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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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One counterargument to meritocracy is that majority or minority populations don't like it when they're outperformed and seek redistribution or expropriation. From a naively utilitarian point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of meritocracy to achieve a bit more stability, or to find an equilibria somewhere you can get a good amount of both.

See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.

Personally, I think this is a bad idea that leads to long-run instability. Opening up and strengthening divisions in the population of the country is a bad idea. If you have meritocracy, then you will have groups of winners and angry losers. If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers, a recipe for toxic politics. Better a nation-state without such dividing points. Or, if you can't have a nation-state then at least try to avoid huge divisions in ability between populations, if you have to import people then aim for similar levels of skill to the general population.

If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers

When the state determines winners and losers among groups, the incentive to compete for state control matches the state's ability to differentiate group outcomes.

I feel like this accounting of winners vs losers in meritocracy is obscuring the fact that there is no 'natural' distributional outcome of meritocracy.

Meritocracy 'naturally' produces an ordinal relationship between people on whatever axis it measures, which does naturally create 'winners' and 'losers' (and those in between).

But one meritocratic system might end with the winners have 10% more resources than the losers, and another meritocratic system might end with the winners having 1,000,000X more resources than the losers. This having nothing to do with how much better the winners are than the losers, just with contingent factors about how the system itself functions.

The meritocratic ordering itself says nothing about which of those two distributional outcomes is 'correct' or 'natural' or 'right,' meritocracy measures something different from that and has nothing to say on the matter.

Which of those systems we should choose to live in, and which distributional outcomes we should want our meritocracy produces, is purely an arbitrary and political question.

If the losers demand that they get more than the winners, then that is trying to overturn meritocracy and take what is not theirs.

If the losers think that winners should get 10x as much as losers, and the winners think that winners should get 1000x as much as losers, then that's just a standard conflict of material interests between two different groups of citizens.

That's just politics.

(also, insert the standard affirmative action rant about 'recruit the kid who runs fast but has terrible form')

See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.

Malays get this so that they don’t riot against the Chinese minority who dominate the country’s economy, as they already have before. For the Chinese, bumiputra is a price they are willing to pay for the preservation of their economic power (and its associated privilege, as it’s not as if they’re less clannish than the Malays are), a fig leaf that minimizes racial hostility. The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely, and while that would be bad for the Malays, it would also be bad for the Chinese affected.

The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely

As I've heard it told, the founding story of independent Singapore involved the parliament of Malaysia voting unanimously (absent members from Singapore) in 1965 to expel Singapore from its state involuntarily. This seems related to the fact that the island was, unlike the mainland, a majority ethnic Chinese. The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Malaysia isn’t that badly off- it’s certainly better off than Indonesia. Difference in government(and Lee Kwan Yew really was a once in a generation genius at government) and geography can explain the difference, probably better than HBD.

The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Ditto the inverse. The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter, and that by extension Lee Kuan Yew's efforts at economic and cultural integration were a waste of time/resources, and yet (as you yourself observe) the differences in outcome are notable.

I imagine that someone will be along in a bit to argue that if Singapore had massacred all the ethnic Malays on the Island rather than integrating them they would have been even more successful but I don't buy it. That's the kind of policy that causes "unrest"

The Malays would have won that riot because they dominated the military.

Which in turn suggests the existence of considerations with far greater effect sizes than simple genetics, supporting my point.

Well yeah, the state of modern Russia points to something beyond national average IQ scores being highly relevant for what happens in a country.

Agreed

Yet Russia's PISA scores are consistently middle-of-the-pack, in mathematics above the US.

Obviously things other than IQ matter. But what, precisely, are you arguing against?

Do you believe genetics is responsible for, say, 10% of variation in educational outcomes? 20%? 50%? 80%? And I specifically mean current variation, not hypothetical variation with different forms of education (which would push up black and white equally, and leave them ranked the same).

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The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter

This is a laughable assertion. The standard HBD take acknowledges that culture and environment can cripple any person or set of persons, just that asserting those things apply to some situations is also laughable.

The problem is most HBDers that are willing to talk about it online are the type of folks who understand that HBD is somewhat real, and then they see absolutely everything through that lens. The people here on the Motte are actually quite reasonable about HBD in my view.

