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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26202 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I'm not really seeing the argument here.

Are you baiting to have it be cited here, to make BAP look better? Okay, you win. That «recent tweet» is half a year old. The actual argument he makes is this one.

Why are there meritocratic admissions in the first place? How did it happen? The reason the universities were opened up in the 1950's was specifically because cases like Feynman's. It was felt unjust that he shouldn't have had entry into school of choice, etc., because of quotas (at that time capping Jewish students) and Columbia eg felt dumb for having rejected him. The feeling was that schools should be opened up to students like him, WITH THE EXPECTATION that they would do great things with their degrees. Maybe not be Feynman or make great discoveries, but at least use that opportunity to try to, or to have notable achievements in other fields, or at least to become very rich, and so on.

The concrete reward for this opening up of universities was eventually expected to be ....money. Whether legacies, or students allowed in on purely merit, alumni who were or became rich donated to these skrewls. For those who became famous or notable in their fields wihout being rich, this also added to skrewl's reputation, bringing in more money or grants or so on by other avenues. In other words, the universities got or maintained something concrete from opened-up admissions, and the easiest measure of that was donations.

Azn alumni and especially Han don't donate. Thus although they were let in initially in high % because of grades, test scores, etc., it was eventually noted they don't donate. But even worse, they become notable or famous at rates far less than others.

Whereas the expectation was ideally a Feynman, what you got in the Han case was use of the degree to become an ophthalmologist in upstate NY etc.; obviously not always; just as in other groups not all came out Feynmans. But the tendency, pattern became very clear. In the vast majority of cases the degree was used for nothing but a comfortable middle class life and the feeling of status. No fame, no reputation coming to the skrewl, and no donations.

Thus you had a population that presented very good scores, grades, conscientiousness, etc., and so if allowed in purely on "merit" would make up a huge % of undergraduate class; but out the other end, they didn't deliver on the whole, and especially...didn't deliver money. [an aside about objective merits of science done by Chinese people. I think the issue of lower effective creativity and irrational lust for busywork are absolutely clear. But, arguably, we are in the regime where Galaxy Brained Ideas both comprehensible for humans and useful in practice have all been had, so East Asian mindset is in fact more valuable].

To this can be added the behavior of Han students in classrooms. It was noticed they are taciturn and in general add nothing to class discussion. In campus social and intellectual life, they seemed absent or kept to themselves etc.; again you may have personal anecdotes to the contrary, I do also. I had very good Chynese students who I was glad to talk to, who were brilliant and got all A's (deserved in their case) and I have Chynese frends, etc. etc.; it matters nothing. As a group universities noticed these very clear patterns in the majority if not vast majority of cases. [an aside about cheating]

…It was, again, a population that, if you applied simple "merit" in admissions, would end up forming maybe even a majority of the student body, but that produced nothing that was expected from holders of these degrees, most notably no donations, but also, no fame, no risk, no contributions, and during skrewltime, another lifeless parody of "study," memorization, cheating, sullen apartness.

For all these reasons universities felt justified in discriminating against azn and Chynese students for admissions--and they were probably justified. But once they started to do this, libtarded professors and admissions committees felt it was necessary to discard almost entirely whatever was left of meritocracy. "This Johnny Cheung has very good test scores and grades and I'm discriminating against him...it's only fair that I don't pay attention to the fact that Johnny Walters also has good test scores and grades. Merit doesn't matter anymore, we had to get rid of it, so...let me invite this nice POC out of feelings of social justice, etc." Thus in a move similar to what justified grade inflation, merit-based admissions was also mostly discarded. I don't know the status of things at moment exactly now after Floyd, but even by 2015 or mid second term Obama's racial demagoguery and BLM craze, it was already starting to be very bad. Even by early 2010's maybe it was accelerating. Obviously there are still very good students who can get in, but it's much harder now.

For what it's worth, I (as a person inclined to be somewhat positive with regard to East Asians and utterly pessimistic about any political proposal of BAPsphere) think this is his strongest thesis in ages. He actually enumerates plausible (and I think true, but of course one can protest and demand statistics to back up the inflammatory etc. etc.) factual premises and delivers his conclusion, he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish, and he mostly speaks like a real person with a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy, rather than a flamboyant auto-caricature.

