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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29762 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Evidence has emerged that the office of Major of London considers a photo (PDF, page 47) depicting a group consisting of: a man, a woman, a boy and a girl, all of whom are of European ancestry, to not "represent real Londoners".

Looking at the ethnic breakdown of the capital of United Kingdom, showing Europeans (still) account for over 50% of the population, it seems premature to declare media depicting them to be unrepresentative.

But even if the natives were succesfully reduced to a minority, one would expect that they should be overrepresented. This would consistent with the mainstram present narrative around representation. That the fractions of ethnic groups in media shouldn't mirror those of the general population, but since people exhibit racial ingroup bias, minorities would be less happy if they didn't see people who look like them.

Defenders of this branding guide have claimed this has nothing to do with race of the people in the image, but I have to wonder if they would thought so, if a photo depicting what appears to be family of four Pakistanis would be caption as "Doesn't represent real Londoners." in a branding guide of a rigth-wing anti-immigration politician.

Especially in light of darwin's description of working enviroment of advertising companies. He claimed that anti-white jokes were common and that even he made them.

Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.

Right above it the report gives examples of staged or PR photos as a separate, but also bad, categories. If that's what they meant it was already covered.

Also,in my experience with Canadian ads, mixed race couples (especially with black people, who should be of much less relevance here) are very over-represented. I don't really see how it can be a coincidence at this point and not a result of the exact sentiment I'm seeing here, even if it isn't as badly or explicitly put. I think they just said the quiet part out loud this time.

What little BBC I’ve watched seems to have a suspiciously high number of black people.

"representation" is a basic requirement of every piece of media I make relating to characters. At the start, the art team defaulted to white characters, we have since been taught that every shot has at least one black character and one female. We instituted a skin-color randomizer to get more diversity, and then we instituted a skin-color-randomizer-override because randomness did not deliver the desired results.

Go figure. It's very noticeable for a lot of properties, like League of Legends, but I always wondered whether it was an unspoken thing or explicit rule in these companies to always be showing certain types front and center. I'm in a different field, but I have received explicit instruction in the past to request diversity from the graphics team when I have ad creatives made.

I suspect this is why you aren't allowed to change the race or sex of your character in Battlefield One. You're gonna have to swallow your pride and accept playing as a black woman fighting for Germany in WW1.

Yeah they can fuck right off with that. I was wondering why I was getting randomly teabagged in a Battlefield V multiplayer game all the time, lo and behold I noticed it had randomed me as a black skinny chick. Fucking nonsense like this in world war 2 games should be straight up illegal.

Pulling from an old post:

The BBC did do that ridiculous piece on a "typical" family in Roman Britain with a black Roman centurion. Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense

Then we have Stephen Moffat basically admitting to lying as a social engineering tactic. He's probably the most prominent person on the fiction side and apparently has first dibs on major British IP (Sherlock, Doctor Who, Jekyll, Dracula...) on that channel:

Moffat even talks about the idea he mentions above — the excuse of “historical accuracy” that some people often give to justify an all-white cast — “[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’”

It's past suspicious for me at this point.

I usually blame the US for everything wrong in the world but it may just be London's impact: half of Black Britons cluster in that area. People working there may just be exposed to disproportionate amounts of black people and react by doing stuff like this.

Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense

Her interactions with Taleb were how I was introduced to her work, so I was actually immensely shocked when I saw people treating her like a real academic or historian. I still don't think her work deserves any credibility, but I don't know if there's any amount of legitimate scholarship that can actually undo the corrosive effect that kind of politically motivated advocacy has on your reputation.

It's especially bad for someone who writes books for laymen.

If she was only involved in highly technical research about Roman numismatics or the climate of the early Roman Republic then it wouldn't be as bad both because the source material would be unlikely to be misinterpreted/misused and her audience of 400 specialists would have the immune system to deal with it.

Beard is one of those historians the rest of us are supposed to be able to trust and read without worrying she's a kook or going too far out on a limb. Except she just did. I like good pop history as much as anyone and she's a very common "safe" recommendation (especially if you want audiobooks) and it sucks cause I just don't trust her or want to hear from her. She seems respected for her actual scholarship, it's a shame this is how she advertised herself and spent her credibility.

Yeah I watched some big sporting event on a Canadian network and I had to google what percent of Canada is black. I follow the nba so I understand Canada has black immigrants but I didnt think they’d be in every car / insurance / beer ad during time outs

This will have been the decision of an agency designer. If someone had said, "what because they're all white?" they'd have said no, because it's a cheesy "too perfect" stock image. Someone senior or the client might have noted the possibility of negative headlines like the ones that have ensued, and then they'd have changed either the picture or the wording of the "don't". (I work in London agencies and know how all these conversations would likely go -- I also know this document won't necessarily have been looked at all that closely by anyone in a position of authority; brand books like this are often makework by agencies to pad their fees and to help brand managers accrue power to themselves. Once you've made something like this, every bit of communication goes through your office to check.)

Now, did the all-whiteness of the image contribute to the sense that this is a clear example of a cheesy "advertising of the past" type image? Very probably. It's what agencies are all keen to avoid.

To me the more interesting thing is that there are journalists scouring every little going-on in public life for evidence of wokeness. Standard culture war stuff I guess but it's a goddamn brand book, one of the least read types of document in the world and not usually a source of scandal!

Brand books are influential. Black people are pushed into every element of culture. Diversity doesn't mean mongolians, it means people who look like and are culturally african American. This is becoming a defining feature of culture in which add campaigns in places that barely have black people are full of them.

It's what agencies are all keen to avoid.

Why is it cheezy to show British people living in Britain? Isn't it more absurd to show it as an African nation? Is it cheezy when Eritreans don't have lots of white people in their adds?

because it's a cheesy "too perfect" stock image.

The photo looks like something from your neighbour's facebook page. The family looks average and it isn't an overly set up shot.

I don't agree that it looks like a Facebook image, if you can't see it you, can't see it, but that screams Getty to me. Look at the carefully casual composition of multiple landmarks in the background, harmonious wardrobe and filtered sun. I bet you it's chosen from hundreds of images of the same people, look how all four of them are smiling at once. Hardly the cheesiest example ever but it seems more appropriate to me for overseas tourists than an audience of jaded Londoners.

Of course I agree that it should be fine to show the right image of an all white family but I think the nature of the decision making process often favours mixed ethnicities except when casts are very large. (If you've seen TV ads with multiple vignettes of different families, pretty common on British TV, that is where you're most likely to see more homogenous families depicted.)

This is becoming a defining feature of culture in which add campaigns in places that barely have black people are full of them.

Aside from the fact that there are lots black people in London, the brand book actually does feature a broad range of races. Plenty of white people, plenty of people who are non-white but not black, and yes plenty of black people. Few Mongolians, presumably, because there are no Mongolians in London.

The family looks average and it isn't an overly set up shot.

Part of the problem is that they are right in front of the eye, which, combined with the general gaiety of the picture, makes them look like tourists.

Agreed. I started a count of white/black/Asian non-Khan faces, but it is skewed by the large-group pictures of "Positive and Optimistic" on p34 which is an almost-all-Asian group and of the African dance troupe on p43. But my casual impression is that the racial mix is only marginally less white than London, and probably not less white than young London (the ethnic minority population is a lot younger than the white population). The most obvious weirdness about the demographics of the photos, which I assume is a message that Khan's team intend to communicate but can't write down for legal reasons, is how young everyone except Khan is. There are zero photos showing Khan (who is 52) with someone who appears to be older than him, and only one picture without Khan (on p44) where a pensioner is in focus.

I think you're being too generous. As Tanista said, there is already a separate example of a staged stock photo. They didn't say the photo of the family walking looked fake, they said it didn't represent 'real Londoners'. The mayor's office has since claimed that this caption was added mistakenly, but that just begs the questions of which caption they intended to put there and why the photo was on that list in the first place?

The photo itself doesn't look staged or fake to me. It looks like a photo of a real (albeit photogenic) London family walking around the city.

Moreover, page 35 specifies that photography must be diverse. Page 33 specifies that all photos must 'reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London'. Given that there are (as far as I can tell) no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the problem with the photo was the ethnicity of the family.

And as someone who works in or with this industry, I don't know if you're just not aware of the implicit rules that the rest of us notice because you're too steeped in them, but this is a textbook example of shoehorned multiracialism. Do you ever notice how every advert on TV these days has either multiple ethnic groups or interracial relationships? Or how every costume drama somehow includes at least one West African character regardless of the setting or era? This is the same thing.

I won't try and speak for the designer but I can imagine different don'ts for staging a situation fakely on the one hand and casting in a way that looks inauthentic on the other. I can't stress enough how makework these things are. The more categories of 'don't', the better, from the agency's point of view. I also know how these things come together, it could easily be a junior designer doing a quick web surf for images that they think look intuitively wrong for the brand, and then they try and think of various categories for why they look wrong so it looks structured and scalable and keeps clients convinced that this is not smoke and mirrors made by failed artists, but real rigorous MBA type stuff. How can we produce a lot of rules and stuff to sell the client is the guiding principle (can you tell I've had bad experiences with brand guidelines?).

I'm very aware that ads tend to try hard to 'represent' for a few reasons, and so if there are two people one will probably be non-white. The decisions are taken per piece of communication, and there are not large casts in all ads, so this has lately led to some kinds of minority over-representation (I don't know what the situation would be if all ads had a cast of thousands, enabling them to more accurately represent the actual demographic mix!).

A photo of a good looking, carefully dressed white nuclear family can easily come across as cheesy for a few reasons, especially that that is how the much mocked ads of the past looked. Agencies want to be seen as modern.

All this is fairly dumb but I think the causation is mostly due to dumb industry dynamics, with ideology part of the mix but not the whole story.

But again, the authors didn't write that the photo of the British family was cheesy or staged, they said they weren't real Londoners. In a guide where they also said (multiple times) that real Londoners were diverse. There's really no ambiguity about what they thought here.

no photos in the guide which only include indigenous (BIPOC?) Britons

Really? Unless you're saying that you don't count the ones with Khan in them, which is almost all of them and therefore cheating really, there are several with just him and white people. There's one of him with two white police officers, with the white woman in the coffee shop (the only other person being a white guy in the background), with just a different white woman in the 'air quality event photo' and one with a white couple in their flat. The one with people strolling around the market square also looks mostly like white people, though maybe one or two in the background aren't white.

No, I wasn't counting the photos with Khan in them. As the guide itself says multiple times explicitly, real Londoners are diverse. The British family walking alongside the Thames are not real Londoners (according to the guide), but because of his brown skin, Khan bestows legitimate Londonness (even if he is an Uncle Tom).

I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards to ignore what the authors of this guide are bashing us over the head with:

p6: Brand principles: We reflect the city’s diversity and openness.

p32: Photography supports our message and is...diverse

p33: The photos we use should reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London.

p35: [Photography] reflects diversity

p42: We should show a true, diverse London that Londoners can relate to.

p43: To fully document the event, we use different perspectives [that are] diverse

p47: [British family] doesn't represent real Londoners

p48: [Preferred social media shots] show audience diversity and their reaction

p50: Audience - Showing diversity and their reaction

p52: Encourage diversity in images

I'm not disputing that they want racial diversity in their photographs. They clearly do, and that's fine. What I'm disputing is this bizarre notion is that because one of the 'bad' photos has white people in it therefore they think white people can't be Londoners, despite all the other white people in the good photos. What about the almost exclusively white street scene? That family actually doesn't look like an 'ordinary London one', the problem being their location especially along with general demeanour that makes them look like tourists.

I'd be more amenable to that explanation if the caption read 'photos of tourists' or 'staged demeanour'.

But it didn't, it said they don't represent real Londoners. Their complaint was specifically about representation, not about the staging of the photo. According to the authors of that guide, a British family with a father, mother and two children are not representative of real Londoners. The guide also included about half a dozen other mentions of how real Londoners are diverse.

