometimes run into the argument that Paul was talking about people acting 'against nature' in the sense of against the way they are created, and he didn't know what sexual orientation is - now that we do know what it is, we understand that for a homosexual person to eschew same-sex relationships would be acting against their own nature. Therefore the Pauline argument should actually be in favour!

And so on. There's a lot of very standard but also very weak argumentation along these lines - here are two examples from the Australian debate a few years ago. I do not think these need to be particularly dignified with a response - in particular I think the second piece's conclusion that we need to be "even more Pauline than Paul" is an excuse for revisionist sophistry, where as long as we can contort a 'big idea' into something that can be awkwardly construed as supporting whatever we want to do today, we're free to ignore all the details of that idea.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that, if one approaches the Christian tradition - including both the Bible and the two thousand years of interpretation and practice on top of that - with anything like a neutral gaze, the disapproval of same-sex relationships is clear and unambiguous.

Nonetheless, people who have been raised in and identify with Christianity nonetheless sometimes want to affirm same-sex relationships. Rather than face the understandable psychic pain of needing to either abandon Christianity, or abandon their convictions about sexuality, they instead go for the oh-so-much-easier approach of convincing themselves that Christianity says what they wish it said.

I think this is an instructive example not only for Christians thinking about issues to do with sexuality, but for Christians thinking about any moral issues whatsoever - because on every issue, there is a temptation like this, a temptation to disfigure the gospel and make it into whatever is convenient for one's present interests.

At any rate -

As for Christianity, so too for Islam. I don't think the clarity of Islamic teaching on this point will help it any. Christian teaching is just as clear, and yet...

Put bluntly - only autistic weirdos care about their religion's actual doctrines and commandments. So it has ever been, and so it will ever be.

This feels ahistorical to me. See: Iconoclasm, the 30 Years War, etc... Revisionists might claim that these disputes weren't "really" about religion. But that's just cope. Before modern times, people deeply cared about religion, even the little nitpicky things, and were often willing to fight and die for it, or even spend their whole lives in a monastery praying.

Does that mean that everyone was rules adherent all the time? Of course not. But it does mean that people thought the rules mattered. Pre or extramarital sex was taboo in nearly all Christian cultures until modern times. If you were caught doing it, it could have dire consequences.

Even today, Catholics can't get remarried if they get a divorce.

And let's not get started on Judaism, which is just nitpicky rules all the way down.

Even today, Catholics can't get remarried if they get a divorce.

Not a secular divorce at least. The completely legitimate and not abused annulment process however...

Even if we accept that the thirty years’ war and all other similar conflicts back to Martin Luther were about religious doctrine, this was a time in which the great majority of lay people could not read and in which the majority of the peasantry barely even practiced (whether Protestant or Catholic) what we would today consider those forms of Christianity - until the late 18th century Christianity as practiced in rural Europe was a weird syncretic blend of Christianity and ancient folklore / paganism.

Sure, I can believe the average peasant soldier in the thirty years war believed they were fighting for God / Christ and that the enemy were infidels, but that they were well versed in the specifics of the philosophical debate? Nah, I doubt it.

Sure, I can believe the average peasant soldier in the thirty years war believed they were fighting for God / Christ and that the enemy were infidels, but that they were well versed in the specifics of the philosophical debate? Nah, I doubt it.

I think this assumption might be wrong. I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, but my understanding is that common people of the time were interested in doctrinal disputes to a surprising degree.

A good analogy would be how a person today, though scientifically illiterate, still has an opinion on the correctness of the Big Bang, evolution, climate change, etc...

Literacy was actually really high in some of these times and places. I remember seeing something—maybe a Scottpost?—about how 1600s America was remarkably literate, sometimes in Latin. Side effect of the massive Puritan influence. It’s why political philosophy was so popular. Paine et al. would get so much mileage out of pamphlets because they were part of a long tradition.

The opening shots of the Reformation largely took place through pamphlet wars. Sure, the main audience was religious or academic. But that got diffused very efficiently to congregations.

I remember seeing something—maybe a Scottpost?—about how 1600s America was remarkably literate, sometimes in Latin.

You probably read that in Scott's review of Albion's Seed. The thing is that that phenomenon was a uniquely Puritan anomaly and not shared with the other English colonies, and certainly not with continental Europe until much later.

While dependent on the printing press, It was more the fact that religous arguments were being made in the vernacular languages at all that caused the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. Translations of the works of men like Luther did in the 16th century what the internet did in the 21st, bringing people face to face with value systems and beliefs sometimes fundamentally alien to their own, and causing some to embark on a century-long bloody crusade to rid Europe of all the newly-revealed heretics.

Yep, that’s it. Thanks!

I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:

There is good reason why atheism ended on garbage dump of history, why outspoken atheists are in the current year seen as racists and fascists.

Old, bolshevik style smashing religion with sledgehammer worked, but this new way, hollowing religion from the inside and dressing in its skin, works much better.

It worked on Christianity, despite many Christian religious scholars protesting that Christianity was never tolerant and LGBTQ+ affirming, and it is working on Islam now.

And it works well. 100 years ago, 50 years ago it would be unthinkable for Pope openly display and worship pagan idols in the Vatican. Today, it is just another day.

pro and contra positions on the controversy.

Pachamama happened in October 2019, and COVID possibly began October 2019. Coincidence? Or demons?

The backlash to the current pope’s… antics… is rather intense and would likely have led to a coup attempt if he was in better health.

To what pagan idols and idolatry are you refering here?

Nevermind, the links weren't showing up properly for me.

Ordinary interfaith ecumenical ceremony, no big deal.

Except when you take Christianity even slightly seriously, then it looks like really big thing, thing from the book of Revelation.

Not many people do in this century and none of them are in position of power and influence in Vatican.

I guess Christianity never had much chance of becoming tied to just one language, given that it was a movement centered around Greek-language stories of a man who spoke Aramaic and Hebrew and lived in an empire controlled by Latin-speakers. But in Christianity's case this probably became one of its strengths. It is unlikely that Christianity could have taken over the Roman Empire if its leaders had been determined to focus the religion around just one language.

was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts.

Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions? We definitely still have those. (Or, more precisely, while there are minor textual differences between manuscripts, we can be sure of the text of the vast majority, and even more if you only care about ones where the differences are at all meaningful)

Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions?

No. This is a polemic tracing its way directly to Mohammed. He claimed he was prophesied in the Torah and Gospel (a common sort of claim for an upstart) and he just...wasn't. The Qur'an cannot be wrong, so the solution for him was to claim it was corrupted. The Qur'anic phrasing usually implies mistranslation or lying - it says people cover up the truth or lie with their mouths, not that the books were lost. It's a more extreme version of the polemics of some early Christians about Jews hiding prophecies of Jesus. God has a sense of humor.

But Muslims eventually* realized that what Christians especially believed about the Gospel was utterly incompatible with their own (the Qur'an seems to believe it was a Qur'an-like book given to Jesus that commanded his followers to fight and die) and so they insisted that it was utterly, totally lost. Meanwhile the Torah was conveniently corrupted enough to eliminate the references to Mohammed.

This also led to a polemic that Islam was so much better because it was perfectly preserved. Not actually true but Islam does have earlier witnesses of the Qur'an compared to say...the Bible and they're remarkably similar to what we have, even though there's still variants due to the consonantal text. Muslims reacted really badly to even one Islamic scholar pointing out "holes in the narrative". It's a deeply emotional issue, a pillar they take for granted.

Muslims instrumentally use critical scholarship to point to things like the Documentary Hypothesis that they think backs their view of corruption. But they will never take the conclusions to their natural end. Conclusions like:

  1. Yes, things like the Exodus and Patriarchs are inherently historically dubious and part of works that show clear artifice. Given the Qur'an copies them...

  2. Yes, even though that is the case we actually have a very reasonable view of what the Bible says over centuries, even if it isn't historically credible and there's no "Muslim Gospel of Jesus" or missing links in the Torah - it's an apologetic construction. We have a general idea of when books were compiled and we certainly have a lot of witnesses and variants that help us try to figure out what was meant (unlike the Qur'an where the "bad" manuscripts were all burned by Caliphal fiat).

  3. There's no "'goldilocks zone" where we accept all we've learned about corruption but also the Bible is corrupted in these exact ways that're helpful for Islam but also substantially true in the telling of its legends that we know from critical scholarship are dubious.

tl;dr: Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off. No amount of showing them ancient copies of Deuteronomy that match what we have now will change their minds. They're right for the wrong reasons.

* The Bible probably wasn't translated into Arabic in Mohammed's time. In fact: a lot of the stories people think the Qur'an got from the Bible actually came from Syriac Christian apocryphal versions that likely would have been spread orally in the region. Most obviously Jesus' miracle of breathing life into the clay birds - not Biblical, but from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Interestingly, from this side of the fence, Islam was treated early on as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion of its own - see Dante putting Mohammed and Ali into the bolge of the Schismatics in the Eight Circle of Hell in the Inferno.

No cask ever gapes so wide for loss

of mid- or side-stave as the soul I saw

cleft from the chin right down to where men fart.

Between the legs the entrails dangled. I saw

the innards and the loathsome sack

that turns what one has swallowed into shit.

While I was caught up in the sight of him,

he looked at me and, with his hands, ripped apart

his chest, saying: 'See how I rend myself,

'see how mangled is Mohammed!

Ahead of me proceeds Alì, in tears,

his face split open from his chin to forelock.

'And all the others whom you see

sowed scandal and schism while they lived,

and that is why they here are hacked asunder

Interestingly, from this side of the fence, Islam was treated early on as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion of its own

People of the time certainly didn't consider it original: "And when Our verses are recited to them, they say, "We have heard. If we willed, we could say [something] like this. This is not but legends of the former peoples." (Q8:31).

The modern revisionist school (people like Fred Donner and Stephen Shoemaker) sees Islam as a sort of ecumenical Abrahamic movement of "Believers" that reached out to conquer the Holy Land (which might explain the smoothness of the conquests). Later Caliphs had to construct a more exclusionary identity for "Muslims" in the wake of Mohammed's death (since most of the biographical material is relatively late by Gospel standards)

IMO Muslims early on probably didn't think of themselves as a distinct and overriding religion. Besides the reasons stated, the Quran says that it was sent so the Arabs could have their own revelation (which fits with the absence of an Arabic Bible at the time) and multiple times it speaks to insist the other groups judge by their books.

The Qur'an clearly relies on other faiths to back Islam (Q7:157) and tells them to judge by their existing books - the doctrine of corruption has done a remarkable job at obscuring that Islam can't actually be a theologically self-sustaining religion for this reason.