But in the wastes of the internet outside our walled garden... well, when you have a hammer as powerful and covered up as HBD, what isn't a nail?

I've rarely seen HBD ever deployed, even on the internet, in any context except for as a defense against unhinged allegations of racism.

Even here, my experience has been much closer to that of @TheDag's.

One of the things that makes you feel that way is that we are often talking about racial differences in outcomes within America, to which HBD is very much "the hammer" because most left wing talking points regarding America are, in fact, nails. And because the left dominates the American media environment, their is a consistent supply of new "nails" being floated out to discuss.

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This is a laughable assertion.

No it is not.

Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

...is not an extreme or hyperbolic take, it's the median.

Charitably you are engaging in a very blatant Motte and Baily where you try to play the "group differences in outcome" card right up until someone asks how exactly you determine group membership for the purposes of determining group differences. IE Is a dark-skinned man who votes Republican "black" or is he, as Joe Biden and the Hosts of the View assert, "white". (Edit: See Slate and the LA Times' treatment of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder)

Less charitably you are simply lying.

  • -11

note: I think it'd be more productive for everyone if you directly responded to the (different) arguments we're all making, instead of picking on one individual example of hypocrisy.

Take the rare very smart black kid in 1800. He's a slave. His masters notice he's clever, and give him more complex work. He remains a slave.

Take the kid post-reconstruction. He's the son of a farm laborer. He grows up, goes to the city, and gets a job at a factory. He's paid less than similar white workers for explicitly segregationist reasons. He's still given more responsibility than his black coworkers though, maybe even more pay.

The kid grows up in 1980. He's sent to a bad public school. Fights break out every day, teachers don't understand half of the material in most classes. But the teachers still read from the book, the textbooks are still available, so the smart kid picks up a lot. And he does well on the standardized tests. He goes to a good college, helped in part by affirmative action, and gets a job as an engineer. Or maybe he finds school stifling, does well on some classes but neglects others, and gets sucked into a culture of drugs and violence, becomes a sad statistic. Both happened.

The kid grows up in 2020. Bad public school, but with 2x the funding. The kid spends half his time on his phone, but still does well on tests. Test scores -> decent college -> decent job. Or, he finds school stifling. But now, he's naturally attracted to online communities with people of similar intelligence, and imitates their interests. With this, he makes connections, learns the tacit parts of upper-middle-class culture, and builds a desire for the kinds of occupations successful people pursue. Via one of those, he gets a good job.

This is why culture and environment 'don't matter'. They do matter, in the absolute. But, first in cities, then via technology, modern life exposes people to every other type of person, allowing people to effectively sort themselves by ability. And this heavily smooths out any differences in outcomes attributable to differences in culture or circumstances. Some still remains, of course, but much less than in the past. Innate ability, by contrast, is as strong a differentiator as ever.

A question: Jewish kids, Black kids, Hispanic kids, White kids, and Asian kids all have access to computers and the internet. They all post on all the major platforms. Why are so many of the best writers or smartest anonymous posters, even via the constrained medium of twitter, jews? Why are so few black?

You might explain this via lack of access, or systemic racism. But the second question is: Why, at least to my eyes, are the racial gaps in ability as large, and often larger, (both in terms of jew/white, asian/white, and white/black) in the realm of self-driven achievement on anonymous internet platforms than they are in educational institutions or real-world occupations?

Just to be clear, you're asking me to imagine a lineage of people who were smart and capable but held back by cultural and policy issues like slavery and segregation...

...and the conclusion that you expect me to draw from this example is that cultural and policy issues don't matter?

I think you're going to need to unpack your reasoning for me.

...and the conclusion that you expect me to draw from this example is that cultural and policy issues don't matter?

The idea is that the extent to which culture and policy has held them back, in the specific areas of education and the economy, has been significantly reduced over time, by a combination of intentional targeted policy and the general free association and exchange of ideas in the modern world. It makes sense that genes would eventually start taking precedent over culture if massive pressures exist on the part of the gap caused by culture.