Moreover, their explanation when caught was that the 'caption was added in error' which is about as plausible as 'my twitter was hacked'. Documents like this don't get made or disseminated without half a dozen people proof-reading them. They knew what they were writing, they just didn't expect any tabloid journalists to read it.

Epistemic charity means taking people at their word, it doesn't mean rewriting their words into something they never said.

they don't represent real Londoners

They don't. The word 'represent' doesn't have to mean race. Tourists on a day trip do not represent real Londoners. And again, what about the almost exclusively white street scene?

Do you really think that they wrote 'this photo does not represent real Londoners' with the intention that the reader interpret this to mean 'these people look like tourists'. If they had wanted to say that the family looked like tourists, they could have written that. But they didn't, they wrote a caption which a normal person would interpret to mean that the photo has inadequate racial representation. If they meant what you're claiming they meant, they could have said that the caption was poorly worded. Instead they said it was 'added in error' whatever that means.

As for the street photo, I'm not sure which one you're referring to, but you answer your own question regardless. Mostly white is okay because this still has diversity, entirely white is bad because this photo is not diverse and therefore the people don't represent real Londoners.

More comments

You're right, but now race flip it. Imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if the mayor's office had a media book saying it would be wrong to have an image with 3 non-white people (not real Londoners!) without at least one white Briton.

Let's say the current scandal is a 2/10. The race-flipped version would be an 8. So is it really accurate to complain about oversensitivity here?

The best way through the culture way is an armed standoff, not one side ceding all ground to the other. We will have fewer cancelings when the right is able to cancel as well. When it's a superweapon that one side can use exclusively, they will use it as much as possible.

The concept of "try to show a realistic mix of ethnicities" just makes sense in mass communications so I'm actually unsure if this would be a much bigger scandal? It depends how it was worded, the nature of the examples etc.

PS Obviously if you used a picture of a black family with the caption "Not real Londoners" that would invite a scandalous interpretation but I don't know how far that takes us? Of course the implications change with a race flip, as black and white are not symmetrical opposites in British society.

I think this proves my point. "Diversity" is a fig leaf for promoting a race-based spoil system that promotes some groups ahead of others.

I don't know why people keep falling for the diversity canard. "But wait, why are white, working class Britons ridiculously underrepresented, I thought you cared about diversity", the naivë conservative whines, not aware that diversity was never the point.

Yeah. I am very anti-cancellation but seeing heads roll for this would be something I would classify as only "slightly bad" instead of "terrible".

are journalists scouring every little going-on in public life

That's a unreasonably negative way to describe journalists reading documents published on official government websites. This is pure "Republicans pounce" style blaming the messenger.

You're right, the scouring is actually good. The selection of this small detail and crafting it into a news story that will push their reader's known buttons is not good. Obviously if you think the story is a big deal you're entitled to disagree, and obviously the other side does it too.

Are they really not doing this though?

There are articles about how being on time is racist. The car you drive is racist. Having a family is racist, etc.

Calling this pure 'republican whatever' is pure misdirection. Argue with their points, not just applying the 'out-group' bad label.

The essence of advertising is tying one's product to high status. And like it or not "new britons" are high status whilst "persons without a migrant background" are low status.

I've made this point before here when someone mentioned their (American) friend complaining about their city being "too white". This is all about aping the values and aesthetic of the ruling class, and we all know that "diversity" is one of their core values, by which they mean a virtuous sidelining of ethnic Europeans.

I just wish people would stop pretending this isn't what it is. But alas, pretending it's not happening is integral to the virtue of the thing so we can't even have a reasonable conversation and everyone has to be all cloak and dagger. Even though by now everyone knows who "real Londoners" are.

At least when the Chinese don't want certain races in their posters, they don't have to make elaborate postmodern discourses for it.

Even though by now everyone knows who "real Londoners" are

Do we? I would say that the connotation of 'real Londoners' is basically just 'doesn't live too far out and isn't too rich'. So while yes an Afro-Caribbean from Brixton is one sort of person that comes to mind when one says that phrase, so is a white plumber from Bethnal Green, or whatever. It just doesn't include bankers, lawyers and people from Upminster.

When Londoners talk about "real Londoners", which is rare, it usually refers to long-term permanent residents as opposed to transients (depending on context, tourists and other visitors, temporary residents such as students or corporate transferees, or rich people with multiple addresses meaning they aren't fully committed to London). The proposition "If you have lived in London for at least ten years, you are a real Londoner" doesn't attract much opposition. There is also a fairly strong consensus that the boundary of London is the M25 and that suburbanites are real Londoners too. The super-rich would be real Londoners if they were long-term permanent residents, but the view that super-rich people are globe-trotting jetsetters without the kind of commitment to any one city to qualify as a real Londoner is widely held.

If a real Londoner wrote that, "doesn't represent real Londoners" means that the people in the photo appear to be either tourists or posed models. I agree that it is possible that some recent (white, thick) graduate of a provincial university interning at a cheap PR agency could think that the family are too white to be real Londoners.

I don't think this is about race at all. Plenty of the other pictures which are examples of good photos show the mayor with exclusively white people. The point is that regular Londoners probably don't spend their weekends strolling along the most famous and photographed portions of the river. With the eye just behind them it looks like a stock photo or like tourists/day-trippers, not average Londoners going about their business. Now, overall they do say they want diversity, but that seems perfectly reasonable, and there is no reason to think that they therefore believe every single photo must contain someone not white. It's just that overall the Mayor should be photographed with a broad range of people; young and old, white, Asian and black, people in hard hats and people in suits etc. etc.

I am no fan of white people and even I think this is not right. There is no way this remark was targeted at any other category in that photo other than white. The photo is not "too perfect" for a stock image, it doesn't seem staged at all. The only good thing from this is that at least the racial animus isn't targeted towards minorities. Hopefully this is a good empathetic lesson for what they historically had to face in the past, and why that was bad and wrong.

  • -15

The lesson that should be learned by whites is to more thoroughly crush your enemies, to stop this kind of thing happening again. We showed, and continue to show, far too much clemency to our subjects. All of this is a result of attempts to uplift, rehabilitate and integrate the conquered, instead of just wiping them out wholesale and replacing them. Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.

Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.

They can still be imported and you're not genociding the whole world.

Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.

I’m pretty sure the genocide necessary to achieve this will raise much more vocal and far longer lasting accusations of racism than anything you’re bothered by now. And that’s assuming it’s an even remotely likely possibility, which it thankfully isn’t.

I’m pretty sure the genocide necessary to achieve this will raise much more vocal and far longer lasting accusations of racism than anything you’re bothered by now.

It won't, though. Arabs engaged in quite a bit of slaving against europeans for quite a long time, with all the rape and brutality you could ask for. They also castrated the male slaves, so those male slaves had no descendents. Thanks to that innovation, their centuries of brutality is treated as a curious anecdote, not a crime that echoes down through the centuries and demands restitution.

Thanks to that innovation, their centuries of brutality is treated as a curious anecdote, not a crime that echoes down through the centuries and demands restitution.

Between the following 2 options, which one do you think is more likely to have affected this demand's non-existence?

  1. Arabs castrating their slaves.
  2. Arabs not having a culture that would tolerate people making such a demand, let alone a myriad of others that are related to this line of morality.

Call it premature, but I'm going to take the position that 2 probably matters more than 1.

I disagree. Issues in the present are raised by survivors of the past. Where there are no survivors, there is no one left to care.

The problem is that it's just not true that there are no descendants of Arab slavery in Saudi Arabia.

From Wiki:

Afro-Saudis are Saudi citizens of Black African heritage. Afro-Saudis are the largest Afro-Arab group.[1] They are spread all around the country but are mostly found in the major cities of Saudi Arabia.[2] Afro-Saudis speak Arabic and adhere to Islam.[3] Their origins date back centuries ago to African Muslim migrants settling in Saudi Arabia, and to the Arab slave trade.[4]

There is also this article from refworks. CDHR refers to the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia:

Sources indicate that many black African Saudi nationals are the descendents of slaves (CDHR 9 Jan. 2014; Professor 13 Jan. 2014). Sources note that slavery was not abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1964 (CDHR 9 Jan. 2014; IGA 10 Jan. 2014) [or 1962 (Professor 13 Jan. 2014; The New York Times 10 Apr. 2009)]. The UVM Professor expressed the opinion that racial discrimination generally stems from the history of slavery (13 Jan. 2013). Several sources indicate that the term abeed, meaning "slaves" [or abda "slave" (The Guardian 28 Sept. 2012)], is still being used to describe black Saudi citizens (IGA 10 Jan. 2014; CDHR 9 Jan. 2014a; The Guardian 28 Sept. 2012).

Their origins date back centuries ago to African Muslim migrants settling in Saudi Arabia, and to the Arab slave trade.

Be careful not to interpret a Wikipedia article as saying more than its literal words. Wikipedia editors carefully word the things they say as much as newspaper writers do.

Notice the lack of numbers, or even the lack of "the primary reason their ancestors came is..."? If it doesn't say "a lot of their descent is from slaves", don't read it to mean "a lot".

There is also this article from refworks. ... Sources indicate that many black African Saudi nationals are the descendents of slaves

The word "many", without being quantified, is a sign of someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes. If they had any evidence for "most", they would have said it, so they don't.

More comments

I'm not sure if you're being ironic, testing the boundaries of what we'll put up with here, or making a serious point. But taken at face value, literally calling for genocide is culture warring in its purest form, and if this is some sort of Swiftian proposal, you're not clever enough by half and you need to speak more plainly.

I thought I was being plain. A lot of online pro-migration rhetoric, particularly on twitter, is phrased as "revenge for colonialism" or suchlike. The reason these descendants of the colonised still exist to be able to make these kinds of statements is the extraordinary mercy of not wiping out the lineage of the conquered in its entirety. If the result of that mercy is disadvantaging ethnic Brits now, then that mercy was clearly a mistake, as far as we today are concerned, wasn't it?

I did not intend in any way to imply that we should finish the murderous job today, if that was what you were worried about. But I did mean that we should consider dismantling them as a political force.

The point of colonialism was never to eliminate the colonized nations or wipe them out. At least not the late colonialism, and I'd argue this is mostly true for most of European-based colonialism in general. The point was to lift the nations being colonized from the darkness where they dwell into the light of civilization. Now, there are many people who may argue this approach is problematic for many reasons, but that's what the colonizers tried to do. Of course, not entirely for free - in exchange, they expected the use of the resources of these nations (just as they use resources of their own nation), and have combined power of them plus colonies be much larger than them alone, and also maybe certain measure of gratitude and deference. Again, I am not discussing there if it was right for them to do that - but only that this is what they tried to do. You can not blame people for not doing properly something that they never intended to do in the first place. It wasn't "mercy", it was the whole plan from the start. Surely, if somebody objected, there might be some killing needed to be done, but again, only in the service of this larger goal.

I mean, I think this is overly simplistic. Did some people aim intentionally for genocide back then? Sure, probably. Did some people aim, agitate, and advocate for uplift? It seems like this was also the case, hence schools and churches. And of course, the natives as labor force is and has always been among the resources being exploited, where it could be, and this can also explain the schools. Iunno, I don't think you're wrong, per se, I just don't think any single strategy can explain colonialism, being as it was an emergent venture prosecuted by many interest groups. I'd expect most things that were done to fulfill multiple interests.

Yes, it is a simplification, if we're talking about motivations of huge number of people, of course there's a variety there. But - if we talk about the leading ideology of the colonial project, I think there was such a thing, and I think it was the ideological and moral basis for the actions of many people and governments. And I think it's possible to say that the drive to wipe out the original population was never a main motivation there - though once can not ignore that specific homicidal and genocidal actions did take place. But it wasn't the overarching goal of this project, that's not what Europeans tried to do.

The first colonialists were not humanitarians. They were a fairly callous, profit seeking band of adventurer-merchant-conqueror-grifters. Colonialism as a civilizing effort was a later rationalisation, and not a convincing one.

