This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think the consensus view here is that people should be treated specially for the sole reason of being white instead of any personal qualifications. This is very anti-meritocratic. I recall though that we just had this discussion on this right? I guess your comments didn't get into this point specifically, but do you not think a moderator saying that "race-blind meritocracy" is a controversial, minority viewpoint in the Motte is sufficient evidence?
Otherwise, would you agree that the Motte's seeming consensus against even skilled immigration (well, I get dogpiled pretty hard whenever I try posting in support of it at least) is pretty anti-meritocratic? I have the impression that the median poster here would prefer their doctors, engineers, pilots, etc. to be white/have far-reaching ancestry in whatever country (depending on the exact poster) than being the most competent people that can be found.
This is just consensus building in reverse. No, these positions are not the consensus, no I'm not going to prove a negative that there is some other consensus. We don't have a consensus, we are a collection of individuals with wildly different beliefs.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure how one could conclude that there's even a seeming consensus of the sort here. Whether or not you get dogpiled over an opinion doesn't really tell us anything about consensus; merely what types of people tend to dogpile, as well as what types of posts you tend to perceive.
I'm not sure how one could come to this conclusion, as someone who spends more time on this forum than I ought to. I don't think there's anything such as a "consensus" here on this kind of stuff, but the closest thing to a consensus I could see here is the precise opposite of this, that almost everyone here believes in putting the most competent people that can be found into these positions. They simply believe that, for empirical reasons, that a world in which the most competent people fill these roles is also a world in which a majority of those people will belong to certain races. They may be mistaken, but the goal always seemed to me to maximize competence, and let the racial makeup fall where they may.
I put a longer reply here. Basically, I don't think this is at all consistent with the policies enacted by the US right---especially the US alt-right that is more in line with this forum.
I mean, maybe. But then you're talking about the US right and the US alt-right, not the "consensus" of this forum. US right and US alt-right are certainly popular in this forum, but to say that there's anything nearing a consensus that such political/ideological movements are Good is, in my view, absurd, just from my time reading the comments here. Furthermore, even if there were, the people here tend to be idiosyncratic enough that their support for broad political/ideological movements such as those tend to have tons of caveats and places of severe disagreements, often in very different areas depending on the person, even when they're ostensibly on the same "team" (this is present on the left as well as on the right here, in my view, where there are plenty of left-leaning users including myself and you, but our views on what the left is doing right and what it's doing wrong tend to be quite different from each other).
If you were to say that there are many people on this forum, especially ones who produce a disproportionate number of comments, that support the mirror image of DEI, then I would agree. If you want to say that the presence of such people who make lots of posts in this vein who don't get significant pushback (a description I disagree with, but I am willing to take for granted for the sake of argument) indicates that there's a consensus, then I couldn't disagree more. Again, I don't perceive there being any consensus on this (the closest thing to a consensus on this forum I can tell is that "wokeness/leftist idpol/SocJus/CRT is, on net, harmful to our society"), but I'd wager that the most common view here - not common enough that I'd call it a consensus, but I'd bet it's a plurality - is that society is better when it prioritizes individual competency when picking people to put into important critical roles, and as such that's what we ought to do. Some (many) people here believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this (one might say this is the mirror of DEI - one core component of DEI is that society is better when it prioritizes Diversity* when picking people to put into important critical roles, and most of its proponents believe that discriminating on the basis of race is one particularly effective method of accomplishing this).
But, who knows, in a forum like this, determining if there's a consensus, much less what it is is both nearly impossible and highly subjective. It's not like we have some numerical criterion by which we can say, "Aha! So that reveals that the consensus of TheMotte is XYZ!" It's almost entirely based on vibes, at the end of the day. My vibes is that there's no shortage of leftist posters here, and probably even moreso centrist/heterodox posters. When weighted by post count, perhaps they're, put together, less voluminous than the rightists, but the amount clearly seems significant enough to deny any sort of rightist consensus (except, again, that anti-DEI thing).