The book gives us a criteria to prove Islam and...it lies with other faiths. You can see why the rejection of the Qur'an by Jews prompted such issues and polemics and why Muslims today have this weird mix of token respect for the Bible as an earlier stage in the fossil record but also it's corrupt and you don't need it and maybe don't even read it cause people changed it to lie.

If these sort of "if you just look at the material reality, you will discover you're completely wrong" arguments have been roundly dismissed in discussions about actual material reality, then why are wwe expecting anyone to take them seriously when the conversation is explicitly about religion?

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following.

I read you as saying that things are hard to interpret or make sense of, and so we can't trust people to do so, religiously or in real life.

I read the post I was originally responding to as saying that things are hard to translate, and so we can't trust translations. But that particular difficulty can be overcome by not using a translation, since we have texts. So then I was expressing confusion, since I wouldn't have expected that a muslim would consider the bible safe to trust if we read it in the original greek or whatever the way they would think of the Quran.

That seems to hold independently of whether things are hard to interpret or make sense of.

No, I'm saying that even when things are easy to interpret and make sense, people are still going to reject them, if they go against someone's preconceived ideas. Even if these people swear up and down they they're unbiased, and just searching for the truth.

On the other hand, when it comes to religion, most of them openly state they're a matter of faith, so why would you be surprised that people reject things that contradict their religion?

Probably! I still appreciated the question, though. Even with religion, sometimes you can have an interesting conversation with someone who is willing to take these questions seriously.

Don't be so sure, at least for some the best path to atheism is autistically researching the origin of the holly books. When you see the profane and base materialness and petty power struggles of the Church's body it really sours the whole thing.

Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):

Honestly this is the case for the vast majority of allegiances between immigrant/refugee groups and Liberalism. It is quickly forgotten by the Western Left that practically everybody from a progressive-tinged first world nation is about 5 jumps to the left socially on most issues, and that whilst the recent imports from wherever else are briefly aligned whilst it's in their financial interests to have a leg up, they are going to revert to form on social issues the second they're established.

that whilst the recent imports from wherever else are briefly aligned whilst it's in their financial interests to have a leg up, they are going to revert to form on social issues the second they're established.

This is not borne out by their voting records, which remains solidly Democratic.

True.

On one hand, you have the high income Muslims who generally try to fit into upper middle-class white society, which means accepting the whole progressive stack and becoming a MINO.

On the other hand, you have the low income Muslims who stand to directly benefit from left-wing politics via either greater government handouts or better odds of bringing family members over.

But things will change. Recently the only Muslim-majority city in America voted to ban the gay pride flag. Looking at who is coming to America and who is having kids, the future looks much more conservative socially, but much more socialist economically.

Recently the only Muslim-majority city in America voted to ban the gay pride flag.

Not really.

Which groups are you using as a proxy? Every major demographic started as a downtrodden immigrant group. Practically the only lasting pro-left successful immigrant group I can think of is the Asian diaspora, though they've been psyopped into some sort of 'despite the fact that you're the most successful and affluent demographic ever, you're victims' mix

All Hispanics with the exception of Cubans, and both south and east Asians.

Which groups do you have in mind here? Tammany Hall era Irish immigrants? That process took the better part of 100 years.

I've been waiting for a long time for the immigrant turn away from modern progressivism, preferably starting with a Hispanic/Asian coalition in California that finally sweeps away its white Democratic gerontocracy and cleans the place up, but it hasn't materialized yet.

Eh, I'm not sure it's a bad strategy to forge an alliance with the first generation and then try to assimilate the 2nd & 3rd generation who grow up on English language media.

The issue is that the most liberal migrants have 0-2 kids. They embrace the individualist culture while not having parents that help them get established in the housing market. They get their small condo in a city when they are in their 30s. The most conservative migrants have 8 kids and make due. When it comes to muslim immigrants we are selecting for religiousness at an extreme level.

In parts of Europe one can make the case that there is a brewing culture war between a shrinking post-Christian secular majority and a growing Muslim minority descended from poor, rural immigrants from North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Levant and Somalia between ~1960 and the present.

In the US this just isn’t the case. About 20% of US immigrants are from Muslim majority countries, although some of those belong to Christian or other minorities in those countries, eg. Coptic Egyptians, Iraqi Christians and so on. A much smaller percentage of total migrants are Muslim than even a revised figure would suggest, since of course the official figure doesn’t include illegal migrants, very few of whom are Muslim. By contrast in much of Western Europe the vast majority of non-EU immigrants are Muslim. American Muslims also have modest birthrates - higher than the average (approx. 2.5 per woman) but not the very high figures one sometimes sees for some European immigrant groups (eg. Libyans in the UK have a tfr in excess of 5 iirc).

Also different socioeconomic classes of Muslims.

American Muslims (and South Asians, or any immigrant group other than Latin Americans) are from the top IQ percentiles of their homelands. Not exactly the case for the UK.

It's a bit exclusionary to claim that CINOs are Christians while MINOs are not. Yes, Islam places tighter controls on the doctrine, but it's still variant enough to spawn Salsfism/Wahhabism, which, as I understand, is something of a Calvinism. Or Jadidism, if you want legalist interpretations of the Quran that embrace modernity. Or Sufism, if esoteric intepretations are needed.

In general, I think studying the history of Islam in Russian Empire and the USSR is quite important for the evolution of modern secularized Islam. Muslim-majority countries often do not allow religious pluralism: there's a single branch of Islam that is accepted and everyone else is a heretic. When a Christian or an atheist state tells you, "you all are Muslims, even this Ahmasomething guy, now shut up, smile and hold hands or it's Siberia for you", this does wonders for intrafaith dialogue.

Your view of Islam is too fixated on mainstream Sunni ideology and argumentation, which makes you mistake the map for the territory. Theologically arguments about Quran and Hadith are interesting but they have a distorting effect if you are trying to deduce whether Islam can be compatible with a fulfilling life.

Islam is ultimately nothing more than a sum of Muslims and their communal practices. In today's world Muslims are often (but not always) in the position of a poor backwards ignored uneducated masses. Even when they move to rich western countries with theoretical equal citizenship they are hardly more than an unwanted minority barely tolerated because the locals don’t want to clean the sewers themselves. So the practice of the religion is heavily influenced by this inferiority complex and backwardness. Muslim populations have a habit of sticking together, fatalism, being wary of outside influences because they instinctively feel that the outsiders will only bring more harm and humiliation. They have a point.

But this wasn’t always the case. When the conditions allowed, Islam in history also acted as a vessel for wildly creative philosophy, cosmopolitanism and intellectual freedom. There are a myriad of ways to work around the limitations of Quran and Hadith. Quran is quiet an obtuse text and there are a million trillion Hadith with contradictory opinions. This is a religious tradition that created as divergent streams as Sufism and Salafism for this exact purpose.

I am also an ex-Muslim by the way. But over time I got to recognise my rejection was more based on a feeling of class superiority than any deeper inquiry. That’s how Turkey works unfortunately and I don’t plan to abandon my social class anytime soon. But I also recognise that if the economic and political currents change Islam is more than capable of once again becoming a religion of good life and progress instead of the current bigoted mess.

In the "Bowling Alone" world I have a hard time getting upset at anyone who tries to salvage a tradition of communal bonding. I was raised in a progressive Christian congregation and while I'm personally an atheist I am very close with the cohort I grew up with in that church and benefitted a lot from the mentorship of older members of the congregation. Being part of an extended social network like that is really valuable especially early in life and while I attend church sporadically now if I had a child I'd be interested in finding a progressive congregation to raise them in. While I can be convinced it's pretty hypocritical I'd rather we sort of awkwardly pretend the anti-homosexuality, radically egalitarian, and anti-women in leadership parts of the Bible aren't there then stay home on Sunday and watch the early NFL games.

If MINO's succeed in amending Islam so that Mosques becomes an intergenerational book club with some meditation and singing that parrot mainstream American values that seems like a better outcome to me than the 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim's abandoning their faith tradition and using the spare time for individualized recreational activities or something.

Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available.

How does this work as a practical matter? How are modern people able to read a 1400-year-old version of Arabic?

Think of the Quran as the bedrock anchor to Arabic. All Muslims are expected to pray five times a day which involves reciting memorized surahs (basically short "chapters"). The more surahs you knew the better, and the most venerated achievement was memorizing the entire Quran (earning the title of Hafiz meaning "Protector"). So literacy was directly encouraged and maintained through this daily repetition and crucially this practice was never relegated to just a clergy caste (which doesn't really exist in Islam).

There's still going to be some linguistic drift over the years but it's necessarily going to stay banded to the Quran's version of Arabic. Think about how different English would sound today if all English speakers maintained a 1400 year old tradition of reciting original passages from Beowulf every day.

affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.

The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".

Reading Sotomayors and Jackson’s dissents all I can think is: “this is an excellent example of why affirmative action needs to be banned”

Thomas is an affirmative action appointee too; no way was a non-black person getting Thurgood Marshall's seat.

One well known reason to oppose affirmative action even for minorities is that just the possibility of it taints the achievements of any minority who is capable enough to have succeeded on his own. Of course, the left doesn't pay attention to this and it's inherently hard for white people to point it out, but it seems as though you have just given an example of it.

The left's answer to that problem, at least as materialized at a certain large Internet search firm, was to demand that you do not notice it and you're subject to adverse employment action if you do. "How dare you assume your co-workers aren't competent?". It's amazing how many otherwise-intractable problems are amenable to the use of force if you just have enough force available.

Of course, it doesn't work on Internet forums like this... but nobody cares what I think.

Of course, it doesn't work on Internet forums like this...

I feel kind of dirty saying that you of all people are too optimistic, but... have you forgotten about the doxxing mobs that go around phoning HR departments?

Such an argument is a losing one automatically, as it implicitly agrees with the pro-affirmative action premise that something is only good(bad) if it’s good(bad) for non-Asian minorities.

Affirmative action privileges non-Asian minorities over Whites and Asians; non-Asian minorities hardest hit.

He at least had the good sense to feel ashamed of it

edit: ignore me, I'm confused

Bork was nominated to replace Justice Powell, not Justice Marshall. That seat ultimately went to Kennedy.

i remember reading a report or a narrative about yale law school affirmative action and them mentioning Thomas (or named him in it, before he was famous). It basically implied he wasn't that great of a student compared to his white peers. I might be remembering incorrectly though - if anyone knows what im referring to, please drop a link

I sorely hope I am never judged on my classroom participation at college.

In today's dissent, Sotomayor observed that "the Constitution places no value on discrimination". Maybe she just really believes in stare decisis? "Whelp, as of yesterday, I had thought that discrimination was a compelling interest, but the Court ruled otherwise, so now I guess that discrimination has no value whatsoever."