The first colonists didn't set the policy however (and they scarcely would wipe out or subjugate the whole the native population, either). The system that sent them - and came after they came back and reported they found something they can name by European name with added "New" in front - did. And I don't think "humanitarian" is a correct word anyway - at least not how we understand it now. "Paternalistic" or "nanny state" would be more appropriate term - and as we know, all these impulses did not disappear, they just turned inwards (mostly).

Colonialism as a civilizing effort was a later rationalisation, and not a convincing one.

How do you explain multiple evidence of the people performing colonialism themselves saying that's what they wanted, and not saying what they wanted was actually to wipe out the aboriginals completely, never actually trying consistently to do that, and spending a lot of effort on things like converting them to christianity, making them follow European customs, etc. etc.? They just knew in the future people would want to rationalize their actions exactly matching the way they are behaving, and obligingly laid the ground work for that, while not doing anything to achieve what they actually really wanted - which is wiping out the natives?

I disagree with destroying the conquered, but the distaste for it is relatively recent in history.

Even Machiavelli advised that when killing an enemy it’s best to kill their whole family, to ensure their offspring don’t come back in reprisal, and with the common people on their side.

I think you're right on the basics, morality nonwithstanding - ethnicities that have been entirely wiped out no longer get to claim any grievances or preferential treatment.

But Machiavelli? Didn't he write the prince tongue-in-cheek? Honest question, I've heard contradictory opinions.

Moses said they could keep the virgins, after killing all the women and boys.

I would prefer we keep only the pretty ones.

Now therefore kill every boy, and kill every woman who has had sexual intercourse with a man. But all the young women who have not had sexual intercourse with a man will be yours.

I don't think westerners need teaching that racial prejudice is wrong. The obsesssion with race and with racial grievance is driven mostly by people of European descent. The people who wrote this guide were almost certainly majority Britons.

Besides, the idea that only non-westerners ever faced racial or ethnic prejudice and that Europeans need teaching how this feels is absurd. You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?

You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?

I didn't know that. Can you elaborate?

Avoid low-effort sarcasm like this.

It's Tuesday in some parts of the world, so Throwback Tuesday to a time where we discussed a similar incident.

It does appear that for many, the mere existence of a white, non-interracial, non-obviously LGBT family is enough to engender seethe. Seethe that is within the Overton window, in contrast to Noticing the overrepresentation of blacks in media and advertising or the overrepresentation of interracial couples (especially black men with white women).

Obligatory in-group biases by race/ethnicity.

We don't really know what their actual intention was, and there isn't a lot to go on. But even if their actual intention was that PR photography shouldn't contain all white people, I have no problem with it. Using a brief google search, it seems like 59.8% of London is white, so that still leaves 40.1% of other colors and ethnicities. The mayor of London is a politician and therefore wants his brand to portray him as representing everyone of all ethnicities in his city. Adding people of different ethnicities in PR photos accomplish that better than just having white people in those photos.

We don't really know what their actual intention was, and there isn't a lot to go on.

Scroll on up to pps 42-43 and check out the kind of 'events' and case study photos that the mayor considers appropriate to portray and I'd say there's a fair bit to go on; doesn't really seem like a 60/40 split is what he's going for.

Ok, I understand the desire to view this charitably... And we probably should, to be honest.

But reverse the variables here. If this was criticism of a very diverse photo, do you think it would be viewed charitably?

I think this is the result of applying the critical theory lens in the other direction. Which was bound to happen.

Reading the whole brochure as a Londoner, the most interesting thing is just how much of a personality cult the Greater London Authority is trying to present itself as. The name "Greater London Authority" is only used on internal-facing documents - to the public, the brand is "Mayor of London", and the mayor is photographed at every opportunity while his staff and other politicians are unpersoned. The key aim of the brand guidelines is that GLA publications should create the impression that Sadiq Khan is solving every crime and fixing every pothole himself, or at least hands-on supervising the front-line workers who are. Unfortunately, I think this was the intention of London's Scottish colonial rulers when they set up the GLA - I have heard lots of serious people saying that the secret to fixing local democracy (i.e. getting voters to vote on local issues) is to personalise it. And the previous mayors were Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, so Khan has to do a lot of PR-mediated cult of personality stuff to compete with their media personas.

Specifically on the race issue, there are plenty of pictures where Khan is the only non-white person in shot held up as good examples, so I don't think the intended message is "fewer white faces". Interestingly, a lot of the white faces in the examples are police - there are good reasons given the politics of policing in London why if I were the Mayor, I would choose my PR shots to make the Metropolitan Police look more diverse than they are, but showing the police as almost-all-white doesn't bother Khan's PR team. I do worry that someone seems to think that the only person in London over the age of 50 is the Mayor.

Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.

Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.

Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.

Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)

But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.

You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.

Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?

Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:

  • Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.

  • Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.

  • You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.

  • Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.

  • Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.

Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.

The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?

This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.

So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year.

But that's not the goal of prison.

If you go to the nearest KKK leader and ask "are you willing to pay for prisons, and incidentally, there will be an innocent black man imprisoned at some point" he'll probably say yes.

The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".

I don't follow. What exactly is that no-cost intervention? Or is the point just that the question is: "Would he still hate black people if they are productive members of society?"

Honestly asking. I don't get what you're saying.

Edit: never mind, I get it now upon re-reading. Leaving this to mark my shame.

Can you please explain for the rest of us? Because I don't entirely understand what that particular example was supposed to demonstrate.

By intervention I meant that hypothetical Soros-funded anti-recidivism experiment that funds all sorts of activists trying various ideas.

The alternative to that is the current situation when violent recidivists are in fact locked up for a long time on taxpayer's dime.

My point is that I'm sure that pretty much nobody, including KKK Grand Dragons, hates black people in a sense that they would actively pay to harm them. So we shouldn't worry that our hypothetical program would receive a pushback from the nonexistent group of people that prefers more black criminals around.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.

This feels more like a D&D scenario than it does political analysis. You're taking a bunch of groups of people, writing a few-sentence description of why they act a way they do, then pitting the groups against each other based solely on that description to achieve an outcome in a tortured way.

Like, """Soros DAs""" (or, more accurately, progressive city-level politicians) are currently a problem because they hold political power and set policy in ways that don't reduce crime as much as they should. If you had the power to set policy, you could set up a complicated incentive game where you trick your political enemies into solving your problem for you. Or you could just have the police aggressively investigate and arrest criminals, using modern technology, and there'd be much less of a recidivism problem because crime would be swiftly punished and no longer be rewarding. Police departments have lists of habitual offenders, gangs, gang members - just take action against them! There's no scenario where setting up the tortured game is actually worth anything - if you have the power to set the rules under which Soros and his 'activists' play, you can just ignore them. And if you don't have that

And there are a ton of people who actively hate black people in the sense they would pay to harm them. Internet nazis, virulent racists, white supremacist gang members, etc. People who advocate for mass deportation of nonwhites. They're currently, no matter how you count it, less than a few percent of the US population, but they absolutely exist. I'm not sure rebutting that point matters though, it feels like poking a hole in some complicated talmudic argument that's already ten thousand feet above reality.

In the same spirit: pointing and shaming how wasteful north americans are for driving instead of using public transport, claiming that if almost all the money we put on road maintenance and car infrastructure instead went to public transport it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.

t it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.

What a specific breed of Intellectual Yet Idiot fails to grasp is that good public transit is a function of density, not the other way around. Rich people in London use the tube because of the density makes it the best option speed wise. Not because they wouldn't prefer a point to point solution or can't afford one. But congestion and death are the great equalizers for majority of people. And you only have so much time here and wasting it in Ferrari in a congestion is a stupid utilization of one's time. And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.

And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.

Citation needed. Certain lines are quite good, but other lines are absolutely not clean, and these days I encounter roughly 1 beggar on the trains every time I go to/back from work.

And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.

I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.

To be honest I don't know why American cities appear so dysfunctional while other places do just fine, when I don't see how the decision-making is remotely democratic. Or maybe it is democratic but ordinary urban Americans are way more brainwashed somehow. I don't know, I know that where I leave we have very nice and cheap public transportation that is used exclusively by people who can't afford cars, but it's nice because it has these social ads playing, telling that if there's some smelly hobo (literally the ad is showing green noxious fumes!) you should immediately call the police and they will remove them. Which they do and if any politician tried to run on the platform of not infringing hobo rights, they would be laughed at by everyone.

I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.

In extremely dense cities like London and Tokyo, it is faster to catch an underground train, than it is to travel in a Taxi/Uber. The only option faster than train is "charter a private helicopter", which admittedly some do, but not in great numbers.

There's plenty of rich people on the NYC subway and it's neither clean nor all that safe.

I do live in a city dense enough for mass transit, and I do use it all the time (having no car myself). It is usually fast enough, but the infrastructure is decaying, there's trash in busses and trains, constant visible, water infiltration in the concrete walls of subway stations that have been left unfixed for years. And the experience of using it in the last 5 years has become notably worse. There's the tolerance of disruptive behavior I've mentionned: mentally ill people screaming, groups of rowdy loitering late teens/young adults. But also the service itself is also getting worse, a mix of desperately hiring whoever is available and strong public service unions puts us far from the kind of pride and conscientiousness of, say, the Japanese rail system. We have busses showing up late (from the yard, not from traffic) regularly, sometimes not showing up at all with no indication at stops. The subway is somewhat more reliable, except for the daily service interruptions. Obviously, the cost has also kept increasing. All of this is of course overseen by politicians who are not in the least incentivized to solve the issues.

And this is one of North America's top public transit systems, and one of if not the most popular (as in % of population using it regularly).

Barring the emergency exits is a plausible framing for deBoer’s strategy. At the least, it fits neatly in with stereotypes about socialists, which I guess makes it good enough for this board. I doubt that it was the motivation for soft-on-crime DAs, and I am confident that it is not, and never has been, the modus operandi for desegregation.

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority? Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end? Who’s coordinating this gambit, anyway?

Here’s a simpler explanation: people opposed segregation because they thought it was bad. Evil, pernicious, self-perpetuating. And people oppose harsh sentences, or racial profiling, or whatever triggered the campaigns of 2018—they oppose these things because they think they are wrong. Not because they’re playing 5D chess with recidivism. Not because they want their opponents to suffer. Because they expect the benefits outweigh any costs.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority?

Because then the majority has skin in the game and has to deal with the problem. It's naive and usually doesn't work, but if you totally expect it from deBoer, why not from other activists?

Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end?

I never said or implied that. But you're conflating two very different things: all the stuff that MLK mentioned, let's call it "negative desegregation", meaning that black people are no longer prevented from being in white spaces, and "positive desegregation" that actively tries to mix up communities, such as busing (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing btw, it was an unmitigated disaster opposed by everyone involved expect the actual rich and affluent whites). Can you give me your best pro-busing steelman? Because I'd put making whites have skin in the game wrt education quality on the first place, tolerance through familiarity on the second, and aesthetic preference for de facto desegregation as a sort of a strawman (though no doubt real) justification.

Same for the Soros DAs. I'm not saying that there were devious conspirators planning to have a crime wave, I'm sure that they hoped that there wouldn't be a crime wave! But don't you think that it was very weird to do things in the opposite order to what I proposed? Like, first you figure how to prevent criminals from reoffending, then you go soft on reoffenders because they won't reoffend yet again? If you go soft on reoffenders first, what exactly do you expect? Is "uh I hope someone also figures how to prevent recidivism now that they are forced to" painting my enemies as more stupid and evil than "idk I don't give a fuck lol"?

Then you weren’t very clear when you claimed

Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess).

You glossed over the part where people thought the segregation itself was bad and had obvious, object-level effects. Is that not a more obvious motivation for desegregation? Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing. It’s not people trying to psyop the oppressors into caring about a problem. It’s people believing their remedy is just.

I said:

Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them

And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.

Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing.

You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.

Because they expect the benefits outweigh any costs.

I disagree. The OP's list of institutions and reforms are highly associated with a set of people who really don't believe in or acknowledge tradeoffs (as a group). Largely those sorts of reforms are caused by an overactive sense of fairness and a Utopian vision. Maybe FDB thinks in the terms of "skin in the game" but mostly public school advocates think in terms of it being unfair if kids dont get the same education, and that if only we could get everyone into "good schools" most of societies ills would be solved. And, in addition, that if we didn't have public schools, all the poor kids would languish in illiteracy.