And of course you would not see «civilization-ending» outcomes. China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired. It is not absurd that the Irish have destroyed a certain America (as @2rafa often argues) – but now that the Irish are Americans too, they get to weigh in whether it was a good or a bad thing, and they're not going anywhere anyway.

You see, culture is fragile, human practices are fragile, valuable conventions are easy to ruin and hard to restore. Consider the following bizarre analogy. Add a random homeless person off the street to your household, have him eat and sleep together with your family (assuming you have one) – it will probably be ruined (some idealistic people have tested this approach). Add a random well-behaved stranger – nothing outwardly catastrophic will happen, you might become friends even! And splitting domestic chores, and paying rent – think of it! But your family will change, will become something pretty nonsensical. Maybe Bryan Caplan would argue that your household income will increase, that your children will be more likely to prosper, thus it is moral and proper to make this choice? The philosophy that BAP subscribes to detests and rejects this sort of crude economic reasoning, deems it subhumanly utilitarian. I suppose a real American must call BAP a sentimental fool then.

There is an argument to be made that many of the scientific achievements and breakthroughs were low-hanging fruits that were inevitable to be discovered. It's just that the Enlightenment took place in Europe and thus most of the low-hanging fruits of scientific knowledge were thus discovered and produced in western nations. (Not to disparage the works of these great scientists and inventors, but if someone is making the argument of why another population is not producing great works, well there is a reason for how these great works were created, and as @you-get-an-upvote make's in a comment down stream "here aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century." Scott Alexander made a similar argument last year on why there aren't any more Einsteins which I largely agree with his reasoning here.

Whatever your thoughts on modern technology may be, many tech companies that provide entertainment or convenience to us today were founded or cofounded by Asian Americans. YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Yahoo, Snapchat, Nvidia and many more exist thanks to the vision and hardwork of Asians. Maybe these tech companies are the low-hanging groups of the Internet era, but that just illustrates my point further.

I will acknowledge BAP's argument is specifically mostly about Chinese people and not Asians in general... but I doubt that's a distinction that matters in enrollment into Universities. Racial breakdown in admissions only goes to the level of Asian, after all, and many Chinese surnames are the same/similar to surnames from other countries near China. The only way to know for sure is if they are a foreign student enrolling directly from China, but foreign students are always a small percentage of people admitted and foreign students are usually not eligible for many scholarships/financial aid, meaning they pay the full tuition. So the universities are making money off foreign Asian students through tuition. Regarding donations "in 2022, more than 80 percent of the donations came from 1 percent of the donors", so it really shouldn't matter whether the other 99% of people that attended these universities donated. Besides, given the clear anti-Asian bias against admissions in a university such as Harvard, I imagine that would have an impact on an Asian's decision to donate to Harvard.

Also, I don't buy his argument that discrimination against Asian Americans leads to dropping the idea of meritocracy. If I'm straw-manning his argument here then please let me know, but he's essentially saying

  1. For many/various reasons, Universities discriminate against Asians.
  2. Because Universities are already discriminating against, Asians, they got rid of meritocracy for whites because they are already discriminating against Asians.

There are better explanations that better explain the affirmative actions of Universities, such as social justice, equity, cultural Marxism, etc and I don't think the fact that Asians were being discriminated against played a big role in the creation and propagation of these ideas. At best a minor justiciation but I seriously doubt anyone in university admission made a train of thought the way BAP did for his hypothetical University admissison officer.

I can't believe it. So much of BAP's argument is built on shoddy premises, the only one that I can't rebut or hasn't been addressed by someone else already is his observations regarding the behavior of Asians when he was going to school since those are his observations and I didn't attend the school he went to, so maybe what he observed is true, but that's just a minor piece of the overall argument.

I think the lack of geniuses comes more from systemic issues in education. Asians aren’t producing geniuses, but neither are whites or Hispanics or blacks. But our system is not only not set up to produce geniuses, but to stymie the development of any who happen to come along.

From age 5 to finishing your BS degree, success is based on your ability to sit still, follow directions, and produce reams of worksheets and essays on topics you don’t care about. Any actual genius would be bored stupid. The removal of gifted classes means that you move at the speed of the stupid kids in the class who don’t understand anything or care that much. The system is poorly suited to teaching independent thought, as it needs to teach to the tests and hit all of the objectives. Having open ended discussions doesn’t produce measurable results so teach kids to regurgitate the correct answers.

