atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?
In defense of those you would call unprincipled hypocrites, one of the main reasons people care about protecting civil liberties is that these prevent loopholes that in the long run would allow the government to become tyrannical. People just don't find the "take guns away -> tyranny that the populace otherwise would have been able to violently oppose" story that compelling.
On the other hand, they might find the slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists -> disappear without due process anyone the administration claims is illegal/a terrorist -> disappear without due process anyone the administration thinks should have their citizenship stripped -> disappear without due process anyone who opposes the administration" dramatically more plausible, especially given the administration's comments on denaturalization. You are of course free to try to convince them otherwise on the factual point, but you can't really call them a hypocrite until you do.
Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
17d ago
I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day
Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful?
Does anyone else find this morally despicable? "It's ok for me to be able to never have to work another day, but wouldn't it wonderful if we make the country so much poorer that everyone else has to spend the rest of their lives doing manual labor?"
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
But tell me, how inclined would you be to entertain this argument if we were discussing an instance of explicitly pro-white discrimination, and this is how I was trying to explain it away?
I'm very inclined to entertain the argument in that case! I think any fair affirmative action policy should include benefits for people who come from very rural areas, small religious universities, etc. and the general impression I get from conversations at conferences is that people are impressed by those backgrounds and willing to personally give others extra consideration because of them (though I don't know how much this shows up in actual admissions policies besides pushes for "geographic diversity"). There are other reasons for affirmative action that I didn't mention---the most important for science and technology specifically is that a diversity of backgrounds is necessary for the diversity of perspectives that leads to the most creative breakthroughs.
Secondly, if anything you got the relative power reversed!
I definitely agree that left-wing racists aren't powerless. I would say that their worst impact has been limited to a few cities, college towns, and academic disciplines, though this is still pretty significant. The biggest impact from right-wing racists has been towards US skilled immigration policy---e.g. the recent debate between Ramaswamy/Musk and Bannon/Miller. As we've discussed before, I think it's very important for human flourishing to have a place where the best and brightest from all over the world can come together, mix all their unique perspectives and ideas, and make scientific and technological breakthroughs. American cities and universities were this place, and the current administration's treatment of skilled immigrants seems somehow even more damaging for this than what the extreme left was doing.
I guess we'll see in the next few years what the racists on the right can really accomplish when their coalition is in power, and nothing would make me happier than for you to win this argument and their powerlessness to be revealed.
is not the best way of expressing that?
Given the reaction here it clearly wasn't, though I'm not exactly sure why. Just because something is bad doesn't mean that the alternative is better and in this case, the alternative coalition to vote for had some very extreme poison pills.
Then make extra sure it isn't perverted into a staging ground for fringe progressive ideology
The entire point is that this impression you have is wrong. Why do you believe this? What experience do you have with actual math/science departments? What fringe progressive ideology have you seen them pushing?
Again, you don't have to take it from me---Alex Tabarrok should be much more credible.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Could you be more specific here/give some kind of link? I don't recall this conversation (this forum being reddit was a while ago).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
but how am I supposed to verify that?
I don't know! I agree that blindly trusting random internet posters is not reasonable, and I would really like to not have an account where I argue contentious politics to be associated with my real identity in a way that could make this actually credible. One question to answer is whether your policy preferences would change if my presentation of the facts is actually correct? I'm not talking about some p-hacked formal studies the department ran, this is just advisors noticing over and over again that all their students from whatever group were way stronger than average.
And another argument that I'd like to make as well, is that even if you want to call this (aspirational) meritocracy, you cannot call it gender- or color-blind, if you're purposefully taking account of someone's race or gender!
Also, about the affirmative action argument, yes, this is why it's a super questionable solution. Can't you imagine some world though in which the de facto violations of meritocracy are so bad that a de jure violation might actually end up improving the de facto situation? I definitely agree that it's usually not a good idea to use bad means for what you think will be good ends.
and have seen scant few progressive-minded academia-inclined posters who expressed any sort of discomfort with them
The Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith crowd is pretty prominent and denounces them all the time (It's Yglesias' sixth most popular article of all time right now). More locally, I think I'm on record here denouncing Okun and DiAngelo? By the way, powerless has only ever meant powerless compared to anti-meritocratic forces on the right---it's a choice of damnations! Voting patterns and comments here make it blatantly obvious that giving the average Motte reader/poster power would lead to much wilder violations of color-blind meritocracy than anything even extreme progressives have managed.
At the very least don't contribute to attacks on people who are saying something.
I don't contribute to attacks against people like Sokal. I contribute to attacks against the people who would replace progressive racism with even worse right-wing racism.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Thank you for proving my original point. At this point, maybe it was correct for scientists to have been so left-leaning because they saw through that the right had this much hate for them.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
No, but the current speaker of the house is. When creationists get in that high of a position, you can't call them strawmen.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage in your crusade to punish these people as much as possible and at worst enemies just because being in the same industry makes you think that they're the same people. This is exactly what I was talking about.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
There are a lot of cultural reasons to prefer the US to the UK
- The UK is much more aristocratic and hereditarian---there's a royal family, a House of Lords, everyone is judged by the accent they developed while growing up, most politicians didn't just go to the same few universities, but literally the exact same high school, etc.
- Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
- The above two points also enforce quite a bit of social conformism. Having unusual hobbies or interests for your social class is much harder than in the US.