* Diversity here has an idiosyncratic meaning of something like "more people from populations that we have judged to have been overtly oppressed in the past and thus still suffer from both the legacy of that and the existing structures that reinforce that today," rather than the generally understood meaning of "having a large variety of types" or the like.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What did you think of this comment from that discussion?
As well as Amadan's below (a moderator).
There definitely are white nationalists here. There are also definitely a bunch of people here who are not white nationalists, and are against, say, a Jim Crow society, who still think that race can sometimes be of some evidentiary value. (And so might be against "race blindness," depending on how it is phrased.) I think there are more of the latter here.
I'll also note that you characterized the American right as being worse on this. But it is very much the norm on the American right to take an anti-DEI, anti-affirmative action stance precisely on the grounds that it is discriminatory and anti-meritocratic. I'm fairly confident that the American right is less racist and more meritocratic than the system of racial discrimination found throughout American society.
Insofar as it is more racist, I think that's in large part a product of the internet, and is worsening over time.
Well, I agree that if that were the prevailing view then my point about being worse on meritocracy would be much weaker. However, I do have a factual disagreement there---I think we all have a very strong cognitive bias to hyperfocus on racial differences over much more informative characteristics. For example, if you see another person walking on the street late at night in a somewhat sketchy area, I think the person's age, mannerisms, dress, etc. would give you much more information about whether you're in danger than if the person was white or black even though race is what everyone instinctually pays attention to first. If you don't correct for this bias---and maybe its so strong that you have to do something extreme like actively ignoring racial information all together---you won't get a very accurate picture of the world.
Furthermore, I think there is a real problem of people covertly arguing for policies that satisfy their actually anti-meritocratic racial preferences by exaggerating the evidentiary value of race, actively manipulating people through this cognitive bias. Part of this admitted paranoia is from extreme right-wingers explicitly saying that this is a deliberate strategy. Part of it is also since I just don't see how actually believing what the quoted comment claims can be consistent with opposition to skilled immigration---for example, Steve Bannon's stated policy preferences, which would be extremely bad for making sure the most competent people get the job:
Again, I was under the impression that Bannon is a pretty well-thought of figure here. Even worse, all attempts of mine of trying to ask here for non-racial reasons to oppose skilled immigration (to this Steve-Bannon extent) that aren't economic nonsense have been unpleasant failures.
On the left, we have DEI excesses and "extreme" affirmative action---i.e. going beyond just attempting to correct for bias that undervalues the qualifications of people in marginalized groups to make sure that institutions actually choose the most qualified candidates. However, I think this sort of extreme DEI or extreme affirmative action is very unpopular and gets shut down whenever it affects actual policy too much---like even in California affirmative action loses in elections.
On the right, you have Bannon/Miller-style drastic reductions in skilled immigration (I'll link this Cato article again). These do not get nearly as much pushback---Stephen Miller is still going to be one of the main influences on immigration policy if Trump wins in 2024. Furthermore, the right in the US is extremely deferential to inherited wealth. For example, cutting estate taxes seems to be one of the most important priorities of the republican party and I'm pretty sure if they were offered a chance to cut the top income tax bracket at the cost of raising estate taxes equivalently, they wouldn't take it.
I think both matter. If you saw a man at night walking with a suit and briefcase, you'd be less concerned about him, regardless of race, I image. But I could see myself being affected by race in some settings a little.
I guess I don't really have a good sense of how much people's positions are insincere.
Personally, I'm way more open to immigration than most on this board. So I suppose, per you, I'm consistent, though others are not.
But some possible non-racial reasons for preferring less immigration might be:
Now, I'm not sure how much those align with people's motivations, but I think the first three, at least, play a factor often. I think it's also coherent to be meritocratic within a country, but view foreign relations sufficiently attached to one's national identity that one dislikes cross-border meritocracy. I'll note in particular that opposition to immigration isn't always racial; when hispanics care about border security (I know some who do) it's not due to hating other hispanics or something.
