It's ironic (to me) that the people who believe this way simultaneously believe themselves to be better, smarter, and more moral than anyone who refuses to agree with them.
Facts. The crux of the situation is as you said, the parents can’t state their arguments without sounding racist. It’s the irony of the “how to be an anti-racist” book, which states that any policy not actively anti-racist is racist. But if anti-racist policies have objectively failed, does that make them racist? 😬 At some point we have to acknowledge that it has always been virtue signaling. To quote a well known guy from a recent interview “I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Fuck them.”
Fantastic piece. But this leads to another question: what's the goal of a society? Is it to ensure equality (of opportunities, of outcomes, of whatever), or is it to improve the overall quality of the society and its lives (think of building a better car or software, but the thing you are building is the society as a whole).
I'm gonna use the example of China - when they aimed to achieve equality (through communism, cultural revolution, or the Great Leap Forward), everything went to hell. But a new leader (Deng Xiaoping) came to power and said, we are going to led some people get rich faster than others, they ended up create one of the greatest economic growth stories in history. There are still tons of inequality there, but the average wealth went up something like 100x over the past 50 years.
Or how should we organize society so that diverse people can best realize their goals?
My best answer so far is that we should strive for a society which people would prefer over any real world alternatives if blind to their particular circumstances. This leads not to utopia, but to continuous experimentation, adaptation, mistakes, learning and change.
Someone made the point (maybe Yuval Harari) that the US has two fundamental tenets that are in conflict: (a) an economic system that emphasizes and rewards individual initiative, and (b) "all men are created equal".
Both ideals are important. As you point out, when China tried eliminating (a) it was a disaster. But there is a tension between these ideas, and that tension creates dynamism in the culture from the push/pull inherent in how we interpret them.
That push/pull also means there is no simple answer to "what should be the goal of a society?" It is something that needs to be navigated and negotiated over time.
I've been thinking about this since Pinker's book came out. I've concluded that very few people believe in the blank slate privately, but there is a high social cost to publicly refuting it so it never goes away. Blank slatism does hold people back as you say, but importantly it doesn't hold back those elites for whom toeing the line confers a social benefit.
There is a related phenomenon that interests me: A proposition X may be strictly speaking false – and everyone privately knows it's false – but we may collectively decide it's in everyone's best interest to treat X as true. "All men are created equal" "You can accomplish anything you set your mind to" etc. I think many progressives see the blank slate as falling into this category; they are afraid to acknowledge e.g. genetic differences because they fear people will use it to justify discrimination.
Strongly agree that there is a double standard of blank-slateism. We all want to feel special, yet that is a view no longer tenable for public discussion because we would have to define special and then there would be have and have-nots.
I reckon the real problem is that we won't allow ourselves to create new pathways for special and success. This would entail allowing the rise of structure and it would be too remniscent of structures that have overstayed their welcome in society and now become oppressors (or at least they're deemed this). Without the ability to organize and add structure and ritual, we are left simply fighting over whether to blame the individual or society as a whole - a wholly unproductive vector to argue, but very polarizing.
This is well-said. We hold to the blank slate out of fear of regressing into the past. We are stuck until we can trust one another that ideas like "IQ has a largely genetic foundation" will not be misused.
Here's the conundrum. We know that people are irrational, and in highly predictable ways. Given a proposition like, "group A has a mean IQ that is 2 points higher than group B", we know that many people will jump to unjustified conclusions. "I refuse to hire anyone from group B because they have lower IQs." People in general cannot reason correctly about highly overlapping normal distributions – and their errors are not randomly distributed but bias in certain directions. What should we do with this knowledge?
One response is to say: Since people are prone to misusing certain types of information, if the risk of that misuse is great enough then withhold the information. We do that by enforcing a taboo.
Oh boy. Ya, this is the crux of it. The Ezra Klein - Sam Altman debate cited int he article is exactly this.
In that debate, I actually found myself surprised that I sided with Klein - we have not proven ourselves as a species safe to act on that knowledge.