If she'd been cheeky enough to cite SFFA when she wrote that, I'd give her some credit.

An opinion piece in the WSJ calls out poor numeracy. It appears the false claim was copied from an amicus brief, still it appears sloppy. I'd have thought statistical claims especially would receive specific attention / validation.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.

You've been warned repeatedly for low-effort booing. This post is nothing but culture war and sneering.

Banned for three days.

the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".

Which is a loophole you can drive the whole edifice through. Thanks for nothing, Roberts.

That's the point of Roberts here. In any case where he knows full well the vote is going to upset the status quo and he cannot stop it (like he did when there was a more consistent 5-4 majority), he by pure happenstance writes the most moderately worded and least status-quo upsetting decision which can be written and still signed on to by the "majority." If this had been a 5-4 majority opinion with Roberts in the minority, this would have been a far stronger opinion.

My understanding based on rumor from within "conservative" legal circles is that he attempted to do the same thing in the Dobbs decision, including looking the other way as it was leaked because he failed to get the majority to sign on to his more watered-down version and edits.

Surely, we'll get that leaker any day now; apparently the most concealed leaker in the history of leakers despite it being known with a decent amount of confidence within a couple days due to the meta data in the document and the plausible leak vector to a sports writer.

Just Roberts Things, although what’s worse is that the others could have passed something stricter without him. This isn’t even a pyrrhic victory, it’s actually worse than anyone on the right expected.

Not worse than what I expected.

Hold on you incorrigible blackpillers, wouldn't it be worse if they actually upheld AA and the majority opinion was Jackson's ?

I'm pretty sure @The_Nybbler predicted that the supreme court would uphold roe and AA and that Musk's takeover of twitter would fail.

I'm pretty sure I did not predict the Supreme Court would uphold Roe. I've made several predictions about Musk's takeover of Twitter, though I don't have convenient links to them.

When roe got struck, you refused to update because it hadn‘t taken effect. When Musk was buying twitter, you refused to update because the deal wasn‘t finalized. Source. Now AA‘s struck and it‘s the same spiel.

Of course, if they‘d upheld, you‘d consider it a validation of your perspective. Do you ever update in the other direction?

When roe got struck, you refused to update because it hadn‘t taken effect.

When Dobbs got leaked. But in that post I made no predictions; I merely refused to update prematurely.

Are you updating now, belatedly?

Often 'refusing to update prematurely" is an excuse not to update at all, like the guy who needs 1000 hours of research 'as a starter' before he can change his mind on HBD.

Certainly I agree that Supreme Court is allowing abortion bans by states. As for Musk, I think the jury is still out; Twitter is definitely better for now but he just turned it over to Linda Yaccarino, who is literally straight out of the mainstream media.

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"At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise... despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.)"

Roberts does specifically mention application essays as unacceptable. That does restrict one of the simplest, most pervasive methods universities currently use to discriminate based on race. Although I agree they'll be back in 10 years to decide if something qualifies as "other means" in a new case. That was probably going to happen anyway.

Roberts might honestly tell himself that all he’s doing is allowing applicants to write about their lived experiences in their essays, but in practice he surely knows that what he said will be cited endlessly to maintain the current regime this supposedly bans.

He doesn't establish application essays as unlawful. Just an application essay which say "I'm black" or whatever. He explicitly allows for application essays with "discussion [of race] is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university". That will be transformed into giving high weight to a pro-forma recitation of how being of a favored minority race matters.

Relatedly, some applicants might be able to use the essay to imply their race in a clever way that gets them in

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna742586

Stanford knew this kid was South Asian though, he didn’t get in by tricking them.

It's a good decision, sir.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask, what role does Thomas's opinion hold when it comes to lower court rulings? He wrote his own opinion after all, that had to count for something, but Roberts has the main opinion and that obviously counts for more.

what role does Thomas's opinion hold when it comes to lower court rulings?

Approximately the same as if he had posted it on Twitter instead.

Well, slightly more. While they aren't binding precedent, they do regularly cite concurrences or dissents of cases—it happened a bunch in this opinion, in Plessy, Grutter, and others, and Thomas especially likes citing his own dissents and concurrences, I believe.

Sure, but the Supreme Court can cite whatever it wants. They cite things like the Articles of Confederation or the Magna Carta all the time. There is really no difference between citing a noncontrolling Justice Story opinion, and citing his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. The court would have no problem citing a tweet if the opportunity arose.

I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements" - where one can't really prove any bias at all. Yes, if you measure by any objective merit criteria, the bias is apparent, but you see, we're not using these criteria, we are using "holistic view", which does not explicitly name race as a factor, good luck proving in court we're using it heavily. They'll just start being more careful about that and develop a newspeak that ensures discrimination is called something else. If academia is consistently good at anything it is at producing impenetrable jargon.

Doesn't this ruling mean that White/Asian applicants have a pretty good shot at suing and winning a discrimination lawsuit against a University implementing such a system?

A University needs to get the message to dozens of employees in the applications office but somehow not have any emails/text messages that could come up in discovery.

A University needs to get the message to dozens of employees in the applications office but somehow not have any emails/text messages that could come up in discovery.

The case has to GET to discovery. Which means the complainant must demonstrate a reasonable likelyhood to succeed on the merits, which means among other things that they have to show that but for the alleged discrimination they would have been admitted. And they have to do that before discovery. When the complainant is of the wrong color (white or yellow), the courts will interpret these requirements VERY strictly and the cases won't go anywhere.

If I were the university, I'd be most worried about whistleblower complaints leading to embarrassing discovery reveals. That new admissions hire with sterling SJ credentials, who talks the lingo fluently? How sure are you that she/they aren't a plant from some right-wing org looking for a big payday? What about the handful of white men still working in those roles, can they be trusted? Progressive ideology plus institutional inertia will definitely incline schools towards noncompliance with the new regime, but Ivies sitting on multibillion endowments are a big fat target, and a single lawsuit can change the tune of the board of trustees in a hurry, even if their school wasn't in the crosshairs this time.

Admissions staff are largely former students who are too lazy to enter the real world but also aren’t good enough to become faculty / do a PhD. They are perfectly selected to conform to the admissions bis of their predecessors.

There will continue to be bias, but I think the difference now is that there is actual clarity in the law and monetary consequences for the losers. Any kind of wink-nod policies are going to have to survive potential whistleblowers and legal discovery.

The case has to GET to discovery. Which means the complainant must demonstrate a reasonable likelyhood to succeed on the merits

No, to get to discovery the plaintiff just has to allege sufficient specific facts to constitute a violation of law assuming they're proven to be true. You might be mixing the standard up with the one for a preliminary injunction, which requires (1) a showing of irreparable harm should the status quo not be maintained, and (2) a showing that the requesting party is likely to succeed on the merits.

When the complainant is of the wrong color (white or yellow), the courts will interpret these requirements VERY strictly and the cases won't go anywhere.

I don't think this is the case after today. Any lawsuit like this would get national attention and won't get quietly swept under the table. I know progressive judges can go off the rails sometimes, but it's still considered a mark against you if your rulings get overturned by a higher court.

it's still considered a mark against you if your rulings get overturned by a higher court.

Only if the higher court is good people. If it's bad people, like Trump appointees, you're a member in good standing of #Resistance.

I covered some of it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/550/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/114107?context=8#context but if you're lazy, you could make it easier - "Diversity and inclusion is our strength!" is pretty much enough to signal what policy is expected, but I am not sure it'd be easy to win a lawsuit claiming "diversity" is an inherently racist criteria. Of course, there could be one or two employees in the admissions office who would not understand that "admitting diverse applicants" means "admit less whites and Asians" - but these could be identified and targeted at the next round of right-sizing, until everybody knows how the system works.

Yes. The ruling specifically calls out "indirect" ways of re-implementing the same system. They can try it, but my guess is most of their lawyers will be advising against it because they will auto-lose if anyone sues.

Their lawyers are fully on board, ideologically. And Harvard has already released a statement pretty clearly indicating they're going to use Robert's talisman to get around the ruling.

The problem is that with ‘holistic’ admissions decisions the plaintiffs would be unable to prove that they were discriminated against. They can’t point to admissions statistics and say “that 15% of freshmen are black and only 25% are asian shows I’m being discriminated against” because Harvard can just say that a) Asians are still overrepresented compared to their share of the population and b) that holistic admissions is based on intangibles, not grades, so SAT scores, GPA etc don’t by themselves prove anything.

I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements"

This is where the fun starts, but does not end. This is an anti-discrimination ruling. In broad strokes, anti-discrimination is an area where America has been building up jurisprudence for decades cracking down on any behaviours that might indirectly behave like discrimination.

The Ivy's will certainly try that kind of indirect discrimination, but lawyers from around the land will be looking for lucrative test cases, and they'll be doing it in an environment where the top court in the land has just told the world that anti-discrimination law cuts both ways.

If Harvard tomorrow decides to condition entry on basketball skills, they can. Their mistake in this case was failing to apply their own purported standards equally to different groups, in the sense that they discriminated against Asians who in every sense passed the university’s threshold for acceptance and so could only have been nakedly discriminated against because of their race. If Harvard abolishes objective admissions criteria entirely and admits purely based on ‘personality fit’ and ‘unique perspectives’, they can admit people in whatever proportions they wish and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The only reason a group could complain is if they were highly underrepresented (eg. Asians are 5% of the population, but made up only 1% of admissions). But Asians have always been and still will be overrepresented at elite colleges, so this approach won’t work.

So, for example, in 2022 the proportion of black freshmen at Harvard was about 16%. Say that next year, Harvard moves to purely subjective criteria for admissions and this rises to 20%, while the percentage of Asians rises by 1% and the percentage of whites falls by 5%. What can anti affirmative-action campaigners do? Absolutely nothing, because Harvard can simply claim the criteria have changed and they now prioritize recruiting people based upon their ‘personal resilience’ or something as evaluated by AdCom.

The best historical parallel is the post civil war amendments, 13-15. Virtually everything 14 and 15 were designed to accomplish should have been accomplished by 13.

Read historically 13, 14 and 15 read as:

Free the slaves.

No, like, really, free them, they're people now, citizens and everything.

No, fucking really, you have to let them vote too.

Then the Democrats made alliance between inner city Irish immigrants and Southern lost causers, the government lost interest in enforcement, and until the 50s the whole thing sat in abeyance.

It will take several more major court decisions, and a government interested in enforcement, before this decision will actually mean AA permanently ends. But it's an important first step.