I don’t think we disagree.

Placing that much value on “fairness” is saying that it would be a huge benefit. Thinking public school ought to be good enough for the elite is assuming away the costs. For someone who thinks access to opportunity really is the only thing holding a kid back, providing that access is really supposed to fix the problem!

I think that’s a reasonable way to interpret progressive policy around education. My problem with the OP is modeling increasing access as a progressive psyop. It’s not—that Utopianism and fairness is enough.

OP is modelling the progressives as percieving and understanding the problem and its solutions the same way as he does, so is confused and left scrambling to find an explanation as to why they chose bad solutions, coming to the conclusion that bad solutions must be a deliberate part of a plan to force people to find good solutions. Progressives do the same thing when they claim that their ideological opponents must be evil or selfish for refusing to fix whatever social ill is their current project.

As you point out, most progressives likely see the issue differently, and their solutions don't seem bad to them.

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated ...

I feel like we read different things.

Here’s a simpler explanation: people opposed segregation because they thought it was bad.

I agree and I agree that segregation is bad. The issue here is the side effects to the solutions proposed. There's a lot of people who greatly benefited from segregation that are now proposing solutions that will mainly effect other people. I'm not saying this is done maliciously but refusing to acknowledge this helps no one (and fuels the idea of 5d-chess).

I’m talking about

Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.

And

But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?

I don’t object to OP’s argument about skin in the game. I think assessing the cost-benefit of a policy (such as busing, soft-on-crime, or general segregation) is a legitimate discussion to have. The unreasonable bit is asserting that progressives are doing this as 5D chess. That they aren’t removing the thing because the thing is bad, but because it will make other people actually fix it. That’s convoluted and uncharitable.

As @anti_dan pointed out, place enough value on fairness, and you’ll come up with something like the soft-on-crime DAs. If you’re enough of a utopian, maybe you really do think the problems will go away when you remove a discriminatory pressure. These are more realistic explanations!

Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious.

I don’t object to OP’s argument about skin in the game.

I'm confused. I think I misunderstood your tone.

As @anti_dan pointed out, place enough value on fairness, and you’ll come up with something like the soft-on-crime DAs... If you’re enough of a utopian, maybe you really do think the problems will go away when you remove a discriminatory pressure.

Right, this is my point. A lot of people have utopian ideas but ignore the unintended consequences of those ideas. This gets galling when the people calling the shots (with those ideals) don't live in the area and don't have to deal with the consequences. Screaming racism because they don't want to deal with that criticism is disgusting.

If you OK a homeless encampment in the park, you don't get to ignore the girl who gets raped.

Aye. No objections to that.

Argument from side effects is legitimate. Claiming that opponents overlooked something, undervalued something, and so on—perfectly fine. Asserting that they were actually choosing policies because they wanted to force the majority to reckon with a problem? Now he’s starting to get uncharitable, not to mention convoluted.

I think the issue is that the people you’re trapping have so little power to actually fix the problems that essentially it’s locking the top deck of the titanic and then telling the passengers that the only way they live is if they manage to fix the leak — without any tools or training. Trapping kids in the public schools essentially means that everybody’s kids fail unless the parents can tutor alongside the school. Lock the school board’s kids in might work, locking in the teachers kids, maybe, lock in the kids of the people elected to government? Sure, I can see it.

Hmm. A civil service that requires employees to send their kids to public schools. Work for the government, no dodging the system you create.

It’s got a certain appeal.

I rather strongly suspect that most civil servants do send their kids to public schools. They tend to live in higher CoL areas and aren't paid particularly well. Likewise for teachers, school board members, etc...

Barring the emergency exits is a plausible framing for deBoer’s strategy.

It's not novel to De Boer.

It's not novel to education.

Ditto for discipline caps in schooling, which is the same logic again.

Ditto for affirmative action and other diversity quotas.

This is absolutely a thing people on the Left do. It's absolutely a thing people on the Right do, probably in the same way, though no examples leap readily to mind. It's a very human and highly recognizable tendency in contentious politics. If you squint and tilt your head, you can see something of the same pattern in Trump supporters' current and continued support for Trump, or in debt ceiling brinksmanship, or in dozens of other patterns of behavior. It does seem to me that leftists do it more with actual institutions, though, possibly because they run more institutions.

Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority?

Because they believe that unwilling majority is ultimately to blame for the problem, and they are tired of waiting for a solution. Re-read that Kline article, it's all there in black and white. People see a problem, and they get angry at the people causing the problem. But then those people and their defenders say it's not them, it's actually a systemic thing. Spokespersons for the system blame individuals, and after a while the people worried about the problem get sick of the buck-passing, and insist on a solution now, even if the solution is lossy or dire. They reason that even if they can't identify exactly where the problem is, they can narrow it down to a general area and carpet-bomb, writing off the collateral damage as a cost of doing business. It's a reasonable strategy if you're correct about the general location and severity of the problem. If you aren't, it's just a disaster.

You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class

This has always been my frustration with affirmative action. Growing up poor, I saw first hand the kind of advantages other kids got. But when it came to getting into school, civil jobs, etc., The people with all the privilege were never the ones affected by it; In that, there was always a way (usually multiple) for them to still get a large advantage. It's like they feel bad for cheating, so they're giving a pass to a group to make themselves feel better.

If you bring this up or talk about a test that's harder to game, you get called a racist.

I had a similar experience when I was in grad school, I’m a white guy with middle/lower middle class parents. invariably the people whom were getting (I assume, i didn’t see their records) affirmative action benefits were overwhelmingly attractive women from more privileged backgrounds. It was one of the lived experiences which completely turned me off on the left and on academia more generally

I’m curious. Why do you think they were getting AA, rather than benefiting from elite backgrounds?

I went to a not-terribly-selective school in the Midwest. There were two big contingents that suggested “privileged background”: Greek life and foreign exchange. You could see either wearing branded clothes, throwing around money, and generally not taking the school part as seriously. But I’d have a harder time picking out anyone I’d assume was getting AA.

Well, unless you count sports.

Because people who benefit from elite backgrounds generally have the benefits that make them deserve it.

When your parent is able to homeschool you and groom you into an elite, you generally end up with the skills to get where you need to without any direct support from them.

But I suppose my definition of elite is the genuine American Aristocracy rather than someone's dad owning a car dealership.

If you had to ballpark...how large a percentage of the American population is the aristocracy?

Depends on where you are, the truly idle rich in my area are probably the top 2 % , but they are clustered here so likely less than 1‰ globally.

So - as a rough ballpark estimate - around the top 0.1 percent in America? That makes sense. Doctor tier salary is doing very well, but you wouldn't call them straight-up aristocrats...maybe either jumped-up tradesmen or managers or very bushleague aristocrats, not the real deal. IMHO you're not rich until you've got $15 million in the bank (and so don't have to work unless you want to) and you're not rich rich 'till you're making five million a year.

I put it more at around 3 million invested so it throws out a good yearly salary in returns. Otherwise unburdened and you can do whatever you want without too much hardship, at least enough to get free housing from someone who matters.

This is what got me in law school. I was one of the poorest students in the class, had never met a lawyer until college, and really struggled to keep my head above water, but received essentially zero institutional support. Meanwhile I had to watch the privileged children of biglaw attorneys and Wall Street bankers get handed cushy paid internships, specialized career counseling, additional academic support, and special access to important alumni because of their "underprivileged" minority status. It's really hard to have positive feelings about social justice when you're watching your friends who are already richer, better educated, and better connected than you get literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of free shit because of the color of their skin, and then still have the audacity to ask for (and receive) extensions on their final exams because they were traumatized by some cop being an asshole a thousand miles away.

I've seen too many children of Yale graduates benefit from affirmative action to support affirmative action.

If you bring this up or talk about a test that's harder to game, you get called a racist.

I honestly think that this phenomenon is behind a bunch of the increase in racism/racists in society. When you're told that acknowledging or trying to solve some of the problems in your society makes you a racist, and that even just having white skin also makes you a racist... you're probably going to start having a look at this racism thing to see if it really does do what they're claiming.

In Scandinavia we are fairly successful in forced skin in the game by using the draft. The smartest, strongest and healthiest are the ones who get drafted. People from the higher echelons of society are more likely to be conscripted and therefore have more skin in the game.

I fundamentally believe that immigration policy would have been completely different if people who voted for diversity had the diversity in their neighbourhood. Their ideological binds wouldn't apply when it is their property. Suburbs were a terrible mistake in the US as it allowed cities to deteriorate without in impacting the elite. The problemen wouldn't have arrisen from the first place as they would have kept things from getting out of hand. Migration is only fun when it is happening to someone else's area.

The corrent eltie completely lack a sense of duty and nobless oblige. This can't be forced, it comes as the result of hard times. The US needs a proper crisis to solve the corruption within its elite.

if people who voted for diversity had the diversity in their neighbourhood.

They do. The most pro-diversity areas are urban areas with lots of younger college grads, not suburbs.

I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege. The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because

  1. Their parents were rich and wealthy. Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.

  2. They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family. This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.

  3. The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them. This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them. Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.

Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed. You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants. If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives. If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers. You can't tax what isn't there. These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive. A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself. A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor. A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.

Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie. The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management. And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.

I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither. It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.

The origin of the concept of noblesse oblige can easily be found in the phrase itself i.e. nobility, hereditary privilege that you are born into i.e. something that you didn't earn through your own efforts and were never expected to, and which thus obliges you to follow certain norms.

Yeah, I get the impression that @functor’s understanding fits a later development. As militaries modernized, warrior aristocrats started to have a much harder time standing out, so justifying their social role got more important. By the end of WWI, their reputation for martial dominance was bleeding out in the mud. The hard times of modern warfare were not good fuel for noblesse oblige.

Suburbs were a terrible mistake in the US as it allowed cities to deteriorate without in impacting the elite.

And then for no reason at all, all the 'elite' moved to the suburbs.

I fundamentally believe that immigration policy would have been completely different if people who voted for diversity had the diversity in their neighbourhood.

This is why suburbs exist. The federal government and courts moved to address equity, the desires or votes of the majority mattered little. The resulting diversity motivated those that could, to move to the suburbs.

I understand your experience in Scandinavia is only recently enabling some to understand a reality that many in the US have known all their lives.

There is a big difference between Sweden and the US. We are far less diverse and the debate has already swung. Diversity is less popular now than 10 years ago and the country is noticeably less woke than it was around the peak in 2015. We have a coalition in government that ran on a platform of restricting migration.

The problems existed 20 years ago but didn't impact the middle class. When it was upper middle class kids getting robbed by immigrant gangs the public debate made a radical switch. In the US there is far more non white crime yet the american middle class seems comfortable with diversity from their suburbs.

In the US there is far more non white crime yet the american middle class seems comfortable with diversity from their suburbs.

Here in the US suburbs do insulate their inhabitants from the realities of urban diversity, in combination with beliefs in progressive orthodoxys, is comforting.

Of course there are many in suburbs who are uncomfortable or oppose the seemingly open border, or would prefer a return to tough on crime policing, or involuntary commitment for a larger cohort of the mentally ill. The silent majority has leadership issues and has been splintered by many divisive topics.

But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.

I generally call this the hostage-taking approach: "You fix the public schools, or your kids suffer". Or in the perhaps more common form "You hand over more money for the public schools or your kids suffer." It's not about skin in the game. Skin in the game might be having legislators and school boards have THEIR kids in public schools. J. Random Taxpayer (even J. Random Wealthy Taxpayer) who sends his kids to private schools is not trying to play the game without having skin in it; he's trying to get out of the game.

first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year

He's probably going to laugh at you and inform you there's no such thing as an innocent n-word.

But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.

