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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I'm not opposed policies which attempt to stop institutional didcrimination. What I'm opposed to is policies that pretend to be stopping institutional duscrimination but are actually just opening the door to discrimination in the other direction.

I support removing names/ethnicities and other identifying information from applications, relying heavily on standardized test scores for college and aptitude tests for jobs etc. All of these policies reduce the opportunity for a bigoted boss or admissions officer to discriminate against a qualified applicant because of their race.

Liberals just don't like these policies because they know from experience what results they'll produce but they're still policies directed at reducing discrimination

Are you in favor of making it illegal to hire someone you already know previous to getting the application? Are you in favor of making it illegal to promote people within a company where their boss already knows them? Are you against putting college names on applications, since some of them are historically black or women-only?

I assume not, that would be silly, which demonstrates how you can't really have race/gender blind hiring/promotion at any scale.

Which is why advocating for that as our primary way to fight discrimination, again, pattern-matches to only caring about hbd: 'I suggest we fight discrimination using this policy, which is nearly impossible to achieve in principle, and I don't intend to even try passing the extreme measures that would be needed to achieve it,' means the same thing as 'I propose we don't fight discrimination'.

It also ignores the ways in which test scores and other parts of the resume can be affected by things other than ability (real easy to get a stellar resume when your parents network do-nothing internships for you at their yacht club), which again is a major part of the systemic discrimination that people chalk up most of the problem to, that you're ignoring in your policy.

And the thing about that it is, you can't actually send government agents into yacht clubs as surrogate parents to underprivileged youths in order to network for them. The real world is too complicated for you to actually correct those differences in opportunity and experience at the source like that.

The only policies to address that type of thing which can actually be implemented are ones that assume a bias exists, and explicitly corrects for it at a single specific layer, such as hiring. I agree that this approach is distasteful, the utopian dream where we can intervene at other places until test scores are perfect metrics of ability would be a nicer world to live in, it's just not the world we actually live in.

People who believe that part of the gap is still from discrimination of various types (again, not just explicit individual bigotry, we did mostly correct that already) and want to actually do something about, end up having to bite that bullet.

People who won't bite that bullet are revealing either their priorities (the problem is real but not worth solving at that cost) or their beliefs (there's no problem because the gap is 'natural'), and the outcome for policy and for people is the same regardless of which it is.