It will take several more major court decisions, and a government interested in enforcement, before this decision will actually mean AA permanently ends. But it's an important first step.

We won't have the second, and we probably won't have the first -- next time there's a decision the court will have changed and it will go the other way. As usual the decision is "heads the left wins forever, tails the left holds the line now and wins forever later".

yeah . holistic admissions is just a way to smuggle in affirmative action

This is why I think the pre-Bakke quota system some universities had was actually the best, as it was far more transparent. Set aside some minimum percentage of place for black students (and possibly also Natives) and Asian students, for instance, at least know they are competing on an even-playing field for the 95%, or whatever, of places left, and thus there is less scope for sour grapes. As you say all this ruling seems to achieve is to make things even more obscure and impenetrable.

Awesome. When can we start talking about reparation for Asians and Whites?

I'm serious. Here in the UK, the RAF was forced to pay out 5 grand to me it had been deemed to have unfairly discriminated against:

https://news.sky.com/story/raf-recruiters-were-advised-against-selecting-useless-white-male-pilots-to-hit-diversity-targets-12893684

Anyone White or Asian who was refused a place at a university while a lower-GPA beneficiary of affirmative action received a place in the same intake year should be entitled to compensation, in my view. Paid out of the university's pockets, naturally.

My goodness but that article is incredibly nakedly biased. Little context, multiple scare quotes from the Left, basically zero indication as to why the majority might think what it does. Is this the news Americans are getting?

Hyup. That’s pretty standard from the US legacy media.

Good news is that these types of outlets are absolutely getting their lunch eaten by alternatives and will likely die out as the boomers die out.

The alternatives eating their lunch are biased as badly. It's going to be hard to find online news sources with a favorable view of the decision.

One hopes, but the ability of existing interests to simply fund them as propaganda organs means they'll probably persist quite a while past their natural expiry date, even if their readership drops away to basically nil.

Roberts' poison pill of allowing race to be discussed in personal essays and then allowing universities to take that into account mostly nullified this decision. As others have noted, this tactic has been used by universities in several states like California in previous years.

I would say this is a small and positive step, mostly for normative reasons, but in practical terms it's a whimper rather than a bang.

Obviously universities will look to get around this, but I don't see a "poison pill" here:

Roberts: "But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today."

Doesn't this leave universities open to lawsuits if they attempt to racially balance? The 14th amendment has a strict scrutiny standard.

It probably bar them from explicitly instituting a policy that mentions race. But it won't ban something like "if you come from a community that previously experienced hardship and bigotry, and is under-represented in higher education, you get +100 points", while the determination of the "community" is such that nobody white or Asian would ever qualify.

Not necessarily. The Court took pains to explicitly disallow the use of racial stereotyping. I take this to mean they can't assign points for being the same race as other people who experienced hardship and bigotry, but they could assign points if you, personally, experienced hardship and bigotry.

but they could assign points if you, personally, experienced hardship and bigotry.

If you're black, you can write "As a black person in America I of course experienced hardship and bigotry on account of my race", and this will count favorably towards your admissions decision (no attempt will be made to check if it's even plausible). If you write "As a Chinese person in America I of course experienced hardship and bigotry on account of my race" this will not count favorably, and the Court is fine with this.

I know these institutions seem like hiveminds, but there has to be some level of actual coordination to pull off affirmative action as it has been practiced. If Universities attempt an end run around the ruling, then the whole admissions process will be open to discovery and one email or whistleblower will blow the whole thing up. I know Middlebury and Harvard PR teams have put out statements to this effect, but I think cooler heads will prevail. University endowments are a big fat target for lawsuits and alumni donors won't appreciate it being ransacked for progressive brownie points. Universities won't be able to operate in the shadows knowing that they will need to meet a strict scrutiny standard for their admissions process.

They will not actually be subject to that strict scrutiny. They will present the talisman Roberts handed them and the courts will accept it.

The fact that universities have gone considerably far beyond what they were previously allowed to do indicates that there is a substantial degree of coordination going on.

That's correct, there was a lot of coordination. Today's decision had the following text from UNC admissions officers:

"[P]erfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th [grade].”

“Brown?!”

“Heck no. Asian.”

“Of course. Still impressive.”

Do anyone think this will be allowed going forward?

I wonder... What's the authentication process for a college application? There's one study design used for employment markets that tries to reveal discrimination by sending in two fake applications, which are substantively identical but have different superficial racial (or gender, depending on the goal) identifiers to them. Would it be possible to run studies of a similar design for college apps? I don't see the ethics of that being any worse than doing that for job applications.

Even if so, it seems a student that's actually harmed would have a hard time proving the discrimination affected them in particular.

I don't see the ethics of that being any worse than doing that for job applications.

Such studies are unethical when they come to the wrong conclusion, as Peter Boghossian could tell you.

Well, we can see from their reactions that Harvard et al. interpreted it exactly as "you can assign points for being the same race as other people who experienced hardship and bigotry, if you write an essay about it". Just mention "systemic racism", and it's done. So at least until they are successfully sued for it - again, they'd try to keep on doing the same thing.

There is going to be a lot of legal scrutiny for any institution that tries to implement the old system by other means. How does a University actually implement this policy without incriminating texts/emails? A University can't have emails to their admissions officers that "being from a black community is hardship wink" or they'll be violating the Civil Rights of other applicants.

I've read an article a couple of years ago (unfortunately, link long lost) about how they did it in California (where explicit racial discrimination is banned). They hire a set of "evaluators", which evaluate the candidates and rank them by their acceptability (I don't remember the exact details of ranking mechanism, but it's largely irrelevant here). They have the training program, which never explicitly mentions race of anything like that. The most they get is the standard "we value diversity, inclusion and treating everybody in the most inclusive and welcoming manner" spiel. And they have a set of supervisors, which oversee the training. The training is done as a set of fake (or maybe real, from past years?) student profiles, which the candidate evaluator has to evaluate, and then the supervisor reviews it and tells the candidate where they may be wrong, if they are. The author of the article was one of the candidates. The supervisors, again, never explicitly mention the race or any prohibited criteria, but if the candidate evaluates certain profiles not in the "correct" way, the supervisor suggests they may want to reconsider - maybe they didn't take all the necessary factors into account, or overlooked something? They may remind them to re-read the policies, etc. That is repeated, until the candidate "gets it" - and starts producing the results that satisfy the supervisors - or the candidate "doesn't get it" even after a set of repeated suggestions, and then it turns out their services are not required at the present time. The author of the article was one of the latter.

If you see similarities to some other, currently popular, area of research - it is probably not coincidental. But it's hardly possible to prove that any racially discriminatory criteria were used. Of course, somebody has to train the supervisors, but it's California we're talking about, Berkeley could supply thousands of such supervisors which wouldn't need a word of discoverable explanations to produce the correct results.

Mechanical Turk + Gradient Descent

For all the obvious-in-hindsight problems with disparate impact, you can kind of see how it might have made sense at the time.

Here's one evasion technique you could use that's very simple and powerful.

"Any racial discrimination is very bad and wrong. We also know that blacks have been discriminated against in the past. Therefore take extra care not to discriminate against BIPOC individuals or risk facing consequences".

Is it illegal to be extra careful against discriminating against a specific race? I think not. And of course, the admissions officer would quickly get the point.

... not sure why I'm giving them ideas.

Admissions offices are ideological, I just don't think they're this suicidal. I don't think this decision is some silver bullet, but any "tinkering" that Universities will do will make them targets for lawsuits. Affirmative action will continue in some form, but it's going to be much more marginal as opposed to a heavy thumb on the scale. There is only so much Universities can accomplish without explicitly using race as a criteria.

I'm pretty cynical, but many posters here are taking it too far. If you're opposed to affirmative action, this is a good day not only for the decision but for the embarrassingly bad arguments put up by Harvard, UNC, and the dissenting justices. It's also a wildly unpopular policy, so the public will back up the decision.

Indeed, for all their attempts to evade the law, the UC system only managed to get the black percentage up to 8% as opposed to 18% at Harvard. Now 8% is probably higher than it would be naturally, but still- that’s more than a 50% reduction in affirmative action.

Given that California is significantly less black than the national average (5% vs. 12%), it's a similar amount of over-representation when compared to the catchment population.

Right, and with this decision there will be a lot of pressure for UC to become less enthusiastic about skirting the law because it just takes one admissions officer or dean of whatever to say the quiet part out loud in an email.

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Not that you're likely to get punished for lying in your essay, but if you were a white man who wanted to take advantage of this signaling without lying, you could just refer to yourself as a disadvantaged minority.

They’ll realize at interview…

Blackface isn’t illegal, they’ll just ask you to leave if they guess.

I forgot that top tier schools have interviews. My state schools did not.

California officially banned racial quotas in universities in the mid-90s. Schools responded by doing detailed evaluations where the results just happened to exactly match the now banned quotas.

Yes, but now with Bakke and Grutter out of the way, these admissions policies can be challenged in federal court with the full arsenal of anti-discrimination case law.

There will be a check box on the evaluation form that says "Applicant discussed their experience as a member of a URM and how that ties in with how they would contribute to the University" and that will satisfy the courts. Roberts handed them a talisman to use.

Exactly, and even if this is against the spirit of the law it will be another decade before it gets back to SCOTUS and by then it’ll be more evenly balanced.

Even with its efforts in recruitment and retention, Black students represented only 3% of the incoming 2022 freshman class, or about half of what they represented in 1995.

Asian students made up 43% of Berkeley's freshmen in the fall of 2022, up from 37% in 1995.

It did work in California and the in-state student demographics of colleges like Berkeley and UCLA did - for many years - genuinely reflect who the highest performing students in California were. Since 2018 the UC system has done everything possible to stealth-implement affirmative action, with some success.

Still, the proportion of African American students at UC Berkeley is half what it was in 1995, and only 3%, whereas at Harvard and Yale it’s 12-15%.

UCLA is back to its pre-ban demographics.

Even by hugely reforming its admissions process over 20 years, radically changing its course offering to appeal to more black students, implementing possibly the country’s largest and most significant outreach program to black high schoolers, and eliminating test scores from consideration entirely, they’re at 8%.

In 2021, 18% of incoming Harvard students were black.

If the court had taken the wording of the California proposition, that would have been a much better judgment.

Quotas have been illegal since the Bakke case in 1972. The Prop 209 ban was re affirmative action more broadly. And the gap between black/Hispanic acceptance rates and White/Asian rates is indeed lower than it was. But then the overall numbers mean little, since admissions decisions at UC are made not at the system level nor the campus level, but at the college level (eg the College of Letters and Sciences or the College of Engineering at a given campus). I don’t know what the numbers look like at individual colleges.

universities [can still] consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university"

Quality of character: The resilience borne of having grown up in the oppressive anti-Black racial landscape of the United States

Unique ability: The ability to navigate hostile white environments as a Black person in a racialized body.