The grant and publication system also locks in mediocrity. If you need to get grants to have a job, and you need to show that your experiment will work to get the grant, you pretty much have to stick close to what is known. Adding the publish or perish mandate makes it more difficult to peruse big projects because they take too long. So where could these breakthrough ideas come from? Nobody has the money an$ freedom to think big.

good find. the extended thread was omitted

  • China itself is not ending, and the Chinese clearly contribute a lot to American prosperity. It's only the particular forms of that civilization that can be disrupted by immigration; this is both known and desired.

I never bought into this trope that east asians lack creativity to counterbalance high Iq. I don't see it. for the math paper I'm working on, most of my sources are from Chinese authors.

Do they not donates as much? I dunno. The evidence suggests Asians are big donors:

  1. Hong Kong Family Stumps Up With Harvard's Largest-Ever Donation '

Hong Kong Family Stumps Up With Harvard's Largest-Ever Donation. The family of Gerald Chan, a Harvard-educated investor, is donating $350 million to the university's School of Public Health, the largest gift in the 378-year history of the U.S.'s richest university.

  1. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20161214160658320

A US$ 115 million donation to California Institute of Technology or Caltech in the United States from Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao and his wife Chrissy Luo tops a generous year for donations to international education and research institutions from Chinese philanthropists.

  1. https://news.mit.edu/2015/samuel-tak-lee-gift-real-estate-entrepreneurship-lab-0108

MIT has received one of the largest gifts in its history, from alumnus Samuel Tak Lee ’62, SM ’64, to establish a real estate entrepreneurship lab that will promote social responsibility among entrepreneurs and academics in the real estate profession worldwide, with a particular focus on China.

  1. Controversial Chinese Tech Billionaire Gives Millions to Elite American Universities https://freebeacon.com/national-security/controversial-chinese-tech-billionaire-gives-millions-to-elite-american-universities/

Ma Huateng, the founder of Tencent, has given at least $5 million to Princeton through his personal charity since 2017 and $5 million since 2018 to MIT, according to previously unreported Department of Education records. Ma also serves on the advisory boards for the Yale Center Beijing and the Cornell China Center, where he and other Chinese business leaders advise the schools on developing partnerships in China. Tencent's charity contributed $900,000 to Columbia University in 2017, according to the Department of Education records.

Same for foreign gifts: Interests based in China contributed over $168 million to 46 American colleges and universities during a six-month period in 2021 https://www.thecollegefix.com/nearly-170m-in-contracts-and-gifts-flowed-to-u-s-universities-from-china-in-2021/

he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish

Maybe if you're used to his non-standard spellings and such. He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me (albeit a very clever one, though not as much so as he seems to think).

Misspellings are allegedly a mechanism to invoke algorithmic suppression and not have your content revealed to the general audience. I do ignore them.

He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me

People generally do not become any smarter with age so that is okay. If one can make an argument at all, it can be made at 15 and with a teenager's mentality. Except when an argument depends on accumulated experience, like his time in academia.

Except when an argument depends on accumulated experience, like his time in academia.

You say this like arguments that depend on accumulated experience are some weird niche issue that barely ever comes up in real life.

If I were to negatively compare someone to a 15-year-old, what I would typically mean is along the lines of "You're making the same mistakes that most of us grew out of when we were early teenagers, but somehow you haven't learned from them yet". For example, talking like a sesquipedalian thesaurus and thinking it makes you sound intelligent (it does - but not to intelligent people), failing to clearly distinguish between the real world and one's own feelings, being unable to model other people as independent agents with their own desires and fears, and so on.

So, which of those defects are present in his thread?

That’s a lot of words to basically say “merit wasn’t being properly measured and when properly measured for it Asians don’t measure up.”

Now whether it is true is a different matter.

I think the confusion is between merit vs potential. Merit would seem to measure how qualified someone is based on the usual objective things like GPA. potential is what happens after graduating.

That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.

No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.

BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».

His whole point seemed to be “sure they come out and do perfectly respectable nice upper middle class jobs but they arent doing something great or amazing”

He is saying greatness is the goal which means merit is how great could you become

This would be fine if he had anything to back it up, but his only "evidence" is complaining that there are no Chinese Feynmans... but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century.

Incidentally, by my count 7 of the last 50 Nobel laureates in Physics and 3 out of 16 Fields Medal winners were Asian.

