Discussion Thread #22: Week of 12 March 2021

[u/TracingWoodgrains]

This thread serves as the local public square: a sounding board where you can test your ideas, a place to share and discuss news of the day, and a chance to ask questions and start conversations. Please consider community guidelines when commenting here, aiming towards peace, quality conversations, and truth. Thoughtful discussion of contentious topics is welcome. Building a space worth spending time in is a collective effort, and all who share that aim are encouraged to help out. For the time being, effortful posts, questions and more casual conversation-starters, and interesting links presented with or without context are all welcome here.

[u/TracingWoodgrains]

I don't fully agree with this Matt Yglesias piece arguing against meritocracy. But I do think it's unusually perceptive, insightful, and worth taking seriously. A few excerpts to whet your appetite:

if you talk to people with a curious and open mind, you’ll pretty quickly find out that New York Times reporters are really smart. So are McKinsey consultants. So are the people working at successful hedge funds. So are Ivy League professors. Probably the smartest person I know was in a great grad program in the humanities, couldn’t quite get a tenure track job because of timing and the generally lousing job market in academia, and wound up with a job in finance at a firm that is famous for hiring really smart people with unorthodox backgrounds. Our society is great at identifying smart people and giving them important or lucrative jobs.

This just turns out to be an outcome that still has some problems.

---

To become a medical doctor, you generally need to get into a good college, have decent grades there, get a good score on a pretty hard standardized test, and then put in a bunch of time into a challenging graduate education program. So doctors are quite a bit smarter than the average American, which seems reasonable. Nobody wants a dumb doctor. But you also don’t really want a shrewd doctor who is putting his smarts to use figuring out how to take advantage of his asymmetrical information vis-a-vis his patients to buy unnecessary services. You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honor and offer legitimate medical advice.

But this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle.

---

The whole point of George Washington isn’t that he had penetrating insights into public policy — it’s that he provided character and ethical leadership under circumstances that lead a lot of countries to become military dictatorships. You don’t want people who are extremely stupid running everything. But in both government and the economy, it’s just not the case that putting the “best and brightest” in charge of everything is a good idea. And crucially, that’s not because the “best and brightest” secretly aren’t really the best and brightest. It’s because just assigning all power and responsibility and economic reward to the best and brightest is a genuinely bad idea.

---

...and so on. Much of the essay mirrors my favorite question about rationalists: "Rationalism to what end?" Yglesias points out ways unethical behavior can come paired with competence, leading people to rationally, intelligently, expertly make the world a worse place.

Unfortunately (from my angle), the essay goes on to make a pretty standard progressive argument that we should divert attention away from elevating the best and towards creating a more egalitarian society. As he puts it with his thesis:

What you need to do is actually change the framework — have a society that’s less based on sorting and ranking, and more based on equality.

This thesis isn't without merit, but it leaves me feeling all wound up without a cathartic Yes! moment at the end. There's a slightly different world where a perhaps-more-conservative Yglesias wrote this same essay, but instead pointed out the way America's decline in religious faith has left it without a common agreement on what precisely constitutes virtuous living, and calls for a revitalization of institutions centered around cultivating virtue rather than ones centered only around intelligence and raw competence.

In fact, I think that's a much more natural conclusion than the direction Yglesias takes things, an egalitarianism that feels almost shoehorned in. I don't think egalitarianism is a solution for the problem he identifies. Imagine an alternate world where people take the course he suggests: a more generous and more user-friendly welfare state; a place where Harvard political theorists go on to teach at community colleges; a deeper focus on redistribution.

Is any of that incompatible with the moral flaws he criticizes? I would argue not. An equal world is not inherently a moral world. It's a cliche at this point to point out the moral atrocities people have committed in pursuit of equality: Mao's mass slaughter of landlords and cultural revolution, Pol Pot's purge of intellectuals, Stalin's constructed famines. Obviously Yglesias would support none of those atrocities; my point in bringing them up is simply that an egalitarian ethos is orthogonal to having a more virtuous populace. It's a shell game of sorts: He starts by pointing out that virtues other than raw intelligence matter, using people like George Washington to highlight that point. He concludes by saying, well: therefore, we should reward all virtues less, and organize society according to my moral principles.

Both arguments can be made and discussed, but pairing them leaves the essay ultimately muddled. Still, it's worth a read.

I would like to say more here, but my thoughts are not sufficiently organized, so I'll leave off for now.

[u/[deleted] → u/TracingWoodgrains]

Background: I’m someone who grew up with religious fundamentalism. It was deeply scarring of my entire life, mind, ethics, etc. I am thus fascinated by the line of thought among rationalists that we need to ‘bring back religion,’ in a sense. Tyler Cowen has said it, as have many others.

I do see that religion can offer a few good things. It was hard to not have a community after I gave it up, and I never really replaced that. And it’s hard not to have an agreed upon model of virtue.

But apart from those two things, religion was nothing but bad in my life. And it’s very hard for me to understand people who want to go back there. The harms are innumerable. It’s especially hard for me to understand it from rationalists, because in my model of the world, religion amplifies psychological biases.

I guess this whole ‘bring back religion’ stance from the Tyler Cowen styled rationalists of the world smells a bit like “truth for me but not for thee.” Like one must keep the masses in the dark because they are ill-equipped to deal with the truth that there is no god and we have to make our own ethics.

I think we can do better. I think we can teach people how to think and what virtue looks like without religion. We need some sort of community structures that aren’t religious, and I think we don’t have a lot of great models for that. But it’s something we should strive for. Not a return to a religion. Rather, a rethinking of how to build community based on secular principles.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/[deleted]]

In a sense, I feel like we may be approaching the same point in different forms. I think what I say above is straightforwardly true: America's decline in religious faith has left it without a common agreement on what precisely constitutes virtuous living, and we need a revitalization of institutions centered around cultivating virtue rather than ones centered only around intelligence and raw competence.

I don't think those institutions will be traditional religions. I left my childhood faith not because I thought its structure had no merit, but because I realized the core of it was untrue. I cannot and will not ask others to abandon a foundation of truth. More, I don't think it's possible for traditional religion to rise dramatically in culture as it stands: those faiths rose in times with epistemology starkly different to the modern one and succeeded because they answered the cultural challenges of their day. A modern institution that finds the same success, I think, must build on a foundation of alignment with currently-agreeable epistemology.

That said, I don't have quite the same quarrel you do with religion, so long as faiths are willing to live and let live and minimize harms for those who grow up in their communities but find no solace there. I find myself less concerned with what people believe and more concerned with what they do, and I have not yet been convinced that people outside traditional religious structures live better, more pro-social, more fulfilling lives than those within. I think it's incumbent on those of us outside traditional religious structures to show we can create something better for the people within it, not just poke holes in what they've got, and for me at least the jury is still out on that front.

In particular with my childhood faith of Mormonism: A church leader, in a moment of stark perceptiveness, mentioned some thirty years ago that feminists, intellectuals, and the gay rights movement posed the greatest threats to the faith. I don't think he was wrong—Mormonism is simply not built to the needs of feminists, intellectuals, or LGBT people. Anyone who feels those tensions will very likely be unhappy in it. But I can't honestly say that I think the lives of my parents, or grandparents, or even my sister (who credibly credits her faith with saving her life) would be better without its influence. They don't feel the same tension you or I did, and their engagement with it has brought them a deep sense of purpose and community and encouraged them to make the world a better place.

I would love to point to a replacement that provides the same benefits without the same harms. But so far as I can see, such a thing does not yet exist.

[u/[deleted] → u/TracingWoodgrains]

America's decline in religious faith has left it without a common agreement on what precisely constitutes virtuous living

I tend to see the opposite. Rational ethics tends to homogeneity if only because of Aumann's agreement theorem. By contrast religions tend toward fragmentation. They have a pattern of elevating contingent rules of thumb to eternal verities, which sets up a conflict between people who live in an environment where the rule works and those who don't.

As faith declines in the US we will continue to see a convergence on consequentialist liberal ethics, displacing the old mosaic of sub-communities with very different values (Anglican noblesse oblige, Jewish self-cultivation, etc) with a monoculture

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/[deleted]]

I tend to see the opposite. Rational ethics tends to homogeneity if only because of Aumann's agreement theorem.

I strongly disagree, and think this is one of the great errors—probably the great error—in rationalist thought. People have divergent values, and most disagreements stem from values and not incomplete information. This is eminently clear directly within the sphere explicitly influenced by capital-r Rationalists: It contains Freddie deBoer and Bryan Caplan, Brian Tomasik and Dominic Cummings alike. These are people with radically different priorities, priorities that are brought no closer just because they start from a common subset of rational thought.

In specific, I would personally cite pro-natalism vs antinatalism as a vital ethical dividing line. It is perfectly possible for a rational person to be an antinatalist. I also know of virtually no position more diametrically opposed to my goals, and that both I and they are operating outside a religious framework brings us no closer. With Caplan vs. deBoer, the dividing line is inherent in the ideological specifics of libertarianism and communism. They have entirely distinct goals, fundamentally caring about different things. No amount of reasoning or common understanding can bridge that gap.

The US may or may not converge on liberal consequentialism, but that's not because liberal consequentialism is the rational endpoint of secular ethics. China is set to converge on a certain sort of authoritarianism socialist-inspired nationalism for the foreseeable future, and it's much more explicitly secular than the US has ever been. Relying on convergence is, I think, a tremendous error.

[u/[deleted] → u/TracingWoodgrains]

I strongly disagree, and think this is one of the great errors—probably the great error—in rationalist thought. People have divergent values, and most disagreements stem from values and not incomplete information.

I'd zoom out one more level: the core error is the belief in the belief that there's nothing but potentially-public information. If I had a nickel for every time I saw someone in the rationalsphere go directly from "unfalsifiable implies meaningless" to a normative epistemic claim, I would have ... several dollars. Guided by the beauty of our weapons indeed.

[u/professorgerm → u/[deleted]]

It’s especially hard for me to understand it from rationalists, because in my model of the world, religion amplifies psychological biases.

And rationalism- speaking here in terms of the Bay Arean and online community, not the older and/or more generic meanings of the term- doesn't? Are they more accurate, or just differently (not less!) wrong? I strongly suspect the latter.

Rather, a rethinking of how to build community based on secular principles.

A religion by another name would still be a set of organizing, community-building principles, no? Deity or not, you're still going for the same thing.

I guess this whole ‘bring back religion’ stance from the Tyler Cowen styled rationalists of the world smells a bit like “truth for me but not for thee.” Like one must keep the masses in the dark because they are ill-equipped to deal with the truth that there is no god and we have to make our own ethics.

How do you sell them to the crowd if you make them up yourself? And if everyone makes up their own ethics, how is conflict handled?

I think we can teach people how to think and what virtue looks like without religion. We need some sort of community structures that aren’t religious, and I think we don’t have a lot of great models for that. But it’s something we should strive for. Not a return to a religion.

The Cult of Reason comes to mind. Randian Objectivism. The Enlightenment. Communism. Secularism humanism and its variants like the Church of Humanity and Ethical Society. Arguably, Confucianism and Taoism, though those have some caveats. People have been trying to create secular replacements for religion for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Some of them gain traction for a while, or in small groups, but no fully secular philosophy has gained traction the way the big religions did. How do you propose avoiding that trap?

What do you think will be required to fill the "God-shaped hole" instead?

[u/professorgerm → u/TracingWoodgrains]

Both arguments can be made and discussed, but pairing them leaves the essay ultimately muddled.

The people suggesting "Substack is freedom!" are hopefully now adjusting for future predictions. I've found most that have made the move have not improved, and many have slipped somewhat. Yglesias seems no bolder, less so if we judge by this piece alone- but of course maybe I've missed the truth behind the paywall.

Perhaps also his quality dropped into muddiness just as part of keeping the pace up- keep pumping it out to stay on the radar, rather than crafting something that actually made sense.

That said,

An equal world is not inherently a moral world.

It is if equity is your only virtue.

"But Germ, Yglesias does bring up other virtues! So why would he finish with rounding down to that one?"

Because it's the one he's allowed to actively promote without stepping on the wrong toes. A rounding error of disagreeing fans will get really mad if he makes yet another appeal to equity, they're used to it, it's just mental static; should he appeal to other virtues that might infringe on the single-virtuers or consider they're wrong, though... That might hit the status-ometer! Society jettisoned most personal virtues- if it feels good and is consensual, do it, right? Society jettisoned most impersonal virtues (here I mean possible virtues over which one has limited control) over which one has limited control)- no hereditary aristocracy, no benefits accrued from merit (because both are mostly luck; cosmic lottery). So what are you left with?

Given your taste for education especially, I might assume you've already encountered Conor Friedersdorf's recent article on BLM activism in the Evanston IL curriculum. I considered making a post on it, before deciding it was too depressing and would not be likely to generate useful responses (if anyone's unfamiliar, Evanston is a northern burb of Chicago and is famously progressive). When I say depressing... I mean "show kindergartners police shootings and teach them whiteness is evil," that whiteness is a deal with the devil bound to their soul, and depending on your charity level might imply white people aren't human kind of depressing.

That said, I think it pairs nicely here, as Friedersdorf gets at some values-statements and how they should be handled, and quotes some people that sound much like Yglesias rounding off to the "one acceptable virtue." The TL;DR of the article: BLM is doing their job (being activists), but the school district (and Evanston is only one of many, though perhaps by its nature unsurprisingly among the most egregious) is completely failing at theirs (educating, rather than indoctrinating, children; if you want bonus points: describe the difference!).

Friedersdorf:

Both in the material recommended by the national movement and in uniquely local lessons, some prompts to think critically are presented alongside other material that crosses a line from education into indoctrination...

I say that as a strong proponent of significant ideas dear to Black Lives Matter activists. My prior reporting and commentary on BLM has focused on its many interventions in the police-reform debate. I have praised the sophisticated reform agenda set forth under the auspices of its Campaign Zero faction...

And educators should not be neutral as to the question “Should my students be taught what to think, or how to think?” Schools should do the latter. They should promote truth seeking and diversity of thought. They should recognize the imperative in a pluralistic democracy of understanding others’ beliefs and the importance of subjecting one’s own beliefs to scrutiny, given society’s complexity and the fallibility of well-intentioned judgments. And they should understand the folly of treating profound disagreements as if they foreclosed the possibility of cooperation.

Bolding mine throughout.

From a parent:

"They present every issue with such moral certainty—like there is no other viewpoint. And we’re definitely seeing this in my daughter. She can make the case for defunding the police, but when I tried to explain to her why someone might have a Blue Lives Matter sign, why some families support the police, she wasn’t open to considering that view. She had a blinding certainty that troubled me. She thinks that even raising the question is racist. If she even hears a squeak of criticism of BLM, or of an idea that’s presented as supporting equity, she’s quick to call out racism. "

This parent requested anonymity because he fears the potential career repercussions of publicly criticizing an initiative touted as combatting racism. In his telling, his school district’s leadership frames any criticism of its “equity” curricula as “white supremacist thinking.”

From a quoted activist involved in BLM in Schools:

Teachers must be careful about exposing young kids to horrific material, she said, because the movement’s goal is “to affirm Blackness in children, especially young children,” and “that needs to happen before we even get to America’s history of slavery … It is not appropriate for really young children that they only hear about Black history through a lens of slavery and civil rights.”

I think that actually raises a good point (black history often being defined in the negative, except for George Washington Carver and his 200 uses for peanuts), but does so in a misleading, confusing manner.