Don’t think for one second the judges didn’t know what they were doing. They’re not morons, they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes. This ruling is deliberately designed to allow everything to continue.

The problem is that Roberts is practically a progressive on this issue, while Coney-Barrett has personal circumstances that obviously make hardline opposition to affirmative action less likely. Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh are only four alone, even if they had wanted to say something else.

Edit:

In a footnote to the majority opinion in the case, Roberts indicated that the decision does not apply to the United States military academies.

So the military even received an explicit carve-out. Wow.

universities [can still] consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university"

Yeah, this just sounds like an explicit invitation to make the "enriched by diversity" argument. Which my suspicious self has always assumed was chosen precisely to avoid the 25 year time limit SCOTUS previously gave on the need for AA.

Might as well have circled the goat path.

Asking anyone who might be willing to answer - what's the cynical take on why the military got a carve-out here? Honestly, I'm confused by this exemption and I'm having trouble imagining what prompted it. A cursory look at the "military officer affirmative action" pro and con discourse doesn't show me any novel or compelling arguments I'm not seeing already in the "affirmative action in higher education" discourse.

The footnote says:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

No cynical take is needed. The Court spent pages and pages on whether the interests served by affirmative action at regular universities are substantial enough to survive strict scrutiny. The interests of military academies might well be different and hence might survive strict scrutiny,and the issue was technically not before the Court, so it makes sense to leave that question for another day.

This was very helpful, thank you!

YW

The military already measures the hell out of everything, so they dodged some of the main arguments. There's also a bunch of historical baggage about segregated units, cannon fodder, and avoiding an officer caste.

Sotomayor's dissent actually goes much further into this. In the main opinion, the majority really just says "no military academies are party to this, we're not binding them."

It’s probably just because the military receives an explicit carve out to everything.

Does the exemption only apply to the four service academies, or does it also apply to Texas A&M and the citadel?

Just the academies, as far as I can tell.

I don't know whether my take is accurate, but if I had to guess I'd say that unlike Harvard, the military does actually struggle to find qualified recruits - and if they didn't have the flexibility to lower standards, it would have an impact on military preparedness and national security.

West Point/Annapolis/etc are hard to get into, at least as measured by acceptance rates. They're not that far off from other elite American universities.

Maybe military academies will argue that they have other purposes besides mere education and some sort of racial discrimination might be helpful, like if they want more Arabic-speaking officers or if they need more officers comfortable with Russian or Chinese culture, or if they want say a Samoan officer able to lead Samoan troops on a mission in American Samoa, they might want to consider race in some sense.

I suspect that the Congressional nomination process for service academy applicants complicates the role of race in admission and that is a separate issue from traditional college acceptance processes.

Don’t congressmen usually nominate anyone impressive who meets the other requirements?

Right, but this is about what to do with the exceptions not the usual. What I am basically saying is that if an Asian-American from California gets rejected and an African-American from Georgia gets in, the system for how it happened is different for Harvard than it is for West Point and trying to come up with a one-size fits all for both situations is a more difficult than just trying to fix the non-military schools.

It may just be that there's other relevant legislation applying to the military academies.

they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes

I'm confused by this statement. Wasn't, "states can decide what to do on abortion" the entire explicit point of Dobbs?

Yes, but I’m saying that SCOTUS didn’t go halfway or waver or preserve a bit of Roe or something, they tore it down and handed it to the states with no limitations. This is because most conservative SCOTUS judges are religious Catholics or otherwise conservative Christians. On AA, they left in these loopholes because at least some of them are probably not, in fact, staunchly opposed to the practice.

I think it's simpler than that. The conservatives on the court actually have principles, the most important of which is "don't legislate from the bench".

Dismantling Roe made sense because Roe was an illegal imposition by a previous court on the legislatures of the states. With the AA decision, the court is doing the least necessary to preserve Constitutionality while not overly involving themselves in the workings of universities. (Note: I think they didn't do nearly enough here, and that universities will continue to racially discriminate against whites and Asians with impunity).

Despite what people believe, the conservative court is not just a party-flipped version of the liberal courts of the last 90 years. It's decisions are based on interpreting the law, not making it.

What is ACB personal circumstances? Only thing I can think of is Notre Dame’s 85% Catholic quota. But I assume you can get around that since it’s not a race but a choice to be Catholic and anyone is allowed to be Catholic.

Barrett has several adopted children, IIRC two of which are from Haiti and would presumably benefit from affirmative action.

They're SCOTUS justice kids, they don't need AA. IF anything the optimal move if she wanted her kids to prosper would be banning uni AA while preserving it in corporations, so that they end up some of the only Black ivy grads coming out.

Catholics that conservative don’t send their kids to Ivy leagues, they send them to either community college and then a commuter school or to small catholic liberal arts schools. Her kids don’t need affirmative action at either- in one case because the admissions requirements are to be able to spell your own name and in the other because they don’t use it anyways.

For graduate studies sure, but the children of scotus justices can expect to get in to a high prestige grad school anyways.

Two adopted black children.

Quality of character: The resilience borne of having grown up in the oppressive anti-Black racial landscape of the United States

It's easy to see how this will be used as a loophole, but I think what they're going for is the almost certainly true idea that it requires far less innate talent to be a straight-A/high SAT asian student from Palo Alto than it does to be a straight-A/high SAT black student from Detroit, and if you're solving for something like, "admit the student where our treatment effect will be the largest" then you'd prefer that black student over that asian student.

the almost certainly true idea that it requires far less innate talent to be a straight-A/high SAT asian student from Palo Alto than it does to be a straight-A/high SAT black student from Detroit,

This doesn't seem obvious, unless you are having innate talent do the heavy lifting. What do you mean by innate talent, and is there any evidence for your claim?

About goddamn time!

I'd say I hope for a similar end of AA/reservation in India, but we're even more far gone at this point with low odds of a return. Not as bad as places like, say Lebanon or South Africa, but the rotten practise runs rampant.

Not only is it bad for the commons, because a rational Bayesian does notice that someone's surname suggests they're from a demographic benefiting form heavy AA and thus likely to be a worse doctor/programmer/engineer, therefore they should be avoided. If AA wasn't in effect, then the people who did genuinely have merit and achieved their results through hard work wouldn't be tainted with the same opprobrium.

Further, it's inevitably poisoned younger generations and ended any hope for a caste blind society. I went from not giving a shit about caste myself to seething vitriolic rage after the trajectory of my life and professional career was forever derailed because my parents, with one of them being a literal penniless survivor of a genocide, didn't luck into that magical Scheduled Caste/Tribe certificate that guarantees passage on the easy lane.

I never hurt anyone or took what was rightfully theirs, and yet my odds of getting into med school and then into a residency program became god knows how many times harder, and all outside my control. I certainly won't let my kids fall into the same trap.

India is too far gone, but at least I can relish the distant bonfire of maybe a few of the more egregious grifters being burned at the stakes they built, though I agree with others that this is a step in the right direction.

Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.

Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.

It's the same in Malaysia, where I grew up (for context, I am Malaysian Chinese, though I live elsewhere now). The part of the Malaysian constitution (Article 153) that legitimises special rights for Malays was rationalised on the basis that this would speed up their economic and social development to standards enjoyed by Chinese and Indians. The Reid Commission, which helped draw this up, recommended that the article be reviewed in fifteen years to see if it should be repealed. Safe to say that the article is still in place today (as well as all the Malay privileges it implies) and continues to be rationalised by people as Actually Being A Good Thing. This always happens the same way. "It's a temporary measure to alleviate disadvantage, we swear!..." and then it never goes away.

People actually killed each other over this historically, May 13, 1969 being by far the most infamous example. What happened was that a general election was held that was contested on a major scale by non-Malay-based opposition parties (the DAP and Gerakan) that held stances on Malay rights that contrasted starkly with those of the Alliance government. They managed to topple the Alliance government from power in three states, and almost eradicated their two-thirds majority in Parliament. There were victory parades in Kuala Lumpur which were mostly led by and participated in by Chinese, which provoked the Malays, who announced a procession and came from the rural areas into the city. A fight between some Chinese and Malays eventually escalated into a situation where Malays went into the Chinese areas of the city and started killing people. And after this event, there was no correction (or at least, not in the direction you'd expect). The Tunku (the then prime minister) stepped down from office, and the government was re-organised to further favour Malays with the New Economic Policy.

This kind of stuff is incredibly dangerous, and this ruling, as far as I am concerned, is a very good thing.

Ah, China-chads being such overachievers that at least 3 countries need to actively suppress them so that most other ethnicities don't get jealous (Indonesia, Singapore and the US, that I know of).

At least Singapore can offer a reasonable tradeoff of most people being significantly richer than they would be if they lived in any other neighboring country. (The US can too, but not to the same degree)

At its very best, the practise is zero sum, and in practise, negative sum because less talented candidates get opportunities and drag down those who could have made the most of it.

The Malaysian system is great for Malaysian Chinese. You own the vast majority of profitable industry (excl oil and gas) in the country, run most profitable businesses, are disproportionately extremely wealthy and are no longer hunted by the Malays. To compare to my own people, the only country in which we have ever done as well as you (relatively) was in inter-war Hungary. Otherwise, neither European nor American Jews have ever been as disproportionately overrepresented among the wealthy and powerful as Malaysian Chinese are in Malaysia. And now, unlike in the 1960s, the CCP and China’s trade relationship with Southeast Asia guarantees the rights of Chinese Malaysians to some extent.

It always surprises me when Chinese Malaysians complain because you guys get the whole country for free, and all you have to pay for it is relatively meagre affirmative action. Take it from me, market dominant minorities elsewhere would kill for that deal.

Firstly, I fail to see why an ethnic group doing well in a specific country justifies discriminating against them in law and policy, especially considering that ethnic groups are not monolithically rich or poor and economic policies based on economic status are always less questionable (there's also the question of what the erosion of meritocracy does to a country). Secondly, I'm not entirely sure what "relatively meagre affirmative action" means to you, but I don't think quotas in education (like the 90:10 racial quotas in matriculation programmes), race preferences in government contracts, discounts on property purchases, access to a reserved slice of public share offerings, among other things, count as "meagre". I mean, I suppose in return the Malaysian Chinese are granted the incredible "privilege" of not being hunted anymore.

