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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"

The fundamental problem with HBD as it is typically advocated by dissident progressives and users here on theMotte is that if the hypothesis is correct (and that is a big "IF") the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero. Accordingly I feel that it only appropriate to question why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested in their opposition to "blank slatism". I have my theories but none that are likely to be considered "charitable" or "kind" by the mod team.

  • -13

What exactly do you consider an "HBD aware" set of policies? If you are going to attack a strawman, at least say what that strawman is. As a sort of HBDer (I never particularly liked the ring of the term, but please tell me what I am allowed to call the position that a lot of valued traits including in particular intelligence are heritable and different ethnic groups have different averages in them, without being lumped in with people who want to advocate for spoils for or collusion their own ethnic group), I don't recall ever arguing or wishing for anything other than colorblind and meritocratic policies, and the posts you regularly make seemingly just to try and remind people to associate the former with the latter are really rather tiresome. I'm struggling to understand why you are doing this - are you trying to troll us anti-racial-spoils hereditarians into surrender or meltdown because you think we're legitimising actual racists? If so, why even bother with the complete political non-force that are card-carrying racists? Is it because you think that they are unfairly associated with your political beliefs?

Then I ask you the same question that I keep asking and that no one here seems to have an answer for. Assuming for the sake of argument that HBD is true and that group differences are, as a rule, more determinative than individual variance, what of it? What value does "HBD Awareness" add over individual assessments of merit? Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?

Why are you failing to understand that the race-blind meritocracy we have tried ends with predictable racial disparities, which leads to DEI to combat “systemic racism”?

Most of the posters I see here support race-blind individualism and recognize that the hereditarian reality will have to be acknowledged such that “systemic racism” won’t move elites and institutions to jettison the meritocracy.

Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, most of us here want individual assessments of merit, not race-based discrimination.

Because unlike most of the users here, I am not working backwards from a preexisting conclusion.

That's not an answer to the question you were asked.

To reiterate the argument that everyone's saying:

  1. We try to instantiate raceblind meritocracy.
  2. We see racial disparities, because they'll continue to exist (and get worse, after the loss of affirmative action) and we're in a society that's going to track that kind of thing.
  3. Progressives say, "See, people are racist, we can't have a meritocracy, we need to fix this with some law mandating equality"
  4. Everyone finds this compelling, and we lose our raceblind meritocracy

What many proponents of HBD-ish things want is:

  1. We try to instantiate raceblind meritocracy.
  2. We see racial disparities, because they'll continue to exist (and get worse, after the loss of affirmative action) and we're in a society that's going to track that kind of thing.
  3. Progressives say, "See, people are racist, we can't have a meritocracy, we need to fix this with some law mandating equality"
  4. Others point out, "Those are due to differences in ability, not discrimination; this was to be expected"
  5. We get to keep our raceblind meritocracy.

I'm sure you've heard this argument at least 30 times at this point. Is there a reason that it's wrong? (It might be tricky to get to work in practice, because people don't like the idea of racial differences of ability. But it's appealing, at least—just explaining why something is the case is always a tempting possibility when people are insinuating that it's the case for other reasons and so endorsing bad policy.)

I don't think most users here are working backwards from a preexisting conclusion; I think you're uncharitably lumping everyone in one bucket.

Edit: And you seem to be the one working backwards from a preexisting conclusion? You've made literally no, as far as I can see, arguments that none of the disparity between groups is genetic, you've just been arguing that those who hold such a position are morally bad.

Missing from this paradigm:

  1. We try to instantiate raceblind meritocracy.
  2. We see racial disparities, because they'll continue to exist (and get worse, after the loss of affirmative action) and we're in a society that's going to track that kind of thing.
  3. Progressives say, "See, people are racist, we can't have a meritocracy, we need to fix this with some law mandating equality."
  4. Others point out, "Those are due to nature being racist, not discrimination by humans; we need to fix this with gene editing or something of that sort."
  5. We get to keep our raceblind meritocracy and close the racial gaps.

Sure. (though I don't expect gene editing etc. to be unique to the disadvantaged)

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