I don't think forcing rich kids to go to public schools will make public schools better. It might make the public schools in their district better in some ways (it won't change the amount of money available since that's determined by property taxes), but I don't think it'll get any better in the way Scott envisions it. The people who own making decisions about public schools: teachers, politicians, parents, administrators, do not feel the pain of being in school. The children do. In that sense, no one has skin in the game. The pain of how shitty or worthless certain parts of public schooling were is a distant memory to those in control.

Now I don't think the correct solution is "let the kids decide", but forcing everyone to participate in something known to be awful in the hope that it'll get better somehow, when all the competing interests don't feel any of the pain, seems wishful.

The people who own making decisions about public schools: teachers, politicians, parents, administrators, do not feel the pain of being in school. The children do. In that sense, no one has skin in the game.

Yeah, that's one of my points (excepting parents, parents feel the pain of their children to some extent), you can tell that this sort of forcing people to have skin in the game can't work because they are forcing the wrong people, the children and their parents, while everyone else would actively stop any attempts to improve things and they wield the power.

Yeah, that's one of my points (excepting parents, parents feel the pain of their children to some extent),

I don't think parents feel the pain of public schools anywhere close to how much children do. When smart kids are being bored out of their minds, isolated kids feel as if there's nothing left to live for, or kids with ambitious parents are being ground down chasing 5.0 GPAs and the most college friendly extracurricular programs, the parents hardly feel any of that pain.

You still haven't made it clear how forcing rich families into public schools will make them better. Rich people's property taxes are already going to their district's schools. What would rich kids in public schools do? More helicopter parents bothering teachers into giving their kids straight A's? Affluent coded extracurricular programs?

I still don't think there's any strong evidence that all we're missing is rich families being forced into public education to make schools great again. Their children will still be in rich upper class neighborhoods which means rich upper class school districts. Or are you suggesting we bus rich kids to inner city schools?

First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime. Though we should do more small and frequent busts.

The bigger issue is Democracy. I have solutions to these problems. It’s probably something like making POTUS the head of the Mormon church. Requiring daily mass attendance or you I guess go to jail. I’d probably put homosexuals in jail. And of course trans wouldn’t exists. I’d ban birth control and abortion. And yes I think enforcing this strict cultural package from our past would solve a lot of these issues. While still keeping modern capitalism.

It does seem to me that religious societies don’t have the social ills you speak of so it seems to work. But I’m fairly certain I am not going to be allowed to do it. But yes I no longer think liberalism works for people who aren’t in the higher IQ parts of society and most would benefit for earlier cultural packages.

If we are talking about rehabilitative justice then it’s probably too late. Just give people a cultural package from the start they can succeed with.

But like I said Democracy. I don’t think I have any chance at enacting this. My theocracy i believe would work. DeBoer seems to be advocating for a statism I think would be awful. But it seems the key thing both have is forcing their plan on others. And I’m willing to give up my plan if I don’t have to risks their plan.

What the fuck?

I can’t tell if you’re making a modest proposal as a roundabout argument for democracy. If so, sure, I’ll play along.

Your proposed theocracy is, to me, morally abhorrent. That’s not surprising, but I don’t think it’s particularly stable, either. Liberalism has a pretty good track record of defusing tensions. Especially the kind which would arise from, say, jailing all your dissidents and trying to build a culture from the top down. It didn’t work for the Soviets, and it wouldn’t work for your Mormon caliphate.

For what it’s worth, I also think you’re overlooking the important community ties underpinning LDS. The service and mission requirements can’t be instilled merely by mandating butts-on-pews. And I don’t think they can displace Western atomism, no matter how many troops you deploy. But that’s kind of beside the point.

Stick with liberal democracy, it’s safer for all of us.

Honestly was doing both.

And I’m not sure the god not god part is the key thing. Though having a dictator in the sky who would punish or reward you for living a certain way helps people to do it.

But as a cultural package spending 20 min a week talking about morality and good behavior (don’t do drugs/drink excessively, don’t get random chicks pregnant, pick a person and commit to them, don’t steal or hurt people), then 20 min doing a bunch of rituals with your neighbors (helps to get to know your neighbors, makes you feel a part of a group), a bunch of community events (sports leagues/fish fries - more community connections). For the average person and perhaps even more for the lower class it’s a package of stuff that works better than modern liberalism which doesn’t have rules anymore and doesn’t seem to produce communities.

But yes I wanted to contrast it with Deboers forced socialism of fixing the schools. Which wouldn’t have the forced morality. Both have a bit of hostage taking to them. His forced public schooling was my forced church going. I’d guess 20-30% of America would agree with my plan which might even be more than his plans. Both would have widespread pushback.

I’m not in favor of theocracy, but I will say that democracy has many problems of its own that are baked in.

It cannot reign in the unelected deep state. We have dozens of autonomous agencies that the official government has little power over, and they pass regulations that define how we interact, what businesses can and cannot do, and what documentation needs to be kept (thus creating the need for administration jobs to make sure that the business can prove to regulators that it’s compliant.

On the other hand, it’s incapable of long term thinking itself. No elected official can afford to really think about the distant future. If his proposal causes near term pain, he’s out, even if it would be enormously beneficial long term. For that matter, a program that doesn’t work fast isn’t good for an elected official either — he might not win, then his opponent gets credit. In a related fashion, democracy promotes flashy new projects and initiatives over boring projects or maintenance projects. If you build a new highway, or a new school, or even a new wing of a school, you get to put your name on it. If you take the same money and fix roads and schools and subways, it’s invisible, and thus “waste”, even if it’s actually more efficient than building something new.

There are also issues of culture. Democracy by nature will embrace deviance however it’s defined. There are potential new voting blocs in legalization of forbidden behavior, in wealth transfers to people who engage in bad behavior, and in forcing acceptance of previously deviant behaviors. This isn’t long term good. Things like drug use are high risk behavior, often imposing hefty social and economic costs on the rest of society. Heroin addicts cannot hold productive jobs and need expensive interventions to allow them to continue. Less obvious are things like generous welfare payments that allow large segments of society to simply suckle the government teat without providing value, or student loan forgiveness that enable students to study useless things and provide little value to the rest of us for the trouble.

student loan forgiveness that enable students to study useless things and provide little value to the rest of us for the trouble

I not infrequently see this framing but it strikes me as being off, and fails to address the root of the problem.

While the things many students study are useless, the loans enable the University to teach useless disciplines. The University has no skin in the game. Like mortgage brokers, they've originated the loan, but don't hold or fund the debt. While being incentivised to originate as many as possible, here the barrier of lack of human capital able to engage in useful disciplines, may go someway to explain the expansion of uselessness.

Students may want to study useless things, they're young and mostly don't know any better. It should be the responsibility of the University to ensure uselessness is minimized and human capital is deployed efficiently in useful disciplines.

The problem being that the current proposed solution would essentially incentivize make the problem much much worse. The colleges are still guaranteed to get their pay even if the students learn absolutely nothing of value. The students won’t care because the government will forgive the debt so why not study the philosophy of Harry Potter?

My thing is that loan forgiveness is basically about the schools through the students. If the government chose to fix the 2008 mortgage crisis by paying back the loans to the bank then there’s no incentive to be more careful about who you loan to, how much you loan them, and whether or not the house is worth anything near that cost. Borrowers would have little reason to economize on their homes or worry about resale value.

I agree that loan forgiveness is not a solution, for anyone other than the students that would have their debt burden lifted.

I'd like to see underwriting standards for student loans that look at the human capital of the borrower and the proposed program of study. Only these conforming loans would be eligible for government guarantees, etc.

The issue is that only by removing the government from the loan business would you have any need for underwriting of any sort. As it stands, no matter what happens after the prospective student signs the loan, the college and the financial institutions are guaranteed the money. If I take out a loan to attend the university of Virginia, everyone involved at present is guaranteed the money even if I never attend class or do anything related. Until that changes there’s no reason to vet anything. It doesn’t protect them because they get the money provided I sign a loan and sign up for class. Forgiveness doesn’t change that, it simply changes the payer from the students to the government.

If there were a risk, there’d be reason to vet students. If they admit unserious or unprepared students, they potentially lose money when those students don’t get jobs after college. If they teach poorly enough that employers don’t want that schools graduates, they lose as well. If they admit lots of students who study trivial things, they’re out the money.

That would be the whole point of underwriting. To not fund high risk borrowers / disciplines / institutions. The remaining confirming loans could be sold off to a GSE to service after a period.

On the other hand, it’s incapable of long term thinking itself. No elected official can afford to really think about the distant future. If his proposal causes near term pain, he’s out, even if it would be enormously beneficial long term.

I mean to steelman the current system, this problem is exactly what these 'deep state' federal programs were meant to fix. You can argue, and I'd agree, that they aren't very effective at fixing this problem, but your argument clearly contradicts itself here.

There are also issues of culture. Democracy by nature will embrace deviance however it’s defined.

This is also absolutely not true. Maybe secular liberal democracy founded in a nation full of deviants, but plenty of democratic societies have been able to avoid celebrating deviance. Look at Finland. Hell, look at ancient Athens. It's certainly possible, but perhaps not with freely open voting to every person in a society.

Those criticisms are decidedly non-unique, though. What system is really free of bureaucrats? Of regulation? Of short-term thinking?

The best I can think of is minarchist libertarianism, at least for the regulatory regime. But it doesn’t incentivize long-term thinking, either, and throws its independent hands up at coordination problems.

This isn’t long term good.

Easy enough to say about hard drugs. A little harder to bite the bullet for all forms of wasteful entertainment. Much harder for the myriad other ways that humans fail to optimize their potential. At the extreme, you can tell a story where industrialization is a high risk behavior, coal mining requires ever more expensive interventions, and in the meantime, our sky gets uglier every day. You and I can avoid going full Kacynzski by observing the actual, material value which the Industrial Revolution provided. But we disagree on how much value to assign to other forms of “deviance.” That’s okay, because we get to let democracy sort it out.

Of short-term thinking?

Monarchy? I guess the bureaucrats and regulation are on par with democracy but by virtue of the king doing whatever he damned pleases he very much could curtail the excessive bureaucratization of society.

I don't want to start shilling for Hans-Herman Hoppe here but he's right on the money. You need the ruler(kings in this case) to care about the well being of his domain, instead of having a revolving door of politicians who are only in the game to get theirs and get out.

In the best case, the Platonic ideal, maybe. But then we should be comparing to a best case for democracy, something like a republic of highly-engaged, highly-informed voters. They have all the same reasons as the monarch to care about their domain. What’s stopping them from voting to curtail the bureaucracy?

Well, the bureaucrats,, naturally. Whoever was benefiting from their entrenchment might also object. And it’s even possible that the bureaucrats actually were providing more value than they skimmed.

All of these pitfalls obviously apply to autocracies, too! Emperors aren’t immune to the pressure, political or social, to avoid upending the apple cart. Today’s monarchies have plenty of short-term strategy, lavish spending on public image, and bureaucratization.

Are Democracies incapable of long term planning? The USA and England did plenty of long term planning in the 19th and early 20th century and emerged as the pre-eminent powers of the later half of the 20th century. The Russian Czars and German Kaisers used all their alleged long term planning abilities to allow their countries to be torn apart in the aftermath of WW1. The dictators Mussolini and Hitler also destroyed their own nations for no gain. They had long term plans that were destined for failure. I guess Stalin made Russia strong enough to defeat Germany; with ample help from the democratic USA, but Mao wrecked his nation and only Deng taking a 180 degree turn has allowed them to come back into prominence.

They claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman.

It cannot reign in the unelected deep state. We have dozens of autonomous agencies that the official government has little power over, and they pass regulations that define how we interact, what businesses can and cannot do, and what documentation needs to be kept (thus creating the need for administration jobs to make sure that the business can prove to regulators that it’s compliant.

I don't think this is a feature of democracy per se, I think it's a feature of what happens when you restrict democracy in a deliberate way. There's plenty of evidence from pre-1910s time frame that democracy can exercise control over the state apparatus. It's just that we got rid of the spoils system and deliberately shielded the bureaucracy from executive controle. Once upon a time, these jobs were handed out to political supporters as a reward for their support. In such a system, you virtually guarantee democratic control of the bureaucracy by virtue of everyone from the postmaster on up directly owing their livelihood to the current President.

