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I'm talking less "complaints about racism in the US", and more complaints like "Trump supporters are racist". You're telling me all the post-2016 drama was about "unconscious bias"?
Well then I have a bit of an issue with making claims like "they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I agree there are actual values disagreements here (no shortage of folks here supporting monstrous things like surrogacy), I don't even mind slapping negative valance labels on them, like "racism", anymore. But if you're going to make an elaborate descriptive statement about what people believe, you should make sure it's accurate.
The first is a point I haven't seen anyone make here, and the latter is already a step down from your original claim, and I still want to know who you're talking about, because it doesn't quite fit into any conversations I remember.
See the discussion here.
Sorry, let me clarify---I also think there are a lot of people here who "honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I think the strongest evidence for this is what I linked above: one of the mods of this place saying that their posts supporting colorblindness tend to be very controversial because those posts are against the prevailing attitudes here.
There's another sort of of-topic interesting point: I'm not really sure that "people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US" is significantly different from "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". The cardinal, anti-meritocratic sin of judging people by their descent instead of their own accomplishments appears just as strongly in in both cases.
I find it amazing that someone who's been here for a long time and is clearly pretty smart can end up with these interpretations of themotte's viewpoints, reading the same words I have but interpreting them so differently, lol.
From the post you linked about someone being downvoted for advocating colorblindness, I upvoted this reply:
This is ... not speaking against meritocracy. If you have a way to measure someone's merit, use it, If not, because it's being suppressed, then use race as bayesian evidence. The replies to the post are evidence against, not for, your claim that a lot of mottizens believe 'people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as'.
We can trade examples all day long, but I don't know how else to interpret even a moderator (who I think should be more aware of the general pulse of the forum than either of us) saying this:
(adding emphasis)
That's not trading examples, I found that by looking for the exact comment you're referring to. Cjet's original post about race blindness, The Case For Ignoring Race, got 18 upvotes and 5 downvotes, which is a perfectly normal ratio. The most downvoted comment related to race blindness on his page has a net karma of ... -3, and it's in response to a 38 upvotes comment with the following:
This is just ... not ... "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". This is "we should judge people on their merit, or our best estimate of their merit, and that merit is correlated with race is an objective fact about the world".
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I disagree with your interpretation somewhat. He's talking about inventors and scientists, so the extreme end of intelligence. This is "tails of the bell curve coming apart" argument rather than intelligent black people not existing.
It's fine and well if this is how you see it, but there are people who don't agree. If you treat these things as interchangeable you'll be slandering your targets in front of them.
I don't think everything should be meritocratic, though. I wouldn't let some random dude take the place of my cousin in my family, just because he's more competent, and/or more pleasant to be around, for example.
Right, so this is a good point that needs to be addressed. However, I don't think that the cousin being related to you is the key detail here---for example I would say the same about a childhood best friend but not about a hypothetical cousin whom I just met and never knew existed until then.
The principle here is really about close personal relationships, whatever might cause them. These come with an obligation of strong loyalty that overwhelms many abstract notions of fairness. The loyalty should be there when the close personal relationship is there even if there's no hereditary connection and doesn't need to be there if there's a hereditary connection with no close personal relationship.
Yes, this isn't purely meritocratic, but there's no one value that determines what you should do in all situations. We have a pretty good system of rules and expectations around professionalism---like how you should act differently in public-facing roles---that help us balance society's needs for fairness and meritocracy with personal needs for loyalty. It's ok to invite your cousin to a party over the other person, but not to hire them for a job.
Sure, I wouldn't want ancestry rules applied in a professional context, but I think there should also be some amount of loyalty to your fellow countrymen. I don't have a strong opinion over how much precisely that would be. The way I see it, countries should follow a general "[insert country here] first" framework, and people with deep roots should have relative priority over newcomers. Though even the latter I wouldn't want to go too far, so it won't turn into a dick-measuring contest over who's ancestors were here the longest.
Do you mind clarifying or giving a justification for why things should be like this? Specifically, what does "deep roots" mean? Is that things like like involvement with local community wherever they live and civic engagement or is it more like having ancestry in the country going far back? I would totally agree with you if its the first and vehemently disagree with the second---for the same reason that personal connection is what's important, not ancestry (see again the comparison between a close childhood friend vs. cousin you've never met before).
Sure, personally I meant both, and while I'm aware that means vehement disagreement, I do want to stress I'd like to avoid some of the wankery that would come with taking the latter too seriously.
As for a justification, it's going to be hard to explain, as there's a certain "you wouldn't get it" quality about the whole thing. Though maybe that's a good starting point, because a concise way to explain it, is that I want to preserve the things an outsider wouldn't get.
It's probably a cultural thing, one if the things that struck me when visiting America was how open everyone was, how strangers would constantly strike up a conversation with you, randoms on the bus would tell you the story of their life. Later on I read somewhere that this has to do with their roots as pioneers, how the country was founded by people from all sorts of places, and even later on there was lots of people moving around, constantly recreating their support networks.
Maybe it's all a fanciful story for why their culture is the way it is, but either way the fact remains they seem to have a knack for that kind of community involvement / civic engagement. Someone moves to a new place, and they make a point to get to know all the neighbors, learns the local culture, tries to integrate, it all sounds lovely, I can't help but think what happens if you increase the numbers. Send a couple thousand Americans to my home town, and they'll probably be running the place within a year, and even if they learn the language and local customs perfectly, it will all be rather superficial. There will be things they don't get, and whether they'll be doing it deliberately or not, they'll start changing the character of the place.
Have complaints about gentrification ever made any sense to you? If not, or if you think they boil down to material factors like "I can't afford to live where I grew up", then maybe none of what I'm saying makes any sense to you. But if they did, then I'm talking about a very similar process.
On the other hand I'm not saying this should be a terminal value, or that no immigration should ever happen, or no refugees should ever be accepted. But I do think it should be recognized that acceptance for even this "model immigration" can be pretty big concession.
Thanks for the excellent reply, this helps a ton with understanding the other point of view---and maybe the way you describe it isn't too costly to values of fairness and meritocracy anyways.
Specifically, I guess we're in a world where the countries with most lucrative opportunities people would want to immigrate for are also the ones where ancestry might matter the least. As long as this is true (well, it's not perfect given how hard legal immigration is to the US), then it's really not a big deal if other places stay the way you want in case that's necessary to preserve these ineffable other values. So maybe I'll have vehement disagreements with other Americans asking for things to be more ancestry-dependent but not people elsewhere.
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