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Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

It is probably true. Schools are like 2% of environment, probably less. In fact, some parents have taken to faking moving into "worse" schools to improve their kids chance of getting into top tier colleges. Its not extreme because its bland and true. If you took all the kids from Brooklyn Tech and put them in the worst school in NYC, and put all those kids into Tech, Tech would immediately become a "bottom 10" school and this rando bad school would become a "top 10" school. Environmental effects need to be much stronger than teachers to significantly affect outcomes.

Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,

This perspective is both buttressed by a tremendous amount of evidence and yet considered impermissible in polite debate. And teachers and schools pay the price, as they are asked to control outcomes they have limited influence on. The abstract of this paper sums up the reality.

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains.

[…]

Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people.

I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.

Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.

…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:

I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.
If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?

etc. etc.

You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.

Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?

The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.

What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".

If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".

How did you ask the question

"If DeBoer is correct that education doesn't matter, how does he explain the fact that scores were going up before the change in policy?"

after being quoted, 24 hours earlier, DeBoer saying

"Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past"?

You're consistently misinterpreting the statements of people who disagree with you in ways convenient for your arguments, that make their positions seem much more extreme than they really are. Please just ... try to notice when you make a mistake and correct for it in the future?

What are your responses to Freddie DeBoer's arguments on this topic? Education Doesn't Work 2.0, a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps and Genes Believe in You are blogposts, and the book is The Cult Of Smart (pirated). These aren't about race, which he sort of ignores, but make strong arguments about individual differences in ability, and ones that readily generalize to race.

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Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?

So is your excuse simply that this shit is your nature and no amount of educational efforts can fix you? A bit inconsistent given the argument you advance, innit?

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In my follow-up comments to the comment you linked, I made it abundantly clear that when I said "it's all genetics" I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect, and I do not, in fact, believe that culture plays zero role in educational outcomes. My hyperbolic assertion that "it's all genetics" was intended to contrast with the attitudes of certain education researchers who do, apparently, believe that genetics plays no role in educational outcomes, and that educational outcomes are entirely determined by culture, upbringing and school quality.

I've made my actual position on this matter abundantly clear to you, and I think it's rather tiresome and dishonest of you to quote this off-the-cuff comment out of context. You seem convinced that this off-the-cuff comment I made in passing was some sort of "mask-off" moment for me, and all the follow-up comments I made expressing my actual position in more nuanced detail were simply lies. I don't know how you arrived at this position and I don't appreciate being misrepresented.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would knock it off and stop involving me every time you want to make a point about how evil and wretched HBDers are. And don't tell a story that you're only pinging me because I'm "one of the Motte's most prominent HBD proponents" or whatever: I barely discuss the issue at all, and the comment you linked is from seven months ago. In the interim, out of the dozens if not hundreds of comments I've posted here, I've discussed HBD in any capacity a grand total of three times, in one case because you were pinging me about it, in another case to explicitly refute the claim that HBD is the cause of disproportionate homicide rates between ethnic groups in the US. It's not a topic I know much about, claim any expertise in or discuss with any great frequency.

If you're so convinced that rabid, unqualified endorsement of HBD is the median position on this site, it shouldn't be remotely hard for you to find a better example to illustrate your point than me, a guy who has never claimed any expertise in the topic, doesn't find it particularly interesting and barely talks about it. Given that you know all of the foregoing, it's really obnoxious of you to repeatedly bring me up any time you're trying to score points in a HBD debate, especially now that you've been explicitly requested not to do so in future.

My read of that interaction is that you were trying to use arguments as soldiers and then got pissy when they got slaughtered to a man because you'd marched them into a killbox.

This is far from the first time that you and I have done this particular song and dance. You'll make some blanket claim about X-outcome is entirely explained by genetics and then someone usually myself or @FCfromSSC will point out that all the genetics in the world won't teach kids to read, or turn a flabby sack of dough into NFL athlete if they don't eat well and go to the gym, at which point you accuse your interlocutor of misunderstanding what you plainly said and/or quoting you out context. Rinse, wash, repeat, every 3 - 4 months.

Simply put, if you don't want to be used as an example of HBDer's poor behavior, stop providing such good examples.

Edit: See also my replies to @DaseindustriesLtd, and @hydroacetylene.

