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I started writing a post for the culture war thread, and it got longer than I thought it would so I ended up just posting it as its own thread. I know some people don't always see those threads, so I thought I'd post a link here. I'm open to discussing it in either location:
https://www.themotte.org/post/604/the-case-for-ignoring-race
For a tl;dr: you make a lot of fine points, but for some reason tie them to 'race'. Most of these anti-racist arguments therefor end up not being anti-racist at all. They seem more like general individual based introspection arguments. For what it's worth I'm not against any of them specifically, I'm just not sure what they have to do with typical 'racist' thinking which, most of the time, deals with groups and averages.
As an example, from "Taking Responsibility":
Deterministic thinking is not specific to 'racist' thinking. Typical 'I can't' most often heard from children doing homework is a great example of this. On top of that the argument falls over itself when you flip it around. Believing yourself to be destined to lose is bad. But believing yourself to be destined to win is good. It's obvious from this that the 'bad' here is not determinism but self defeatism.
As for your personal maximum capacity for achievement, the argument you make falls to similar issues. The point about 'maximum genetic capacity'(my paraphrasing) is not about you personally, it's about you in relation to others. The reason Usain Bolt could become the world's fastest sprinter is not because of his magic training or the sand in Jamaica. The guy started training very late at 17 and his diet consisted mostly of McNuggets straight from McDonalds. It was his DNA. If you thought you had a genuine chance in competing against him, you were stupid. But if you liked running track, why let that stop you? Just run to see what you can do. The problem here is not 'race' and minimizing it changes nothing. It's our lizard brain competitive spirit trying to outcompete Dunbar's number when in reality it is competing against 7 billion people.
As for "Information and Stereotyping"
Making conceptual arguments about this seems rather pointless. We don't need conceptual arguments to figure out that blacks commit more crime than do whites. On top of that, making the argument individualized further leads us astray from the utility of 'race'. Since 'race and crime' generally refers to populations, not an individual instance in someones life.
To meet your conceptualized argument head on: If I am walking alone at night and there is a guy in a hoody and worn out jeans walking towards me, I'm not going to think he is mugging me. Ever. Because that sort of thing has never happened where I live. Ever. But if you live in the USA in an average black neighborhood, my instincts would be potentially dangerously wrong because the chances are no longer 0. Because average white Scandinavian town and average black USA town are not the same. To that end race is useful. One town is average USA black, the other is average Scandinavian white. You can comb through the finer details but race is still there as a fact of life. Ignoring it would be stupid.
As for "Policy"
The reason affirmative action is bad is because it is trying to fit an unfit population. There is nothing wrong with affirmatively actioning a bunch of otherwise neurotypical 140 IQ people into colleges. They would probably do very well and better the school and society. The problem arises when the population is on average at 85 IQ and demand for 'diversity' outstrips supply of college material people.
If you want 'diversity' there is no magic process that can fix your problem with blacks. Without a mechanism that selects unfit people to meet your 'diversity' quota, you will not meet the quota. Without a program that is designed to cater to these unfit people, you will not see many of them graduate. Without unfair you get less than 1% black at the elite level. With those kind of numbers you will be seeing 'calls to action' against your racist policies.
As for "Immigration"
We are again using conceptual arguments. Why make those arguments imprecise? Here's one: lets have an immigration system that only imports good people we will all personally like who will also benefit the economy and save a child and/or pet in need.
OK, we don't have that. What do we have? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S00148-017-0636-1
We have information. For some reason, despite race being allegedly irrelevant, geographically isolated population groups perform differently when placed in the same environment. We can theorize a system of import that weeds out the 'bad'. But that still leaves the fact that there are so many bads that they need extensive weeding out when compared to 'Western' people.
What I don't understand is, why do you care so much to ignore this sort of information? You could make a similar case for ignoring anything. Just figure out some proxy for it and voila. But that doesn't change the reality behind it. The kind of systems that functionally racially discriminate against blacks are conducive to healthy and happy western societies. You can dress them up how you want, it doesn't change the fact that people notice. And it's not the white identitarians.
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