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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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here are a large number intelligent people I share a country with who actually just have irreconcilable value differences; people who have such crazy policy preferences to me not because they disagree about facts like the far-left people I meet, but because they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as.

This might be less clear than you think. I think quite possibly the largest contingent of people here are in favor of colorblind meritocracy, roughly. But in the absence of data, then your priors would be affected by race. That is, you should think a random Asian you meet is probably a bit smarter than average, until you actually get to know them or they go through some other filtration mechanism so that you know more accurately. This is technically treating people differently by race, but it's due to variation and knowledge constraints, not value differences.

That said, you only said that here are a large number, and the more substantially racist minority may still be a large number to you.

I think quite possibly the largest contingent of people here are in favor of colorblind meritocracy, roughly. But in the absence of data, then your priors would be affected by race.

I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the most prominent writer fitting the view you describe is Richard Hanania. I'm searching through comments to see what this place thinks about his writings on racial issues---here's something sitting at +28 against it, though here's another at +14 possibly in favor though it's hard to tell what they would think in the perfect world where colorblindness was possible. (I'm not super good at searching for things, maybe you can do better?). Somehow this still leaves me with the impression that the voting population here is further towards racialism that Hanania.

I also think the link I gave above about what one of the mods thinks about the general attitude towards colorblindness is also very strong evidence.

Oh, but Hanania's known for more generally being a troll and bothering people, so I wouldn't trust opinions of him as reflective of the popularity of this one stance (though I think he not infrequently has interesting things to say). I don't currently have time right now, but maybe I'll look later.

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