I personally found keyhole solutions a pretty compelling consideration, even if it would be hard to pass politically, especially in a way that isn't going to immediately slippery-slope itself. Maybe I should write up a post on that sometime; that might draw some downvotes, but whatever.
Thanks for the Cato article (even though the headline is slightly misleading), that was informative.
I think you're drastically underestimating how common this extreme DEI is. In use at all colleges, well, at least before the supreme court decision a year or two ago, and probably still, slightly more surreptitiously, afterward. Legally required for all government contractors (a quarter of the economy). Offering things like scholarships restricted to minorities is routine, and, I believe, illegal. Yes, it is quite unpopular among the electorate, but it is popular among those who set policy. Given who governs in this country, I think the kind of affirmative action you describe is basically never necessary.
I guess I haven't personally seen any opposition to estate taxes in particular, rather than being generically anti-tax.
I agree with you that support of restricting immigration as a whole isn't incompatible with valuing meritocracy. While I definitely support increasing all immigration, this depends on lets just say many much less certain moral and factual beliefs---it's not really something I'm prepared to defend on a forum like this.
My specific claim here is that as far as I can tell, opposition to specifically legal, skilled immigration is blatantly incompatible with valuing meritocracy to the point where I think people claiming to hold these contradictory beliefs either haven't thought very carefully or are being disingenuous---usually making bad-faith arguments in support of policies motivated by either hidden anti-meritocratic racialist values or anti-meritocratic selfishness to protect themselves from competition at the cost of the rest of the country. I don't think any of the 4 reasons you gave contradict this, right? 1 is the closest, but I think that unless your definition of "American culture" includes most people looking white (in which case you're back in the racist camp), it's pretty easy to include ability to assimilate in your definition of skilled.
I also consider opposition to cross-border meritocracy just as bad as opposition to within-country meritocracy. The main benefit of meritocracy is to make sure that the most competent possible people are doing important jobs and both versions get in the way of this. I guess Bannon is basically admitting to this justification so at least he's not being disingenuous. There are of course lots of reasons to not like meritocracy---someone recently pointed out to me idea of having non-meritocratic "reserves" to be super careful about avoiding homogenization and keeping ineffable, hard-to-measure values from being optimized do death. However, engines of progress like Boston, NYC, or SF should not be these reserves.
This is why I feel that Bannon/Miller-style anti-skilled immigration beliefs being represented at the highest levels of the federal government is much more of a threat to meritocracy than DEI. I do however, have to address the other side of the comparison---I've spent a lot of time at universities in extremely liberal parts of the country and even the most extreme DEI people I ran across were very purely motivated by factual claims that DEI policies would lead to more meritocracy instead of less by counterbalancing systemic discrimination. In particular, they could be convinced away from many damaging policies---anti-standardized testing, anti-math acceleration, "gentrification" justifications for NIMBY, elite-college "holistic" affirmative action, etc.---by arguing these factual claims. Despite stereotypes of "woke" closed-mindedness, these discussions were also far more pleasant and polite than anything here that wasn't buried deep in reply chains (though caveat, my time was all in math departments, and many people here have pointed out that the situation may not be so rosy in other situations).
Checking for yourself how much a threat something is seems like much stronger evidence than relying on dueling cherry-picked media reporting from both sides. The comparison between discussions in my departments and posting here made the "which is worse" judgement feel very clear.
I suppose you are correct that opposition to immigration is incompatible with meritocracy, if meritocracy is understood as an absolute, rather than as a general value that can be overcome when there are other interests at play. (Which, to be fair, it is often understood as exclusive.) That is, people can want things to be more meritocratic generally speaking, without being committed to meritocracy in every respect.
