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I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
Well then, we're at a mutual disadvantage, because the fields I'm familiar with are one's you're not (or does IT count? I guess it doesn't matter because I'm not an academic and only know the corporate world), and vice-versa. At the end of the day my experiences left me with no reason to believe that any such reasonable spaces exist anywhere in the Western world. Maybe math departments managed to play the Kolmogorov Complicity game just right, but how am I supposed to verify that?
While I'm more traditionalist and believe we'd all be better off if we stopped pretending men and women are the same, gender- and color-blind mertiocracy are acceptable terms of a cease fire for me. I just don't know how you can claim they haven't been ruthlessly violated by progressives.
What I will argue is that by discussing entry criteria, and education outcomes, we've moved from the field of math and hard science, and firmly into social sciences, a field that you've conceded is ideologically compromised. I will also argue that I have no reason to trust either in the information provided - every single argument about systemic racism / sexism, like the "wage gap" or disproportionate arrest stemming from bias, turned out to be flawed and probably made disingenuously to begin with, so I have no inclination to give this argument any benefit of the doubt - or the intentions stated. And another argument that I'd like to make as well, is that even if you want to call this (aspirational) meritocracy, you cannot call it gender- or color-blind, if you're purposefully taking account of someone's race or gender!
Finally, I will ask if you are really sure you want to be making arguments like "You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy" in the context of this conversation? Because there's something I'd like to apply it to, if you find it compelling.
Because I've been having conversations with people about this topic for years, and have seen scant few progressive-minded academia-inclined posters who expressed any sort of discomfort with them. Most you'd get from people pretending that the woke are powerless, marginal, and unrepresentative of the left, and I don't count that as being bothered by them.
No, but at some point it behooves you to say something. At the very least don't contribute to attacks on people who are saying something.
Do you think you may be contributing to the nastiness by calling anyone who wants to do something against the woke "creationists and birthers"?
I don't know! I agree that blindly trusting random internet posters is not reasonable, and I would really like to not have an account where I argue contentious politics to be associated with my real identity in a way that could make this actually credible. One question to answer is whether your policy preferences would change if my presentation of the facts is actually correct? I'm not talking about some p-hacked formal studies the department ran, this is just advisors noticing over and over again that all their students from whatever group were way stronger than average.
Also, about the affirmative action argument, yes, this is why it's a super questionable solution. Can't you imagine some world though in which the de facto violations of meritocracy are so bad that a de jure violation might actually end up improving the de facto situation? I definitely agree that it's usually not a good idea to use bad means for what you think will be good ends.
The Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith crowd is pretty prominent and denounces them all the time (It's Yglesias' sixth most popular article of all time right now). More locally, I think I'm on record here denouncing Okun and DiAngelo? By the way, powerless has only ever meant powerless compared to anti-meritocratic forces on the right---it's a choice of damnations! Voting patterns and comments here make it blatantly obvious that giving the average Motte reader/poster power would lead to much wilder violations of color-blind meritocracy than anything even extreme progressives have managed.
I don't contribute to attacks against people like Sokal. I contribute to attacks against the people who would replace progressive racism with even worse right-wing racism.
One major problem with this situation right now is that, for as much as we can certainly imagine that world, the organizations and individuals that society has relied on to check if our real world is at all similar to that imagined world have so destroyed their credibility that we can't actually trust their claims that they verified that our world is similar to that imagined world. It may be possible to regain that credibility within my lifetime, but I'm skeptical that that will happen, and I'm pretty sure it won't happen in any time frame meaningfully shorter than that.
Which is to say, the very notion that there are good ends to be pursued here is contingent upon something that we have no way of verifying is true. That doesn't mean it's not true, but it does mean that it should be taken about as seriously as people claiming that some Jewish conspiracy is what's making Jews so successful or whatever.
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Sure, I'd be in favor of having these students served, I'm just skeptical of doing so on the basis of the color of their skin. Surely, such a state would imply that there are also white, Asian, and Jewish students who would have better academic outcomes than their test scores would imply, and I see no reason to exclude them from your outreach measures... but, if it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that only people from particular groups are affected, and there's no colorblind way of helping them, than sure I supposed I'd have to accept the only remaining solution.
It's not beyond the realm of physical possibility, if that's what you're asking. But tell me, how inclined would you be to entertain this argument if we were discussing an instance of explicitly pro-white discrimination, and this is how I was trying to explain it away?
Well, credit it where it's due. I have some amount of antipathy towards these gentlemen (not including you, of course), so I didn't keep up with their writing. That said, I'm pretty sure it still counts as "scant few".
I'm pretty sure you're wrong on both counts. First, for the longest time I was being told "it's just a couple crazy kids on college campuses, they'll grow out of it when they go into the real world", indicating that it's about absolute powerlessness, not relative. Secondly, if anything you got the relative power reversed! Right-wing racists are pretty much marginalized, left-wing racists are building race-segregated dormitories on campuses. Progressives have already gone far beyond what the most sophisticated 4chan chuds barely dare to dream of.
Would you agree that a statement like "if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists" is not the best way of expressing that?
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