It's worth noting that this is roughly inline with Asian representation at Harvard today (14%) and most Nobel laureates were born before 1950 -- research labs weren't really accessible to a billion Asians then. So not sure how meaningful those numbers are in either direction.

(Side note: interestingly, Fields Medal winners cannot be older than 40).

but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century

This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.

  1. I noted that there is the question of whether he is right.

  2. I guess the question so what is the right denominator for determine over or under representation.

"Skrewl"??

BAP insists on talking like Borat swallowed a 1932 encyclopedia Britanica for some reason.

School, it’s one of those babyspeak things.

I think Rush Limbaugh coined that one.

The Limbaugh bit was specifically "Screw-ells" based on the claim that big-name schools were screwing over their customers/students by encouraging them to take on increasingly unrecoverable amounts of debt. He also coined the "you'll own nothing, and you'll like it" line years before software as a service became a thing.

He also coined the "you'll own nothing, and you'll like it" line years before software as a service became a thing.

Do you have a link? "You'll own nothing and be happy" is from a 2016 WEF video based on an essay by Danish politician Ida Auken (which went viral in part because it did not make clear that the future depicted wasn't nessesarily supposed to be desirable). If Limbaugh had a similar line before, that implies that either the video creator got it from him (directly or indirectly) or that they coincidentally used a very similar phrase.

Do you have a link?

Not on hand, but I'll see if I can dig something up as I distinctly remember it being a thing within the right wing/tea party blog/talk-radio sphere during the whole "Life of Julia" kerfuffle circa 2012 or so.

That said, and not knowing otherwise, I strongly suspect Auken's statement is a case of either coincidental infection or convergent evolution. IE different people describing the same thing similarly.

I'm sure I remember a sentiment like it in one of the utopian satires I read as a teen. Erewhon maybe? Also it's a natural extension of communist expectations.

a sane, if objectionable, reason to dislike test-based meritocracy

It's a sane reason to dislike the Anglo-American tradition of clinging to rheumatoid institutions that turn A into B when what you need is something that turns A into C. But look, they say, enough of the C's you get are B's as well, or there's a second institution that turns B into C as a side effect, or B and C are interchangeable in current conditions.

But then something changes, and everyone starts to cry about how inefficient the institution is, we need 10 of C, but it's producing only 8 of them, we need to fix it to make more B. Fuck no, you don't need it to make B, you need a different institution to make C!

It's not a revelation that the Ivies dislike Asian students because they are not donating as alumni. But you know what they should do? Use projected total donations as the admission criterion. Hire some actuaries and build a table that estimates how much every applicant is likely to earn and how big of a share of their total lifetime earning they are likely to donate to Harvard and admit the most profitable applicants. Oh, a future high earner claims to be unfairly judged to be stingy? No problem, they can sign a contract with the university and get a donation-sized price of admission.

What about the prestige of the institution? Well, come up with a figure of how much money you are willing to sacrifice and make your admission essays about the ways in which the student will glorify the existence of your university.

Oh no, such primitive, mercantile approach is ruining the vibes-based reputation of your institution? Tough fucking luck. Oh no, other colleges that promise the best education for the least amount of money are stealing the brightest applicants? Mission fucking accomplished.

But you know what they should do? Use projected total donations as the admission criterion. Hire some actuaries and build a table that estimates how much every applicant is likely to earn and how big of a share of their total lifetime earning they are likely to donate to Harvard and admit the most profitable applicants. Oh, a future high earner claims to be unfairly judged to be stingy? No problem, they can sign a contract with the university and get a donation-sized price of admission.

That would be telling; it would be common knowledge that they were just a self-licking ice-cream cone at that point and they would lose their prestige. They have to pretend to be something else.

I feel like this complaint is aptly addressed in the closing paragraph.

There are a lot of (I assume) illegal contract types that could make this easier. I wonder how admissions would change if Harvard demanded 5% of lifetime earnings of all its students, maybe with a billionaire heir waiver in exchange for a one-time $50m donation.

I’m not sure if he’s talking about native born American Chinese or simply students from China here. If he’s talking about Chinese students coming to American universities, it’s hardly surprising that they don’t donate — they aren’t Americans and have no reason to invest in American universities. They’re coming to get the name-brand diploma and afterward a good number of them go back to China. If American kids were graduating from Mexican universities, it’s unlikely they’d donate to their schools either.

I don't think there exists the distinction that you think exists.

What distinction? Americans with Chinese ancestry vs. people from the PRC?

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