Yeah, what you have looks a little bit like Italian Fascism. I suppose it might work, for certain values of "work"; I've heard China called the world's first mature Fascist state.

First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime.

That’s only more reason to punish recidivists harshly: if you identify someone as a recidivist type, you want to hold them in jail until they age out of crime. Third criminal conviction at 24, we keep you in jail until 40 (of course, for three felonies we keep the life sentence).

Why Mormon theocracy? It seems as worthwhile as Jewish theocracy for all the US would accept it.

I don’t know. Jewish advantage seems to be higher group IQ from centuries of only breeding with each other. And hence being an ethnicity. Mormonism seems to work for whoever joins.

Though I’m not sure one is better than the other. We just have a better example of it happening in Utah.

And Utah is pretty much the only state which wouldn't rebel against an establishment of the Mormon church. It may as well be establishment of Zorastrianism.

The problem with this is that it assumes that problems have solutions. Easy mistake! But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ. No set of incentives will find a way to generate negative net entropy, or move faster than the speed of light. People can successfully build a bridge or fight a war, sure, but contemporary politics have solved most of these tractable problems.

First of all, that's literally the first point in my list of possible explanations for why forced skin in the games fails in my examples.

But also I want to point out an important thing: I'd want a stable legitimately non-working solution. As in, imagine one of the more inconvenient possible worlds where we have implemented my proposal for solving recidivism, everything appears to work as intended, George Soros makes sure that the people he funds really believe in the cause, those people report that they get nothing but enthusiastic cooperation from the prison staff, and they keep trying protocols devised by the best sociologists and they can't get recidivism rate below 70%.

That world is pretty unfortunate, but it has one very good property: whenever someone says "hey I think that you people are doing rehabilitative justice wrong, we should abolish prisons and replace it with mutual support communes, and for starters let all recidivists out on no bail" we tell him that there's currently three pilot mutual support communes, he's free to join any of them as staff and try to do rehabilitative justice right, but no, no way no how we are restarting any of those catch and release programs. If his ideas work, they work, yay, he solved an impossible problem, the criminals don't reoffend and are not affected by our harsh recidivism laws. If not, too bad, but at least the society is safe.

It's important that if the solution doesn't work the society can be reasonably sure that it's because the problem is very hard and not for the lack of trying.

But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ.

PGT-P, polygenic testing for diseases for pre-implantation embryos in IVF, is available right now. The exact same technology works for IQ, and could be used today if people weren't worried about legal/regulatory/PR pushback. 50% chance it already is being used secretly.

Also, even before that, we know how to increase IQ: use sperm/eggs from smarter parents. This isn't something most average parents would want, but it'd work. In a few decades, there'll probably be direct gene editing for something like 'your kid looks like you but has the intelligence-related-genes of someone much smarter', and even though valuing your child looking like you but not valuing them acting like you is quite confused, that'll probably sell. Black on the outside, jew on the inside.

I don't have great insight into this field but I think you overstate the science somewhat. A number of genes have been 'implicated in' intelligence but that is a long way off from the proof that inserting these genes into someone will make them intelligent. I believe there is evidence that genes can function differently in different circumstances/populations so it's not a trivial X makes Y scenario.

No, I'm not overstating it. Read this post by gwern or this post by genesmith for an overview of why embryo selection for intelligence works. Intelligence isn't caused by a few genes, but by thousands of genes that individually have a minuscule contribution but, when added up, cause >50% of existing variation in intelligence (note: i'm not claiming we understand each individual gene that's part of that, just that we've inferred that). (Note that this is in the modern environment - environmental effects have a much higher impact when malaria and starvation and infections from skin wounds are rampant, but they aren't in the modern US).

When parents have children, the DNA the child inherits from either parent is random. So we can say - okay, can we predict, just from the DNA of children, which child will be smarter? And polygenic scores indeed predict which child will be smarter.

So how big would the gain be? Using some code from Gwern's monster post on embryo selection for intelligence, I'd estimate that if both parents are of European ancestry and you have 10 euploid embryos to pick from, the gain would be about 5 IQ points.

There is significant room for this benefit to improve in the near future. If we simply gave intelligence tests to people who are already participating in existing biobanks, we could increase the IQ gain from embryo selection by about 70% or more. This would imply a gain of 8.5-13 IQ points. Administering these intelligence tests could be done for a few tens of millions of dollars (or perhaps less if you're clever about it).

I'm not 100% confident in these estimates, but they seem to be around the right order of magnitude. And ... that's a lot of IQ points. Even if we divide those estimates by ten, it's still well above anything that education reform can do.

I was more pointing to the gene editing reference. It seems more intuitive that we could select embryos as all the bits are functionally integrated via evolution.

There's a lot of reading so will tap into later. Do we really know if the causal correlation is from genes to IQ in the % of variation explained. Might they be markers of ethnicity, itself with a cultural link to IQ?

My journey in these waters is first to explore what level of evidence do we have. Aggregate associations between genetics and IQ scores would be low quality in terms of causal inference wouldn't it, in terms of evidence based medicine?

I was more pointing to the gene editing reference

Ah, I meant direct gene editing on the alleles that the PGS identified / DNA sequences that people who are smarter than you have, so just a stronger version of embryo selection and natural reproduction, not the intentional design of entirely novel mechanisms, which I agree is far off.

Do we really know if the causal correlation is from genes to IQ in the % of variation explained. Might they be markers of ethnicity, itself with a cultural link to IQ?

That's what the sibling natural experiment is for - the ethnicity, culture, and environment for siblings are the same! Yet the sibling with a higher PGS does better in school. (outside of mutually reinforcing interactions between those and genes)

The similarity is also a problem in assigning variance to a single component but it's definitely a kind of experiment so worth taking seriously

Intelligence isn't caused by a few genes, but by thousands of genes that individually have a minuscule contribution but, when added up, cause >50% of existing variation in intelligence

I would bet good money that taking a genome, and then editing it until it had every gene which is correlated with higher intelligence, would not get you a baby that was even a single standard deviation above what you would naively predict based on the parents.

Consider a simple toy model, where

  1. Human intelligence is modulated by the production of a magical protein Inteliquotin (IQN), which causes brains to wrinkle.
  2. Human intelligence is a direct but nonlinear function of IQN concentration -- if IQN concentration is too low, it results in smooth brains (and thus lower intelligence), while if the concentration is too high, it interferes with metabolic processes in the neurons (and thus also results in lower intelligence). Let's say the average concentration is 1.0µg/mL.
  3. The optimal IQN concentration for inclusive fitness in the ancestral environment, and the average among the human population is 1.0µg/mL. However, the optimal concentration for intelligence specifically is 10% higher, at 1.1µg/mL (between those concentrations, improved fitness due to increased intelligence is more than offset to decreased fitness due to, let's say, "increased propensity for Oculoumbilical Tendency leading to elevated predation rates")
  4. The production of IQN is modulated by 1000 different genes IQN000 - IQN999, with the high-IQN variant of each gene occuring in 10% of the population, and where each gene independently causes IQN to increase by 0.01µg/mL.

If you have this scenario, each gene IQN000...IQN999 will explain about 0.1% of the variance in IQ, and yet using CRISPR to force just 5% more of the IQN genes to the "good" variant will lead to poorer outcomes than just leaving the system alone.

All that being said, you should be able to squeeze some results out of that technique. Just not multiple SD of improvement, at least not by doing the naive linear extrapolation thing.

I don't think that toy model captures important features of the situation - there are people with 4SD higher intelligence, and while it's not clear how much of that is caused by non-additive genetics / idiosyncratic or random environmental contingencies, you could just clone them. I'd expect the children of two people of 3-4SD intelligence to be more than 1SD above average, and an algorithm that just randomly generated a child of two random 4SD intelligence people seems pretty close to a linear extrapolation, intuitively, yet performs above 1 SD.

The intuition for why linear extrapolation might work better than you'd expect in a complex system is that new beneficial alleles have a strong pressure to combine linearly with other alleles to spread throughout a population that'll have many different alleles in its members.

The toy model definitely does not capture the entire situation. It's mainly intended as a warning that the tails come apart. I specifically expect that the linear extrapolation would break down if you tried to use it very far outside the naturally occurring distribution, and proposed a toy mechanism of that.

you could just clone them

Yes, I'd expect that would work fine. In fact I'd expect that "clone a very high IQ individual" would work much better than "CRISPR up a baby from two average parents so that it has all of the SNPs that GWAS said were best".

I would bet good money that taking a genome, and then editing it until it had every gene which is correlated with higher intelligence, would not get you a baby that was even a single standard deviation above what you would naively predict based on the parents.

What do you mean by this bet? Actually waiting for gene edited baby to grow is slow, and illegal, and we're still nowhere near to being able to edit 10,000 genes of future child without breaking unintended genes .

You are entirely correct that linear model has its limits. Arguing that than it would break well before 1 SD, is... just wishful thinking. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit.

while if the concentration is too high, it interferes with metabolic processes in the neurons (and thus also results in lower intelligence).

Looks like in actual world, the tradeoff was "decreases libido, increases cuckoldry and other non-reproductive activity" rather than "decreases intelligence".

I am not arguing that you can't get a single standard deviation of gain using gene editing, and I am especially not arguing that you can't get there eventually using an iterative approach. I am arguing that you will get less than +1SD of gain (and, in fact, probably a reduction) in intelligence if you follow the specific procedure of

  1. Catalogue all of the different genes where different alleles are correlated with differences in the observed phenotypic trait of interest (in this case intelligence)
  2. Determine the "best" allele for every single gene, and edit the genome accordingly at all of those places.
  3. Hopefully have a 300-IQ super baby.

The specific thing I want to call out is that each of the alleles you've measured to be the "better" variant is the better variant in the context of the environment the measurements occurred in. If you change a bunch of them at once, though, you're going to end up in into a completely different region of genome space, where the genotype/phenotype correlations you found in the normal human distribution probably won't hold.

I don't know if you have any experience with training ML models. I imagine not, since most people don't. Still, if you do have such experience, you can read my point as "if you take some policy that has been somewhat optimized by gradient descent for a loss function which is different from, but correlated with, the one you care about, and calculate the local gradient according to the loss function you care about, and then you take a giant step in the direction of the gradient you calculated, you are going to end up with higher loss even according to the loss function you care about, because the loss landscape is not flat". Basically my point is "going far out of distribution probably won't help you, even if you choose the direction that is optimal in-distribution -- you need to iterate".

Actually waiting for gene edited baby to grow is slow, and illegal

Yep. And yet, I claim, necessary if you don't want to be limited to fairly small gains.

Arguing that than it would break well before 1 SD, is... just wishful thinking. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit.

Note that this is "below 1SD of gains beyond what you would expect from the parents, and in a single iteration". If you were to take e.g. Terry Tao's genome, and then identify 30 places where he has "low intelligence" variants of whatever gene, and then make a clone with only those genes edited, and a second clone with no gene edits, I would expect the CRISPR clone to be a bit smarter than the unaltered clone, and many SD smarter than the average person. And, of course, at the extreme, if you take a zygote from two average-IQ parents, and replace its genome with Tao's genome then the resulting child would probably be more than 1SD smarter than you'd expect based on the IQs of the parents, because in that case you're choosing a known place in genome space to jump to, instead of choosing a direction and jumping really far in that direction from a mediocre place.

Maybe technical arguments don't belong in the CW thread, but people assuming that the loss landscape is basically a single smooth basin is a pet peeve of mine.

Hopefully have a 300-IQ super baby.

I don't current state of art, but I think setting all genes to "high IQ allele" would have linear projection for IQ well past 300. So getting 300 IQ would need to avoid setting some alleles.

if you take some policy that has been somewhat optimized by gradient descent for a loss function which

I have some experience with gradient descent methods, thought, not with ML. I challenge the premise "somewhat optimized", we are currently living in dysgenic age. If we were talking about making Borzoi dogs run faster, I'd have agreed.

