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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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supporting race blindness makes a comment one of the most controversial in your posting history

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:

Looking through my own "top" and "bottom" comments I am not surprised or offended by their placement. My "bottom" comments are often my controversial mod decisions, or times when I have decided to defend viewpoints that are unpopular here on TheMotte (like race blindness, or open borders)

(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:

As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.

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".