I don't think 1 needs to be racial. Say you're concerned about socialism, or some other political matter, for example. Having immigrants who have similar values to you will help with that, and the opposite will harm that. (Though, maybe that isn't the best example at the moment given just how bad economic knowledge is, at least online.) But sure, if you include that as part of your definition of skilled, that's includes it, but is an unusual way to do so.
There are also possible non-meritocratic non-racial values, like if people care about the American people (the current set of people) more than foreigners.
I'll reiterate that I think I mostly agree with you, most of the above is a "people could believe…"
Yeah, I would expect math departments to be better in that regard.
I don't think those are a good comparison. You are taking a set of people selected mainly along an axis that is not political (people in math departments, maybe also other life acquaintances), and comparing them to people selected mainly along an axis that is political (willingness to engage on a forum that permits and contains fairly right-wing political opinions.) If those had the same concentration of extreme views, it would be concerning.
Perhaps you are saying that the people holding one set of ideas are worse than the other. Sure, fair enough, though I'd perhaps argue that you should compare here to some portions of reddit, rather than your IRL acquaintances. But in terms of real world impact, I think it should be indisputable that racism on the left currently has a far greater impact than racism on the right.
I think the crux here is that I'm really at a loss for a better way to make this judgement than what I described. I think we can both agree that trying to get a sense from media reporting is not really a good idea. The next level up in credibility is trusting anecdotal evidence from your own life experience. Mine have made the judgement very clear in one direction and assume yours have done the opposite. Again, anecdotes are pretty weak evidence, but I really do not have anything better to base my votes/political support on---it's not like there are good surveys or studies. I would actually really love to be convinced of your judgement. At the very least, it'll at least make the next election feel a lot better. Also, who knows, maybe I'll be cynical and burned by something and feel differently in 5 years---having to base these factual beliefs on personal anecdotes really sucks!
For the other points:
It's more natural when you think from the perspective of the policymaker deciding whether to let someone in or not. Maybe skilled is a bad word here---"merit based", or something else might be better where "merit" is some measure of how much you can "contribute" to the country by being competent at a difficult but important job, assimilating well and building community, not corrupting important values, etc. The upshot is there is are many, many potential immigrants around the world that most Americans should be delighted to have come over, especially given how popular western liberal values are everywhere.
Again, I think with the right selection, there should be lots people that benefit the country even if you just measure the benefit to current citizens. I'm going to risk being concrete---I think giving green cards to every international student graduating from a top-20 undergrad who passes a security clearance, English proficiency test, and civics/values interview should be a win-win for everyone who doesn't care about racial considerations.
Section 3:
I think I agree.
Section 2:
Merit is definitely a better word than skilled, that's more sensible.
Section 1:
So what I was trying to make clear is that left-wing racism seems to have much broader effects. With regard to college, people with SAT scores hundreds of points apart, but of different races, can have the same chance of admission. Jobwise, I have a rather strong impression that things like hiring policies are largely shaped by left-wing bureaucrats and HR departments who want more women and non-asian minorities, and fewer white people, asians, and men. Do you disagree with that?
This includes at the level of governmental enforcement. The civil rights act prevents discrimination; this has been redefined to include unintentionally disparity-causing practices, which is everything, but for some reason you never see enforcement actions who favor the left-favored groups a little too much.
Meanwhile, my perception of the racist right is that it's not the largest, and in large part online. But I'm not all that sure about this. But I can't see that having many real-life effects, they'd get sued and lose easily in any instances of blatant discrimination. I'm pretty sure that the suburban, middle-to-upper class, not-terminally-online right is fairly not-racist. I don't really know what things look like rurally. But even if they turn out to be more racist, which, I don't know that I expect, that matters less anyway, in terms of power wielded—important institutions exist in cities.
How does this compare to your perception?
Given all the complaints people have made here and in other places, the SAT data etc, I can't disagree that this likely seriously goes against value of the most qualified person getting the job in lots of cases.