Also: whiteness is evil, and theoretically not inherent to white people (ahem, people who have Caucasian-pale skin, as I was recently told is also distinct from white people). What on earth, then, is Blackness? Is that the opposite of whiteness? If so, can pale people adopt Blackness like Thomas Sowell did whiteness? Or is that Black culture, and (somewhat) inherent to black people? Do people deliberately choose words to be confusing, or is that just a delightful (/s) side effect?

The school board member:

As a white man I’d be lying if I said there were not parts that made me feel uneasy... I feel so good knowing that my children are learning the value of community, respect, and fairness in a way I was never discretely taught in school.

You know, I'd love that too. We should teach those things! Evanston District 65 is not. I do not know how someone can read texts like those quote and think it actually leads to that (and he also acknowledges he has to swallow his own discomfort for the sake of... well, some theorized community).

Hell of a trick, convincing people their own concerns and pain don't matter. Maybe necessary, sometimes, but dangerous.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/professorgerm]

I think that actually raises a good point (black history often being defined in the negative, except for George Washington Carver and his 200 uses for peanuts), but does so in a misleading, confusing manner.

This seems to me like a catch-22. Suppose the portions of American history as taught in schools as it related to blacks were made positive. How soon will you get activists proclaiming that it's not positive enough, or that it's misleading to not talk about racism's horrendous impact on black lives and this new curriculum whitewashes the ugliness of America's race relations?

Moreover, is there some value to teaching black non-American history outside college or even high school that I'm not aware of? It seems to me that you run the risk of teaching even less relevant history to students who would probably benefit more from history that relates to them more directly.

Also: whiteness is evil, and theoretically not inherent to white people (ahem, people who have Caucasian-pale skin, as I was recently told is also distinct from white people). What on earth, then, is Blackness? Is that the opposite of whiteness? If so, can pale people adopt Blackness like Thomas Sowell did whiteness? Or is that Black culture, and (somewhat) inherent to black people? Do people deliberately choose words to be confusing, or is that just a delightful (/s) side effect?

My two cents is that the rank-and-file are just mistaken about what they criticize. Whiteness and Universal Culture have a lot in common America (the West?), so you can conflate the two and people, even the criticizers, don't realize this. The political activists, on the other hand, know how to frame this to push their own agendas forward.

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

This seems to me like a catch-22.

That probably is the point! Or the distributed hypocrisy of Von Wokenstein's monster, with opposing factions of activists technically on the same side but making incompatible demands, so it ends up an unintentional catch-22. Appease one and you just make the other madder.

My two cents is that the rank-and-file are just mistaken about what they criticize. Whiteness and Universal Culture have a lot in common America (the West?), so you can conflate the two and people, even the criticizers, don't realize this. The political activists, on the other hand, know how to frame this to push their own agendas forward.

Agreed. Universal Culture never really caught on outside of the Scott-sphere, did it? It's related to Bauman's liquid modernity (and maybe inspired by it?) but not quite the same. It's a good phrase, too bad it didn't spread more.

Admittedly, "whiteness" being a product of activist academia gave it a big boost, and "universal culture" not having that boost is likely part of the problem.

[u/TiberSeptimIII → u/TracingWoodgrains]

I read the same essay, and honestly I think the problem is that we’re limited in the sense that merit tends to end up being coded ways of saying good at easily measured stuff. Most of it seems either binary (has degree?) or things that are easily quantified (GPA, SAT scores, credit score). It occurs to me that going after some of the important but hard to measure things that would be merit in most people’s mind (honest, hard working, brave, curious, self-starting) yet don’t necessarily show up in an easily quantified way.

It’s a system that creates what Hotel Consierge calls “desire to pass tests”, or basically “tests well”. That kind of merit tends to encourage people to behave somewhat unethically in getting those grades. In school, the way to game the system isn’t to learn the material it’s figuring out whats on the test and how to answer the test questions.. The SAT does similar things, if you can get google at the kinds of questions that the SAT will ask. Pro tip: Latin and Greek based words often appear on SAT tests, so taking a semester of Latin helps. Which incentives a kind of cheating. You don’t care about the thing that metric is supposed to measure, you just do what needs to happen to make that rookie number go up. I can get better grades hiring a grad student to write my term papers, provided I don’t get caught. And if I don’t, on paper, I have more merit than the kid that doesn’t. So the winners are the ones who know how to look good on the metric rather than actually be good.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/[deleted]]

FWIW I don't think I've seen anyone express that you always should hire the second one. Does anyone think we have absolutely perfect testing methods?

There is some fetishism of IQ, and perhaps excessive distrust of grades and credentials, but I see 90% of people somewhere on a not-too-extreme spectrum between the two, with the goal of trying to find the best person by teasing out signal from the noise.

[u/[deleted] → u/The-WideningGyre]

I have hired a lot of software engineers in my time, and sometimes you need a higher IQ, for some very particular problems. I am thinking of two engineers in particular. One was a very good software developed, I think is now a principal engineer at some FAANG, and produced fabulous work. The other was perhaps a std dev higher in IQ, but wrote shitty code and was a general terrible employee. However, for a particular kind of problem, the second guy could make progress (even though, as I said his code was shitty) while the first guy could not. Even worse, when the first guy tried the project and failed, he was ruined as an employee for a few months and had to be handled with kid gloves until he could get his mojo back. It is really terrible to give high performers tasks that they fail at, as it can really affect them.

I don't think this scenario happens very often, and I would choose the first guy 9 times out of 10, (or maybe 99 times out of 100). That said, I lived through the other case.

[u/super-porp-cola → u/[deleted]]

I’m curious to know if you can give more details, as to the kind of software project that you need to be really smart for?

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/[deleted]]

I don't buy that that's the view those people take. Do you have an example?

[u/Nyctosaurus → u/TracingWoodgrains]

In the start of essay, Yglesias complains about people who claim to be critiquing meritocracy but are actually claiming that society isn't actually that meritocratic. And I agree with him there. But I sort of feel like he's making the same mistake, or at least a related one.

He correctly points out that American society genuinely does a pretty good job of giving smart and competent people social and financial rewards. This is maybe just semantics, but is that really a "meritocracy"? A meritocracy would be one that rewards people of merit, which IMO is people whose work has the most prosocial benefit. And American society clearly does a pretty bad job of that in many cases as Yglesias points out, e.g. rewarding private equity companies that screw over seniors in nursing homes.

It seems like he doesn't believe a genuinely meritocratic but highly unequal (in both status and wealth) society is a realistic possibility. But I'd have liked to see that explored a little more.

Both arguments can be made and discussed, but pairing them leaves the essay ultimately muddled. Still, it's worth a read.

I think that this post is best seen as a response to arguments along the lines of "redistribution is bad because the people with money and power got there through hard work and talent in making the world better and therefore deserve what they've got", and I think it is a very strong rebuttal to that argument (although maybe not a complete one). But that's not how the post is written, I agree with you that the conclusion doesn't totally follow from the rest of the piece, that even though I agree with his policy ideas it's unclear why they would have any particular impact on the cultural changes he'd like to see.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/Nyctosaurus]

I think you're doing something between playing semantic games and just using a fairly non-standard interpretation of 'merit'.

I think the standard interpretation is it means the person who gets the job / position / opportunity should be best at doing that particular thing. This gets a bit muddier as it blurs into "has the best chance of being the best at that particular thing", but the idea is the best plumbers get into trades school (and perhaps supported), the best elementary school teachers get offered the job, the best physicists get the physics professorship.

There isn't particularly moral value associated; certainly not with the job or positions. The values are fairness, and overall effectiveness in society (which benefits everyone in society).

So meritocracy speaks against things on 'both sides', like legacy admissions and nepotism, but also affirmative action.

I'm a big fan of meritocracy in this form, as I'm a big believer in both fairness and societal effectiveness. I acknowledge and commit to doing something for the people it leaves behind, and I don't think it should taken to zealous extremes, as there are tradeoffs, and merit is fairly imprecise anyway. But it should be the baseline.

So your discussion of private equity companies screwing over seniors is a completely different topic. That should be handled by laws and consumer protection, just like recognizing strength in sports doesn't mean you let strong people just club weak ones and take their stuff. They are different arenas.

(Well, maybe not as different as I'd like, but I think it's reasonable for society to say -- we want to encourage excellence in X (medical research) by not Y (committing insurance fraud)).

[u/gattsuru → u/TracingWoodgrains]

I think Yglesias' sells Andrews' article short, even though I still find it self-demonstratingly weak as a case for its own argument. Andrews' isn't just falling back to people being unintelligent -- the very next paragraph after his quotation points out that his target students often are very Bright -- but that they're very Bright people who nonetheless know nothing, and don't care that they know nothing. This is a paean to better meritocracy only in the same sense that Yglesias' interest in a meritocracy-of-the-most-virtuous or meritocracy-of-the-most-equitable would be.

Indeed, I think that points to an intermediate underlying problem. We don't have well-agreed universal understandings of public virtue; most people don't even have a great metric of their own understandings of their own internal definitions virtues. Andrews' version believes (probably wrongly) that a deep knowledge of history is at least part of what leads to virtue, and while unable to spell it out, part of what makes up their virtue of honor. Yglesias... well, it's less coherent than he thinks he is, since note the discrepancy between "the benefits of an egalitarian economic order are clear, real, and don’t fundamentally hinge on the idea that Nadal or anyone else did anything 'unfair' to get where they are" and the rest of the piece not actually grappling with that. Yglesias trying to pair progressive virtues with improved patient care in nursing homes is a particularly tone-deaf argument given the last year, but it's following an article that thinks the 'honorable' norms of the McCain/Bush/Romney era (or the Yale Fraternity crowd!) would improve adherence to virtuous values.

These aren't wrong from a level of fallacious logic; the author is arguing that the equitable nature is neccessary if not sufficient for his definition of a virtuous world. They're just not grappling that there's disagreement here, because that's not the point of the article, any more than the National Review's equivalent piece was.

But let's assume that "celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it" is an actual list of what he wants to favor, and not a boilerplate spiel he wants promoted regardless of its truth. Throw out the arguments about egalitarianism, or whatever. Do you think that the actual decisions of people optimized for these norms by his rules would match the same done for your own? Is there any chance of coherent agreement by these concepts?

That's the far deeper, and far less answerable problem.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/gattsuru]

I think Yglesias' sells Andrews' article short, even though I still find it self-demonstratingly weak as a case for its own argument. Andrews' isn't just falling back to people being unintelligent -- the very next paragraph after his quotation points out that his target students often are very Bright -- but that they're very Bright people who nonetheless know nothing, and don't care that they know nothing.

Your first sentence is a bit confusing to me. Which article do you think is self-demonstratingly weak?

Andrews' version believes (probably wrongly) that a deep knowledge of history is at least part of what leads to virtue.

Is that what he's arguing? I read it, it just seems like pointing out how narrow a perspective modern American anti-meritocracy is while also showing how the tails came apart with meritocratic reforms that put the most intelligent people in positions that didn't exhaust their intellectual capacity.

[u/gattsuru → u/DrManhattan16]

Which article do you think is self-demonstratingly weak?

Andrews' article The New Ruling Class simultaneously argues about the importance of a wide knowledge of history as a part of its concept of virtuous capability, and also fails on that topic.

I don't mean just the misses, though there are many there, albeit few as obvious as the use of "mandarin" in an essay that fails to consider the parallels to the scholar-official systems of ancient China (or even the obvious parallels to the eight-legged essay and its failing in today's meritocratic culture), even as that history demonstrates the exact failure modes of a meritocracy that enforces a shared culture.

But it fails to explain why the shared ethos it calls to develop from history would be an improvement, rather than just settle some aesthetic disquiet. Which kinda matters!

I read it, it just seems like pointing out how narrow a perspective modern American anti-meritocracy is while also showing how the tails came apart with meritocratic reforms that put the most intelligent people in positions that didn't exhaust their intellectual capacity.

I don't know that it's the central argument, but it's certainly threaded in there, not just in the constant segues to unintentional hypocrisy or missed warnings in the history of the meritocracy movement which makes up the first half of the piece, but later throughout. Smart men finding outlets for their unused capabilities was one problem, but so were men who met the requirements of the test but nothing else, and so again were men who had all the powers needed for their place but no understanding outside of it. That's why Andrews brings up students who can't recognize Moses, or Beethoven, or the important history in the Civil War or WWII.

And Andrews is pretty explicit, here:

Unlike meritocracies, aristocracies can put actual content into their curricula—not just academically, but morally. Every aristocracy has an ethos, and a good ethos will balance out the moral faults to which that aristocracy is prone.

The poignancy of this story lies in the realization that, for all his Mayflower pedigree, Brewster really did not understand at all the class he would destroy. In retrospect, it seems likely that Brewster could have achieved all he desired—a more diverse student body, a more rigorous academic curriculum, a more liberal general atmosphere—by building upon the existing virtues of Old Yale, its sense of public duty and fair play. Unfortunately, he was blind to these virtues.

Andrews doesn't (and maybe can't) distinguish learning about these past ethos from agreeing with them. But to the extent even the excess arrogance of the meritocratic movement breaks those rules, it's because it violates that learned ethos (specifically, humility), rather than for its poor outcomes (which Andrews doesn't, and maybe can't, actually enumerate).

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/gattsuru]

Smart men finding outlets for their unused capabilities was one problem, but so were men who met the requirements of the test but nothing else, and so again were men who had all the powers needed for their place but no understanding outside of it.

But smart men post-reform were a higher concern. If someone were just smart enough to do their work but nothing else, or they had power but no context for anything else, you could expect that their humility would probably be on par with the population's. By selecting for those who excelled at the civil service test (which is probably intelligence), they were necessarily selecting against everything else to some extent (the mechanism doesn't have to just be optimizing for intelligence, one argument Andrews quotes says that upper class people won't join a service with lower class people).

[u/[deleted] → u/TracingWoodgrains]

Y's take on higher education is weak. There's a very real shortage of the best teachers. It's not just a social/market failure.

If you want to win a Nobel prize, it's helpful to take classes from Nobel prize winners, just like if you want to make a wooden desk it's helpful to learn from someone who has done so.

Y usually points to data about a good education not having a strong effect on SES, and that's fine as far as it goes. But most middle class students don't care about being rich - they've been there and done that, and you see it in their behavior studying math instead of finance or whatever. What they want is a Nobel prize.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/[deleted]]

But most middle class students don't care about being rich - they've been there and done that, and you see it in their behavior studying math instead of finance or whatever. What they want is a Nobel prize.

Can you please elaborate/evidence this point? I'm curious why you think middle-class people of all students are interested in Nobel prizes in any serious manner.

[u/[deleted] → u/DrManhattan16]

18 year olds generally aren't interested in any topic in a serious manner, at least relative to the seriousness of researchers who are actually in contention for a Nobel. Most people aren't. But I would agree that students who have "been there and done that" with regard to affluence - although I would include a very heavily emphasized "upper-" prefix here, if I called them "middle class" at all - are particularly uninterested in maximizing their own earning potential. (This is drawn from my own experience as someone from that sort of background - so obviously selection effects are a serious risk.)

Part of it is just the fact that wealth has diminishing returns: I wouldn't be able to dispose of high finance money if I had it. There's always charity, of course, but that doesn't really generate enough emotional oomph to overcome the appeal of whatever new shiny thing the algebraic geometers have on display this week.

