site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31443 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst.

No, it isn't. And you clearly show in the rest of your post that you know this is not true. Harvard is not taking a ranked list of individuals and selecting the best N from the list and accepting them or trying the compute the equivalent. They are trying to select the best student body of consisting of N individuals. I'm sure they have some rather high minimum quality bar to be considered, but after that, they're optimizing for group dynamics and various axes of diversity.

Say Harvard switched to a meritocratic racial spoils system in which every year they accepted the top x% of black people on the SAT, the top x% of whites, the top x% of asians and so on. Is that preferable to the current system?

I would prefer it because it's more honest

It also obviates the need for racial trauma essays or remaking oneself as a victim.

Yes. I like discriminatory preferences to be as legible as possible. If Harvard is going to have a racial quota system (which they obvious do), I'd rather they just say so flatly.

If you want Harvard to be honest you have to start by making racial quotas legal, which seems like a terrible choice if the only benefit is a bit less hypocrisy.

I don't think the only benefit to free association is less hypocrisy.

It's not the only benefit to freedom of association. It is the only benefit to making a racial quota system legal (a prerequisite to Harvard admitting it uses a racial quota system).

People say that a lot here, but honestly illegible systems are better for having to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally wrong. Children who grow up in the system will naturally see it's immorality. Once you commit to the idea that discrimination is good, then you end up like India with riots every year over whether such and such caste or tribe deserves reservation benefits. People in India view the whole thing not as a matter of morality, but just a crass materialist way to get more for you and yours.

Forcing Progressives to say the quiet part loud on affirmative action is a victory in it's own right.

I disagree. This chart is nothing if not ranking people from best to worst along every relevant domain Harvard can muster. Axes of diversity go into their rankings within some of those metrics, but while their numbers may not match up to what you or I would rank as "best" or "worst", they are very much trying to select, and justify their selection as, the best.

This chart

Your link is broken since Twitter blocked non-logged-in users, so I can't use Nitter to view it. I did try to use a Twitter login I had lying around and the page wouldn't actually load.

It's the same set of 4 charts I embed towards the top of my article, showing the relative rankings of students of different races on academic, extracurricular, personal, and overall axes.

I'm able to see it fine and I don't have a twitter account; not sure what's going on

The chart demonstrates (to me anyway) that they're just plain lying about the personality dimension in order to use it as a proxy for preferred races, giving them the thinnest veneer of a defense rather than absolutely none. What, I'm supposed to believe that the black Harvard applications are actually just incredibly excellent personalities? KBJ's incessant babbling suffices to convince me that's not the case. Or that their Asian applicants are just lacking a certain je ne sais quois? That certainly doesn't match my experience with smart Asian-Americans, who seem to be basically just like other smart Americans. No, I think it's pretty obvious that they just plugged in personality values that lined up with the races they wanted to give bonus points to.

Well to be fair on the criteria shown in the above link it does reference overcoming obstacles &c., and it seems straightforwardly true that Black applicants are more likely to have faced more important obstacles given the average lower socio-economic standing of black families. Vice versa for Asian Americans.

In my mind, in support of this claim: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yjbefg/oc_how_harvard_admissions_rates_asian_american/

When looking at alumni interviews, which actually meet the applicant, Asian applicants do better overall and pretty much identical on "likability, courage, kindness." Asians only do worse when ranked by the committee that doesn't meet the applicant.

Oh, of course they're lying. To my eye, it's mostly kayfabe: they pretend to believe those things and other informed observers pretend to trust them. That's part of what makes holistic admissions so insidious to me, though: for uninformed observers, the kayfabe becomes real, and people start to accept that there must be sound, justifiable reasons for highly capable applicants to be rejected in favor of candidates with lower objective scores across the board.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats