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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

The options for anti-woke billionaires are limited. Major tech companies are worth hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. A billion dollars does not get you far. Trump and Peter Thiel have had no successes at changing anything. Trump appointed Thiel as an advisor and then a year later decided he had no use for him . Politics is still dominated still by lawyers and ivy elites, not CEOs. Billionaires like Elon Musk can help direct sentiment against wokeness but this not the same as policy.

Here is what I would do if I had a billion: create a competitor to Ivy League, but the criteria for admission is a highly g-loaded test correlated with IQ, and there would be no actual school. Just the test. Because the reason why these schools are prestigious is not for their curriculum or learning, but for the superior intellect of their students. Harvard grads are implicitly understood to be smarter than average, because they got in, not because Harvard's curriculum is superior.

Isn’t this basically cal tech? Or is your Ivy League competitor also teaching social sciences?

the SATs have a low ceiling due to recent revisions, and also only test two subsets of intelligence, those being verbal and quantitative

To test for diligence, graduation from the school should require 1 month of extremely difficult and often boring work, 7 days a week 15 hours a day often with students working in teams. To test for emotional resilience, while working students will be insulted and yelled at by the instructors. To get students to go through this, pay the first few graduates $50,000. Eventually, the quality of the past graduates will make graduating from the program a good enough signal so that you don't have to pay students.

Tired: Feminists accidentally reinventing traditional marriage.

Wired: Greytribe galaxy-brain rationalists accidentally reinventing Army Boot Camp.

That’s nice. But what policies do you put in place to ensure no skin-color discrimination?

Fighting “wokeness” is not the same thing as fighting “racism.” This is true even if you believe one is a strict subset of the other. Donald Trump is not an anti racist. His opposition to woke politics is downstream of tribal alignment and rational self-interest. I don’t know how Thiel fits into this either.

You can't "ensure" an absence of skin-color discrimination any more than a 7-Eleven can ensure that their minimum-wage, bored clerks never get lazy and sell a beer to an underage purchaser. All you can do is make clear that you don't like it, and refuse to deal with people who engage in it.

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