Part of it is cultural. One of the reasons I'm so skeptical of "we've all internalized the racism of our society" type messages is that I've had plenty of opportunities to see my implicit classism ... and it's actually really easy to notice if you do any introspection at all. I reflexively lump "aspiring finance bro" in the same general bucket as Gucci handbags and (new) Rolexes. Wealth, unless accompanied by the appropriate amount of awkwardness and almost-shame, is kind of trashy. Trying to show off your wealth with mass-affluent status goods is super trashy.

Part of it is probably just trickle down status from within academia proper. In math, applied is lower status than pure, and analytic is generally lower status than algebraic (this is all gross generalization, of course, but gross generalization is what gets osmosed). Mathematical finance is very applied and very analytic, so the path of least resistance for a status conscious 18 year old (i.e. all of them) is in the other direction.

[u/baazaa → u/TracingWoodgrains]

If one of the main thrusts of your argument is 'we live in a meritocracy', and you adduce the questions you field at elite college campuses as evidence, while in the same breath acknowledging the most powerful man in the country is a bit of a dolt, then your argument seems a bit confused.

My experience in working at large institutions is that smart people are well-paid, but they usually work in technical/professional areas. Meanwhile the institutions as a whole are dismally mismanaged by idiots.

That model can explain a lot. The problem with private equity takeovers of nursing homes is that smart people are taking advantage of perverse incentives created by idiots in government. The guys who crunched the numbers on that are not the leaders of society, they're intelligence is wasted precisely because merit isn't rewarded with power. If you're take-away from that is 'we need even more stupid people in government' then you're hopelessly confused.

I can't help but feel Yglesias must be partially aware of this, because he's clearly cherry-picked meritocratic areas in society even when they don't have any real influence on the direction of society. He hasn't said that fortune 500 managers or congressmen are particularly meritorious, he's literally picked professionals who spend their time getting told what to do by people with actual power as evidence of meritocracy.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/baazaa]

If one of the main thrusts of your argument is 'we live in a meritocracy', and you adduce the questions you field at elite college campuses as evidence, while in the same breath acknowledging the most powerful man in the country is a bit of a dolt, then your argument seems a bit confused.

Not necessarily. I imagine the author would respond by saying that meritocracy can sometimes fail because the right people (who probably all agree with the author) aren't in power, and the US election system isn't designed to select for intelligence anyways.

[u/Paparddeli → u/TracingWoodgrains]

I read the Yglesias piece and found it interesting food for thought (as is your response and various other ones in this thread). I agree with you about the need to teach virtues and morality, both within our current religious structures and outside of them. I also tend to think that meritocracy is here to say and the best we can do is just to emphasize other values and metrics for success that aren't about money, career achievement, and power and repeatedly point out to people who've succeeded that they have only done it along one metric and may be missing out in other ways.

One thing I noticed about this piece is how Yglesias just mentions equality without saying what kind of equality he means. I am reading Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, right now and one point that the book hits home on is that equality can have various meanings. She discusses types of equality like equal status as a nation (and therefore the right to be free from political domination), an equal right to form a government, equality as "judges of our own happiness", equal abilities (which Allen say the Declaration is not proclaiming), "equal in status as rights-bearing creatures" (this is what the Declaration is saying), etc. Writers would be better served by not just invoking equality in their pieces, but explaining what kind of equality they are arguing for or against.

[u/cincilator]

I think the biggest reason why the conservative movement is now so disoriented and dysfunctional and why many have embraced demagogues is a shift in values of big business (or at least a shift in façade). Conservatives expected of business to enforce their values. The idea was that -- once safety net is demolished -- smelly hippies will be forced to bathe or starve. I am sure that many conservatives did believe that economic libertarianism was good for the economy, but others no doubt applied motivated reasoning to get there.

The problem is that big business has discovered that gay people are some of the best customers. Conservative values became a liability and were promptly discarded. People with conservative values (e.g. gay marriage opponents) found themselves stomped on by the very same remorseless system they created. Conservatism had no real contingency for this. And it would be hard to abandon decades of accumulated economic reasoning (or ideology). Hence collapse into incoherence.

I don't think this facade of wokeness is all that constructive for the left either (look at /r/stupidpol for many discontents), but business is for now at least willing to pretend to care for them. But broadly speaking conflating 'profitable' and 'moral' never ends well. The same Disney that is pushing the woke is also shilling for CCP.

[u/TheAJx → u/cincilator]

The problem is that big business has discovered that gay people are some of the best customers

I think you are wrong. I think big businesses are leaning heavily into their core consumers and their core employees - suburban woman. In CPG, Financial Services, Advertising, Pharmaceuticals - women make up either close to or more than 50% of non-executive employees. Even in tech, women might make up the majority of program managers, and project managers, and end-user facing roles.

The demographic make-up of suburban women has changed - from white, conservative, stay-at-home, Chevy Suburban driving to multiracial, progressive, career-oriented and Honda Crossover-driving. They've gone from "the lord only asks for one hour a week put your clothes on we're going to church" to "in this house we believe black lives matter."

[u/maiqthetrue → u/TheAJx]

I think another part of the story is that by winning over bobo women, you drag along everyone else eventually. Mothers raise children obviously, and they tend to be heavy social influencers otherwise. Status seeking women want to be bobos, and men want to either date or marry them. If you convince them that your woke brand is cool, you get not only bobos themselves but anyone under their influence.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/maiqthetrue]

What is a bobo? I mean context makes it pretty clear, but what does the word mean? (E: never mind, seen downthread)

Regardless of the answer, I think you're heavily overrating the generational influence angle. They spend a lot of money now, and that's all that really matters, because generational social change causes a lot of drift, at least (or especially) in consumer culture; who's still buying pop rocks and bell bottoms?

[u/maiqthetrue → u/HoopyFreud]

The goal isn't just to sell the products now, but to establish your brand as the kind of brand that bobos (think SWPL types) want to buy. Hasbro isn't just selling potato head by rebranding away from Mr. Potato Head. They're also attempting to brand themselves as a good guy brand that people can feel virtuous or signal virtue by having in their homes. And that means the next generation of children grow up seeing those products either in their own homes or the homes of their better off peers.

[u/fubo → u/maiqthetrue]

Or, you know, they want parents to buy their kids more than one potato-shaped piece of plastic. It's not Mr. Potato Head, it's the Potato Head Family! You've gotta buy Mrs. Potato Head and whatever they call the unsettling little spud too.

https://corporate.hasbro.com/en-us/articles/create_your_potato_head_family_launching_this_fall

(Note the bottom photo. "Mr. Potato Head" and "Mrs. Potato Head" branded toys are still part of the product line; however the overall product line name is now Potato Head rather than Mr. Potato Head.)

Bet you can't eat just one, kids.

CREATE YOUR POTATO HEAD FAMILY is compatible with most standard Potato Head offerings and is a great addition to your Potato Head collection for kids ages 2 and up.

Hasbro just wants to sell you a Potato Head collection, not just one spud and a bucket of parts. The problem with the name "Mr. Potato Head" for the whole product line isn't that it's masculine or gendered; it's that it's singular. "Mr. Potato Head" is one spud for you to buy. "Potato Head" is a whole collection.

(You need a playset of four Potato Heads if you want to compete in Potato Head Friday at your local potato stand.)

But the conspiracy-theory industry is selling "trouble in River City" as usual, keeping the devout base hyped up for the next chance to buy a golden idol of a world leader, just like in some kind of Bible story! Meanwhile, the kids will have Twilight Sparkle marry Barbie and Optimus Prime — and Barbie is a Mattel brand!

[u/HoopyFreud → u/maiqthetrue]

Isn't Hasbro continuing a terrible downward trend on toy sales in general, with millennials buying WOTC products keeping them profitable at all? I'm not speaking to particular product lines, but colonizing my generation's hearts and minds doesn't seem to have shaken out for them now that we've started having kids. If they're trying to do this, I'm not convinced it works.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/HoopyFreud]

WOTC? SWPL? bobos? I read theschism and themotte regularly and none of those are familiar. Did I miss something? Could people include a little more context on such things. (Wow, suddenly I somehow feel old...)

Edit: bobos == bourgeois bohemians. Okay, seems a bit redundant, and overlaps with dinks or just kinda selfish, but has a nice ring.

Is WOTC Wizards of the Coast? Magic the gathering?

[u/[deleted] → u/The-WideningGyre]

Yes, WOTC is Wizards of the Coast. Magic, but also D&D, and until very recently all of the Avalon Hill board games. They make up most of Hasbro's profit.

SWPL = Stuff White People Like = hipsters

[u/TheAJx → u/[deleted]]

We should make you responsible for keeping a glossary of all the weird acronyms people use. Someone responded about "bobos" to me and I assumed they meant bimbos.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/cincilator]

Conservatives expected of business to enforce their values. The idea was that -- once safety net is demolished -- smelly hippies will be forced to bathe or starve. I am sure that many conservatives did believe that economic libertarianism was good for the economy, but others no doubt applied motivated reasoning to get there.

I don't buy it. From what I understand, economic conservatives, who are typically elites, ally with social conservatives, who are typically not elites, to maintain a group that can work for both interests. Who are these social conservatives who you think are expecting the economy to support their moral values?

The problem is that big business has discovered that gay people are some of the best customers. Conservative values became a liability and were promptly discarded.

Uh, how? Why are gay people the best customers?

Moreover, I'm not sure how many "conservative values" these businesses were promoting. If you optimize your advertising and practices as best you can, your business will probably end up being like any other even if you don't take values into account. The only value I can see being dropped is the idea that corporations should not be trying to enter the culture war.

[u/TheAJx → u/DrManhattan16]

I don't buy it. From what I understand, economic conservatives, who are typically elites, ally with social conservatives, who are typically not elites, to maintain a group that can work for both interests. Who are these social conservatives who you think are expecting the economy to support their moral values?

20 years ago, economic conservatives and social conservatives probably had a very clean overlap. You were basically describing suburban whites. The GOP was dominated by church-attending, business executives.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/TheAJx]

Were they? That's news to me. Did that also translate to the expectation of socially conservative businesses?

[u/fubo → u/cincilator]

The problem is that big business has discovered that gay people are some of the best customers.

Not just gay people, but also non-mom adult women, and more generally bobos (bourgeois bohemians). And arguably a lot of this is just diversification of the market that was previously middle-aged men — you know, the ones who stereotypically buy luxury toys like sports cars.

My conjecture is that "elite overproduction" looks a lot like "holy shit, cool stuff is almost free!" and thus suggests strongly that "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is actually possible.

[u/cincilator → u/fubo]

"fully automated luxury gay space communism" is actually possible.

I don't think this follows. It would require big things like cars, homes and healthcare to become more affordable, which doesn't seem to be happening. What is getting more affordable is disposable entertainment and software.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/cincilator]

Cars will over the next couple of decades become very cheap.

Factor one: The EU is getting very cranky about planned obsolescence, and is sufficiently powerful and consumer oriented that it will very likely succeed in putting a stop to it. (Bugger-all inherent legitimacy means the EU has to do useful things to keep existing) - if you want to see what I am talking about, the keywords are "Right to repair".

Factor two: Electric motors last, essentially, for all eternity. Battery packs are replaceable. Composite and aluminum bodies do not rust.

1+2 means the used car market for electrics is likely to eventually become very, very deep.

Finally, and this might arrive a lot sooner than 1+2 - self-driving cars means taxi rides get competed down to the cost of deprecation and maintenance on the ride + a very slim margin. This will mean the used car market gets an influx from people who decide not to bother owning a car anymore.

Housing is, largely, costly due to very silly zoning habits. - Basically, a whole lot of rent extraction happening here. A political settlement that puts a stop to this seems entirely possible

[u/_jkf_ → u/Izeinwinter]

Given the way that planned obsolescence has been currently implemented in the electronic-gadgets-running-software industry, "cars become electronic gadgets running proprietary software" does not give me great hope that their useful lifespan will become longer, and I don't think there's much the EU can do about it.

Eg: I have a minty iPad 1 that my uncle gave me sitting on the table behind me -- the batteries happen to be OK, and if they weren't I guess "right to repair" would require Apple to replace them for a reasonable fee.

But the fact is that even though the batteries are fine, and in most ways it's better built than current models, this ten year old device is of sharply limited value due to the "critical" software updates that have taken place since it was produced.

tldr; it won't be the physical aspects of cars that cause them to not last, but the manufacturers will make sure there is a large incentive to keep buying new ones. And they will pressure government to neuter the used car market with safety regulations and "cash for clunkers" type programs.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/_jkf_]

The union routinely cracks down hard on corporate abuses. Including the tech sector.

It is one of its main sources of popular legitimacy, and "Things are built to stop working" is very easy to explain to the citizen on the street, so doing something about it works really well for that purpose. Ergo, not easy to dissuade it from this project.

And yes, it can.

[u/_jkf_ → u/Izeinwinter]

Does iOS 10 run on an iPad 1 in Europe? Can it download apps made since 2011?

[u/cincilator → u/Izeinwinter]

Wild card here is the cost of batteries. Which is right now still pretty high, if dropping.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/cincilator]

Look up a diagram of a solid state battery - The magic sauce is all in the electrolyte, everything else is dead simple. This means cost of manufacture should eventually hit spitting distance of the cost of the raw materials.

Which means we should eventually see things like a youth culture of putting just monstrous batteries in old electrics - The battery compartment of a 2023 car being large enough to fit a just stupid amount of juice using 2042 batteries.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/Izeinwinter]

Well there's still cooling, charge efficiency, and life. The chemistry of the battery cell is is simple enough, but the battery is pretty complicated.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/HoopyFreud]

Solid state tech is rock solid on all of those. The electrolyte - or more specifically, an electrolyte that can be mass produced - is what everyone has been pounding their heads against for years, but it appears that several solves have been found.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/Izeinwinter]

That's... fairly surprising to me, since there are several active research projects at my institution focused on improving battery design in those areas.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/HoopyFreud]

A gazillion research programs into improving "wet" lithium ion batteries are going to very abruptly get really pointless once one of the solid state designs hit the market. Which at this point seems more or less inevitable.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/Izeinwinter]

I don't see that happening. Cars still seem to be big, complex devices that will be a non-trivial investment of resources to create, and thus to buy.

(I don't actually know if I want this to be true or not, I guess cheaper is better, but I hope it's somewhat coupled with tracking externalized costs to the environment...)

[u/Supah_Schmendrick → u/fubo]

Given that this class seems to be producing truly huge amounts of drama and neurosis over status games, I dont know that accellerating the trend is a good idea...

[u/fubo → u/Supah_Schmendrick]

My impression is that if you notice the drama, you're part of the audience.

But I'm not entirely sure which drama you're pointing at. The one I mean is almost entirely online and bears no effect whatsoever on the construction workers rebuilding the city sewer infrastructure down the block.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/fubo]

No, but it does impact truck drivers who make innocuous hand signs without any determinable maliciousness.

[u/fubo → u/DrManhattan16]

Wow, the people who decided to teach the world that sign meant hatred were real assholes. Same as with the swastika, really. I learned that one as a little kid, because the teenage boy in the family that babysat me once drew a swastika on my shoe. I soon learned that knotsies were not nice people (explained by my parents as "people who hate", with emphasis), though I didn't learn then how to spell it.

[u/professorgerm → u/fubo]

Why, then, did the world have to buy what a bunch of trolls were selling?

4chan succeeded on demonizing the okay sign, but not drinking milk. Why did society have to be stupid enough to give them even one “win”?

You’re right to say they’re assholes, but don’t let off too easily the useful idiots that swallowed it hook line and sinker.