I don't think that means we should not be aware of this knowledge however. Rather, the task is to maximize real pathways of achievement for an ever-expanding base of human traits that we will innevitable identify and measure.
Freddie deBoer and Kathryn Paige Harden have offered the left a pathway to not only accepting innate differences among individuals, but also using these inequities as justification for leftist policies. Eg, if economic outcomes are strongly influenced by factors that are outside of individual control and can’t be equalized through education and other interventions, then financial redistribution is the only practical way to achieve more equal material standards of living.
If anything, the focus on ineffectual educational and societal interventions is a distraction from achieving leftist goals. Furthermore, this allows us affluent PMCs to demonstrate our concern for the poor and disadvantaged without having to bear the burden of the higher taxes needed for a proper welfare state to equalize material outcomes. From an even more cynical perspective, we ensure funding for members of our caste to “work” on these futile interventions in governments, universities, and NGOs in perpetuity.
Great article. I'd disagree that the view that Hitler and Mother Theresa are morally equivalent is one that no one holds, though - I think that's mainstream Christian theology, and therefore a view that many people on both the left and the right hold.
Applying the parable of the prodigal son, your past actions don't matter to your moral worth. Anyone can be saved at any point, and when they are, the evil they have done is not held against them. No one is morally superior to anyone else.
As the parable suggests, this is something that cuts against human nature and what we instinctively think of as being right, but I think it's a view that is nevertheless widely held (whether entirely because of the influence of Christianity I have no idea).
Great piece. Find it interesting that you never hear a peep out of equalizing opportunity or outcome for something like basketball or football (which minorities are disproportionally good at)
It's ironic (to me) that the people who believe this way simultaneously believe themselves to be better, smarter, and more moral than anyone who refuses to agree with them.
Facts. The crux of the situation is as you said, the parents can’t state their arguments without sounding racist. It’s the irony of the “how to be an anti-racist” book, which states that any policy not actively anti-racist is racist. But if anti-racist policies have objectively failed, does that make them racist? 😬 At some point we have to acknowledge that it has always been virtue signaling. To quote a well known guy from a recent interview “I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Fuck them.”
Fantastic piece. But this leads to another question: what's the goal of a society? Is it to ensure equality (of opportunities, of outcomes, of whatever), or is it to improve the overall quality of the society and its lives (think of building a better car or software, but the thing you are building is the society as a whole).
I'm gonna use the example of China - when they aimed to achieve equality (through communism, cultural revolution, or the Great Leap Forward), everything went to hell. But a new leader (Deng Xiaoping) came to power and said, we are going to led some people get rich faster than others, they ended up create one of the greatest economic growth stories in history. There are still tons of inequality there, but the average wealth went up something like 100x over the past 50 years.
So what should be the goal of a society?
Or what should be the goals (plural)?
Or how should we organize society so that diverse people can best realize their goals?
My best answer so far is that we should strive for a society which people would prefer over any real world alternatives if blind to their particular circumstances. This leads not to utopia, but to continuous experimentation, adaptation, mistakes, learning and change.
Someone made the point (maybe Yuval Harari) that the US has two fundamental tenets that are in conflict: (a) an economic system that emphasizes and rewards individual initiative, and (b) "all men are created equal".
Both ideals are important. As you point out, when China tried eliminating (a) it was a disaster. But there is a tension between these ideas, and that tension creates dynamism in the culture from the push/pull inherent in how we interpret them.
That push/pull also means there is no simple answer to "what should be the goal of a society?" It is something that needs to be navigated and negotiated over time.
I've been thinking about this since Pinker's book came out. I've concluded that very few people believe in the blank slate privately, but there is a high social cost to publicly refuting it so it never goes away. Blank slatism does hold people back as you say, but importantly it doesn't hold back those elites for whom toeing the line confers a social benefit.