Either way, the disillusionment of Chinese Malaysians with the current system is reflected in the phenomenon of "brain drain". Often Chinese Malaysians jump over to Singapore, where there are both better prospects and where the ruling party is better at promoting meritocracy than the Malaysian government. If they want to lose human capital, they can go ahead and keep doing what they're doing, but people are going to leave for places which don't shoot them in the knee for the horrific crime of doing well.

I think the problem in India is more that public sector jobs are often seen as more desirable than many private sector ones, at least with the exception of the tiny minority of Indians who go work for a top ‘MNC’ (and most of those probably studied abroad or at an IIT). There are gazillions of pointless public sector sinecures in India and wiping them out would do more for the country than even getting rid of affirmative action would.

It’s always funny when you see Hindu nationalists rail against the SC/ST designation though, until they realize that it’s the one thing that keeps so many poor Hindus voting for them and that they’d abandon the BJP and its affiliates in a second if they stopped it.

The problem is that public sector jobs are the gibs and spoils that demagogues use as the bait in identitity politics. It's a political nightmare to revoke, and interest groups are incredibly militant about it.

I'm not aware of riots over AA in the US, at least in the past few decades, but an entire state in India is currently going to hell because of the attempts of a single minority group to wrest benefits from the recognition of their lack of privilege, and people are dying over it.

It's a largely coup-complete problem for the foreseeable future.

public sector jobs are the gibs and spoils that demagogues use as the bait in identitity politics.

Not just demagogues. Public sector jobs are nominally welfare in disguise (edit: borderline sinecures) and the number of positions increases over time in the West.

My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America. I’m at a mega corp and we practice what certainly looks like racial/gender discrimination (for example leadership teams and # of managers have to comply with HR DEI %’s). I’m honestly not sure how we get away with it when racial/gender discrimination in the workforce is already illegal in the US, but either way would love for this ruling to push companies to reevaluate these policies or even better for another case to make it to SCOTUS around corp DEI policies.

My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America.

These are already black-letter illegal. Racial discrimination in employment practices was never considered acceptable, even for the "diversity" fig leaf; note employment and education are covered under different parts of the Civil Rights Act(s). But those implementing the practices and those overseeing them (e.g. at the EEOC, and in the lower courts) don't care.

I've always wondered how corporations are able to get away with setting goals to hire a certain number of female/black/latino people and then publicly celebrate meeting those goals.

Perhaps they could say that it's the result of outreach efforts and not discrimination in the hiring decision itself, but would that fly if a business decided they wanted to conduct outreach efforts exclusively to white men?

Have they been sued over the former?

Yes, the lawsuits just disappear into a morass of procedural obstacles.

Yes, outreach efforts are fine. Eg, if I hire a random selection of every applicant who scores over X percent on my employment test, but only 2 pct of my applicants are Hispanic, there is nothing illegal about advertising my job openings heavily on Telemundo.

As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company. It would obviously raise some suspicions, because historically such efforts have tended to be intended to exclude non-whites and women, but it is not inherently illegal.

As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company.

Would it be illegal to continue outreach programs only to certain minority groups if those minority groups happened to be overrepresented at your company?

Presumably.

Also at universities? Thomas sure seems to be fine with HBCUs. Do you think there could be trouble a-brewin' there?

I don’t know that HBCUs discriminate racially in admissions. Rather, I am pretty sure that relatively few non-black students apply. And many are not particularly selective. See data here

When the President of the United States can hire a public employee to the highest court in the land with a brazen declaration that Progressive Racism will be followed to the exclusion of the majority of qualified candidates, it’s probably quixotic to imagine change in your local workplace. Consider Biden the alt-Woodrow Wilson and yourself the alt-target of Wilsonian federalized bigotry. Going by the original timeline, we’re 50 years off from civil rights.

The President has much more free hand there than a rank-and-file bureaucrat. It'd be very hard to sue the President for not nominating me to Supreme Court because I am a white male. It's a very exclusive unique position, and it'd be almost impossible to argue - even if I were an accomplished law scholar, which of course I'm not - that I deserve that particular position, and while the racism here is indeed brazen, formulating a legal policy that would prevent it while not unduly constraining the President's choices would be very non-trivial. On the other hand, university admission or hiring practices or any other governmental action applied en masse is easier to regulate, since it requires some rules, procedures, official criteria, etc. It won't be sustainable if Harvard president had to personally decide on each case. There would be institutional procedures. That's where you can look for discriminatory policies. Of course, it's possible to hide them, and I am sure Harvard will try their best to do just that, but at least they couldn't do it in the open anymore. It's not the victory over racism, but it's a step in denormalizing it, with is a necessary precondition to victory.

A silver lining amongst the clouds—judging from today’s reactions in public discourse, it appears that the center of the mainstream Overton window has moved from 2) to 3) in recent years.

Where 1) is a dated and quaint: “The impact of affirmative action is minimal; it’s just a tie-breaker between two otherwise equally qualified candidates.”

Then 2) is its evolution, Schrodinger’s affirmative action: “The impact of affirmative action is minimal and just a tie-breaker, but it’s a good thing that we as society need and paramount for diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

And 3) is “The impact of affirmative action is massive and that’s why it’s a good thing that we as society need.”

At least with 3) there is greater agreement all around as to the facts on the ground, that the impact of affirmative action is massive. Progress!

Or maybe I’m just hopped up on hopium and we’ll be forever stuck in limbo at 2).

I don't know if that's what the center of discourse reads as, but Jackson's opinion reads more like combining (2) and (3) along with the flimflam of the celebration parallax. Yes, it's vitally important that universities engage in discrimination, but don't worry, it's actually quite small, and might even benefit whites! Seriously, she actually wrote this:

Thus, to be crystal clear: Every student who chooses to disclose his or her race is eligible for such a race-linked plus, just as any student who chooses to disclose his or her unusual interests can be credited for what those interests might add to UNC. The record supports no intimation to the contrary. Eligibility is just that; a plus is never automatically awarded, never considered in numerical terms, and never automatically results in an offer of admission.84 There are no race-based quotas in UNC’s holistic review process.

Mainstream discourse that I see involves the same sort of insistence that large pro-black discrimination is necessary and good, but also not happening, but the court ruling will destroy it and is therefore bad. I don't think the intellectual reconciliation to consistency that you're looking for is happening.

NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson blasted the ruling, saying in a statement, “Today the Supreme Court has bowed to the personally held beliefs of an extremist minority.”

Heh.

Opinion here. Big emphasis on Grutter, and on its three criteria for working around the equal protection clause. I think this is really important!

  • Clarification on "permitting judicial review." This directly calls out a bunch of the existing fig leaves for AA, as they don't line up with other applications of strict scrutiny.

  • Affirms that booting Asians is, in fact, stereotyping. Duh.

  • Points out the lack of a measurable end date.

Presumably, when Harvard and UNC roll up a new admissions process, the resulting court case will be far more tractable. The defense looked terrible, and half of their arguments were categorically thrown out. Multiply that by the number of programs across the country which are getting overturned, and this is a real win.

There are also some direct shots at the progressive zeitgeist, mostly about how poorly it fits the prediction made in the 90s and 00s. This...is not a good look when being accused of partisanship. But I think it is the smart choice. 90s-era race-blindness is a much better position for the right than the more fringe opinions.

Speaking of which--NBC is really underselling Sotomayor's dissent. They framed it as railing about progress, but neglected to mention her best argument.

In fact, this Court has recognized as compelling plenty of interests that are equally or more amorphous, including the “intangible” interest in preserving “public confidence in judicial integrity,”

She goes on to list several other examples of random bullshit that the court said was compelling. Their decision is creating additional complexity in a system which wasn't actually causing splits of authority. While I'm sympathetic, I think the rest of the court's reasoning holds up.

But this goes to show how great of power SCOTUS wields, not just absolute power but also relative power, as other branches struggle to do anything. Passing legislation is like giving birth, but SCOTUS can nullify laws deemed unconstitutional (which the court gets to decide what qualifies as such) or set precedent, at the stroke of a pen. Presidential elections are less about policy, but about choosing judges, whose rulings can have far and reaching consequences long after the confetti is cleaned up.

SCOTUS is an elderly patriarch. He determines the nature of the rules, but he relies on others to enforce them and, if they don’t want to, his power is limited.

Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly. The same thing was made illegal in CA, and it just meant that measures that whites/Asians did well at got devalued in college applications.

Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly

They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.

But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.

I suspect the money isn’t there and that the cases will be very hard to prove. Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission. Essays, life-experience, and in some cases meeting the students can give admissions officers plenty of “I-can’t-believe-it’s-race” reasons to exclude whites and Asians. Your essay about visiting your ancestral home in Korea might simply not meet standards. Had nothing to do with you outting yourself as Asian. We just didn’t like the essay.

Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission.

But this is not the way American anti-discrimination law works. For decades lawyers and civil-rights bureaucrats have been successfully going after every more implicit forms of putative discrimination. "Here's my statistical evidence that Foo has a disparate impact on Bar. I was FooBarred, now give me $$$$$$$" is standard practice.

That cat really will be among the pigeons if the Court can make that particular sword cut both ways. My guess is that over time the court system will follow the leader, but the EEOC will not unless the Republicans take over the government and gut the thing.

As far as bringing a case sure, but I don’t think anyone wins the case. In most employment cases, you actually have a hard time because of at will employment. I can fire you if I don’t like your haircut. This makes those kinds of cases hard to prove because unless you have some sort of evidence in your possession that race figured into it at all, the defense simply has to cite any other reasons why you got fired and unless you have proof or witnesses, they win.

I mean, can always pass a constitutional amendment. Prenumbras and emanations can only exist to a point in the SCOTUS.

Will colleges drop federal funding to be able to continue affirmative action?

They can, and I expect some will.

To quote Roberts' footnote 2,

Title VI provides that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 42 U. S. C. §2000d. “We have explained that discrimination that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment committed by an institution that accepts federal funds also constitutes a violation of Title VI.” Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 276, n. 23 (2003). Although JUSTICE GORSUCH questions that proposition, no party asks us to reconsider it. We accordingly evaluate Harvard’s admissions program under the standards of the Equal Protection Clause itself.

So while the constitution is brought into play, the relevant statute is still Title VI. This only applies to "any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Any college, then should be able to circumvent this by refusing federal funding. Indeed, some colleges already do this (though this is more for Title IX than Title VI). This includes scholarships and loans.

Harvard in particular has a perfect score, per Forbes, on financial health. With a 50 billion dollar endowment, if we assume a yearly return of even only 2%, they can continue perpetually into the future spending a billion a year. They don't need money, and could easily drop federal funding. University of North Carolina is a public university, but a state one, so I'm not as acquainted with how that could work, but I expect they too could drop federal funding if they really wished to do so.

