People are Different

Blank slatism is holding people back

Housekeeping: We launched a new podcast with Samo Burja this week.

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One of my most controversial tweets was my tweet on meritocracy. I then wrote a post about it which confirmed my suspicion that people really don’t like the idea of meritocracy.

I spent some time trying to figure out why meritocracy as a concept is so controversial. To start with, you can't concede that some people are inherently smarter and more capable than other people. Then, you can't concede that any of these people have agency, the ability to make their own choices, and benefit from the good choices. Then, you can't say the disparities between people can’t be mostly or solely explained by systemic discrimination or unfairness. And you certainly can’t say life is unfair or inequality is good.

And that’s when it hit me. Here's why Sam Harris vs Ezra Klein about Charles Murray matters, and why the piece about Eugenicons matters, and why the working 40 hours twitter meme matters, and why all these other controversies matter, and why everything sweeping through all the institutions matters:

The *core* presumption of modern day politics is what Steven Pinker calls the "Blank Slate hypothesis", and what others have called "human neurological uniformity". The presumption that people are the same with respect to their potential and their ability to achieve outcomes. “Talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not”, the saying goes.

If you believe that presumption, then any differential outcomes are due to oppression, socially constructed discrimination and bigotry.

And that therefore we must continuously struggle to reform society until we get to the equal outcomes that nature wants us to have.

And that anyone who argues otherwise is *actually* racist/sexist/bigoted/etc. by denying the reality that we should all be achieving the same outcomes and that our failure to do so is due to discriminatory social systems. Marxism was of course the class lens on this, and wokism is the identity lens.

What happens if that core presumption falls? Then the entire edifice falls. Virtually every other assumption and conclusion and policy and program built on top of that core presumption needs to be rethought and at the very least dramatically reimagined if not outright rejected.

This is why any suggestion that there are differences between people have to be rejected before they can spread and be used to give aid and comfort to the political enemies. Regardless of the nature of such suggestions (genetic, cultural, individual choices), regardless of the politics of the person making the suggestions, and regardless of their truth or falsehood. Which is why people hate the concept of 10x engineers, hustle culture, meritocracy, the notion of being “self-made”, and any other concept that indicates that disparities are explained by biology or culture or anything that isn’t prejudice or luck.

The idea that talent isn’t evenly distributed — whether due to nature or nurture — is *the* thing that brings the whole edifice of modern liberalism down.

And that edifice is quite big. Starting with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, there have been thousands of new laws and regulations, hundreds of new government programs, revolutions in how companies run recruiting and HR, affirmative action applied explicitly and implicitly in many fields, and literally trillions of dollars deployed against these problems according to the proposals of the leading experts from 1964 through to today… all meant to mitigate disparities and equalize outcomes on the group level. And what happened? 

It didn’t work. It may have even made things worse.    

And so the same kind of people who designed all of those programs want to design all the new ones. Instead of taking responsibility for their failures, they say that the reason we don’t have more success is we didn’t sufficiently invest in their policy proposals. 

So, what is the accounting for all of that work, all of those programs, all of those efforts, and all of that money deployed 1964-2019? What can we learn from that experience that will guide us to make the right policy and societal and governmental decisions today? At the very least, there should be a performance review.

Of course, talent isn’t evenly distributed. Is talent in Facebook the same as in Walmart? Is talent in the U.S.A the same as talent in Indonesia? Is talent in San Francisco the same as Nebraska? Talent is extremely unevenly distributed in individuals, so of course it is in groups and regions and countries as well.

Interestingly, the right is confused on this issue as well. The left is deluded in thinking that any differences in outcomes is due to discrimination. The right is deluded in thinking that everyone has the same potential and it’s just a matter of effort or “personal responsibility”. While personally responsibility is a critical input, genes and culture matter too. Ignoring those puts onerous burden on people who don’t make it. Freddie Deboer and Katherine Harden are leftists who’ve written books on this from the left perspective.

As a result, republicans also have unrealistic policy prescriptions, most of which make the problems worse. Just as one example, "everyone should go to college". Or another example, "restrict free trade".

How do you solve for uplifting poor communities? It's not a solvable problem as framed. To have the discussion, you have to open Pandora's box on all the untouchable questions:

• Are there differences between people (nature, nurture, etc) ?

• Is there personal agency? What consequence, good or bad, should there be for individual decisions?

• What "social problems" can actually be "solved"?

• What do we do with a social program aimed to reduce inequality that's run for 30 years and the problem it was supposed to solve still exists?

• What social norms set by the elite are actually good for the masses?

These aren’t merely intellectual questions. The Gates Foundation itself and many other experts now concede that virtually every attempt to change education environments to equalize education outcomes by group have failed over the last 50 years. If you are an anti-Blank Slater, this isn't surprising. If you are a pro-Blank Slater, this is just more evidence that American society and systems are still massively discriminatory. So having a view on these topics is critical if you want to prevent schools from dropping algebra.

But by not asking these questions we keep making the same mistakes. Instead of celebrating the hard work Asians did to get a great SAT, we’re outlawing the SAT and outlawing other testing measures. If there were measures for grit, we’d outlaw those too. The idea that the only reason we don't have absolute equality is because our society hasn't been reformed enough, the logic goes.

