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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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If I said that affirmative action isn't supposed to be opposed to any of that, it's supposed to counteract known disequities of opportunity in order to end at true meritocracy, like adjusting to the left because you know the sites on your gun are off a bit to the right, would you believe me?

I do believe that people sincerely believe that. My general impression having talked with some of these people, is that they are unconcerned with the problem swinging in reverse by overdoing a correction. I also feel that a correction of such things should take a single generation, but affirmative action has been going on longer than a single generation, and there is no suggested end to it.

If someone else said that all of our laws are already equal and all our bigotry is already ended, so all you have to do to get true meritocracy is get out of the way and let the market work, the invisible hand will take care of it all, would you believe them?

I think fewer people believe both parts of this at the same time. Our current set of laws is not just "letting the market work". There are some people that think we should just let the market work (I count myself among them). And there is another group of people that believe recent laws have been sufficient (though many of them actually seem to think laws in the 1990s were at the perfect spot).

Unfortunately, it's all part of the culture war now, and which one of us someone believes typically has more to do with which side they're on than a careful consideration of all the mountains of evidence. Which gets back to the basic problem of epistemic learned helplessness, and trusting your own experts and ingroup testimonials.

Yeah, I agree its mostly explained by conflict theory and fighting over resources rather then by mistaken beliefs on the part of one group or another.

I still think I'm confused about where HlynkaCG falls on all of this. He sometimes says things that make me think he disagree with me strongly, and other times says things that makes me think we actually agree.

I think Hlynka is hard to interpret because he's actually not just backing one of the sides, he has an idiosyncratic personal position on the matter that's complex and detailed and includes many points that would piss off either side.

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