So the elite schools, at least, could easily openly maintain affirmative action in this way. This becomes much less true of colleges which are in harsher financial constraints, or rely more heavily on tuition—dropping federal funding could cause them to be outcompeted by other schools which can use the funding to offer more aid, resulting in a downward spiral of increasingly dire financial distress.

Whether many colleges will drop federal funding, then, will depend on several factors. Ideological factors, of course—how strongly are they committed to this. Image—how prominent do they want affirmative action to be associated with them. Finances, obviously. How easily they can achieve their objectives otherwise, through more nebulous and less explicit means—Roberts spoke against doing so, but colleges will undoubtedly try, and we have yet to see how such attempts will go.

So I think ultimately this case will fail at one of the main goals, stopping affirmative action at elite colleges. But at the same time, it might reduce the amount of subsidies going to students (maybe—I haven't actually acquainted myself with how federal student loans and scholarships are funded and allocated), which is a good thing (except that it will disproportionately harm those who need the aid more). And it does establish that affirmative action is no longer just the thing schools do, which may make it less acceptable in public opinion, even if it continues on at the highest levels.

Edit: I realized I forgot about federal research grants. That's a big deal as well.

From my understanding these schools get massive amounts of federal funding from research grants. Did some quick googling and looks like Harvard gets over $500mm a year. Certainly not chump change.

Yeah, that'll make them a lot more hesitant to go no-federal-money.

I can't see it. It's one thing to turn down various sorts of squishy bits of federal funding, but Harvard isn't going to pick up the tab for the research scientists that are presently on R01 grants. Even if they were willing to, the restructuring would be absolutely enormous and potentially undermine the credibility of research science there. These aren't just about the funding, they're about the prestige and credibility of being part of the nationally funded network of scientists.

For better or worse universities are all government institutions, with the possible rare exceptions of places like Hillsdale.

My understanding of the ruling is that Title VI applies only to institutions who receive federal funds, but that the Equal Protections argument is separate and affects any government institution under the Constitution, including Universities for the several States.

Ah, you're probably right.

Affirmative action in universities wasn't going to last.

The upper middle class/lower upper class stops being woke when it impacts them. Defunding the police is fun, but they still want rigorous security around their lower Manhattan office. Affirmative action gave too many seats to non whites making it harder for the children of the lower elite to get into college. The Asian problem will be fixed with an increased focus on sports, extra circulars and personality.

Regime stability is nearly always prioritized over ideology. Promoting a sizeable group of lower Iq people into the elite threatens the long term viability of the American empire. Harvard graduates are put in positions of power, and an increasing portion of the graduates were simply not meeting the standards. The issue is exacerbated by lower entrance standards necessitating lower educational standards during the degree. The result is mediocre people who have studied subjective topics and lack skill and knowledge. Now that we are reentering an era of great power competition, having the Pentagon staffed by people who didn't make it there based on merit is shooting oneself in the foot. The political radicalism of the affirmative action students was probably viewed as a positive a few years ago, as they were seen as committed to left-liberalism. Today, there is probably increasing concern that the radicalism has gotten to a point at which the loyalty of junior members of the elite is questionable. The state department can't be staffed by people who believe the US is a white supremacist state that needs to be destroyed.

Defunding the police is fun, but they still want rigorous security around their lower Manhattan office

The wealthier and whiter you were, especially if you lived in Manhattan, the more likely you were to vote for the far-left ‘defund the police’ candidate in the last New York City mayoral election.

In fact, the only reason that the moderate former cop Eric Adams won the election was because poor black and latino New Yorkers in the outer boroughs voted for him.

Regime stability is nearly always prioritized over ideology

Or AA was the regime stabilizer. It would have been very awkward for elite institutions to remain vastly white while the rest of the country was supposed to be "reckoning with race".

EDIT: It also bought off the most enterprising black elites. Inside the tent, pissing out and all.

I've honestly never really understood the obsession with "merit" and college admissions. Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students? The discussion really seems to be wrapped up in some notion of rewarding hard work or talent. But why should we reward that as opposed to something else? Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?

As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect. I guess it could be the case that the kid with the highest high school GPA will get the largest treatment effect, but it's not really obvious to me that this is true. Maybe it's the legacy white kid who will be able to build out his connections; maybe it's the black kid who had to endure a shitty high school and by a gritty miracle ground out a 1300 SAT score; maybe the 1600 SAT score asian kid is going to do great no matter where he ends up.

People need to do a bit more work in connecting the dots here IMO.

Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?

Because it is a prize. This is an objective, undeniable fact. It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it. Basing admissions on academic achievement rather than the subjective whims of the admissions officers is at least an attempt at making it "fair".

Unless you just think that upward social mobility itself is not something that society should be optimizing for. But then that's a separate discussion entirely.

It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it.

Right, so how do we decide who gets this status? Is it the person who benefits the most, or is it the person who got a 1600 on their SAT? It's not clear that these are the same people. They might be, I don't think I've ever seen an anti-AA person clearly connecting the dots.

Most anti-AA people also take a libertarian-ish view of economics and they think that wealth should be distributed based on merit. The person who works the hardest gets paid the most. The person who works the hardest should be given the most status. Not the person who "needs" it the most. I don't see what dots they're not connecting; they're being internally consistent, at any rate.

Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.

So do they think inheritance should be taxed at 100% so as to prevent lazy heirs from benefiting?

Otherwise, what is the metric for wealth distribution? Is it who works the hardest? Is roofing in the summer as a redhead especially lucrative?

All of which is to say hard work is not the only or even the main determinator of who makes the most money. So why shouldn’t the spoils go to people with the he most need? Or of a specific race?

What should determine the distribution of wealth?

To a Libertarian wealth should not be distributed at all, based not on merit or anything else, but rather sit with the person who generated it until they decide to do whatever they want with it. I think a Libertarian would argue that wealth belongs morally to the person who created it because its an extension of bodily autonomy, personal freedom, and the fact that all civilization rests on freely agreed to contracts.

And if "whatever they want" includes giving it to their heirs to squander, the state should have no opinion on the matter. Inheritance taxes are an infringement on the dying man's right to his property being disposed of in the way he wishes (in his will).

Otherwise, what is the metric for wealth distribution?

How useful you are to the people with the money to pay you. Which generally implies being willing to take on extra work, or having done a bunch of work yourself for free to build expertise, so that you're useful later. The children of the wealthy are generally considered extreme outliers, who tend to lose the money within a couple generations, and don't really have much of a long-term effect.

Is roofing in the summer as a redhead especially lucrative?

Suffering doesn't buy the boss anything. Working hard may require suffering, but the suffering itself does not have any value, unless the boss is a (literal) sadist, in which case it may provide quite a bit of value. The value is generally in the work, and if you can find a way to do the work without suffering (example: the redhead wearing a wide-brim hat to protect their neck), basically nobody would say you should charge less.

Why do these libertarians take the view that their abstract notion of merit entitles them to a Harvard education? Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?

Our rules >> your rules applied fairly >>>> your rules applied unfairly.

We might prefer laissez-faire to anti-discrimination law, but anti-discrimination law only applied when the discrimination is against certain races is worse than either.

I agree with this, but it's a different argument than the meritocracy argument.

Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?

This is Culture War, the integrity of the debate crumbled long ago. As is often said here: My rules applied fairly> your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly.

If all universities receiving federal funds were allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and could discriminate against any race, I think libertarians would have a more tempered view. But when its only against Whites and Asians, the one-sidedness of the argument becomes apparent and we enter the matrix above.

Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?

Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?

The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.

Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who

When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.

Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”.

Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.

Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society.

Why should Harvard care about that? What they want is people who will donate generously to their alma mater and who are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique. They don't really want to admit Amanda Chang who will become a CFO of a Fortune 500 company, own three homes and a yacht and bequeath the rest of her fortune to her children.

Not sure I understand your point? The super-rich love making donations to their alma mater. Ken Griffin's $300M to Harvard made the news, but it's pretty common, it's where half the buildings get their names. This article names a variety of others of various occupations.

And professors / judges / politicians 'are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique'.

What I meant is that Harvard calibrates its admissions to increase the benefit to itself, not to the country at large. If Asian applicants have shown themselves to be generally unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, Harvard will deprioritize them. Wealthy Nigerian applicants might be equally intellectually unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, but they pay well for their education and legacy students like to study next to well-spoken Black people and not next to grade-obsessed Asians.

Sure, but that kind of partial incentive misalignment is legion. Capitalism cares about the personal wealth of capitalists, not social benefit. Individuals care more about status than doing valuable things. People will gamble or play video games or drink instead of working or 'pursuing meaning' or whatever. But capitalism, individual labor, and Harvard are all still useful to society.

The system still mostly works, and both in education and connection-making Harvard and other top unis provide valuable services to society! Not that they couldn't be provided better in other ways, but existing institutional knowledge and inertia isn't nothing

Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?

  1. Probability of successfully graduating and acquiring knowledge and skills defined by the curriculum

  2. Establishing a social environment where one is among high-achieving peers which would support each other in achieving (1) and is able to establish networks that would help them post-graduation

  3. Allow professors to teach on a level that is suitable for high-achieving students instead of being bogged down by the need to cater for the lowest common denominator - which will also allow access to higher level of teachers

  4. Establish a basis for at least part of the graduates to become superstars, adding their prestige to the prestige of their alma mater

  5. Establish a lifelong relationship with a large number of highly successful people, who would support the college financially, socially, organizationally and culturally.

If you accept a bunch of random people, some of which drops out and some barely graduate with a bunch of C-, none of this works well. For some colleges, the "gimme money, I give you the papers" model works, but Harvard obviously wants to be more than that.

Everyone seeks status, and the more unequal, more diverse and more fractured a society is, the more important status is. In Denmark, status is relatively less important than it is in America, where it is in turn less important than it is in India (which is not to say that there are not surely many social-climbing Danes, but their struggle is less desperate).

Status is security, it’s freedom, it’s opportunity, above all it’s protection. At the floor, an undergraduate degree from Harvard in a major with decent employment prospects is the surest guarantee of a comfortable life in America’s upper middle class. At the ceiling, it’s a pathway into the true ruling class (return for a JD, clerk for a SCOTUS judge, get set, go).

The Harvard degree acts as a proxy for status in the U.S. It is not perfect, and it is far from the only indicator, but it is widely accepted by everyone from employers to your fiancé’s parents to dinner party companions and clients. It is not necessarily Harvard’s “fault” that this is how it is, but when a single institution becomes a core bestower of status in a country, scrutiny is always justified.

