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How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.
There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.
Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!
Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.
The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.
Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.
Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?
It devalues individual merit by arguing that you should focus on group differences instead of individual merit.
6 paragraphs of why that's actually a good thing doesn't change the underlying argument.
Nowhere did I say anyone should “focus” on group differences. In fact I made it very explicit multiple times that when fine-grained information about an individual is available, you should use it to override the assumptions you made before you had it.
You didn’t make any effort to actually engage with the specifics of any of the examples I brought up, the distinctions I drew, etc. This is by far the most common outcome of my interactions with you. You just repeat some stock phrases and act like they’re knockdown arguments for every situation. It’s very tiresome, and I feel that you’re an especially poor ambassador for the general constellation of ideas you ostensibly advocate.
Ive been around the internet enough to know that engaging with the specifics of a Gish Gallop is a fool's game. That's why I didn't.
No matter how much you try to hedge and caveat you are still trying to argue that knowledge of group differences is more valuable and informative than fine-grained information about individuals, and that is a premise that I reject.
Nah man you shamelessly ducked. Massive L.
See my reply below
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I am literally and explicitly arguing the opposite, and you’re just obstinately insisting otherwise, despite (again) not actually demonstrating that you’ve made an attempt to understand the specific arguments I’ve made and why.
You asked if racial discrimination was a priori a bad thing. I responded that from a Western/Culturally Christian perspective, yes it is a bad thing and provided a rationale. Specifically that the emphasis on individual merit is a key component of what sets "the West" apart, and that racial discrimination goes against that. You responded by pointing out that judging people individually is often difficult/inconvenient and urging me to cosider the possible benefits of embracing racial discrimination but none of that has anything to do with why I maintain that it is a priori a bad thing.
And when he provided numerous uncontroversial examples of other situations in which a person makes assumptions based on observable traits, you shamelessly ducked having to explain why those are different.
Guessing that an elderly person is likely to be weaker than a young person, or that a bearded man in a keffiyeh might not want any bacon, is just common sense. But you apparently don't have an arrow in your quiver that explains why some assumptions "go against individual merit" while others don't, so instead you just muttered something about not being gish galloped even though that's blatantly not what was happening.
Big fat L.
"Uncontroversial" my ass
This adds nothing. Make an actual point, don't just sputter angrily.
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What is controversial about the claim that, on average, a person is less physically vigorous at age 80 than at age 30? I’m not aware of anyone who would say that this is controversial. Similarly, what person who has even a cursory knowledge of world cultures would consider it controversial that an Arab Muslim is less likely to consume pork and alcohol than a white German Protestant?
I would ask “what is controversial about the claim that a woman is more likely to have the ability to become pregnant than a man is”, but this is one issue about which there is, inexplicably, a controversy, and I’m very confident that you come down on the side of “Why would anyone dispute this very obvious claim? The entire point of our species having two sexes is that one of them gets pregnant and the other does the impregnating.” If you met an individual woman who is infertile — due to health issues, age, a hysterectomy, or any other reason — you would have no trouble understanding that this doesn’t in any way invalidate the general principle.
Yet you have no answer, nor have you even attempted to offer an answer, for why that’s different, and why every other category of individual must be treated as a total blank slate, whose observable characteristics provide no valuable predictive information whatsoever until you’ve had the chance to personally get to know the person and observe his or her behavior. This is an absurd standard and I don’t think you’d actually defend it, except for you feel morally obligated to do so when it comes to race and are too obstinate to admit that the principle holds in regards to the many other observable characteristics that people can have.
As a result, you’ve backed yourself into the corner of having to adopt the same stance as a stereotypical blue-haired college progressive: “Um, excuse me, did you just assume that person’s age? Did you just assume that person’s religion?” And so on. Apparently you’re an unexpected ally of the progs! Literally all you have to do, in order to dig yourself out of that hole, is to admit, “Yes, okay, obviously we can make assumptions about people, even if we don’t know them as individuals” and then explain why race is different from those other characteristics.
It’s not even hard to do so! There are plenty of strong arguments for why race, unlike age, doesn’t provide valuable predictive data. I could even make some of those arguments for your although I have no interest in bailing you out. It seems like you can’t make that argument, though, because, truth be told, you haven’t thought that deeply about it.
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I presume you are neither omniscient nor psychic, able to gather masses of true, fine-grained information about an individual from a glance? You are arguing for explicitly, dogmatically ignoring any information about a person that you can gather by inference. Yes, you can do Bayesian inference by always having a completely blank prior and admitting only facts in a specific category, but you will get worse information than if you had calibrated priors and allowed use of all information.
In short, your argument appears to be that people should cripple their judgment-making facilities for moral reasons. You can hold to this moral system, of course, but you haven’t made any argument for why anyone else should.
Im not claiming to be phsycic or omniscient. Im saying that behavior is the best predictor of behavior.
Again I ask, what did you think the parable of the Good Samaritan was about?
I think it’s saying that sometimes you can be wrong about people, and sometimes kindness comes from places you don’t expect.
Yes, don’t write someone off completely before you get to know them. But OTOH the existence of a ‘Good’ Samaritan pretty strongly implies they have a bad rep, and that rep likely comes from somewhere (other behaviour at other times). Going alone into an alley with five Samaritans probably isn’t a great idea unless you know them and you have personal experience of their specific behaviour to draw on.
Reputation matters precisely because it’s the distilled remnant of far more interactions than you can ever have personally. I’m in China at the moment and was nearly lured into a back alley to ‘see some calligraphy’ - a scam that is famous now I look it up. Waiting until I had personal experience with each scammer to know that they’re dangerous was and is a bad idea! I am now going to be much more wary of any given Chinese person who is unexpectedly friendly to me and that is very very sensible. Sucks if you’re a friendly Chinese guy who likes talking to foreigners but I’m not going to put myself at risk for that.
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