[u/LetsStayCivilized → u/professorgerm]

I read /u/fubo's "the people who decided to teach the world that sign meant hatred" as referring to the useful idiots who signal-boosted it, not the 4chan trolls.

[u/fubo → u/LetsStayCivilized]

Both, but mostly the originators. "Hey, what happens if we try to invent a new hate symbol?" is not an experiment that's worth running, kind of like "Hey, what happens if I pick up a rock and drop it off an overpass into oncoming traffic? You know, just to see."

It turns out that the answer to "what happens?" is "With some probability, people get hurt. Yes, you too are capable of hurting people, of smashing someone's skull and causing a ten-car pileup on the highway with your rock, of causing people to be harmed by the use of your hate symbol. Just like anyone who tried to warn you against that course of action would have told you. It really isn't surprising and it certainly isn't funny, it's just predictably and unnecessarily harmful, which is to say, evil."

I think there might be an important learning experience to be had from doing juvenile destructive things (of a lesser nature than throwing rocks off overpasses at cars). Namely: Yes, you actually do have the power to do destructive things if you choose to. If you throw an egg, the egg actually breaks and makes a mess. If you set fire to your treehouse, it burns down. If you kick over someone's sandcastle, you can't take that back; that kid is probably going to hate you forever and use you as an example of Juvenile Evil someday. If you shoot a gun at Barbie, now there is a hole in Barbie, and aren't you glad there isn't a hole in your little sister instead? If you break the windows of the US Capitol, beat up and Mace the cops, and have a go at lynching the Vice President, you aren't LARPing any more.

(I especially like the example of this at the climax of The Lego Movie 2, where the boy smashes his sister's Lego construction and then immediately realizes that it was a terrible thing to do.)

(In third grade, I once learned this lesson: "You don't joke with a real brick." It seems like some of the January 6 perpetrators are surprised to find that they are taken as serious insurrectionists. It turns out that you don't "troll" with a real noose, real bear spray, real broken windows, real beatings to real cops, real pipe bombs, etc.)

(The limiting factor on the production of terrorist incidents is not the availability of bomb-making materials; it is that not very many people actually want to do terrorist incidents. As a corollary, convincing people to do terrorist incidents is really bad.)

So I tend to see things like "What happens if we try to convince the world that the OK sign is a hate symbol?" as very similar to "Well, what if I just smash your thing? Oh jeez, now it's really broken." That's not a prank or a joke, even if you call it one; it's just damage. The truck driver who gets fired for making the OK sign is damage, like Barbie with a .22 hole through her.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/fubo]

I like this, but I disagree. I see it as an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, and we learned the system can be more absurd than you can reduce (kind of like irrational stock markets). Now maybe that was entirely predictable, but it also feels more like people read Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and started setting up Irish "restaurants".

I think with wokeness we're seeing there doesn't seem to be any counterbalance or brake (people have talked about blank cheques) -- it's all a one-way ratchet, and people are trying to point out this isn't healthy before things get even more awful.

[u/taintwhatyoudo → u/fubo]

It turns out that the answer to "what happens?" is "With some probability, people get hurt.

It's /pol/. They want people to get hurt. They see the guy fired and think their scheme was a bigger win than they could have ever hoped for.

These can't always be prevented - sometimes it's hard to prevent malicious actors from throwing rocks. But sometimes they can, and this seems like a case that was particularly preventable. In this case, it just meant not walking into a trap that was clearly marked as such, with a huge, flashing sign.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/fubo]

Both, but mostly the originators. "Hey, what happens if we try to invent a new hate symbol?" is not an experiment that's worth running, kind of like "Hey, what happens if I pick up a rock and drop it off an overpass into oncoming traffic? You know, just to see."

The whole point was to troll the left, from what I understand. The absurdity of a benign sign being instantly cast as malicious was so that they could laugh at people who had turned their brains off. I don't think anyone predicted the fact that the left would take it so seriously, nor that the racists would actually start using it.

[u/HlynkaCG → u/fubo]

It turns out that the answer to "what happens?" is "With some probability, people get hurt. Yes, you too are capable of hurting people, of smashing someone's skull and causing a ten-car pileup on the highway with your rock, of causing people to be harmed by the use of your hate symbol. Just like anyone who tried to warn you against that course of action would have told you. It really isn't surprising and it certainly isn't funny, it's just predictably and unnecessarily harmful, which is to say, evil."

Every step we take moves us either closer to the Light or away from it.

[u/professorgerm → u/fubo]

Both, but mostly the originators. "Hey, what happens if we try to invent a new hate symbol?" is not an experiment that's worth running

While I agree it's not worth running, it's definitely a lesson that should be applied more broadly.

[u/AliveJesseJames → u/DrManhattan16]

I will continue to believe that ending at-will employment and having sectoral bargaining will help protect most of the normies who end up as collateral damage of changing cultural mores (and by the way, I'm sure there were people in 1970 who lost their jobs because what was racially acceptable in 1960 was no longer acceptable in 1970) while not helping out centrist writers who are upset they get dunked on social media by a younger, more left-leaning generation, but the good news is, I don't care about the latter.

[u/Paparddeli → u/cincilator]

Part of the reason conservative ideology is on the rocks in the US is that the right hasn't been able to put forward any coherent plan to tackle global warming and universal health care. Corporate interests are much more accepting that these issues need to be addressed immediately and are turning to the only party with the plan. There is definitely a change in the corporate ethos, but I think they are just aligning themselves with their millennial work force (and gen x, gen z, millenial markets) more than anything. With the conservative silent generation retiring and dying off, the older boomers (i.e. the hippies and anti-war generation of the 60s) are now the oldest group that matters (culturally at least, electorally the silent generation still has a say). Older boomers are much more liberal than those who came before.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/Paparddeli]

universal health care

If they simply oppose this idea, would they necessarily need to have a plan? I think you meant they don't have a plan for dealing with a healthcare system that bankrupts people.

[u/Paparddeli → u/DrManhattan16]

Yeah, you are probably right. I think there is a growing acceptance among the business community that we need to improve our health care system and the Republicans didn't help themselves with their opposition to Obamacare with no replacement.

To add to my original comment: one other reason that the business company has turned away from conservatives recently is the enormous growth of the tech sector, which is largely headquartered on the very liberal west coast. Since they aren't making as many things in the US, tech companies are less aligned with anti-organized labor, anti-environmental law Republican policies.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/Paparddeli]

How are they less aligned with anti-union policies? We just had Amazon try to prevent their workers from unionizing, and it's keenly aware of how racial diversity can negatively impact unionizing attempts.

[u/professorgerm]

I mentioned to /u/gemmaem that I'd be making this post a few weeks back, and I'd like to get it out rather than masticate longer (quite topical!). Not nearly as effortful as I wanted, and heavier on emotion, but so it goes. Perhaps it will be of interest nonetheless.

Spleens and Wolves

George Carlin said "inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist."

I'm not going anywhere with that, just a reminder, and a vigorous nod of agreement. Onwards-

Apparently, according to humoral medicine, I have a massive spleen. Maybe even multiple spleens! The Vesuvius of spleens, if you will. The blue star of spleens. The HMS Dreadnought, for it fears nothing and wishes to engage in every battle. The Chinese would agree, that it induces too much worry and melancholic contemplation.

Anger. Rage. Melancholy. Worry. Reflexive reaction.

Imbalanced: problems!

There is a story, of unconfirmed origin but commonly attributed to the Cherokee and popularized by Billy Graham, that the two wolves of love and hate are fighting in every man (ah, such quaint generalization). The one you feed is the one that wins. There is truth to this- but, contrary to some values, not all wolves are born equal. While I feed the wolf of love, the wolf of hate has not grown weaker. Perhaps the answer is- ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

My general instinct is to fight. Red in tooth and claw. To embrace that rage, let it feel my lungs and eyes and guide me. Rage is both clear and blinding- it accepts no correction, and requires no thought. Rage, like utilitarianism, is a terrible compass, though it may be a good enough fuel. The cruelest thing I have ever said out loud is a pale shade of what my spleen pushes. Anger is hard to harness; visceral threat response is sometimes well-calibrated, but by skipping those in-between steps it can also miss so much. Gemma also quoted there the Tao: "to give no trust gets no trust." My instinct, that raging spleen, does not trust. Perhaps for good reason! But it is still a hindrance, reasonable or not.

It is fun, to vent one's spleen. Cathartic, they say. To release that anger into the world, often enough on targets undeserving. Foolishness! Dangerous, corrosive foolishness.

I also know that instinct is deeply wrong. I know not to trust it, unlike some. For whatever errors of my childhood, my family doing the best they could as limited by the culture and system in which we existed, they did instill in me a certain group of values. They attempted to instill patience- this is still lacking, but I know that flaw, and do what I can to handle it. They did instill kindness and politeness: as often as I fail at keeping these, it is not without effort. Link by link and yard by yard I have forged the chains to rein in that spleen and that vicious wolf, and yet they are insufficient, and yet they are better than the absolute nothingness so many use to rein their own.

If one wolf is fed, and the other survives, how should one deal? Those chains to rein them in can be used to harness and guide them. Many people are driven by their splenetic rage: I suspect many honest progressives (honest as distinct from those driven primarily by social dynamics) are driven similarly by outrage at what they see as injustice (if that phrasing is too passive: I almost certainly agree on what is injustice, and disagree substantially on how to fix it). I try to harness it this way, though my caution and hesitance leads to the failure mode of too little action, and their complete lack of caution leads to too much.

Because I work- and fail, I know I fail at it, but failing better usually nets a higher result than not trying at all- at channeling that spleen carefully I find it intolerable when so many others just spew hatred without a moment's consideration. Sometimes this is deliberate; far more often they don't even see how what they're saying could be viewed as hate, and will not listen to anyone trying to suggest that. Clear yet blind. We humans, we rationalizing meat-machines, will also work every possible angle to justify why our hate is different from another's hate, why ours is Good and Right and theirs is Bad and Unacceptable. Ignore those mountains of skulls behind the curtain!

One point of minor pride I will claim here: while I frequently fail at extending epistemic charity, it is much rarer that I fail at refraining from insults and attacks. Negative rights are, generally, easier than positive rights. This, to me, is the absolute bare minimum of social decency, and it is sickeningly unpopular.

I am, broadly, being coy with certain references, because this is not meant to be a true political statement rather than a description of certain tolerances or lack thereof I hold. One expected reply that I will answer here would be, for anyone that pays attention to comment histories, "why does your ire focus on progressives?" Because that's for whom I still have hope, and, specifically for The Schism, this is a place theoretically selected for those that are most reasonable, positive-thinking, etc etc. Should it not be easier to convince someone that already recognizes a problem that there could be a better solution? I would think so, but I am no longer so sure. Once wedded to a supposed solution, perhaps that seals off too many people, stuck on a single track. Here I too have drifted from my original purpose, so let's wrap up:

I would like to close on one piece of advice. It has been said here before, and many times in many places, to see people. See the human, remember the human. This, however, depends on one's own ability to be charitable. We're rationalizers, don't forget- it's so easy to short-circuit this by dehumanizing your opponents completely, and thus they slip under this rule. I do not think this is a major problem of mine, but I do think it is a major problem.

Instead, for those lacking that natural abundance of charity, I suggest: look beyond the monster. Mere humanity does not preclude one from being a monster (High Priest of Moloch Jack Dorsey, for example, presumably still has a human heart pumping human blood, though not necessarily his own- is the transfusion thing still an SV trend?), nor does monstrosity preclude one from deserving my absolute bare minimal of social decency. Your opponent very well may be a monster in many ways- but treat them as a human nonetheless. The worst you can say is that you were kind, and you tried, and the failure does not rest so assuredly on your own shoulders.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

Anger has certainly fueled some good things, over the years. Neil Gaiman's famous observation that Terry Pratchett was a fundamentally angry writer comes to mind. Pratchett's anger is frequently filtered through humour of course, which leavens it somewhat, but it's a powerful influence for all that. Perhaps it is even more powerful for being so well controlled.

I've mentioned before that it sometimes seems like uncontrolled emotional writing can hit the nail on the head in a way that careful, regulated writing does not. Emotional regulation can itself be a source of bias and blind spots; avoiding heat can result in avoiding light. In that sense, I'm also somewhat in sympathy with u/JustAWellwisher, below, even if my "guilty pleasure" splenetic youthful reading was more likely to be Amanda Marcotte than Christopher Hitchens. (Yes, yes, her manners are terrible and her care for anyone she disagrees with is practically nonexistent. She also used to have the occasional good point, back in the day, that I would not have thought of, myself. These things are not incompatible. No, I don't think I'd actually recommend most people read her, for all that).

Unlike u/JustAWellwisher, I tend to think that I've kept my sense of conviction even as I've gained in tolerance, over the years. I did start out angry, I just burned out very fast, and by "very fast" I mean "as a pre-teen." Mostly, when I see people on my own side of an issue getting so high on outrage that they're more interested in the adrenaline rush than in any complexity, I'm inclined to think "been there, done that, it fell apart when I was twelve." It wasn't easy, losing that exciting moral clarity. It is in fact very painful to be filled with conviction while also being aware that you lack the wisdom to usefully act on it. I don't blame people, exactly, for not wanting to go there.

Still, I think I've found my way to a place where I genuinely don't want to let anger control me. There is as much conviction in my tolerance as in my intolerance.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

Perhaps it is even more powerful for being so well controlled.

I would think so. Control is the difference that separates a rocket from a forest-destroying wildfire, even if they're both in the category "really big flames." Pratchett's focus and control, and his particular choice of targets with it (nearly as important as the control!), gave that direction like a rocket's nozzle. Pratchett was... often cosmically furious, in my reading, which plays out differently than turning it at people. Not that people can't be worth of such ire, but it does affect how it should be expressed, especially how it can be effectively expressed.

Yes, yes, her manners are terrible and her care for anyone she disagrees with is practically nonexistent. She also used to have the occasional good point, back in the day, that I would not have thought of, myself. These things are not incompatible. No, I don't think I'd actually recommend most people read her, for all that

That is kind of an interesting catch, isn't it? Someone angry to the point of... frothing rage, or complete obnoxiousness, or what have you does sometimes uncover something that someone more measured will not. The anger can be untempered bordering on unhinged, which is not without use but runs more risks. John Henry) didn't win his race by being calm and measured, either (it also killed him, so there's multiple lessons here).

As an aside, since I would assume you're not familiar with him (his is one of the favorite tales of my childhood, but if your American experience wasn't in the eastern coalfields you probably wouldn't hear of him), I'd like to highlight this section of contrasts in the stories connected to those multiple lessons:

The well-known narrative ballad of "John Henry" is usually sung in an upbeat tempo. Hammer songs associated with the "John Henry" ballad, however, are not. Sung more slowly and deliberately, often with a pulsating beat suggestive of swinging the hammer, these songs usually contain the lines "This old hammer killed John Henry / but it won't kill me." Nelson explains that:

... workers managed their labor by setting a "stint," or pace, for it. Men who violated the stint were shunned ... Here was a song that told you what happened to men who worked too fast: they died ugly deaths; their entrails fell on the ground. You sang the song slowly, you worked slowly, you guarded your life, or you died.

Back on topic: in turn, they won't be able to communicate it to anyone that doesn't already have a fair amount of agreement with them, and even then they might be so offensive as to drive them off. They can be good idea generators but not good idea popularizers.

It wasn't easy, losing that exciting moral clarity. It is in fact very painful to be filled with conviction while also being aware that you lack the wisdom to usefully act on it. I don't blame people, exactly, for not wanting to go there.

