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 don't think I could answer better than naraburns' (not sure how to ping users on the new site) post here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/azpeio/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_11_2019/eib5dfx/
Okay. My comments in what follows will take this stipulation seriously, so please bear that in mind before forming opinions on what it is that I actually believe.
The most important thing that comes next is, we stop wasting money trying to "uplift" people through social welfare programs.
The fact that this is totally distinct from e.g. arguing that someone doesn't deserve dignity or respect, is a point that seems to be completely lost on the critics of HBD folks like Charles Murray. But here is how the received welfare narrative functions on the Left:
If you have a shitty life, it's because someone fucked you. If nobody fucked you, personally, then their ancestors fucked your ancestors. Nobody's life is irredeemably shitty, it's just that the patriarchy or the colonizers or the 1% would rather fuck us all than share their boundless wealth and power actually improving the human condition. And if we just give people with shitty lives enough free housing, nutrition, education, and income, then we'll break the cycle of poverty, we'll smash the school-prison-pipeline, we'll wreck the pattern of abuse, we'll repair the damage of slavery, whatever historical thing it is that is to blame for your shitty life, we can fix it, and then we'll all start from a "level playing field" and everything that happens after that will be legitimate and just.
This narrative is entrenched in extant justifications for social welfare programs. Sandra Day O'Connor once voted in approval of Affirmative Action on grounds that after 40 or 50 years, it would be unconstitutional again because once a generation of fair racial or gender representation was forced into existence, this would sufficiently address the wrongs of the past and future generations would have proportional representation emerge organically. The whole premise of slavery reparations is "bad stuff continues to plague black communities because of the legacy of slavery, reparations will put an end to that."
If you believe in HBD, then you know why Sandra Day O'Connor was wrong. There is no more affirmative action for women in law schools or medical schools, because once they were told that they were allowed to do these things, women did them. But women were also told they were allowed to do particle physics and philosophy and drive garbage trucks and become plumbers, but for some reason women didn't choose to do those things as often as men did. And affirmative action for racial minorities doesn't seem to have actually solved anything; in many cases, things were made worse, as universities and businesses hired token minorities who failed to succeed because they were not equipped to succeed in the first place. Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities, because black communities will still be filled with young men who murder each other and catch others in the crossfire, and slavery will still have happened, and giving them extra money won't change any of the things that actually matter.
So if you are building enormous social welfare and education programs on premises like "everyone can succeed," "all kids deserve to go to college," "nobody is born stupid," then you are lighting piles of money on fire. It's not a problem of dignity; it is a problem of having false beliefs and acting on them in ways that never deliver the promised utopia and then refusing to recognize that your beliefs about race are destroying resources that could be used to actually make things better, if only they were directed to projects that could possibly succeed.
Notice that we could totally say, "people of X race have lower IQs on the whole, so it shouldn't surprise us if they don't earn a lot of PhDs," and still accept members of that race into PhD programs when they show themselves to be a statistical outlier. But when that person says "I would like for this profession to be less Asian/Jewish/white/whatever," our answer should not be to, by hook or by crook, make the place less Asian/Jewish/white/whatever, our answer should be that, until we build some IQ-boosting gene therapy, they are just going to have to make their peace with being an outlier.
If you combine this reasoning with e.g. Bryan Caplan's Against Education, you might notice that there's a lot of money being poured into inner-city schools to try to lift them above miserable failure, and it doesn't work. The Obama administration demonstrated this extremely well by pouring billions of dollars into "fixing" failing schools, with no substantial impact. You can't pay teachers more to fix kids who are constitutionally incapable of learning algebra. No amount of money will give them cognitive capacities they lack at a genetic level. Frankly, it's cruel to try.
And you can't even fix the problem by, say, liquidating social welfare and issuing cash payments. But maybe we should do that anyway; once we've accepted that some people are going to have shitty lives, not because someone fucked them, but because they are genetically disposed to have shitty lives, we can worry a lot less about fixing everyone's shitty life. Better yet, this may actually improve people's lives, in those cases where the real problem is a poverty trap, or where the solutions they need are discoverable by individuals outside the scope of regimented bureaucratic "solutions."
The main reason we don't go this route, I suspect, is because it shatters the illusion of government as solution-maker. If the nanny-state can't actually solve our problems, then why would anyone support having a nanny-state? Of course it is transparently obvious already that the nanny-state can't actually solve all our problems, but if you entertain false beliefs that everyone could be an upper-middle-class professional if only they were given the right handouts, then you may refuse to notice that the nanny-state can't actually solve all our problems. Or you may even admit that the nanny-state can't solve all our problems, but insist counterfactually that it can at least solve these particular problems.
