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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   28137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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There's a great comment on the communism thread about how an arbitrary but efficient procedure is better than a fair procedure that eats up arbitrary amounts of resources to calculate:

The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".

(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)

Making everybody spend seventeen fucking years in the school system so that we can determine who most deserves the high paying, high status jobs is the meritocratic equivalent of having a societal conversation every time two cars arrive at an intersection instead of using traffic lights and stop signs. Literally reserving those positions for a hereditary aristocratic caste would be better than what we have now, because then people could know where they stand and get on with their damn lives instead of grinding themselves to the bone trying to compete with everyone else in the all-consuming zero-sum red queen's race.

Okay, I think I understand the point now, but what I find to be the real issue is that if we were completely honest there's no need for "seventeen fucking years" to determine stuff like who should go to what college and etc. We can determine who is suited for what job with much simpler metrics like IQ, OCEAN personality traits, etc. The whole problem of inefficiency in the current "meritocratic" rat-race is that we lie by saying that "everyone can potentially become anything if they work hard enough for it", therefore subsidizing for example teaching non-basic math to kids that have neither interest or talent for it, making them also suffer through the process. We currently think of "meritocracy" as "giving everyone equal opportunities to compete" rather than "giving those that stand a chance opportunities to compete", the latter being much more efficient and still a "meritocracy" to me.

There's much better aptitude tests we could create if we were willing to throw out of the window two very important principles in the western hemisphere, namely "Everyone is equal" and "Hard work is more important than natural talent". They're very bitter pills to swallow though so I guess we just don't. The current education system is a very long, inefficient and expensive (but "fair") aptitude test, I agree on that.

Competition for resources or general adversity are the main factors that drives improvement not only in economy but in natural evolution too as far as I understand it (improvement in evolution being something like maximizing reproduction/survival efficiency in a given enviroment), a hereditary system removes or undermines those two factors and seems prone to stagnation/atrophy in the long-term.

If you told me then that we would make this "aristocratic caste" a large enough part of the population that it would still allow plenty of competition within it for higher paying positions, I would agree with you that it would be a better system than we've today but it would still feel like "meritocracy" to me, as long as "new aristocratic families" could join the club if they were more fit to compete rather than an "old aristocratic family" that somehow had a downturn in the metrics for consecutive generations. You would also have to ban marriage outside of the "caste" I guess which again also means you need it to be large enough to have enough genetic diversity.

So, on my part I conclude that hereditarism is perhaps a short-term improvement in efficiency but long-term decline in efficiency if we want to maximize results/achievements. Would be interested to see what you think of my logic here.

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