There is a related phenomenon that interests me: A proposition X may be strictly speaking false – and everyone privately knows it's false – but we may collectively decide it's in everyone's best interest to treat X as true. "All men are created equal" "You can accomplish anything you set your mind to" etc. I think many progressives see the blank slate as falling into this category; they are afraid to acknowledge e.g. genetic differences because they fear people will use it to justify discrimination.
Strongly agree that there is a double standard of blank-slateism. We all want to feel special, yet that is a view no longer tenable for public discussion because we would have to define special and then there would be have and have-nots.
I reckon the real problem is that we won't allow ourselves to create new pathways for special and success. This would entail allowing the rise of structure and it would be too remniscent of structures that have overstayed their welcome in society and now become oppressors (or at least they're deemed this). Without the ability to organize and add structure and ritual, we are left simply fighting over whether to blame the individual or society as a whole - a wholly unproductive vector to argue, but very polarizing.
This is well-said. We hold to the blank slate out of fear of regressing into the past. We are stuck until we can trust one another that ideas like "IQ has a largely genetic foundation" will not be misused.
Here's the conundrum. We know that people are irrational, and in highly predictable ways. Given a proposition like, "group A has a mean IQ that is 2 points higher than group B", we know that many people will jump to unjustified conclusions. "I refuse to hire anyone from group B because they have lower IQs." People in general cannot reason correctly about highly overlapping normal distributions – and their errors are not randomly distributed but bias in certain directions. What should we do with this knowledge?
One response is to say: Since people are prone to misusing certain types of information, if the risk of that misuse is great enough then withhold the information. We do that by enforcing a taboo.
Oh boy. Ya, this is the crux of it. The Ezra Klein - Sam Altman debate cited int he article is exactly this.
In that debate, I actually found myself surprised that I sided with Klein - we have not proven ourselves as a species safe to act on that knowledge.
I don't think that means we should not be aware of this knowledge however. Rather, the task is to maximize real pathways of achievement for an ever-expanding base of human traits that we will innevitable identify and measure.
Freddie deBoer and Kathryn Paige Harden have offered the left a pathway to not only accepting innate differences among individuals, but also using these inequities as justification for leftist policies. Eg, if economic outcomes are strongly influenced by factors that are outside of individual control and can’t be equalized through education and other interventions, then financial redistribution is the only practical way to achieve more equal material standards of living.
If anything, the focus on ineffectual educational and societal interventions is a distraction from achieving leftist goals. Furthermore, this allows us affluent PMCs to demonstrate our concern for the poor and disadvantaged without having to bear the burden of the higher taxes needed for a proper welfare state to equalize material outcomes. From an even more cynical perspective, we ensure funding for members of our caste to “work” on these futile interventions in governments, universities, and NGOs in perpetuity.
Great article. I'd disagree that the view that Hitler and Mother Theresa are morally equivalent is one that no one holds, though - I think that's mainstream Christian theology, and therefore a view that many people on both the left and the right hold.
Applying the parable of the prodigal son, your past actions don't matter to your moral worth. Anyone can be saved at any point, and when they are, the evil they have done is not held against them. No one is morally superior to anyone else.
As the parable suggests, this is something that cuts against human nature and what we instinctively think of as being right, but I think it's a view that is nevertheless widely held (whether entirely because of the influence of Christianity I have no idea).
No mention of genetics? Which is a great reason to support the bottom 25 pct
Ag gave Hss a surplus of calories for the first time.
Surplus gave Hss a surplus of numbskulls for the first time.
Numbskulls gave Hss a surplus of useful idiots.
Useful idiots gave Hss a surplus of warlords.
Warlords gave Hss a surplus of war.
War gave Hss a surplus of govt.
Govt gave Hss a surplus of bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats gave Hss a surplus of govt.
We're stuck in a loop fo the last two lines.
Great piece. Find it interesting that you never hear a peep out of equalizing opportunity or outcome for something like basketball or football (which minorities are disproportionally good at)
Recommendation - https://www.amazon.com/Meritocracy-Trap-Foundational-Inequality-Dismantles/dp/0735221995
TL:DR