If you were to take e.g. Terry Tao's genome, and then identify 30 places where he has "low intelligence" variants of whatever gene, and then make a clone with only those genes edited, and a second clone with no gene edits, I would expect the CRISPR clone to be a bit smarter than the unaltered clone,

Alternatively, we could just skip detection on which alleles have low IQ and just eliminate very rare alleles, which are much more likely to be deleterious (e.g. replace allele with frequency below given threshold with its most similar allele with frequency above threshold) without studying any IQ.

Maybe technical arguments don't belong in the CW thread,

Well, people on this forum don't discuss genetics in detail at all.

but people assuming that the loss landscape is basically a single smooth basin is a pet peeve of mine.

It's a basin in some places until we travel to a mountain ridge. Since we are decades away from even trying "set all genes to specific allele" - even for model organisms - very few people discuss it.

In your hypothetical bet, how would result "IQ as intended, but baby brain too large for pregnancy to be delivered naturally" count?

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I am sorry for using "just wishful thinking", this was bad.

Large mammals, such as polo ponies and police dogs, can be cloned. Not only do these animals not have health problems, but they are able to perform their role very well. It's not difficult to extrapolate from that and conclude that human cloning is technically possible. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that some large, powerful nation-state has a human-cloning black project going...those super-soldier Navy SEALs might be in elementary school now, being raised by their SEAL fathers or CIA agents or something like that.

I'm pretty sure that isn't happening, although I wish it was.

Too expensive? I mean, the Chinese government is pretty goddamn ruthless and if they wanted to they could easily pull this off. Maybe it's more expensive to clone 1,000 Navy SEALs and hope that a hundred of them decide to follow in their fathers' footsteps. You've got 900 guys who are doing something with their lives other than being SEALs. Take David Goggins...there might be 1 David Goggins and 9 fat truck drivers (which Goggins was, more or less, at one point) from your cloning program.

The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.

To my dismay of course, I think we should absolutely be engaging in that kind of activity, but the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.

I don't know about that. There's definitely genetic editing that we probably should be doing: metabolic diseases like Huntington's come to mind. Then there's things where we've got trade-offs...where a little of it can be OK but a lot is straight up crippling, like autism and ADHD. The issue we have with cloning is that maybe a hundred or so different types of human become fashionable and that kind of monoculture is going to fuck us up royally. If it's a few hundred Navy SEALs or something it's all good though.

The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.

If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.

the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.

Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?

If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.

Not limited to fiction.

I mean, the Chinese government is pretty goddamn ruthless

What I've always suspected very strongly, but wasn't sure about until the happening on 24th February, is that people tend to be very mistaken about «ruthless» states. It's not ruthlessness a la evil AI picking the most instrumentally useful move in its strategic agenda to dominate the light cone, it's the ruthlessness of an unemployed wife-beater who sometimes shows her an inkling of kindness to keep mooching off. This geopolitical gobbledygook is cope, generated on auto by the pro-regime intelligentsia for the masses with superficial interest in politics; the elites of those regimes don't even notice it for the most part, and are exclusively invested in inner «stability» and individual survival, to the point of undermining the whole system's survival odds, to say nothing of its Grand Civilizational Future. If Putin couldn't be assed to make the army procure some drones or inflatable plyboard fake tanks… scratch that clever-ass stuff, even tyres or med kits – why would Xi invest in creepy, speculative projects like cloning? Does he even believe in genetics in the first place? Why would anyone below him risk checking if he does?

So it goes.

your kid looks like you but has the intelligence-related-genes of someone much smarter'

Yeah, that's not about to happen. Especially in the face, a lot of those genes are doing multiple jobs and almost anything else in the body also affects the brain/neurons.

first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year.

I imagine he'll tell you that there's a much simpler, cheaper and literally infallible way of preventing black recidivism and that he's happy to pay for it and implement it personally.

Presenting a binary choice narrows the range of options tremendously.

more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives

How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals? From a quick glance at their name, the 'Open Society Foundation' is more focused on the latter. What they'd do is the same inept 'rehabilitation' that works to undermine law enforcement already and a media/decisionmaker campaign against your harsh recidivism laws so it looks like you're causing the problem, not them.

How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals?

They were very successful at electing people like Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin and George Gascón who kept and keep doing exactly what was expected of them, so if that part were somehow removed and they were forced to select for people who are good at overseeing rehabilitation initiatives because that's the only way recidivists don't get back to prison, the people the Soros Foundation would choose for that would be pretty good at it.

It's, like, I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.

The Waffen SS was pretty good at fighting. But their combat abilities are localized, not general. They would not want to fight to defend Israel for instance - quite the opposite. Some of them went to help the Egyptians and Syrians attack Israel.

if that part were somehow removed

People have their own innate ideological goals and they want to advance them. You can't remove their core, motivating goals.

The Open Society Foundation wants their own goals and they'll advance them. If your goals are opposed to Open Society, then they're your enemy. They don't want to imprison anyone, they want to be nicer to criminals as part of their broad plans to transform society. Boudin wants to release criminals, to reduce imprisonment, to let repeat offenders out on 'community supervision'. You want to reduce crime, by rehabilitation if possible but otherwise by imprisonment. You're in conflict with his goals and he's in conflict with yours. Your foundational worldviews are dissimilar.

There's a time and a place for mistake theory and compromising but there's also a time for directly combating opponents. Trying to work with these people given differing goals and worldview wouldn't end well. Far better just to appoint prosecutors and officials that are aligned with your vision and suppress opponents.

They'd absolutely do the same to you, these are the kind of people who brought down the Tsar because he left them alone rather than suppressing them!

The Waffen SS was pretty good at fighting

Minor nitpick but I believe the regular waffen-SS was actually outperformed by the Wehrmacht in combat, and the units with exceptional combat records were mostly highly selected units recruited from non-German groups after the war started to seriously turn.

I don't disagree, that's why I said, specifically:

I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.

I'm not sure that the Open Society Foundation and the DAs it champions would prefer a world where unrehabilitated rapists are let free with a slap on the wrist and continue raping. Maybe they do but understandably never say it aloud, maybe they do but never even admit it to themselves. Maybe they don't believe that about rapists at all, but do believe that shoplifters are just collecting involuntary reparations. Anyway they end up promoting lawlessness, in effect valuing well being of criminals above that of law abiding citizens' while I strongly value them in the opposite direction, so I and other likeminded people should realize that this is an irreconcilable value difference that allows no compromise and we should fight to win.

What I was saying however is that a well-designed system doesn't need to be run on impeccably loyal people totalitarianly selected to have the same worldview (and in fact any system that has that as a requirement will fall to sociopaths). In case of Soros and friends we only need to ensure that they have no say on when to release repeat offenders, then their interests are aligned with ours: without an option of prematurely releasing unreformed criminals they sure prefer reforming criminals (so that they don't get imprisoned again for twice as long) to not reforming them, and can be relied to do as good job at it as they can.

I think you’re overlooking that a lot of these people pushing dumb social policies are conflict theorists- people(the rich in the case of deboer, racists in the case of some of the soft on crime advocates) are defecting against the commons to ruin outcome x for group y, and the way to get them to stop is to make it impossible to escape the consequences of their actions.

‘Defunding public schools’ and ‘systemic racism’ are just unfalsifiable mechanisms, because the point of conflict theory is that your outgroup is evil, not having a good model of people’s behavior.

But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game.

There a lot to respond to here but this sentiment just seems backwards to me. Isn't the goal not to get people who have decision making power to have artificial skin in the game, but to put people with genuine skin in the game into a position of decision making?

That's the difference between socialist and libertarian approaches I guess. A Libertarian seeks to reduce the scope of consequences of decisions to the maker of them. A Socialist seeks to increase the scope until everyone is affected including the people in power so they are forced to make decisions that are good for everyone else too. Or like everyone is forced to talk about it and make decisions that are best for everyone, because everyone's in the scope.

I guess that dichotomy works, but it seems over-necessary. It seems to me more like the rational vs. bizarro choice, poltical sensibilities aside. Consider these scenarios:

  1. A local high school is unhappy with the prom planning decisions made by the responsible faculty.

    Option A: Force the responsible faculty to attend the prom as guests with their spouses as their own 'date' night

    Option B: Give the student council some decision making power in prom planning

  2. The town council has a committee to plan road expansions that will affect a local neighborhood, and there have been some complaints.

    Option A: Force the town council to move to that neighborhood.

    Option B: Hold a public forum with input from the neighborhood members / have a representative join the committe.

  3. You and your friends are planning on dinner and drinks and debating where to go. Some folks plan to eat at home.

    Option A: Force everyone to eat at the restaurant chosen.

    Option B: Don't count the folks eating at home in the vote for where to go.

I guess you could frame all of these as Socialist vs Libertarian, but it looks more to me like obvious path vs. comically absurd.

Or, looking at the valence of your choices, comically absurd vs. obvious (I hope.)

In the real world, the argument tends to be that the decision makers with no skin in the game are pulling all triggers available to them to ensure that they retain sole decision making authority, so it really looks like

Option A: Force the responsible faculty to attend...

Option B: Force the responsible faculty to surrender some of their decision making power in prom planning to the students. (They claim that this will be the doom of the prom and seem like they might even go so far as to deliberately do their job badly, just to be "proven right" about this)

The most direct way this is confused is that public schools are just not that structurally different from private schools. They both have english, math, history. Students in both write essays on To Kill A Mockingbird. Students in both do homework. Students in both play sports in some capacity. Most of the differences (e.g. misbehavior, poorer academic performance) are caused by the different student populations/genes/cultures (and the rest are caused by the different teacher populations, which have the same cause as the different student populations). Affluent/rich/elite people cluster spatially, both for other reasons and intentionally for 'good schools', and - where they differ - public high schools in rich areas are much closer to private rich high schools than public poor schools. So it just doesn't do what it'd claim to. Maybe we could do class-based busing? I don't think that'd go over well.

Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.

Any form of rehabilitation that'd work would be too coercive for the DAs to endorse, though. Even something like 'actually preventing most crime' is too coercive for them. Moldbug's only-a-little-in-jest suggestion a decade ago was to give black church leaders legal control/ownership of the convicted black criminals.

The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time.

I'm sure you've heard of 'three-strikes laws'? The anti-prison activists didn't 'try to rehabilitate their charges', they just fought three-strikes laws.

Any form of rehabilitation that'd work would be too coercive for the DAs to endorse, though.

I'm sure you've heard of 'three strikes laws'? The anti-prison activists didn't 'try to rehabilitate their charges', they just fought three-strikes laws.

https://www.themotte.org/post/640/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/132062?context=8#context

The actual problem we have today is that progressives think that, even though recidivism is happening, criminals (many are black, after all) still shouldn't be imprisoned for extended periods of time. That's the thing that needs to be solved. Your proposal just assumes you can pass three-strikes laws that actually work, and then leave recidivism reduction up to team Soros, but ... we currently can't, because of the efforts of team Soros. As a result, I don't see the point here.

that private schools are just not that structurally different from private schools

I assume one of those was meant to be "public".

The author is comparing private schools in US to private schools (actually public?!) in England surely! /s

The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem.

Wasn’t the point of charter schools to allow tax money to travel with the children to pay for private(ly owned) schools instead of public(ly owned) schools? Are charter schools now considered places for children of the rich? Did I miss something big?

Related question: Does the military treat its troops better if you have universal conscription or if you force the military to compete in labor markets?

Jury duty is an example of a service that people are universally compelled to provide. So looking at the working conditions and pay of jurors may also be instructive towards answering this question.

Comparing this comment with astrolabia's IDF comment, I wonder if that's a reflection of different culture in the US vs Israel (the US seems uniquely bad at public goods relative to peer countries) or jury duty being easier to escape than IDF time.

I've heard that in the Israeli Defence force, young conscripts are generally treated with kid gloves (e.g. not ordered around much or expected to suffer) to the point where boot camp is referred to as "summer camp", apparently because even the children of the powerful have to do it.

On the other hand South Korea’s similarly ‘no exceptions’ conscription seems to have a reputation for being rough.