However my experience in all highly-selective settings I've personally been in has been that DEI/affirmative action policies in practice didn't actually do this. Specifically, members of the groups that benefited from it were not on average less competent than those that didn't. On particular group of affirmative action beneficiaries, women in math, were actually consistently more competent on average (specifically they were completely absent from the lower tail in competence).
It lined up exactly with the steel-man justification of affirmative action---that it was a necessary corrective to un-meritocratic biases. I can definitely believe that this doesn't hold in less selective settings, but it still makes me skeptical about the true magnitude of its material impact on meritocracy. Actually, I wish people here would talk more about personal experience with anti-meritocratic outcomes of DEI of just focusing on whatever cherry-picked, hot news story happened recently---studies/good statistics > personal experience > media reporting
Conversely, I'm not just focusing on skilled immigration as a hypothetical here. I've had many very competent friends (including two literal IMO medalists!) who have had to leave the country because they couldn't get work visas. The anti-skilled-immigration policies that forced them out seemed to be a direct consequence of the---I'll use a slightly different word here to be more specific---hereditarianism on the right (which they're doubling down on if you saw the end of JD Vance's acceptance speech when he started talking about immigration and national identity). Sure, there are a lot of crazy extreme policy preferences online that don't have a chance of being implemented, but the underlying hereditarian ideals really do cause significant material harm.
Of course neither is good, but we don't get to pick none of the above.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You admitted of discriminating against European Americans to such an extent, that even you noticed a decline in quality of students. You have 0 moral leg to stand on to condemn mere desire for discrimination.
More options
Context Copy link
First of all, I think you are mistaking "A handful of people with very strongly held and loudly and frequently voiced views" with "consensus opinion." I do not agree that the consensus view of the Motte is white nationalism and extreme nativism, and I don't think even the average white nationalist would agree with you that they'd rather have a white doctor than a more competent non-white doctor. Far be for me to speak for wignats, but one of the few remaining valuable aspects of this place is actually understanding how people whose views I despise really think, rather than assuming a mustache-twirling caricature of how they think.
Like, this is what I've been trying to do from my first post on this forum 4 years ago. It's worked pretty well with some topics.
However, specifically on the topic of skilled immigration or racialism vs. meritocracy, I never seem to get any replies that don't confirm the mustache-twirling caricature---and this was actually not at all what I expected to happen! Furthermore, the mustache twirlers have been generally been extremely unpleasant to interact with---even right now, I'm getting replies with bizarre false claims and misquotes. The mustache twirlers also have very long history of making unmoderated personal attacks (see especially the linked and endorsed reddit post there).
I would be very happy to be proven wrong here---for example, do you have examples of anti-skilled immigration posts that aren't the caricature of "we want to do this because it's important to us that the US stays more white"?
I'm not one of those people who saves links of past posts to refer to in the future, but the topic of skilled immigration has come up before, and there have been people who are against it on the basis that it lowers the market value of skilled labor for citizens. Agree with this or not, it is not just about "keeping America more white."
Sorry, I should have taken more time with the reply and qualified what I was asking for more---specifically, an argument that is plausible enough to be the true reason for support for a significant number of people in this forum. Also it's not always just whiteness---many times it's just a preference for people with a deep ancestry in the country (which is just as bad for meritocracy!)
The competition argument is not plausible. It's naked selfishness asking that the rest of the country sacrifice to protect a well-off class from competition, not to mention very anti-meritocratic. Also, since the competition relevant to posters here is likely to be for tech jobs, it's almost certainly not even true given how many tech founders are immigrants. Probably Sergey Brin and Jensen Huang by themselves more than make up for any wage pressure in tech from skilled immigration.
If this is your standard for meritocracy, then approximately 0 countries in the entire history of the world have been meritocratic and approximately 0 ever will be.
And yet I'm posting this from a country where the literal first founding words are "All men are created equal" and whose founders hated hereditary privileges so much that titles of nobility are constitutionally banned.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link