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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25671 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I'm not really seeing the argument here.

Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.

Why are there meritocratic admissions in the first place? How did it happen? The reason the universities were opened up in the 1950's was specifically because cases like Feynman's. It was felt unjust that he shouldn't have had entry into school of choice, etc., because of quotas (at that time capping Jewish students) and Columbia eg felt dumb for having rejected him. The feeling was that schools should be opened up to students like him, WITH THE EXPECTATION that they would do great things with their degrees. Maybe not be Feynman or make great discoveries, but at least use that opportunity to try to, or to have notable achievements in other fields, or at least to become very rich, and so on.

The concrete reward for this opening up of universities was eventually expected to be ....money. Whether legacies, or students allowed in on purely merit, alumni who were or became rich donated to these skrewls. For those who became famous or notable in their fields wihout being rich, this also added to skrewl's reputation, bringing in more money or grants or so on by other avenues. In other words, the universities got or maintained something concrete from opened-up admissions, and the easiest measure of that was donations.

Azn alumni and especially Han don't donate. Thus although they were let in initially in high % because of grades, test scores, etc., it was eventually noted they don't donate. But even worse, they become notable or famous at rates far less than others.

Whereas the expectation was ideally a Feynman, what you got in the Han case was use of the degree to become an ophthalmologist in upstate NY etc.; obviously not always; just as in other groups not all came out Feynmans. But the tendency, pattern became very clear. In the vast majority of cases the degree was used for nothing but a comfortable middle class life and the feeling of status. No fame, no reputation coming to the skrewl, and no donations.

Thus you had a population that presented very good scores, grades, conscientiousness, etc., and so if allowed in purely on "merit" would make up a huge % of undergraduate class; but out the other end, they didn't deliver on the whole, and especially...didn't deliver money. [an aside about objective merits of science done by Chinese people. I think the issue of lower effective creativity and irrational lust for busywork are absolutely clear. But, arguably, we are in the regime where Galaxy Brained Ideas both comprehensible for humans and useful in practice have all been had, so East Asian mindset is in fact more valuable].

To this can be added the behavior of Han students in classrooms. It was noticed they are taciturn and in general add nothing to class discussion. In campus social and intellectual life, they seemed absent or kept to themselves etc.; again you may have personal anecdotes to the contrary, I do also. I had very good Chynese students who I was glad to talk to, who were brilliant and got all A's (deserved in their case) and I have Chynese frends, etc. etc.; it matters nothing. As a group universities noticed these very clear patterns in the majority if not vast majority of cases. [an aside about cheating]

…It was, again, a population that, if you applied simple "merit" in admissions, would end up forming maybe even a majority of the student body, but that produced nothing that was expected from holders of these degrees, most notably no donations, but also, no fame, no risk, no contributions, and during skrewltime, another lifeless parody of "study," memorization, cheating, sullen apartness.

For all these reasons universities felt justified in discriminating against azn and Chynese students for admissions--and they were probably justified. But once they started to do this, libtarded professors and admissions committees felt it was necessary to discard almost entirely whatever was left of meritocracy. "This Johnny Cheung has very good test scores and grades and I'm discriminating against him...it's only fair that I don't pay attention to the fact that Johnny Walters also has good test scores and grades. Merit doesn't matter anymore, we had to get rid of it, so...let me invite this nice POC out of feelings of social justice, etc." Thus in a move similar to what justified grade inflation, merit-based admissions was also mostly discarded. I don't know the status of things at moment exactly now after Floyd, but even by 2015 or mid second term Obama's racial demagoguery and BLM craze, it was already starting to be very bad. Even by early 2010's maybe it was accelerating. Obviously there are still very good students who can get in, but it's much harder now.

For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.

And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.

You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.

There is an argument to be made that many of the scientific achievements and breakthroughs were low-hanging fruits that were inevitable to be discovered. It's just that the Enlightenment took place in Europe and thus most of the low-hanging fruits of scientific knowledge were thus discovered and produced in western nations. (Not to disparage the works of these great scientists and inventors, but if someone is making the argument of why another population is not producing great works, well there is a reason for how these great works were created, and as @you-get-an-upvote make's in a comment down stream "here aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century." Scott Alexander made a similar argument last year on why there aren't any more Einsteins which I largely agree with his reasoning here.

Whatever your thoughts on modern technology may be, many tech companies that provide entertainment or convenience to us today were founded or cofounded by Asian Americans. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Yahoo, Snapchat, Nvidia and many more exist thanks to the vision and hardwork of Asians. Maybe these tech companies are the low-hanging groups of the Internet era, but that just illustrates my point further.

I will acknowledge BAP's argument is specifically mostly about Chinese people and not Asians in general... but I doubt that's a distinction that matters in enrollment into Universities. Racial breakdown in admissions only goes to the level of Asian, after all, and many Chinese surnames are the same/similar to surnames from other countries near China. The only way to know for sure is if they are a foreign student enrolling directly from China, but foreign students are always a small percentage of people admitted and foreign students are usually not eligible for many scholarships/financial aid, meaning they pay the full tuition. So the universities are making money off foreign Asian students through tuition. Regarding donations "in 2022, more than 80 percent of the donations came from 1 percent of the donors", so it really shouldn't matter whether the other 99% of people that attended these universities donated. Besides, given the clear anti-Asian bias against admissions in a university such as Harvard, I imagine that would have an impact on an Asian's decision to donate to Harvard.

Also, I don't buy his argument that discrimination against Asian Americans leads to dropping the idea of meritocracy. If I'm straw-manning his argument here then please let me know, but he's essentially saying

  1. For many/various reasons, Universities discriminate against Asians.
  2. Because Universities are already discriminating against, Asians, they got rid of meritocracy for whites because they are already discriminating against Asians.

There are better explanations that better explain the affirmative actions of Universities, such as social justice, equity, cultural Marxism, etc and I don't think the fact that Asians were being discriminated against played a big role in the creation and propagation of these ideas. At best a minor justiciation but I seriously doubt anyone in university admission made a train of thought the way BAP did for his hypothetical University admissison officer.

I can't believe it. So much of BAP's argument is built on shoddy premises, the only one that I can't rebut or hasn't been addressed by someone else already is his observations regarding the behavior of Asians when he was going to school since those are his observations and I didn't attend the school he went to, so maybe what he observed is true, but that's just a minor piece of the overall argument.

I think the lack of geniuses comes more from systemic issues in education. Asians aren’t producing geniuses, but neither are whites or Hispanics or blacks. But our system is not only not set up to produce geniuses, but to stymie the development of any who happen to come along.

From age 5 to finishing your BS degree, success is based on your ability to sit still, follow directions, and produce reams of worksheets and essays on topics you don’t care about. Any actual genius would be bored stupid. The removal of gifted classes means that you move at the speed of the stupid kids in the class who don’t understand anything or care that much. The system is poorly suited to teaching independent thought, as it needs to teach to the tests and hit all of the objectives. Having open ended discussions doesn’t produce measurable results so teach kids to regurgitate the correct answers.

The grant and publication system also locks in mediocrity. If you need to get grants to have a job, and you need to show that your experiment will work to get the grant, you pretty much have to stick close to what is known. Adding the publish or perish mandate makes it more difficult to peruse big projects because they take too long. So where could these breakthrough ideas come from? Nobody has the money an$ freedom to think big.

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