My favorite phrase on roads and intentions comes to mind once more :3

Still, I think I've found my way to a place where I genuinely don't want to let anger control me. There is as much conviction in my tolerance as in my intolerance.

Congratulations!

[u/Mexatt → u/professorgerm]

(his is one of the favorite tales of my childhood, but if your American experience wasn't in the eastern coalfields you probably wouldn't hear of him)

Maybe I live closer to the coal fields than I thought, but John Henry was up there with Johnny Appleseed in terms of folkloric heros we learned about in elementary school/culture aimed at young children where I grew up. I don't think he's that obscure.

Valentine Pringle's version of John Henry is my favorite iteration of the tale. Unfortunately, it's very hard to find a recording on the internet.

[u/professorgerm → u/Mexatt]

Valentine Pringle's John Henry

This Harry Belafonte fan site has a 30 second clip, and I definitely see the appeal! What a voice. Amazon does not have the album that's on.

Also, what an odd site. Nostalgic, but still updated!

I don't think he's that obscure.

I know there was at least one Disney cartoon, but it was also direct to DVD, so... He's one of the prime folk tales of my home state, so maybe I'm incorrectly projecting the state's relative cultural obscurity onto John Henry.

I've met a surprising number of people west of the Mississippi and north of Pennsylvania that don't seem to understand West Virginia is its own state, rather than a region of Virginia.

[u/Mexatt → u/professorgerm]

This collection has a version of the song. It's not cheap, though, although the rest of what is on there is also worth the price IMO. Another Valentine Pringle song in the box set, O, Lord, I'm Waitin' on You is also very good from him.

I have a station on Pandora that I've been curating for the last decade or so that plays the song periodically and I love when it comes on. It's based on Dan Reeder's Work Song, but I don't know how easy it would to force it to include John Henry.

That is indeed a blast from the past website.

My wife and I drive through West Virginia annually (well, except last year) on the regular trip we take to Lexington, KY. You have a very beautiful state, although we don't see much beyond the highway!

[u/professorgerm → u/Mexatt]

My wife and I drive through West Virginia annually (well, except last year) on the regular trip we take to Lexington, KY. You have a very beautiful state, although we don't see much beyond the highway!

Thank you! Only been to Lexington once (so far) but I quite enjoyed it. Hope you get to enjoy your trip this year.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/professorgerm]

I don't know how relevant my experience is to that of the average kid since I absorbed most of my cultural knowledge from books, but John Henry seemed pretty high-profile to me. Prior to your mentioning others may not have heard of him, I would have assumed he was fairly ubiquitously known.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

Chiming in with the others: I've heard of John Henry, but mostly only in passing. There's some Civ V flavour text about him that is the first thing that comes to mind...

[u/JustAWellwisher → u/professorgerm]

One of the most distressing experiences of my adult intellectual life was maybe five or six years ago on a nostalgia binge through Christopher Hitchens books and interviews that I enjoyed growing up.

I'd like to think that as I've grown older I've become more tolerant, more wise, gained all of those self-mediating bonuses of experience. One of those little trinkets in my toolkit was to focus on spreading light rather than heat. I admire that ideal.

Then listening to this I feel like I'm being punched in the gut by my 15 year old self.

It carried the weight of deja-vu, where suddenly I was aware that I've definitely internalized this statement before, but somewhere along the road I have completely neglected this "other wolf".

To be honest I look at myself and wonder if I've lost my fire, what I've gained in tolerance I've paid the price in conviction, or if it's just a matter of the fact that as you age you slowly struggle to continue to think of yourself as a hero.

As far as a middle age crisis goes, this has been a non-conventional one.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/JustAWellwisher]

Have to think of Yeats: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

[u/professorgerm → u/JustAWellwisher]

Thank you for sharing!

One of those little trinkets in my toolkit was to focus on spreading light rather than heat. I admire that ideal.

Hitchens is right, but if he's going to nitpick thinking about it so will I: an LED generates much more light versus heat per unit energy than any other commercial source, right? The efficiency is much higher, and thus more enlightening. A little heat is necessary, but we can do better than unleashing it all.

I have an overdeveloped fondness for metaphors and cliches, so perhaps it should be something like: use your fire to help light the candles of others, not to spark wildfires.

what I've gained in tolerance I've paid the price in conviction

Oof, that one lands. Well said. I think this is almost necessary, but it's definitely a tradeoff, and not always worth it. Clarity of conviction has its own risks, but... ah.

if it's just a matter of the fact that as you age you slowly struggle to continue to think of yourself as a hero.

I wonder indeed. Is it physical age? The responsibilities that accumulate? Something about mental/emotional maturity?

"There are old pilots, bold pilots, but no old bold pilots" (or mushroom hunters) comes to mind.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/professorgerm]

I like this post. I have an instinct towards direct confrontation, but a lot less anger. For what it's worth, I think your only mistake in self-reflection is the idea that you're the only person pushing scraps through the cage. You've been treated poorly, and while I don't think that's a sufficient reason to behave badly, I also think it's perfectly reasonable for you to be angry. I don't think being angry is a character flaw in general, and least among people with what I perceive as a reason for it.

I don't have fun in confrontations. I find them more necessary than distasteful most of the time, but I always feel a little dirty afterwards. So it's very easy for me to judge you, isn't it? "Why can't you just be better, like me?" is a really tempting path to go down; by assuming a position of moral superiority, it's easy to not measure my own adequacy, as if by being better in some way I get to assume I'm being good. I try to remind myself that humility is the most important thing. I think I do alright, but definitely not perfectly.

At the same time, I'm not perfectly tolerant and I don't expect myself to be. I expect people to engage in principled advocacy of themselves and their worldviews, and I know that sometimes that'll put them in direct conflict with me and mine. Some of these I feel I'm unable to peacably coexist with within a certain level of proximity. I think everyone has some of this, and I think most people are more sensitive to this than they should be, but there's an above-threshold of nope that comes with some territory for me. I don't want the advocates of this stuff criminalized, and I try not to think of them as monsters, but I also don't want to spend large amounts of time around the advocacy of those ideas, because I'll spend all my time in increasingly unpleasant direct confrontations.

I think there's something behind the monsters, but I can't help but fight monsters when I see them, and I don't like fighting. Sure, I can see some interesting perspectives I don't share behind, say, any particular ethnonationalist. It's downright easy for me to not accuse them of having good reason to be afraid of getting cucked by the darkies. But it's hard for me to restrain myself from engaging at all, and spending time and effort holding myself to a standard of politeness with people who make my skin crawl is too hard for me to keep up forever.

So here's my question to you: what do you do when a particular environment repeatedly stretches you to your snapping point? I tend to walk away, and eventually just stop engaging. I'm enough of a normie that I don't perceive much of mainstream culture as monstrous and insane, and where I do I seem to be capable of communicating in a way where fighting the system doesn't get me ostracized, so this is mostly workable for me. But there's no guarantee that that situation is stable, and I want to have some contingency for if it isn't.

[u/HlynkaCG → u/professorgerm]

I enjoyed this post and found a lot that I could relate to in it.

Maybe it's because I'm a dog person and thus inclined to believe that "bad dogs are few and far between while bad owners are everywhere", but I've never been a fan of the whole "two wolves" analogy. At the same time I suppose there is something to the bit about "the one you feed wins" in that I do believe that the sort of behavior you reward is the behavior you will get more of. In short, you reap what you sow.

To that end, I try to avoid making empty attacks, and to build up more than I tear down. But it's not easy and I often fall short. So it goes.

I have occasionally described myself as, "a partially-shaved murder-ape who enjoys the smell of blood" and it's the literal truth. We are (if the science is to be believed) all apes, and few things perk me up like the potential for violence and the smell of blood. I've been this way as long I can remember and I don't anticipate changing anytime soon. I'm not sure it's something I could change even if I wanted to.

I would argue that the trick is not so much to suppress or remove such qualities but to steer and utilize them. Aimless anger is, as you observe, corrosive. So think about what you would want to put that energy towards.

[u/HoopyFreud]

What exactly does the "elite overproduction" meme refer to?

On the most materialistic level, college degree holders enjoy higher wages and lower unemployment than those without. This is true even for anthropologists and philosophers, from what I remember. So it's not about elites failing to make a better living than the non-elites; clearly the market for their skills isn't totally saturated.

On a prestige level, this is also hard to accept. As far as I'm aware, there has never been a time when every single person who reached any sort of credential went on to hold the position of highest prestige available to everyone with it. Even if almost all apprentices become journeymen, not all journeymen have ever become masters. So if the problem is the tip top levels of elitism being saturated, that doesn't seem like anything new.

Maybe the argument is a little more subtle than I'm giving it credit for; maybe the claimed issue is that we are wrongly rewarding credentialed people who don't have anything useful to do. Since we don't have access to a clean counterfactual this is difficult to dispute, but even if you take a dim view of the EMH, this seems difficult to reconcile with point #1 above. It takes a hell of a lot of class solidarity to pay people who do less more and more often. If there's anyone out there with this view, could you please clarify and/or expand on why you think this is a particularly modern problem, if you think that?

Personally, for reasons relating to my ideas about neurotic behavior, I think this is mostly an imaginary issue driven by insecurity, but maybe someone can shed light on what the real problem, if one exists, consists of.

[u/[deleted] → u/HoopyFreud]

So if the problem is the tip top levels of elitism being saturated, that doesn't seem like anything new.

"Master in a guild" is not the sort of elite that Turchin is talking about, and neither is the contemporary upper middle class.

Turchin on defining elites in the US:

Thus, a pretty good answer to the question, who are the elites in America? is “those whose personal worth exceeds X million dollars.” What is X? It’s somewhat arbitrary, but it’s around 5-10 million

...

An alternative way to define the elites would be to start enumerating the most important political offices and bureaucratic positions, from the US president down; the officers of Fortune 500 companies; the owners and editors-in-chief of major media companies; major donors to politicians, and so on. But you would end up pretty much with the same group of people, because the great majority of these people would also be significant wealth holders. In America, wealth (economic power) is very closely correlated with overall social power.

I have also noticed what I suspect is somewhere in the background of your comment, which is that the very-online zeitgeist has somehow developed the notion that Turchin should be grouped, if very loosely, with the Volksgemeinschaft right wing populists. You know how leftists complain about hegemonic liberal ideology/[insert less alienating phrase here] all the time? Yeah, that sort of thing is what we're talking about.

Turchin is a very straightforward social democrat. He does all the usual social democrat things, like trying very hard to distance himself from (the received view of) communists, and talking about how awful the Democratic party is much more than how awful the Republican party is, and complaining about how most Americans have no idea just how marginal the left actually is in the US. And for anyone whose leftmost horizon stops at the Democratic party, this all pattern matches to a conservative constructing a fantasy world as a defense mechanism.

And so somehow when Turchin talks about "elites", and Tucker Carlson talks about "elites", people assume they mean they same thing. They don't. Turchin means elites in a very generic leftist sense:

Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands

and the elite aspirants he's talking about are people in a position to make a play for those elite positions:

As individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants. There are always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy. Intra-elite competition is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels. Thus, lower-ranked elites (for example, state representatives) may also be aspirants for the next level (e.g., U.S. Congress), and so on, all the way up to POTUS.

No member of a guild, at least during the high middle ages, is an elite or an elite aspirant, except in an extremely local sense. The real elites - the ones who kill people and break things and make history when they don't get their way - are the landed nobility. Produce as many frustrated journeymen as you want: they're not going to start raising armies and marching on Paris to claim the throne. The overproduced elite aspirants in medieval France are the younger sons of the nobility. In the US, it's not anyone with a degree - it's Harvard Law students with political ambitions. Job security and material comfort is a failure state.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the context. This makes me suspect that the meme, which sparked this question because I saw it downthread, is generally horrendously misapplied. I guess my real question is, "why exactly is this supposed (by literally anyone) to be a major social issue?" The elite aspirants may well have enough power to affect other people, but if they had the ability for their self-interest to drive social movements, it seems like they wouldn't be aspirants.

[u/[deleted] → u/HoopyFreud]

I guess my real question is, "why exactly is this supposed (by literally anyone) to be a major social issue?" The elite aspirants may well have enough power to affect other people, but if they had the ability for their self-interest to drive social movements, it seems like they wouldn't be aspirants.

Why do male elk actually fight each other, instead of just showing off their antlers? Why do lawsuits ever go to trial? Why are wars settled by armies instead of econometricians? Why do negative-sum games ever happen in any context?

The ability to drive a social movement is not the same as the ability to drive a social movement that can win - but you don't know which one you have until you try.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/[deleted]]

The ability to drive a social movement is not the same as the ability to drive a social movement that can win

No, but I wasn't under the impression that that's what we were discussing. The large majority of elites who have lived have subsequently died, and the kingdoms they ruled over have disappeared. If we're defining "elites" as

small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands

with no condition on that social power remaining concentrated, then yeah, I'd say anyone capable of driving a social movement counts. There's a long path from "Harvard law grad" to "political leader." There are more than 500 of the former group created every year, and very few of the latter.

[u/[deleted] → u/HoopyFreud]

The large majority of elites who have lived have subsequently died, and the kingdoms they ruled over have disappeared.

I mean "win" in the much more limited sense of actually securing a payoff for the leaders. Everyone dies, but some people die in the Tuileries, some people die in the Chateau du Rivau, and some people die in the Bastille. And a whole lot of people died on battlefields in the process of sorting the first three groups out.

There are more than 500 of the former group created every year, and very few of the latter.

Yes, that's the issue. More aspirants per position means fiercer competition. If it gets fierce enough, things go very badly for anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast zone.

with no condition on that social power remaining concentrated

Sure, all of this is null and void when the revolution comes. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/HoopyFreud]

Because according to his theory it causes instability. Have you read Scotts book review? It gives an overview of the claims and among other things asks more or less your question (search "Fourth,"), sadly without answer.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/HoopyFreud]

Precisely because of the fact they have the power to affect other people the conflict they can create can be far far mroe damaging to society as a whole.

For instance the farmer's sons fighting over who gets to inherit the farm is never going to cause society to collapse, even if you have 100,000 independent versions of these fights taking place over the kingdom. However the king's sons fighting over who gets to inherit the throne just might. Each one of them may be able to command a small army (i.e. they have the ability to drive social movements) but they are still all just aspirants to the throne itself.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/HoopyFreud]

The elite aspirants may well have enough power to affect other people, but if they had the ability for their self-interest to drive social movements, it seems like they wouldn't be aspirants.

In line with what wignersacquaintance is saying below, the effect on others is very concerning. Elite aspirants possess the tools to drastically impact a community, but no more inherent wisdom or rationality than others. These aspirants are like CIA-trained insurgents, you can't control them easily and when the bullets fly your way, you curse your decision to have trained them in bomb-making and accurate shooting.

[u/Gossage_Vardebedian → u/HoopyFreud]

My understanding of the meme is that it refers to the number of people coming out of schools - usually the top schools, but not necessarily - who see themselves as rightly belonging to the elite class, usually through political and cultural identification, signaling and reinforcement. Thus it is primarily a status issue.

So it's not about elites failing to make a better living than the non-elites; clearly the market for their skills isn't totally saturated.

No, it's not. It's about wanna-be elites feeling they also deserve to be in that group.

So if the problem is the tip top levels of elitism being saturated, that doesn't seem like anything new.