This, as I understand it, is kind of Charles Murray's whole shtick. He sees that first-world nations are sorting people into IQ clusters before they have a chance to form long-term reproductive relationships, and he sees why that is bad for populations over time. He sees first-world nations trying to fix problems ostensibly caused by "historical injustice" rather than by genetic disparity, and he identifies why that's not going work. And yet most people I meet who even know Murray's name just have him pattern-matched as "that dude who falsely believes that black people are inherently stupid." Not only do these people have a false belief about Charles Murray, it is a false belief that protects their other false beliefs.
So when you suggest that really understanding the truth of HBD is just an intellectual dead-end where certain people get to feel smug and other people have to feel sad and nothing more can be said, all I can say is that you are operating from a stereotype of HBD, one that has been primarily crafted to preserve a politics (egalitarian leftism broadly, but certainly SocJus leftism) that is empirically untenable. You're right that, humans being humans, some people who learn the facts about disparate racial IQs draw bad inferences from that data and become racists in various horrible ways. But far more harm is already being done by the lies that we emerge from the womb as mental equals, and that such suffering as persists among us can be done away with if only we can implement the right pattern of resource redistribution.
In short, if HBD is true, then the premises of distributive egalitarianism are false. That's a very, very important consequence, far more important than any worries you might have about the way people are made to feel by hearing the truth.
This is fairly obviously a gross oversimplification. For starters, especially in the kind of blue-collar communities from which most garbage men and plumbers will come, those kinds of jobs are surely still very male-coded. Certainly, fewer people are telling women they can't be plumbers etc. but, ironically, it's a very urban elite perspective to suggest that we've wholly eliminated gendered employment expectations, so all discrepancies must now be genetic/natural/whatever. A survey from a few years ago by City and Guilds suggested that, in the UK, around 17% of surveyed students were encouraged by their school to consider apprenticeships, compared to 33% of men. It's also important to remember that these things reinforce themselves without any individual engaging in career stereotyping - if every plumber who ever comes to your house or truck driver you see go past is a man, then one can see how girls might be dissuaded from such career choices.
This needs some sourcing; the onset of quota-based affirmative action in the 1970s saw an explosion in the number of black Americans graduating, not just enrolling, so clearly most of them were sufficiently well equipped to deal with the universities into which they began to enrol in larger numbers.
Again, a baseless unsourced claim; there is evidence to suggest that more generous welfare provision does actually reduce crime;
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07418829800093741?needAccess=true
Look this pretty much goes for every claim you make. So many words and yet a total absence of any evidence to substantiate some fairly dramatic claims.
I think you missed the part where it’s a person quoting another person steelmanning a position he doesn’t necessarily hold himself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Excellent, this is what I was looking for. Thanks for the link
More options
Context Copy link
Note that if you switch their ancestors fucked your ancestors to "your ancestors fucked you through giving you shitty genes" then the argument still holds. If I want to prevent people having shitty lives it doesn't matter whether they have shitty lives because they were oppressed or because they have "bad" genetics or because their dad beat them or their uncle abused them.
My prediction is this. Even if HBD in the form you describe became a mainstream belief, roughly the same people who want distributive egalitarianism now would want it then. You are looking at their rationalizations not the cause. The cause is that they truly do not want people to have shitty lives. Lighting piles of money to try to help makes them feel better and those feelings will trump any facts. The arguments they make (as most people's are) are backwards rationalizations to justify how they feel. That's why they can switch the argument each time it is disproven and keep the conclusion, because the conclusion comes first. People are not rational, logical agents.
More options
Context Copy link
With an @, like this: @naraburns
More options
Context Copy link
Has it actually been demonstrated that most of these students are actually incapable of learning algebra? Or is it more that the school needs to slow down, separate out the high achievers and the actually retarded, and maybe adjust the teaching strategies(all things that the Obama admin strongly rejected trying in favor of doing the same thing, but more expensively).
I mean, some of the kids we're talking about in the public school system are profoundly mentally retarded, so you can't just discount them entirely.
But after that, it depends on what you mean by "demonstrated" and "incapable," I guess. Suppose, for example, there were someone who actually could learn algebra, but only if they have one-on-one tutoring for eight hours per day for five years? Of course, you have no way of knowing that's true at the outset, so: at what point between just "send them to a standard high school algebra class for a semester or two" and "expend every possible resource teaching this person algebra" do you conclude that they are "just not capable?" Or if "incapable" is just an off-putting word for you here, at what point do you conclude, "we've made every reasonable effort, at this point if they want to learn algebra they're just going to have to find the time and resources on their own?"
Slowing down and adjusting teaching strategies may not be what the Obama administration favored, but I know many schools have taken that approach anyway. I'm not aware of any impressive results that didn't experience regression to the mean in pretty short order, but naturally I'm not aware of every experiment anyone has ever done! But I've discussed educational experiences with a lot of students, and a large number of them manage to master just enough algebra to squeak out a "C" so they can graduate. The movement to abolish algebra requirements seems like some evidence that many educators have concluded, yes--some people are just never really going to get it, or at least not in a reasonable enough timeframe to justify the effort of teaching them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link