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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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