This SF school board saga the past few years is a perfect example of this. They're killing the best school in SF and nobody can talk about the actual arguments. The egalitarians demand everyone conform to the view that all kids are equally endowed and that any differences in outcome are due to prejudice. And so any claim of aptitude, or cultural practices, or individual behavior, that leads to better outcome is ruled out of bounds. And so you have to both eliminate the entrance criteria for a school like that, and then eliminate the advanced parts of the curriculum. And turn it into yet another least common denominator school in the name "justice". Any position of "people are different" is de facto racist. The parents arguing against this can't make the actual arguments! Because we think it’s a result of prejudice, we focus on the top students back instead of putting the onus on bottom students to adopt the agency and cultural practices that would help them advance, even if they’d never equalize the disparity completely.

We have to concede that something other than prejudice explains disparities between people, but then we also have to cede that certain inequalities are desirable. As we covered previously:

"Everything you love is a result of inequality. When you seek a mate, do you want someone who is exactly average, just like everyone else, or do you want someone who is special? When you have kids, do you want them to have the same life outcomes as every other kid in the world, or do you want them to do better than that? When you have a job, do you aspire to turn in absolutely average performance, to be careful not to ever exceed the performance of your peers? Or do you aspire to do the best you can, even if that means you do better than your peers? Is it moral to want the best surgeon, the best teachers, or the best spouse to raise a family with? "What kind of society would you have to have where everyone gets the same quality spouse, same outcome with kids, delivers the same level of performance at work and no more?"

When Asian people outscore everyone else on the SAT, we immediately say the test is racist. We don’t ask, what can our cultures learn from asian culture to get the same results?

In a more sane world, this would be a highly fascinating topic regarding the outer edges of human capability and accomplishment, and worth seeing what we can learn about what leads to extreme achievement and how we can set up more people to achieve at those levels.

While there is certainly an ability for people to improve themselves, to quote Marc Andreessen in his great podcast with Richard Hanania: “I think there’s a real argument, and this is the most uncomfortable form of argument, that there are just a certain number of super-elite people. There are a certain number of people who are going to be really good scientists and it’s just not going to be that many. It’s some magical combination of intelligence, honesty, industriousness, integrity, the ability to recruit and build a team.  And there’s only a certain number of people who can do that. And then of course, the implication of that from a societal standpoint is that we’ve really got to know who those people are and we’ve really got to give them room to run.  If someone is truly a member of the elite, are able to generate elite-level results, if you wanted to demotivate them and draw them out of the field, what would you do? You would surround them with mediocrity and drown them in bullshit.”

But there’s a bitter pill hidden in this. Because if there's an unequal starting line, people aren’t equal. Because of where people grew up, the advantages their parents gave them, the environmental and biological makeup of their parents, people have unequal potential. Opportunity isn’t evenly distributed, but neither is talent. Why would it ever be?

Indeed: there is a group of people that don’t actually think we can distinguish between people. That all people are equal. This group then believes that all differences between people are due to discrimination. After all, if it’s self-evident, that all men are created equal — how do we have disparities? Are all men not created equal or not? Jordan Peterson’s view is that he doesn't think it needs to be fixed, he thinks it's good for society if its brightest and most industrious are allowed to fully realize their potential. But he does think there is moral injustice that comes along with that. He thinks you should hold the simultaneous views "some people are smarter and more capable than other people" and "all people are of equal moral worth". And not get confused that they're both true. Even this sounds like cope however. Of course people don't have equal moral worth — even leftists wouldn't say that say, Hitler and Mother Theresa are worth the same. Why would the differences only apply to the extremes, instead of being a smooth gradient throughout?

I think most everyone understates the other positive flip side to accepting inequality, which is that you don’t have to make the poor bottom-quartile kids feel terrible for being where they are. Conservatives are wrong here, it’s not only a matter of personal responsibility. Liberals are right to say that environments dictate a lot -- but they’re wrong when they don’t stand up to people who are trying to equalize outcomes in the name of equalizing opportunity, which is what equality of opportunity means in practice, since you’re taking from someone to give someone else. Kids don't need to be playing games for the entirety of their childhoods that always result in them losing and being told either that they're dumb or lazy. Not everyone needs to study Chaucer, people can be carpenters or janitors, it’s OK. 

We don’t want to live in a feudal system where your life path is set when you’re born. But we also don’t want to go so far on the other extreme that we think that the reason we have any inequality is because of prejudice and we need to spend trillions of dollars to equalize outcomes. We tried that. It didn’t work. We've spent 50 years implementing measures intended to equalize group outcomes, and they haven't equalized. Which, to the leftist activist mindset, is enormously enraging since the obvious explanation is much more pernicious ongoing discrimination than they even imagined. And yet, that’s the exact wrong conclusion to have.

We should try to raise the floor, and we should take a holistic way of doing that, including encouraging everyone to study the habits that successful communities have adopted, instead of just blaming disparities on discrimination. We should also accept that inequality is the natural state of the world, and any program meant to equalize outcomes is dead on arrival. By accepting that (and studying why) people are different, we can achieve a proper balance between social mobility and hierarchy, between nature and nurture, between what we can change and what we can’t — and deploy our dollars and set our expectations accordingly. By refusing to admit that individual decisions and cultural values make a difference, we’re actually hurting the communities we claim to serve, alienating them from their agency. It might feel kind, but it’s anything but.