  • -12

This is far from the first time that you and I have done this particular song and dance. You'll make some blanket claim about X-outcome is entirely explained by genetics and then someone usually myself or @FCfromSSC will point out that all the genetics in the world won't teach kids to read, or turn a flabby sack of dough into NFL athlete if they don't eat well and go to the gym, at which point you accuse your interlocutor of misunderstanding what you plainly said and/or quoting you out context. Rinse, wash, repeat, every 3 - 4 months.

For what it's worth, pretty much everything in this paragraph is unambiguously false. I recall exactly one instance in which I expressed a HBD opinion, you disagreed with me, and I replied to you attempting to clarify my opinion (the comment to which you linked, above). I cannot find any examples in the intervening seven months in which I expressed a HBD opinion and you or @FCfromSSC replied to contradict me. This is the second instance in the last seven months in which you tagged me in a comment to use me as an example of how monstrous and wretched HBDers are, without me actually saying anything new to prompt you doing so. I went through my comment replies from the last year and found five examples of @FCfromSSC replying to a comment I'd posted, none of which bore even the most tangential relationship to HBD:

I went through my notifications on Reddit as far back as April 2021 and couldn't find a single occasion on which @FCfromSSC replied to a comment of mine in the old subreddit. These are the only times you replied to comments of mine in the old place, and neither of them have anything to do with HBD:

I'm open to correction, you're welcome to link me to a comment of mine in which I expressed a HBD opinion and you or @FCfromSSC replied to contradict me, but after digging through two-and-a-half years of comments on two websites, I can't find anything remotely resembling the sequence of events you've described, which supposedly recurs every 3-4 months. At this point I think it's only reasonable to assume that either you've mistaken me for someone else (easy mistake to make, nobody's perfect), or are simply lying.

Either substantiate your ridiculous assertions or piss off and leave me alone.

Get lost and stop trying to involve me every time you have a debate about HBD. I'm not particularly interested in discussing this topic with anyone, and certainly not with someone as obnoxious and inconsiderate as you.

stop providing such good examples.

The last time I provided you with a good example of the poor behaviour of HBDers was seven months ago. If I had provided a more recent example, you would have used it. I haven't, which is why you have to keep bringing up a comment I posted seven months ago. You have this bizarre fantasy that I'm constantly posting about HBD, but you have to trawl through seven months of comments I've posted to find one that illustrates how awful you think I am. And you know what? I think it's sad, I really do.

How long, exactly, do I have to not post a HBD-related comment before you will stop pinging me every time you have a debate on this topic? A year? Two years? Three? You're demanding that I "stop" providing you with good examples of HBDers being obnoxious, but please tell me: what the fuck does "stop" mean to you if not "hasn't done it for seven months"?

If you want to think I'm a horrible wretched human being, fine, go nuts. Just extend a tiny modicum of common courtesy and stop pinging me every time you have a debate about HBD with someone. It's really not hard and I don't see why you have to be so gratuitously obnoxious just because I don't share your opinion.

will point out that all the genetics in the world won't teach kids to read, or turn a flabby sack of dough into NFL athlete if they don't eat well and go to the gym

So where are the white cornerbacks?

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it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

No Hlynka, as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.*

The reason that differences in outcome are minimal for a smart kid in a private versus public school is that they both surpass a minimum threshold of quality such that any further difference is down to genetics. Take the same kid and chuck them in the kind of rundown, underfunded schools you might find in the worst parts of India and you're going to see them suffer. If you wish to attribute all the disparities of the world to either genetics or "culture", then that's the latter because it has fuck all to do with genes.

You're so comfortable in your Western skin that you don't notice how almost everything around you is far better than it historically was, say a century ago, and is still better than the majority of this planet.

*Another example of your exasperating tendency to forget anything inconvenient to your narrative. Even my usual desire to adhere to the presumption of good faith and charity here on The Motte has long worn thin for you.

as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.

And yet HBDers keep arguing the contrary.

To be blunt, you either endorse the linked comment or you don't. Which is it?

To be blunt, you either endorse the linked comment or you don't. Which is it?

Did you stop beating your wife? Yes or no answers only 🙏

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