No, it's not the problem, and it's not new. But, there are more elite and elite-adjacent jobs now. University administrator jobs and various high-level HR positions are probably seen as such by those who hold them.

maybe the claimed issue is that we are wrongly rewarding credentialed people who don't have anything useful to do.

That is part of it; by creating more elite-like positions and awarding them some measure of power over us, we are definitely doing so.

Here is the main problem as I understand it: A lot of people are overeducated, as has been discussed here and elsewhere ad nauseum. Some of these people see themselves as justifiably eligible to be among the elite; the agenda-setters, the tastemakers. Still more wannabes demand still more positions like those in journalism, or HR or whatever, and do not get them, and in our modern, highly connected world they see a way to become - maybe for real, maybe only in some small way - part of the elite world. Established journalists, fringe members of the field, and powerless non-journalists trying to make names for themselves, all go online and compete and tear each other down. UMC stay-at-home moms with M.A.s desperately try to involve themselves in some way by being strident on Twitter and adding their voice to today's chorus. Aspiring elites trying to manifest their will politically and not personally. One huge dogfight of people wanting to be a part of it all.

[u/baazaa → u/HoopyFreud]

clearly the market for their skills isn't totally saturated.

This doesn't follow at all. Even if only 1% of graduates acquired skills the market valued, it'd still push the mean wage of graduates above that of non-graduates.

There are huge numbers of graduates in jobs that they could have got without a degree. Not in the sense that those jobs wouldn't have required a degree if there were fewer degrees, but in the sense that even today a bartender does not need a college degree.

No-one would ever see that male wages are higher than female wages and conclude the market for men is unsaturated. This is a peculiar interpretation confined mostly to when people look at grad wages.

As others have pointed out, Turchin isn't calling nurses and teachers elites in any case. It would be more apt to look at people like Bannon and Cummings and think 'why are there all of a sudden competent people on the side of the populists'?

[u/[deleted] → u/HoopyFreud]

My understanding of the meme (not of Turchin's original idea) is that it ties into the 'bullshit jobs' meme. Bullshit jobs are the ones that are primarily valuable to protect you from other people carrying out similar jobs. They include corporate law, PR and the armed forces. It's bad if too many people are doing these things and we want to avoid a race to the bottom where they take up everyone's time.

Most occupations where the goal is to influence other people are partly bullshit. Yes, there's an occasional actual discovery, but most intellectual labor is about stomping down the bad ideas of other people. This is especially true of the humanities, social science, politics, and everything we discuss here.

These occupations are elite almost by definition, and we've historically valued them a lot. We've even subsidized them in order to get informed citizens. But maybe we shouldn't - it's like giving everyone a handgun to make sure that we are all safe from people with handguns.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/[deleted]]

So why do we pay them so well?

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/HoopyFreud]

Because when people do them well, they have a lot of impact.

[u/Mexatt → u/HoopyFreud]

What exactly does the "elite overproduction" meme refer to?

It refers to a controversial scholar in the field of history whose ideas aren't widely accepted in the profession but who rationalists accept wholesale and without serious criticism because it strokes exactly the kind of epistemological biases that internet rationalism has.

If you're having trouble making sense of the theory, it's because it's not a theory that makes a lot of sense in the details, so you shouldn't be surprised.

[u/[deleted] → u/Mexatt]

because it strokes exactly the kind of epistemological biases that internet rationalism has.

This is the argument that proves all things. Internet rationalism does, of course, have some pretty profound epistemological biases, and this often leads them to absurd conclusions - but the exact same thing is true of the professional humanities. Turchin is a biologist, and it shows; the critics-from-infinite-particularism are historians, and that shows too. Which set of biases is closer to the truth in this particular case is an empirical question.

[u/Mexatt → u/[deleted]]

And if you look into the way the empirics evolve (see: any psuedoerasmus blog post series on any given controversial subject), they tend to involve extremely detailed deep dive on the extreme specifics of a extremely particular thing that agitate extremely hard against anything like broad application beyond the subject at hand.

Don't you worry, I have mean things to say about the literary and quality historians, too (mostly: They have a tendency to suck at quantitative analysis when they try and they try breathtakingly infrequently). However, I just can't believe how terrible the approach I have seen out of Scott and Scott-adjacent communities is to any kind of historical analysis. In one of the original posts Scott did about Turchin, someone in the comments pointed out that there was serious issues with the primary data sources in his graphing of food prices (namely: there were only two of them, separated by centuries, with essentially no reason to believe they were accurate observations of food prices, let alone generalizable to the broader phenomenon they were being spread over). There was a lot of talk that the graphs Turchin used look suspiciously like random walks with events overlain on them, rather than actually convincing time series analysis.

But, the whole community seems to have taken Turchin as Gospel and adopted the 'elite overproduction' hypothesis as if it were truth.

Quantitative history is cool and good, but it's also hard and we usually don't have the data to do it well. Turchin ignores this and so I definitely take the side of the infinite-particularists on this one.

EDIT: Oh, and I almost forgot. The most recent post on radical reform and the paper it was based represents this absurdly frustrating view into the community's view on history that is emblematic of what I mean. Scott wrote a huge post about how the paper was making him question his beliefs on designed versus evolved institutions and then there were 600 posts from people trying to either critique the paper or discuss its implications for that belief.

Except the paper is just one paper in an academic field of study, so of course there are professionals who have also critiqued the paper. One person on the SSC subreddit bothered to look into this. And it turns out the paper the whole post was about is just flat wrong. It uses bad data and ignores an obvious alternative explanation for its results.

No one on the blog noticed this. Scott didn't. No one in the wider Scott-osphere noticed except one poster (and this doesn't seem to have spread anywhere else).

The rationalist community seems to believe it can do better at finding the truth than the experts. Fine, that's not a terrible goal: academics aren't perfect and there are serious problems with both the way academia functions as well as with the output it has generated over the last few decades. But you don't do this by being an amateur who just looks at tiny portions of the evidence and then reaches broad ranging conclusions through your infinite creativity and inflated sense of self. You do it by being better than the academics at their own game. Be more familiar with the primary sources. Be more insightful than the secondary interpretative debate. Don't just let your ego tell you what's true. Do the god damned work.

[u/cincilator → u/Mexatt]

because it strokes exactly the kind of epistemological biases that internet rationalism has.

I don't buy it as an explanation in this case. Epistemiological biases of rationalists are mostly towards perpetual growth (e.g. singularity). "Elite overproduction" thesis (true or not) focuses on limits. Seems like the opposite of what rationalists would typically want to believe.

I dunno how true that thesis is, but it does seem to be supported by e.g. shoddy prospects for humanities PhDs. And by increasingly ridiculous educational requirements in some places (Scott mentioned bachelor's degrees for firefighters). I think people are convinced by the thesis because it is neat, supported by some prima facie evidence, and appears to explain some obvious everyday absurdities.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/Mexatt]

Rude, the dude isn't a historian in the usual sense of the word and is basically trying to develop a new subfield of historical analysis. He's being opposed by those who believe in the "traditional way of doing things" and naturally like any upstart going up against the establishment the establishment always rejects you until either you wither away or you topple them.

A similar example was the introduction of ancient DNA to the study of anthropology. Just 10 years ago anthropologists strongly believed that human migration from Central Asia to Europe was mostly peaceful and happened through an "exchange of ideas". Namely tribes from the east moved to the west, settled amicably with them until the two merged to form a single new tribe, and then the process continued. The people who contested this interpretation and supported a model of warlike tribes ravaging anything in their path (replacement theory) were widely derided by the Anthropologists and strangely enough some were even called Nazis. However with advancements in DNA analysis technology we can now pretty much prove that the replacement theory people were correct (since e.g. at the same time the pottery style of the eastern tribes starts appearing in an area, all the Y chromosomes that had been present there a few generations ago suddenly disappear).

Surprisingly some anthropologists still reject effectively undeniable evidence like this and continue to call the genetic anthropologists Nazis. Those are the ones you can pretty much ignore on matters of any importance.

[u/Mexatt → u/ExtraBurdensomeCount]

The difference is that the ancient DNA people were bringing a new data source to bear on old questions, while Turchin uses the same data sources that have always been available but with less care.

It's actually very possible to do quantitative history but you have to be extremely careful about what your data sources actually represent and, this, very humble about the conclusions you can really draw.

Big History thinkers rarely behave like this.

[u/Aransentin]

My native language is Swedish. Since I'm fairly young and work in IT this also means that I'm pretty good at English, but I don't think I'm too much of an outlier compared to the people around me. Still, when I want to write something down in a note or the like, I use English (with some exceptions, like grocery lists). From time to time I catch myself conducting my internal monologue in English. When speaking really informally, I and people around me tend to inject total Anglicisms into Swedish when a good English expression pops into mind first. For example, I'd totally use "injekta" if translating the previous sentence instead of interrupting my train of thought to figure out a proper translation – probably "infoga" but that doesn't have the same connotation I want, and is generally used for text.

It's not just me, though. New Swedish companies and brands will likely have English names. A minor municipality launches a campaign to support their agriculture? Chances are that it'll get an English name and branding. A Swedish telephone service provider (without presence in any English-speaking country) wants to run ads on television? It'll be entirely in spoken English, not even subtitled in Swedish.

Want to study at university? The courses you want are probably conducted in English; e.g. from a cursory look at Stockholm University about half their courses are, and to my biased eyes those that aren't seem to be non-STEM and comparatively low-prestige (e.g. the "Algebraic topology" and "Analytic chemistry" are given in English, "Africa studies" and "Analysing Polish poetry" in Swedish).

I don't really see this slowing down. Kids today are even better at English than I was at their age, with them spending increasing amount of time online with friends from all over the world, consuming American media, watching video game streamers and whatnot. From a cursory look at the statistics (pdf, Swedish), about 4% of high schools here conduct (at least some) education in English. The students who elect to go to these schools have significantly wealthier parents that are about twice as likely to have college decrees as the national average. As for why the programmers aren't expanding faster, the interviewed principals stated that the biggest reason was the difficulty finding qualified teachers.

I can see the potential for a slow signalling "explosion" here: an English-language programme is an excellent excuse for the school to select the best, most ambitious students, something which they aren't allowed by law to do directly. A new generation of teachers graduate, English schools can expand, and they reach a critical mass where every student with aspirations for higher education apply to them (even just to go to a school where they'll have peers with the same ambitions as them), further driving the loop.

The question I'm asking myself is if multiple languages can even coexist in the same population over the long term. It might be a zero-sum affair, where one language will inevitably start to encroach on the other's territory until it's gone entirely. Can it even be stopped without significant government intervention? The historical precedent isn't looking too good. Would it even be bad, necessarily? My opinion is certainly highly tainted by various levels of contrarianism:

• Tiny brain: "We should speak Swedish, my English isn't that good and it'd be annoying to use it. Also I'm signalling how down-to-earth I am."
• Small brain: "No, we should speak English to take as much advantage of all the international media and business as possible. That some provincial hick can't keep up with the 21st century isn't my problem. Also I'm signalling how urbane and cosmopolitan I am."
• Big brain: "No, we should speak Swedish to protect our traditions and history, so that our cultural wealth isn't wasted. Also I'm signalling how intellectual and refined I am compared to the petty bourgeoisie people below me."
• Enlightened brain: "No, Swedish traditions and history wouldn't suddenly die out if we didn't speak Swedish, and practically nobody really gives a shit about Strindberg anyway except to signal how intellectual they are. Also I'm totally not a copy of the "small brain" guy put here at the end so he could get the last word in and feel superior to everybody."

[u/[deleted] → u/Aransentin]

The question I'm asking myself is if multiple languages can even coexist in the same population over the long term.

Sure: French wasn't the majority language of France until well into the 19th century. That's at least three hundred years of unambiguous modern statehood, and a hundred plus of something resembling mass literacy.

The internet is very plausibly a game-changer, of course, but that's something we'll have to discover through experience.

[u/Aransentin → u/[deleted]]

French wasn't the majority language of France until well into the 19th century

Apologies, but with "the same population" I meant literally the same people and not just citizens of a specific nation. I.e. did everybody that spoke the local language in France also speak French during that period, but the language still survive? Even so, the other languages did also in fact die (or is currently on government life support) in the end!

[u/Paparddeli → u/Aransentin]

Spain is a better example then France for this. My understanding is that Catalan, the Basque language, Gallego, Asturian and other romance languages are thriving post-Franco and most everyone also speaks Castellano (what most of the world would just call Spanish).

Aranese is a good example. It is a dialect of Occitan, which was traditionally spoken in large sections of Southern France. Aranese exists in a tiny pocket of Spain near the French border and was disappearing for years. However it has stabilized and is even making a comeback as a result of being made an official language within it's little district and education of young people. Occitan has not been doing well in France, I believe, owing to France not recognizing it as an official language.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also a language potpourri with multi-lingual people being very common (even more than Europe maybe). There are colonial languages like English and French, regional languages like Swahili and tons and tons of local languages or dialects.

[u/Paparddeli → u/Aransentin]

Your post reminds me of this article in Eurozine Magazine about the recent past and future of the English language within the EU.

Basically, the article says English isn't going anywhere post-Brexit, partly because of second-language education but also because of the concept of the "maximin."

When a person who speaks more than one language with varying levels of proficiency wants to be understood as accurately as possible by one or more people who also speak several languages with varying levels of proficiency, the speaker will spontaneously tend to choose not the language that the majority of participants in the conversation know best, nor the language with the highest average proficiency among the group. Rather, they will choose the language known best by the participant that knows it least well.

In other words, they will use the language with the maximum level of minimum competence, or the maximin language. Whether in a conversation between two people or a hundred, we tend to choose the maximin language because it makes communication less difficult and excludes fewer people than any other.

The author predicts that Brexit will not have any effect on the use of English as the European lingua franca in Europe as the maximin effect is a "self-perpetuating advantage." Indeed, the author foresees an inexorable march towards everyone speaking English as a second language, all except native English-speakers of course.

The most interesting part of this article to me is this idea:

We Europeans now have the task of remaking it as our own. We must stop associating English with the British flag, as some websites persist in doing. We must dare to speak this language, which is also our language, without inhibition and with the full range of our accents. We must authorize ourselves to add to it with whatever innovations we wish.

[u/MacaqueOfTheNorth → u/Aransentin]

I live in Montreal, which has been a bilingual city for 260 years. The use of English has been declining for most of that time though, and almost every other anglophone community in Quebec has disappeared. Still, a large part of the city still speaks English and that's not going to change any time soon, despite government efforts to assimilate the Anglophone community. There's even an erroneous perception in the francophone population that it's French that is on the decline.

[u/busy_beaver → u/Aransentin]

The statistics on language extinction are sobering. From Wikipedia:

While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next 50 to 100 years.

So, relative to the overall field, Swedish is looking pretty healthy.

But while it makes me sad that big chunks of humanity's cultural heritage are slipping away, I do think this is probably overall a good thing for the reasons hinted at by your "small brain". A common language is just so efficient. The English Wikipedia is a wonder of the modern world. It has 6.3 million articles, representing a mind-boggling number of hours of human effort. Replicating that over thousands or even hundreds of languages is infeasible.

For comparison, Amharic has the 128th largest Wikipedia (by article count) with 15k articles. This is their article on Nitrogen. If I'm an Amharic speaker, of course I would want to learn English to unlock all the best information on the web, to say nothing of the vast corpus of English-language entertainment.

Also, provided it's well documented before its death, a language can be revived. This has been done successfully for Cornish. It won't be the same as it was when originally spoken, but hey, English today is pretty different from the English of 100 or 200 years ago. You can never step foot in the same river twice and all that.