- Ambition and particularly hard work are looked upon much more favorably in the US.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
Isn't this because most of the rhetoric you hear from politicians is targeted at the general public? They're specifically playing for an audience without the expertise to see through the obnoxious, bad-faith games. I hope first, that they don't do the same when behind closed doors and second, that if the public got better at whatever the LSAT tests, their strategies for communicating with the public would also change.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
There are entire books on how to study for the LSAT. I presume that would be a place to start, though it might be good to hear from someone who actually took the test.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments
Right, part of the reason I'm posting this is that I don't really talk to that many lawyers and that I think they're a few here that might be able to give a more informed view. Is it correct to extend what you're saying bit to that the bad-faith arguments can be arbitrarily subtle and training people to catch more obvious bad faith also trains them to hide their own bad faith better?
There is no way it would stay neutral
Oops, I guess I forgot this other very important anti-poll test argument that they're way too easy to corrupt. Embarrassingly enough, it's actually probably the textbook one too through various Jim Crow examples. Thanks for making it.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.
I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?
Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
Yup, it's really a testament to the strength and dynamism of the economy in Texas. You have to condemn the grid mismanagement that led to the blackout, but it's really amazing to have a place that can just eat a cost like that as if it were nothing. I feel similarly about Hurricane Harvey on this second point.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo ago
Second, we had a moderate disaster back in 2021
Wikipedia claims >$195 billion in property damage. As a comparison, Hurricane Harvey is listed as $125 billion and the 2011 Japan earthquake as $360 billion, though in 2011 dollars.
If these numbers are correct(?), this is closer to "one of the most expensive natural disasters in human history" than "a moderate disaster".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic
There's a standard counterargument here: even accepting this, ancestry is at most weak proxy for values---the distributions always have significant overlap. Using the weak proxy instead of more direct measures of values is silly. I bet even English proficiency and being able to pass a civics test gives more information on acceptance of the current American values than ancestry. I'm not going to complain if this picks out different proportions of different ancestry groups---just don't prejudge anyone based on very weak correlates when there's a better way!
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
So what are the things you love about Trump so much that would make you a die-hard supporter, if his (or the Republicans') stance on immigration wasn't an issue?
It's more that I agree with you that the Democrat's stance on American identity isn't ideal. I would become a die hard supporter despite everything else I don't like because then the Republican party and Trump would be the best instruments to make the stance on identity I like dominant---I'm basically a single-issue voter on this issue of identity.
Democrat's constant abuse of the very notion of meritocracy.
Despite also being bad on this issue, the Democrats at least have a wing that supports meritocracy. This wing can actually win primaries/elections in very left-leaning areas; for example, they are going to be running San Francisco as of the recent election. On the other hand, the anti-hereditarian meritocrats on the Republican party, like Ramaswamy, seem to get slaughtered in primaries. Whatever Trump actually believes, meritocracy is something he's very willing to sacrifice when it comes to actual policy decisions. Stephen Miller is still going to be the most influential immigration policy advisor!
no one said how high the skills have to be to count as "skilled"
I'll give a line: better for the country than the median citizen in some measure combining ability to assimilate and ability to contribute. Given how dominant US culture and values are globally, it shouldn't be very hard to find a huge number of people making this cut.
Vivek Ramaswamy gave an interesting talk at Yale's Buckley institute a few days after the election. What I specifically want to focus on is the part starting at 34:35, where he describes what he thinks is a divide in the Republican party between two different notions of American national identity. The first is that being American is about following a common set of values---meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc. The second (starting 39:12) is that being American is about having deep, ancestral ties to a particular piece of land---"blood and soil". He sees the coming years as an almost factional fight within the Republican party between these two notions of identity.
This topic is very close to my heart---I think the majority of my interaction with this forum has been very unsuccessfully arguing in favor of the ideals-based notion of identity. Ramaswamy fervently supports the same and I hope hearing his much better-argued case (from a much more authoritative source) is far more compelling than anything I've tried to say.
However, what I'm actually interested in is what people here think the outcome of the factional fight is going to be. What do you see in Trump's choices of appointees? Is Ramaswamy going to be pushed out or is he going to be an influential figure moving forward? Which side do you think various major figures in the Republican party land on?
Just to put my cards on the table, I personally think Ramaswamy is delusional that it's even a fight and that the Republican party is fully dominated by the blood-and-soil side. This is in fact the main reason I vote Democrat and if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter. I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you. As for why I believe this, I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous. Both what happened in the last Trump administration and experience talking to right-wingers here seemed to very strongly demonstrate that US Republicans are very against skilled immigration.
Yeah, I would say that. When a stranger (like not a friend, family member, mentor, doctor---stranger means someone with no professional or personal reason to care significantly about specifically my welfare) is trying to convince me to do something (vote for someone, buy something from them, sign a contract), its just a default assumption that there's serious amounts of lying and manipulation involved.
Specifically for politicians, you might as well complain about a TV ad lying to you. And sure, I guess part of my gut judgement here is based on a personal bias that I find lawyerly lying way easier to see through, but I hope I presented enough arguments that don't rest on this bias.
A criterion like 3/4's of your life spent in the US if you're under 18 and 3/4's of your childhood in the US if you're over 18 would be much better. On the other side of it, there are people whose parents moved when they were infants, are fully connected to the US and have no memory of living outside, and don't get citizenship.
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