It's not enough that the silver spoons have to do it - they also have to lack the ability to segregate themselves to cushier-than-average deployments.

Finnish conscript troops are treated fairly well. I hated the army myself, but that probably reflected my own weaknesses as a 20-year-old, really. The food was really good, at least, and I got into a better shape towards the end of it.

Conscription in Turkey used to be universal and quite tough. This spawned about a million ways anyone with connections or money could get their sons an easy deployment or even an exemption. Meanwhile the average peasant would have to endure near slavery conditions in the hands of commanders. Also certain deployments in the Kurdish areas could be genuinely dangerous with serious casualty rates.

Nowadays anyone can legally pay some amount (not low, not crazy high) to do only a one month training course and be exempt from the rest of the service. The actual fighting army is a professional force and it pays a pretty decent salary for a stable job requiring no education.

The conditions in the training and service are much much better nowadays. Some of this is because Turkey is a wealthier and more middle class country now so overall conditions are better anywhere. But I suspect a big part is due to the need to recruit contract soldiers from the conscripts.

My lesson from this change is that without a very established civic culture and a homogenous society (not necessarily in terms of race but broadly in terms of group identity) it doesn’t work to try to take elites hostage in the system to force skin in the game. People with means almost always find ways to work around the system, and they cause enormous inefficiencies and dysfunction while doing so.

Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.

I doubt you're the only one, but the opposite experience seems to strike a chord with many, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (set in just such a suburb) wouldn't have been the hit it was.

Yeah public schools are a cesspool of misery and frankly, evil. @aqouta you're lucky you avoided the worst of it my friend. No wonder you're such a chad.

I had a decent, if lacking, public school experience here in Albuquerque. From the teachers, that is; the kids teased and hectored me to the point of tears quite regularly.

But the future is a foreign country, and those schools are not the same, even if housed in the same buildings.

I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.

Like @DuplexFields says below, schools have likely changed since we were in them as well. I'd imagine kids nowadays don't have to deal with the same brutal physical beatings that nerds like myself went through in public school, but it seems that the social ostracization(sp?) is perhaps even worse due to social media and other factors that have been accelerating.

Not to mention the rise of internet pornography, the redpill sphere, etc. Growing up as a young man in public school must be a minefield nowadays, even outside of trying to figure out how to act in a socially acceptable manner.

I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.

I really wasn't anything like a particular cool kid, I had a couple social groups but frankly in retrospect a kind of an outsider complex that made me feel like a victim even though I probably wasn't. I was a bit of a geek, more into wasting time in video games than much socializing. albeit most of the time was playing those games with people I knew so socializing in a way.

I definitely had some social complaints but talking about the schooling itself? My teachers were professional and seemed happy and engaged in teaching the subjects, with one exception or my chemistry teacher that I think had to do with a last minute replacement for someone who quit. My fellow students mostly weren't disruptive and did what the teachers asked of them without much question. By highschool we were given quite a bit of freedom and had access to a wide range of elective options at either a community college or a career and technology center that many high schools shared(I took a couple CISCO certification classes, a video game design class and an mobile phone programming class).

People are talking about above and beyond improvements like better sleeping hours and even more accelerated options. These might be worth considering in their own right as an improvement on something that already works. But as far as doing all the basic stuff right I think I've personally seen it work given you have the right student population.

But yeah, the separate question of whether schooling itself is oppressive or the tyranny of teenaged social interactions ring somewhat true. Making young people going through puberty not be total assholes to each other constantly as they figure it all out just doesn't seem like it could reasonably be in scope in a discussion about improving schools in a country where, just to pull the first depressing stat I could find, 63% of high school seniors can't read at grade level.

I went to what was considered to be one of the best public schools in the area, possibly in the country, and I didn't hate it at the time, but in retrospect, I do think that there really should be better alternatives.

Regarding interactions with other kids, I wasn't beaten up, and I had friends, but there is a degree of psychological bullying that happens there regardless. Your popularity was determined by how little you cared about anything. Being passionate about hobbies made you vulnerable to ridicule by the greater school body populace of the cooler kids, and people thought you were lame for it. That seems perverse, as we should be encouraging people to pursue their passions, not ridiculing them for it. I think trying to fit in with that system did leave some lasting personality problems for me. And I was very shocked in college that the opposite was true, and the people who did nothing but ridicule others for being passionate were not considered the top of the popularity chain.

Then there's the education aspect. I was in every advanced class that I could take, and it was still entirely underwhelming with regards to what I learned. I feel like if I was challenged and allowed to grow, I could have learned at least 5 times as much as I did. Instead I wasn't challenged to really learn, and instead was swamped with tons of busy work every day.

Had some rough times but past that I just remember constantly being tired in school.

Feel like school could get a lot better if we got away from school as babysitting. Give the lecture once or twice on a subject instead of 5 times. Fewer hours at school. Trust the kids to do the work at home.

The being tired bit was it’s own torture.

I do remember being quite tired, but I've always credited that to not listening to this wisdom of my parents and constantly staying up super late. There probably is something to scheduling in a way that affords students more sleeping time.

It probably says something that the one education policy that actually literally everyone agrees on is to have high school start later.

When high school starts depends on when the busses from other schools are available. If high school starts later, elementary school may have to start earlier, and that may be worse.

You’re good at learning the lecture material and homework so schools should just trust all students to be good/responsible at that. You’re bad at going to bed on time so schools should not trust students to go to bed at a sensible time.

Why should your strengths and weakness just be presumed to apply to all students?

True I’m more of a late person. Ideally you wouldn’t need to offer just one program.

And this would, indeed, be a major improvement for middle class kids with IQ’s of 105+. But public schooling is all about serving all kids, and those are a minority.

The core issue is that students are no longer allowed to fail, or even to feel badly about themselves. When half or more of the population did not complete high school, and vanishingly few graduated from college, those degrees were an actual signifier of merit. Now that they are essentially birthday gifts, withholding them seems unfair. I wish that was fixable but I cannot see the path.

Ideally you could walk and chew gum at the same time. Product differentiation isn’t an issue everywhere else in America

Ok. Figure out a way to let middle class kids with IQ’s above 105 do it your way, without breaking any laws, and not making things worse for everyone else.

Because what you’re describing is ‘homeschooling’ and it works really well for the sorts of people who homeschool. But it isn’t a replacement for public schools and the reason it hasn’t seen much adoption among middle class families has at least as much to do with stigma as it does with lack of practicability.

Probably charter schools. Overall we just haven’t had experimenting in schooling because of the dominance of public schools and the unions.

I also don't have too many complaints about my education, but to be fair I spent the last few years of it at a magnet school with a lot more freedom and higher quality students than is the norm. Being familiar with some East Asian school systems also colors my perceptions, and while I have always been somewhat bemused by Libertarians in the US raging about how schools are prisons for children, their arguments are perfectly valid in places like China or Korea.

It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.

It's also the curriculum, teachers and administrators.

I would happily send my children to my elementary school too, in 1980, when I started half-day kindergarten.

The reality of school today is very different even in top decile areas than 1980. We've found our high performing public school to be insufficiently academicly rigorous. Our school committee feels more like PR or cheerleaders for the superintendent and faculty, who are products of post-modern education academia.

Writing also doesn't require spelling, penmanship or much actual writing.

Going to be honest, I remember 15yo pensmanship looking much the same. That was kind of the nadir of teenage effort.

They do so little handwriting in school I'm not surprised. There's some direct instruction but opportunities for incidental use / practice have been removed from much of the school day.

Per multiple flyers from my elementary and middle school kids' schools, it is "educational equity". The bullet points are retaking tests, essentially no late penalties, etc., etc. I will see if I can find one of the ones I threw out last week for the exact verbiage. But this has been going on at least since Covid, if not explicitly denoted as such.

Fortunately my kids think it's ridiculous and will continue to follow the actual deadlines for the sake of their own innate sense of fairness. It has been interesting to see their relatively unfiltered takes on these issues.

I remember before Covid that in practice deadlines usually weren’t enforced(this would have been mid 2010’s), although it seemed like it was mostly for the sake of making teachers’s lives easier by not failing anyone.

I did, but I was in the third richest public school district in the country, locally recognized as a stealth private school.

By the time I graduated, I could see that bad times were ahead, even there.

Scott wants a place where smart and well-behaved students like him will not be bored to death. Freddie wants to use the school as a tool of redistribution. Neither are willing to discuss the impact of culture, so they argue around each other. There's a distributed motte-and-bailey going on here, where Scott and Freddie switch between three different concepts of "good schools". They're actually three different things, "good teachers/facilities", "well-behaved students", and "rich students". The three are correlated, but distinct.

It's not socially acceptable to talk about anything other than "good teachers/facilities", so everyone pretends that's what they care about.

When middle-class parents are buying a house in a "good school district", they pretend to talk about "good teachers/facilities", but they're really looking for good peers because they don't want their kids to fall in with a bad crowd or be bullied. Unless you're an immigrant, you don't say that out loud. Nobody seems to be checking on teacher effectiveness, they just look at test scores, which are mostly a proxy for parent involvement.

Freddie wants to use the schools as a tool of redistribution. He cynically accuses middle-class parents of being rich people who want to hoard the "good teachers/facilities". This is of course false. If middle-class parents were told that their school district boundaries were to now include a neighborhood full of poor Chinese kids, there would be no complaint. The reason "bad schools" are bad is not because of their funding, facilities, or teachers, but because are full ill-behaved kids. Whatever schools these kids are put in become back schools, because these kids are the problem.

Since you cannot discipline or expel badly-behaved poor kids in America, rich kids escape to better districts while well-behaved poor kids become the hostage.

Scott, who is mildly on the spectrum and from top-1% Irvine Unified School District, doesn't understand the sub-games being played around him and earnestly talks about the teachers/facilities/curriculum. He doesn't get that the middle-class parents are using education-talk to justify escaping the underclass, and Freddie is using education-talk to enact redistribution to the underclass.

but they're really looking for good peers because they don't want their kids to fall in with a bad crowd or be bullied. Unless you're an immigrant, you don't say that out loud.

Yes you do. You leave out the part where the ‘bad crowd’ can often be identified by the prominent skin color, but lots of parents say the quiet part out loud that they’re looking for their kids to have peers from stable middle class families. It’s what’s keeping catholic schools full(and catholic school tuition might well be cheaper than buying a house zoned for a ‘good school’- it certainly has less risk of bussing). It’s the main red tribe explanation for why poor kids do worse in school, too.

Now I’m not discounting that there might be some pockets of the blue tribe who pretend that they’re more concerned with their child’s access to a science lab than with their peer group, but it definitely doesn’t seem predominant.

If middle-class parents were told that their school district boundaries were to now include a neighborhood full of poor Chinese kids, there would be no complaint.

Yes there would. Middle class whites don’t want to have to become tiger moms to keep up with class rank.

Now I’m not discounting that there might be some pockets of the blue tribe who pretend that they’re more concerned with their child’s access to a science lab than with their peer group, but it definitely doesn’t seem predominant.

NJ is lousy with those types, but the peer group is already table stakes for them. These are the parents who want their kid to go to Princeton-Plainsboro* school district, with the robotics program and space camp and telepathy lab and what have you, rather than a more normal decent school district. Also all their kids are simultaneously geniuses and need extra help with their ADHD and/or high-functioning autism.

Yes there would. Middle class whites don’t want to have to become tiger moms to keep up with class rank.

Yep, that group exists too, the term they tend to use is "pressure cooker".

* OK, it's actually West Windsor, there is no Princeton-Plainsboro whether it's a school district or hospital.

The fix the public schools dogma is missing the forest for the trees. Poverty, or at least poor people, isn’t why our schools suck. Lots and lots of poor people wildly succeed at educating their children. Whole, impoverished countries even! The state is an inadequate replacement for interested parenting and community. You will hardly ever succeed at forcing worse outcomes on people with means over the long term. This is an un-winnable game. Fixing education in practice more often than not turns into to destroying the social signal that education used to provide because that’s the direct incentive of all the low level players, at which point, society will create a new ones.


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