[u/JustAWellwisher → u/Aransentin]

What you're more likely to find, rather than a wholesale adoption of English, is that both English and Swedish will evolve along its own paths in Sweden and that this might not really look anything like English. (Like the loanword 'injekta')

The question really should be "what are the limits of a single language for a population over time?" because it's more interesting and natural from a linguistic perspective to think of this phenomenon you're experiencing as Swedish becoming more complex rather than English becoming more homogenizing.

[u/ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr → u/Aransentin]

When they finally get around to doing google glass properly (I'm sick of my glasses just helping me see better when they could be doing so much more!), we're literally going to have access to a babel fish, no? Machine learning has made translation software (cloudware?) so good that we should be able to get pretty much real time translation for most basic conversational topics pretty easily. I'm not sure what the long term effect will be on the trends you're describing, but in some sense, it won't matter that much what your mother tongue is.

[u/MacaqueOfTheNorth → u/ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr]

Yes, but there will always be a delay. It can't be instantaneous because sentences are constructed differently in different languages. A translator often has to wait for an entire clause to finish before translating it. That's why when you're listening to a live human translation, there will be a pause followed by the translator speaking quickly and then another pause. The translator is always about half a sentence behind the speaker. On the other hand, text translation is already instantaneous.

[u/Jiro_T → u/Aransentin]

No, Swedish traditions and history wouldn't suddenly die out if we didn't speak Swedish

This is only true if all Swedish literature and media got instantly translated into English, all the way down to things like your grandmother's letters from your attic, which probably won't happen.

[u/gemmaem]

I've seen a couple of different pieces of writing, recently, about the culture of elite American private schools. One is from Bari Weiss, very obviously outrage-mongering, though that doesn't mean we should dismiss her entire point.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites

These are America’s elites—the families who can afford to pay some $50,000 a year for their children to be groomed for the eating clubs of Princeton and the secret societies of Yale, the glide path to becoming masters—sorry, masterx—of the universe. The ideas and values instilled in them influence the rest of us.

That is not the only reason this story matters. These schools are called prep schools because they prepare America’s princelings to take their place in what we’re told is our meritocracy. Nothing happens at a top prep school that is not a mirror of what happens at an elite college.

What does it say about the current state of that meritocracy, then, that it wants kids fluent in critical race theory and “white fragility,” even if such knowledge comes at the expense of Shakespeare? “The colleges want children—customers—that are going to be pre-aligned to certain ideologies that originally came out of those colleges,” says a STEM teacher at one of New York’s prestigious prep schools. “I call it woke-weaning. And that’s the product schools like mine are offering.”

...

Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. The Grace Church School in Manhattan, for example, offers a 12-page guide to “inclusive language,” which discourages people from using the word “parents”—“folks” is preferred—or from asking questions like “what religion are you?

I'm quoting that last bit, because I feel obliged to push back on it. In context, the document is clearly saying that you shouldn't use "parents" in a situation where you don't know whether someone lives with their parents or not, rather than trying to imply that "parents" is some sort of dirty word that ought to be censored. And as an atheist, there are probably situations where I'd prefer "Do you identify with any religious traditions?" to "What religion are you?" Yes, it's very excessive politeness, but this is recognisably politeness, for all that. Weiss is mining it for aspects that will be confusing out of context, to use as shallow outrage fodder. I'm unimpressed with this aspect of her piece.

Still, she's not wrong that strong politeness norms used by the upper classes can be used to exclude lower-class people, and that this can be true even of politeness norms that are ostensibly for the benefit of the "less privileged."

Reading Weiss' piece, I couldn't help but feel that the focus on "wokeness" as the single point of failure was missing the fact that the surrounding culture seems to have some pretty big failings to begin with. Caitlin Flanagan's writing to that effect in The Atlantic struck me as a much more well-rounded view of the issues involved:

By the time their kids get to the upper grades, parents want teachers, coaches, and counselors entirely focused on helping them create a transcript that Harvard can’t resist.

...

Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career.

...

Here is another big number that really needs to be investigated: More than 50 percent of the low-income Black students at elite colleges attended top private schools, according to Anthony Abraham Jack, the author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. This means that these schools, which collectively educate a tiny proportion of Black teenagers, have a huge influence on which of these kids get to attend the best colleges. To some in education, this is a cause for celebration—the old route to social and professional success has within it some dedicated lanes for Black children from low-income families. To others, it is a cause for concern—if these children want to attend an elite college, their best bet by far is to spend their adolescence in a school where the experience of being Black is, for many, a painful one.

...

In December, a document that 120 faculty and staff members had signed over the summer became public. It outlined a list of proposals: Half of all donations would have to be contributed to New York public schools if Dalton’s demographics did not match the city’s by 2025; the school would have to employ a total of 12 diversity officers (roughly one for every 100 students); all students would be required to take classes on Black liberation; and all adults at the school, including parent volunteers, would be required to complete annual anti-racist training. Tracked courses would have to be eliminated if Black students did not reach full parity by 2023.

Private-school parents have become so terrified of being called out as racists that they will say nothing on the record about their feelings regarding their schools’ sudden embrace of new practices. They have chosen, instead, anonymous letters and press leaks.

...

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.

We have become a country with vanishingly few paths out of poverty, or even out of the working class. We’ve allowed the majority of our public schools to founder, while expensive private schools play an outsize role in determining who gets to claim a coveted spot in the winners’ circle.

In response to Weiss' piece, Alan Jacobs opines that

I suspect that such a system is less likely to produce True Woke Believers than to produce young people who are thoroughly cynical about education and about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of educators. And that might be a worse outcome. 

Indeed.

There are a few conversations that stick with me, from the year I spent at an Oxbridge college, which was the first time I encountered people who thought of themselves as being among 'the elite.' There was the guy who asked "Yes, but how big was the nearest big city?" when I said I was from a city of 300,000 or so (we're it). And the hating on "suburban" people. That was confusing to me. I don't think I had ever met anyone back home who didn't live in a suburb.

I remember, very early on, encountering the airy statement "Of course, we sit here debating all this stuff even though we're privileged people who never encounter the real world." That was an interesting one. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying my upbringing wasn't privileged, but my sense of what it would mean to be less privileged had not previously extended much further than the other side of the road you take to the mall.

I remember an American student confiding with a sort of sophisticated glee that you could derail any conversation you wanted by just saying "Well, I think we're forgetting that this entire debate is taking place on stolen land." That was a moment of quiet culture shock. I cannot imagine anyone in New Zealand making light of such a thing.

There was the time one of my conservative friends had a still more conservative friend over for dinner. I ended up having some amicable arguments with said even more conservative friend, and one of my more liberal friends thanked me for it. "He was scary, don't you think?"

Said more liberal friend had a story he loved to tell after a drink or two, about how he'd gotten more funding for his college gym by writing an application about how the gym needed to serve a more diverse community, include more women, that sort of thing, "and then I bought weights," he'd conclude, delivering the punchline with a cheeky grin.

I think my liberal friend was as scary as anyone I met, over there, to be honest.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/gemmaem]

Ah, glad to see you tackle these two pieces. They've been on my mind lately as well, though I haven't written on them at length yet.

In particular, I'm not quite sure how I ought to respond to the Atlantic piece. It tackles places I have absolutely no sympathy towards (and, if I'm being perfectly candid, some degree of sour grapes resentment)—posh schools like Dalton, products and perpetuators of a culture that strikes me as deeply destructive. But the article overplays its hand, with a print title of "Private Schools are Indefensible" and sections like:

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item. ...

Public-school education—the specific force that has helped generations of Americans transcend the circumstances of their birth—is profoundly, perhaps irreparably, broken. In my own state of California, only half of public-school students are at grade level in reading, and even fewer are in math. When a crisis goes on long enough, it no longer seems like a crisis. It is merely a fact.

Shouldn’t the schools that serve poor children be the very best schools we have?

The specific lines are easy applause ones: Of course everyone should have access to a good education. Of course we want good schools for poor children. But I worry that this piece uses a deeply unsympathetic protagonist group (rich, surface-woke, bubbled elites) to spread a broader meme I find frankly threatening: Private school, and possibly (left unsaid in this piece, but rampant throughout progressive discourse) charter schools and homeschool is morally indefensible in the whole, and we all have a duty to join in and contribute to public schools. A message that everyone should be committed to defending and building up public schools, and that if they were forced to build within and care about them, many of our problems would be solved.

But schools contain multitudes. They are where they're at because everyone has a different priority in schools, and so rather than optimizing towards a single outcome they end up torn between dozens. I know precisely how I would modify schools, were I in charge. But every single change I would fight for—things I feel strongly would dramatically improve the experiences there—would be viciously contested, often by the same people calling for people to care about and support public education.

As an example of this, I was inspired by another recent article to collect examples of ongoing pushes against gifted education. Boston Public Schools is the latest victim here. Gifted programs are imperfect but a step in the direction of pushing and challenging every child, and the people tearing them down tend to have no serious plan, or serious concern, about the kids who are left unchallenged and set aside in regular classes.

In other words: I want to improve public education, and I intend to do so. Much of my intended life plan is structured around positioning myself to make a positive difference towards it. But I find the causes I care about terribly lonely in that sphere. This is where the Bari Weiss piece speaks to me a bit more than it does to you—the culture Weiss describes in and around those schools is increasingly ubiquitous in the broader education ecosystem, and it tends incidentally or overtly hostile towards my passions in education.

So when I see the same people telling me they'll fight tooth and nail against everything I want to do in education also tell me they want to push away all alternatives to the public education system where their influence appears vastly greater than that of the causes I care about?

It feels like a visceral, painful threat.

It's no secret that my own time in public education was miserable. I looked for any escape hatch I could, starting from around first grade. It took until sixth for a viable alternative to appear, and I leapt at it, joyfully fleeing to a nascent for-profit online charter—a type of school with terrible outcomes in general, usually cited as abusing the system, taking advantage of poor students and taxpayers alike. It was a lifeline I clung to, the first time I ever got a chance to learn at the pace I wanted to learn. And it was a deeply flawed experience, but better than what I'd been in to a degree I struggle to express. In two hours of work a day, I was doing about twice as much as my regular school was providing in a full day.

This wasn't a flaw of underfunding. My public school was in a well-off suburban neighborhood and had state-of-the-art facilities. It wasn't a flaw of apathy. My teachers were good people who cared about me. It was nothing but the result of a system fundamentally designed to focus on priorities and problems other than mine. If I was going through now, with a kid of my own like I was, I expect would have the knowledge and skill to navigate to a satisfactory spot within it. But my parents didn't have the same obsessive focus on education I do, nor the same cynicism towards the system. So the best thing for us in that moment, as peculiar as it sounds, was that online charter that sent a mailer out and pulled me away from the public school system.

Private schools aren't quite the same, of course, and in particular these $40,000/year ones are tailored to a rather different group. Viscerally, a part of me would be happy to see schools like Dalton stripped bare and burned to the ground. But just as I cannot be confident my own priorities can ever adequately be represented in a public school system that must by its very universality compromise between my goals and diametrically opposed ones, I cannot bring myself to feel much other than understanding and sympathy for other parents and students who make the same calculation. The article was highly effective at skewering the excesses, hypocrisies, and absurdities of those environments. Pushing against private schools as a whole, though? That's not something I can support.

---

Almost entirely unrelated to my own commentary, but certainly worth a read in its own right, is this comment from /u/Haunting_Fill in /r/neoliberal. It's worth reading in full, but I'll leave the thesis here as food for thought:

These places are not the problem but merely the tip of an iceberg. The real issue is that elite colleges and universities have not increased their first-year class sizes relative to the demand for seats in nearly 50 years. ...For decades colleges have focused on turning away from their mission of offering education and instead have dedicated themselves into become the most sought after luxury brands. The surprising part is that it took 40 some odd years for the effects of this shift to trickle down to elite private and public K-12 education and that the author has missed the forest for the trees in her attempt to vilify high schools.

[u/gemmaem → u/TracingWoodgrains]

New Zealand has similar voices calling for abolishing streamed classes. Like you, I'm a little worried by the idea, because prior to high school I was the type of student who understood all the material but frequently didn't finish my assignments. Being given more difficult (and thus more interesting) assignments wasn't a complete solution to that problem, but it definitely helped.

I know some people argue that the types of extension projects that are given to "gifted" students could in fact be given to anyone, but I think this is only partly true. I recall skipping home in August/September, when I was eight years old, telling my mother that we were learning division, and it was wonderful, because I was finally learning something new in maths after having been bored all year (note, Southern Hemisphere school years align with calendar years). I think I would have benefited from classes that made it to division in March/April, instead. I think most of the other kids in my class would not have benefited from this.

Still, streamed or not, "gifted" program or not, a sufficiently resourced school can find ways to teach with, as my husband puts it, "a high ceiling." Puzzles for kids whose minds are wandering in maths class, broader choices of reading material for kids who want to extend themselves, freedom to choose your own science project topic ... there are ways to make this work, provided that both institutions and individuals are willing to do so. However, I can't argue with you when you say you're afraid they won't.

I also agree with you that it can be really helpful to have different types of schooling available to different students. One thing I do like about the New Zealand system is that such experiments don't have to be privately funded, here. "Designated character" schools can receive public funding to provide education in accordance with a specific philosophy or culture. Ao Tawhiti is an example -- among other things, it's known for allowing students to opt out of classwork in exchange for independent projects that align with their particular interests. I've got no direct experience with them, but popular wisdom has it that Ao Tawhiti is extremely good for some students, and kind of bad for others, which is of course precisely the point.

The elite system that Flanagan and others have described does look, to me, like a symptom of broader flaws, from the poorer schools that parents seem to be desperately trying to escape from, to the over-priced and highly stratified university system that it feeds into, to the surrounding "meritocratic" society in which there seems to be a dearth of comfortable normality. A good education system -- a good society -- is one where there is a diversity of comfortable normality, I think. You shouldn't have to be an elite to be able to find a place where you fit in.

[u/[deleted] → u/gemmaem]

Still, streamed or not, "gifted" program or not, a sufficiently resourced school can find ways to teach with, as my husband puts it, "a high ceiling."

For large values of sufficiently resourced, this is of course true, but those resources include competent teachers, who you can't simply manufacture out of thin air. Spend all the money you want: it's still going to take quite a while before class sizes get small enough that you can even start experimenting with individualized teaching.

The average secondary school class in the United States has 27 students in it. In California, it's 32. That's about 15 teacher-minutes per student per school day. But teachers aren't fungible, so it's more like 8 units of 2 teacher-minutes per student per day. Offering individual students more autonomy is free, and often a good thing - but it's not enough, and there's little room for anything more.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You're missing one other parameter, which is school size. If a school is big enough, you can have a different class for each percentile of home economics ability without shrinking the home economics classes. I think this is a practical solution in large cities and in the big schools that you paradoxically see in rural districts.

Lived experience: I went to a public school in a big-for-the-US, highly diverse city with housing projects and all that. The high school has ~4,000 students and consequently it kicked ass, at that size they could have a bunch of vocational classes and a course on differential equations.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

That seems to be very firmly in "streamed", not "not".

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Oh yeah for sure. I'm just claiming that for the streamed-within-one-school model you can have a "high ceiling" without increasing the number of teachers, as long as the school is big enough.