Right, what I'm asking is why it's so obvious that the decision rule we use to decide who gets that status should be based on who got a 1600 on their SAT in high school, or some similar measure of pre-college merit. Why shouldn't it be based on our best estimate of who will benefit most from that status? Maybe these things overlap, but it's not obvious that they do.

Are the people who 'need' more status the ones best equipped to reap it from higher ed? There's some data that suggests shoehorning such candidates into positions that are beyond their level of merit or capabilities only ill serves them and increases the rate of drop-outs and failures. Maybe 'Harvard flunkee' has more status than a community grad, but ehh.

You say more work needs to be done to connect the dots and explain why merit-based ascent is the way to go. While I'll admit this model is fuzzy and imperfect, I am having trouble imagining the alternatives and what their decision-making matrix even looks like, or how it would be any less abstract or illegible than the status quo.

For my part, it's simply that the equal protection clause exists. If that's no good anymore, then okay, let's amend the constitution according to the process it lays out. But laws for thee and not for me is not an acceptable equilibrium.

I still think extending the 14th Amendment to apply to private universities on the basis that they accept federal funds is a massive overreach, but it's one that's done in plenty of other venues, so it is what it is.

We actually already have pretty good evidence which option works best here. Economic analysis shows that the productivity of high ability people goes up almost exponentially when in close proximity to other high ability people. This is an example of what is known as a “network effect” the flip side of which is when we put antisocial criminals together in a prison we accelerate their criminality. Like attracts and works best with like.

According to these principles diversity is a major obstacle to innovation and productivity. No one demanded that the Manhattan project be more diverse. Somehow a highly homogeneous team of male Hungarian Jewish geniuses pulled off major innovation, if DEI existed back then we would probably have never developed the bomb.

Anyway, hence we need high ability people together to get the most out of them. That’s if you actually care about society as a whole and not myopically focused on the welfare of a few antisocial criminal underclass cultural groups.

It is interesting response to “diversity is our strength.” That argument goes that there are biases so even if you don’t always hire the best person you have a better team.

A response is that diversity has benefits and costs so figuring out the direction and size of the direction is difficult.

Your point is that talent is exponential; not merely additive.

It’s a silly argument. Does anyone seriously think a diversity in work ethic makes for a better team? A diversity in intelligence? How about a diversity of medical conditions?

For there to be a true diversity to prevent biases you’d need viewpoint diversity. Somehow that one never makes the cut.

As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect.

I disagree. There's room for organizations like that, but I wouldn't want Harvard to fill that role, and I doubt Harvard itself wants that either. Elite institutions like Harvard are places where I want - and I believe the institutions themselves want too - people to get educations that allow them to contribute the most to society. And I'd want the people we send to Harvard to be people who are most able to take advantage of the education to get to a state where they can make such contributions. I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.

Of course, some of this hinges on what one means by the "effect" in "marginal treatment effect." If the "effect" here is referring to something like "ability to meaningfully contribute to society," then it seems clear to me that the people who do enjoy the largest marginal treatment effect will overwhelmingly be people who have already demonstrated a combination of hard work and talent. Pushing people who are at the top of those things even further will almost definitely create greater, more significant contributions to society than pushing people who are at the middle or at the bottom up to the top or middle.

I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.

Really what I'm asking for is some evidence for the assertion that sending A+ students to Harvard is the way to maximize the number of people who contribute amazing world-changing things, and that the C- student who got affirmative actioned into Harvard isn't doing that.

I doubt that any specific evidence of that sort exists. I think it's a pretty good guess, though, based on how we know things like intelligence and drive interact with academic performance and overall life achievement. Given the limited number of seats at elite institutions and the observation that achieving amazing world-changing things tends to be easier if one is highly intelligent and driven, it seems to me that filling those seats with people who have a track record that indicates high intelligence and drive is likely to result in more amazing world-changing results than filling those seats with people whose track record indicates mediocre levels in either or both.

If there were somehow evidence that pointed in the direction that taking a bunch of mediocre people and uplifting them to become slightly above average is more conducive to great innovation and prosperity in society than taking a bunch of extremely capable people and uplifting them to be elite even by those standards, then changing the attempted-meritrocratic system seems reasonable. I don't think that is the case, though. I think it's the same reason why MLB teams tend to draft people who already have a track record of good baseball performance - someone who already has that good track record is likely to be a better player than someone whose track record is mediocre, even after subjecting both of them to the same sort of training from the team and farm system.

I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad. Anyway, as you said, it would be hard to identify this in the data anyway, but I just don't think it's the open and shut case that a lot of people here make it out to be.

Who are the lots of people making it out to be an open and shut case?

I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad.

That's a huge "if," though.

And there's the big issue that there's no particular reason why Ohio State couldn't just as well as Harvard "uplift" a bunch of people into those same positions that don't require true genius to do well. And Ohio State (representing any generic state school) has a lot more seats and lower tuition. Why would we want an elite institution like Harvard to do that work when cheaper, more plentiful tools exist? Unless you mean Harvard and other elite colleges just shouldn't be elite and all colleges should have the same status? That seems untenable given the natural status-chasing inclination of people who run organizations. And given how network effects work, it seems valuable to me to have colleges that are specialized for bringing the best of the best at certain things together, potentially far more valuable than having those people dispersed.

Harvard in particular isn't focused on getting the best of the best (although getting much of that is a side effect of its actual goal). It's to serve as a reproduction ground for the elite, metaphorically but also very literally.

Access to Harvard and its sister institutions is about gaining entry to the elite. Which serves the elite well, as it enables bringing in the most meritorious members of the middle class, but only to an extent: a truly and fully meritocratic system would result in the current elite still being admitted very disproportionately but not enough for the reproduction of the current elite.

You are hitting on the three competing and unreconcilable goals of education: Democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility.

The theory for "merit" is that schools are intended to teach people useful things, and that "merit" is supposed to track the ability of individual students to learn from and engage with those useful things, such that they are more productive in later life and contribute additional impact to society. The extent this is realistic depends pretty heavily on the topic and school, since med or engineering students having certain skills is a lot more important than law fields, but it has supposed to be part of the spirit constantly.

As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect.

I'm not sure I buy that -- for my criticisms of 'merit' as applied to Harvard, if it turns into a university pinata we might as well just seize the endowment and apply EA to that instead -- but even presuming it's true we actually still have both constitutional and federal law specifically prohibiting the government from making "largest treatment effect" analysis based on race without far more serious cause than present here.

((And I don't trust Harvard, or even the local YMCA, to apply a race-aware largest-treatment effect analysis in such a way that would recognize minorities they disfavour.))

Our elite colleges claim to admit people based on merit. They ought to either actually do that or stop claiming they do; I wouldn't have cared either way as long as they were consistent. In reality we should have clearer distinctions between different types of schools with distinct admissions policies (Ivy League-type incubators for future elites, Caltech-type schools that admit solely based on test scores, trade schools, etc.).

But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard. The school itself does, in partnership with its prospective students and their potential future employers. They all follow their local incentives

Students: go to the school that impresses the most employers, and at higher levels allows for the best networking opportunities, which in both cases is usually the highest status school that will have you (gaining some skills is a nice bonus)

Employers: hire students from the schools that filter for the cream of the crop (having them get a general education is a nice bonus)

School: keep your audience happy by being selective in admissions, scrubbing out fakers, and statusmaxxing in other ways to pull ahead of your competitors

If there were an Education Tsar (a real one) then maximizing social utility from the process might be a priority. As it is, we have an elaborate workaround to the fact that hiring based on IQ tests is illegal.

But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard.

We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.

We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.

This is so misleading as to be inaccurate. SCOTUS isn't determining what Harvard's admissions standards ought to be; they're determining (determined) what sorts of discrimination is and isn't allowed when organizations like Harvard choose their admissions standards. In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?" Whether Harvard wants to prioritize students who would have the largest "Harvard marginal treatment effect" or whatever is up to Harvard; all SCOTUS (society by proxy) is telling them is that one thing they're not allowed to prioritize is the students' race. If Harvard wants to scrap the meritrocratic approach and look for students with the largest "Harvard marginal treatment effect," they're free to do so in a race-neutral way.

They're restricting the space of inputs that Harvard is allowed to use when making admissions decisions. I don't see how it's misleading at all to characterize that as SCOTUS having a say in who goes to Harvard.

In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?"

There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.

There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.

There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.

There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.

It's misleading, because SCOTUS is ruling on the first paragraph up there, about whether "race-based discrimination is bad," not on the 2nd paragraph, about whether "AA is bad because it's not meritrocratic," though the original statement was about the topic of the 2nd paragraph. SCOTUS - society by proxy - has nothing to say on whether or not Harvard choosing (pseudo-) meritrocracy for its admission standards is bad. Your claim was: "As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect." You responded to the claim that society doesn't have much of a say in this by saying that SCOTUS (representing society) just handed down a ruling which implies that they do have a say. But that's misleading, because the part society has a say in is only about the racial discrimination aspect of it, not on the overall standard of Harvard choosing meritrocracy or not. It's a shift in topic from "society getting to dictate what standards Harvard uses in admissions" to "society getting to dictate that Harvard and similar organizations can't racially discriminate in admissions." Just because they're both placing limitations on admissions standards don't make them the same thing.

Again, society has no say on whether or not a private institution like Harvard decides to pursue a meritrocratic approach in admissions. What we do have a say on is if they get to be racially discriminatory during it.

This feels like semantics so I'm going to drop it after this, but I'm responding to someone saying "But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard" by pointing out that if society is restricting the ruleset by which Harvard can choose who gets into Harvard, then clearly, plainly, obviously, society is on its face having a say in who gets to go to Harvard. I'm not sure what's complicated about this tbh.

Correct, it's semantics, and it seems like you're playing semantic games by responding to the person's point with an unrelated but technically semantically correct point that doesn't address the person's point in any meaningful way.

Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?

I don’t particularly care about Harvard admissions- I’m not getting in whether they have affirmative action, no affirmative action, bias towards southern whites, etc- and I think the actual effect of affirmative action tends to be overstated(white and Asian men who go to a podunk state that has rejected exactly one applicant in the past five years mostly do fine), but I do think establishing the precedent that it’s legal to discriminate against me, and only me, is a bad thing.

Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.

You could try to maximize social utility, but Harvard would stop being Harvard really quickly if it stopped admitting scions and legacies. That strata of society - the connected, the wealthy, the exceptionally bright and motivated, would immediately find some new signal for their status because they have the means and ability to do so. It’s the signal and network that are the value proposition here, not the education.

Okay fine, but I hope people with this view are ready to bite the bullet and support admitting a ton of legacies and athletes and CEO's kids.


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