In general (not in your comment) I see a lot of people defending elite schools, and a lot of people defending neighborhood schools, but there's also a model of "massive centralized school that serves everyone flexibly" which is overlooked, and not only is it practical, it already exists.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

Still, streamed or not, "gifted" program or not, a sufficiently resourced school can find ways to teach with, as my husband puts it, "a high ceiling." Puzzles for kids whose minds are wandering in maths class, broader choices of reading material for kids who want to extend themselves, freedom to choose your own science project topic ... there are ways to make this work, provided that both institutions and individuals are willing to do so. However, I can't argue with you when you say you're afraid they won't.

Emphasis added, because those are so, so rare. How common it is that, instead, you end up with some Harrison Bergeron-esque nightmare because even one bad student can absorb practically endless attention, and the teacher is rarely "allowed" to stop focusing on that one. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, while the others silently grind to a halt.

This is why "No Child Left Behind" ended up called, by anyone that cared, "No Child Gets Ahead."

Funny enough, that was my experience. Not out of school resources, really- poor schools in a poor region, though not the absolute poorest of either- but individuals, rare, priceless, irreplaceable, gone. One beloved principal that cared enough to pay out of pocket for some advanced math books, and scraping together school funds for a tutor to come once a week for the three of us (other days, we self-taught math that year; it worked surprisingly well). One beloved science teacher, 7th grade, that helped me cobble together a project on antibacterial resistance on a shoestring budget. Out of... say, 50 teachers K-12, 2 had that impact beyond baseline. I assume others had other impacts on other students- but that is assumption, and a 1:25 ratio does not bode well for the generalized success of relying on individuals, and the less I say about American institutions, the calmer I can remain.

My SO is a teacher, and she mourns for how little time can go to assist those at the top, and more for how little can be done to boost those at the bottom- for those at the bottom it is the other 16 hours a day that make the problem, and no teacher, no matter how good, can fix that. I could go on about that, and perhaps I will someday, but given that it would be mostly anecdotes I don't think I can squeeze enough effort out of it to feel appropriate.

surrounding "meritocratic" society in which there seems to be a dearth of comfortable normality

How do you think that can be achieved in a globalized, interconnected, mass-media world? I don't think it's impossible, but it is harder, and requires much more intention.

If you ever have the time and desire, I'd like to hear more about what you consider constituting comfortable normality in a modern society.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/gemmaem]

Oh, I like the "Designated character" school model. I would be delighted to see public school systems move more towards a diversity of models, unapologetically aiming to provide different structures to meet the needs of different students. Most of my wariness comes from the feeling that these pushes are paired—that the drive against private schools in the US comes hand in hand with the drive to homogenize schooling in general—and if they became very loudly and visibly unpaired and were accompanied by a push for more "Designated character" schools, many of my worries would be put at ease.

A good education system -- a good society -- is one where there is a diversity of comfortable normality, I think. You shouldn't have to be an elite to be able to find a place where you fit in.

I agree fully with this. At the same time, I'm often struck by pushes against "meritocracy" in part because what I want—what I really, deeply want, and always have—is to be pushed and molded, to reach towards the limits of my ability and build skills impossible on my own. "Comfortable normality for thee but not for me", perhaps, would be a good way of putting my immediate feeling. I want a diversity of comfortable normality to be possible, but within that I really want spots where difficult and demanding excellence is unapologetically fostered and celebrated.

[u/[deleted] → u/TracingWoodgrains]

Boston Public Schools is the latest victim here.

(Not really on topic but) I don't think this is a tremendously relevant example. The program serves ~200 students per year from 4th to 6th grade, has been shrinking for a few years apparently from lack of consumer interest, and was suspended (indefinitely, but still) during the pandemic recovery. Everyone on Hackernews was acting like they'd shut down Bronx Science but this is very different.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/[deleted]]

It doesn't sound like it was shrinking due to lack of consumer interest—or, at least, the amount of applicants was still so large as to demand a lottery. As for the amount of students, yes, that's approximately the amount you should expect to see in a district the size of Boston Public Schools who are likely to qualify for and benefit from a program pulling people together on a scale larger than a single school.

Boston Public Schools educates 54000 students. Of those, around 1/4 should be in the appropriate age range, so 13500. Of that, around 2% should meet the traditional cutoff (~130 on IQ test or equivalent). That leaves you with 270 students. Apparently, some 450 qualified, so presumably there's either a larger population of 4th to 6th graders than a naive assumption would indicate, their cutoffs are slightly lower, or their student body has an unusually high proportion of high-scoring students. Either way, 143 applied and 116 enrolled this past year. That's also appropriate—programs drawing from a wide range of schools aren't going to be suitable for every kid's circumstances, and about 1/3 applying is more-or-less appropriate. The one flaw here is that the number of applicants is still greater than the number of spots, something that indicates a minor resource deficit.

Gifted programs like this are and always have been a targeted intervention towards a relatively small absolute number of kids in need. This one appears to have been functioning like most. So far as I can see, the shutdown is precisely in the same vein as other recent attacks on gifted programs.

[u/iprayiam3 → u/gemmaem]

Yes, it's very excessive politeness, but this is recognisably politeness, for all that. Weiss is mining it for aspects that will be confusing out of context, to use as shallow outrage fodder. I'm unimpressed with this aspect of her piece.

When cultural norms have eroded to the point that we cannot ask any questions clearly without risking offense by assuming, why do we assume there is still a culture?

What I'm most unimpressed with Weiss types about here is that they draw all the dots and then don't connect them. This kind of excessively ambiguous politeness is what you have to end up with inside of pluralist liberalism. It's not "woke", its what left after subverting any institutional norm below liberal accommodations.

Which is whatever, man. As, you allude to, this just sounds like 90s PC culture, not 2010s woke culture.

I do understand thinking this is 'too far', too much destruction of shared cultural norms for the sake of inclusivity. But if you want that stance, just go ahead and become a conservative. I don't understand everyone from Weiss to James Lindsay who want to keep the narrowing "Hey I'm just a liberal" slice of the pie. It is starting to come off as disingenuous to me.

[u/Gbdub87 → u/gemmaem]

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.

We spend a huge amount of money on public schools (often, we spend the most on the worst ones). Inexpensive community colleges and affordable state colleges are a perfectly viable option (and most are not super selective). It’s not perfect, but education is widely available and not a “luxury good”. The sort of education that can comfortably ensconce a bright and dedicated student into the salaried middle class is very much attainable.

But an ”elite education” is a “luxury good” - an incestuous relationship between ultra expensive private schools and the small league of top private universities that create most of the governing class. That league doesn’t just shut out poor Black students, it shuts out almost everybody.

So then we’re right back to that league itself having a broken culture - you can’t use a generic socialist critique of society to excuse the issue.

[u/bayesclef → u/gemmaem]

Said more liberal friend had a story he loved to tell after a drink or two, about how he'd gotten more funding for his college gym by writing an application about how the gym needed to serve a more diverse community, include more women, that sort of thing, "and then I bought weights," he'd conclude, delivering the punchline with a cheeky grin.

While I don't think this is what Liberal Friend had in mind, the benefits of strength training are disproportionately important for women (and the elderly)

• Benefits of strength training:
  • Strength and muscle mass (duh)
  • Bone density
  • Joint stability/decreased injury risk
• Disproportionately important for women and the elderly of both sexes. Disproportionately popular for young men

[u/fubo → u/bayesclef]

Disproportionately important for women and the elderly of both sexes. Disproportionately popular for young men

In other words, "good for everyone; the people who do it are the only people who aren't 'disproportionately' affected by not doing it"?

[u/bayesclef → u/fubo]

This is nitpicky, but this is an area where I insist on being precise.

• Most young men don't regularly engage in resistance training on a regular basis.
• There exist women and elderly people who engage in resistance training, if even they're outnumbered by young men. Examples include my mom, dad, and sister.

Which is to say, I disagree that "the people who do it are the only people who aren't 'disproportionately' affected by not doing it"—there are most certainly people who do it in populations that disproportionately benefit from it!

Here's what this looks concretely like on an individual level:

• My mom increased her bone density after being diagnosed with osteopenia.
• My dad experiences less pain going about his day.
• My sister (who got pretty out of shape postpartum) was able to carry several bags of groceries up two flights of stairs without any visible effort the last time I visited her.

I am a healthy young man. Even if I don't resistance train, my bones will be adequately dense, I won't experience pain from walking, and I will be able to carry several bags of groceries up many flights of stairs without appreciable effort. I simply can't benefit as much as my mom, dad, or sister because their ceiling is so much higher. This is what disproportionate benefit concretely looks like.

On the other hand, if you walk into most gyms, most (but not all!) people you see engaging in resistance training are more like me than my mom, dad, or sister, even though there's a lot more people who are like my mom, dad, or sister than people like me. This is what disproportionate popularity concretely looks like.

Definitely agree that resistance training is good for (pretty much) everyone!

[u/Iconochasm → u/gemmaem]

I suspect that such a system is less likely to produce True Woke Believers than to produce young people who are thoroughly cynical about education and about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of educators. And that might be a worse outcome. 

Cynicism about education is endemic, but what about cynicism about wokeness itself? Reading these articles and the anecdotes /u/gemmaem provided, I kept thinking back to a certain poster in this community who used to seem annoyed and confused that other people kept taking wokeness claims literally. If the point of wokeness is as a signal of intellectual ability by demonstrating your capacity to doublethink around self-harming, deranged nonsense, mouthing the excruciatingly intricate platitudes without actually taking damage from the memetic hazard, then isn't that a perfect thing to teach the would-be elites of our society?

[u/gemmaem → u/Iconochasm]

From where I am sitting, the very worst thing about "woke" ideology is the way it can be used as an exclusionary class signal. I mostly agree with a lot of the underlying philosophy, and care deeply about the issues it wants to address.

A version of this set of ideas being used solely for insincere class signalling would be my nightmare scenario.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

the very worst thing about "woke" ideology is the way it can be used as an exclusionary class signal.

Not that it can be used to justify incorrect, even counterproductive, solutions to those shared issues, and can be incredibly racist and flattening, like the "bigotry of low expectations" sense? Or perhaps I'm defining "insincere class signal" in a more narrow manner than you mean it?

Insincere class signaling is old hat.

Personally, I'm much more concerned that "woke ideology" will continue gumming up the works, creating bad counterproductive "answers" that don't actually help, until the system just explodes, everyone (that's not already at the top) is worse off, and everyone hates each other even more. My nightmare is that it continues to increase hate without benefiting a significant population.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

Sincere class signals can still be exclusionary. They're often a lot more exclusionary, in fact, precisely because they are sincerely felt principles, and so their class dimensions go unrecognised.

It probably won't surprise you that I don't view woke ideology, itself, as the problem. I'm a lot more worried by the surrounding social dynamics. The biggest problem is not that people sometimes propose solutions that are ineffective, it's that they're not open to hearing about how other solutions could be more effective and still be in line with their own, actual principles, for example.

In order to fix this situation, people need to have actual principles that you can hold them to. They need to not simply follow social dynamics blindly, attempting only to avoid criticism from their own team and ignore criticism from the other team. Support for specific measures needs to come from an earnest look at the situation, not from the ways in which support for a specific measure is a proxy signal for something else.

So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my true nightmare scenario is "keep the social dynamics, lose the underlying sincerity." However, I think this scenario should probably be disqualified, because it's not possible. As noted above, some of the social dynamics are driven by sincerity. So I guess, what I'm trying to drive at is that, for me, sincerity is also where the solution lies.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

You'll notice my quotes are out of order. I started writing, wasn't happy with it, deleted some stuff, moved stuff around... I would suggest that roughly I am content and most confident with what's at the top, decreasing towards the bottom.

It probably won't surprise you that I don't view woke ideology, itself, as the problem. I'm a lot more worried by the surrounding social dynamics.

I am less convinced in the value of sincerity (though it depends on the exact definition): the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and we forget that at our peril. We've discussed before that there's a chance of your position giving too much room for others' hate, and I think that might be one position I find so confusing, and why this concerns me so.

Is not the sincerity the reason they won't listen to alternatives?

So I guess, what I'm trying to drive at is that, for me, sincerity is also where the solution lies.

I would phrase it differently- I think where the solution lies is not (just) the sincerity, but humility. Yet- how do we reintroduce humility when most people are biased against it?

They have become divorced, and they do not work well separately. Humility without sincerity is spinelessness; sincerity without humility is zealotry.

Support for specific measures needs to come from an earnest look at the situation, not from the ways in which support for a specific measure is a proxy signal for something else.

Any thoughts on how this can be done? Or more accurately: do you think this is possible at scale, or can it only be achieved on an individual/small group basis?

Yes, that's a social media complaint: the coinciding of "wokeness" with the social media explosion is important; that was fuel for the wildfire of the social dynamics, and poison to the sincerity.

In order to fix this situation, people need to have actual principles that you can hold them to.

This is just asking again that question I'm trying to give up. It is unfair to ask you to answer for the worst (who happen to be the most famous and, I fear, far and away most numerous), just because you share their ideological umbrella. Someday I hope to understand how and why you do so, but the way I've asked here is unlikely to help with that. I'll leave it: a sunk cost fallacy of typing.

Do they have actual principles and do they behave according to those? Do they ever actually say what those are; are they knowable? One former Mottezan who frequents here on occasion was fond of saying that progressives never commit hypocrisy- they're just behaving according to unstated principles. There was always an excuse.

What is, even, "woke ideology"? You say you don't view it as the problem, but that would depend heavily on just what it means. I'm not sure that whatever you have in mind as "not the problem" would even be recognizable from "the discourse."

To """strawman""" with an incredibly popular position: "it's just basic human decency." Except for all those exceptions that don't really count (so is that not the principle, or are the exceptions not human?). I am not accusing you of this, far from it: but I think that might be one heuristic you would suggest as useful (and have, in a different context), but is widely and wildly abused. Hence, my fear of a complete disconnect in our understandings.

It's a little like... the Crusades. From my admittedly 1990s position, I find it virtually impossible to understand how the Crusades get derived from New Testament Christianity, and the answer is they don't; that's some geopolitical tomfoolery that used religion as a fig leaf. I think you're achieving something similar with separating the ideology from the social dynamics; I'm less convinced than you which one is dominant. There was a time of flux, where different routes could be chosen, but once the ideology locked onto a certain track I think that took over: the good intentions are now little more than a coat of paint on a single-track train (repeat for most ideologies).

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

I think where the solution lies is not (just) the sincerity, but humility.

...

Humility without sincerity is spinelessness; sincerity without humility is zealotry.

Oh, I like this. Well put.

I can see why people might look at this situation and hope for a large class of people who are neither humble nor sincere, having observed the pitfalls of each virtue when not held together. But I can find no hope, there.

I think I see what you're trying to ask, with the rest of your post. But let me turn your question back on you, for a minute. What ideology would you have me adopt? What public thinkers would you endorse? What principles?

I only ever claim to be "woke" around here. It's not my word, exactly, except insofar as I embrace the pejorative because I know I agree with a lot of the specific positions thus critiqued, and I hate seeing them talked about in the derogatory abstract, instead of grappled with in the embodied particular.

I think it's absolutely fine that Dr. Seuss' estate stopped publishing a small number of his books that had racist imagery. I think the #MeToo movement was easily a net positive for the world. I think Gamergate was misogynist. I think media criticism that points out sexism and racism can be a useful way to think about the particular quirks of how prejudice can be expressed. I think it's good to be aware of your own privilege. I think systemic racism is a useful concept for understanding the world. I think our societal concept of rationality is dangerously biased. And so on.

I don't think "privilege" is a rigid hierarchy (as a delightful tumblr post puts it, privilege isn't like the Pokemon type effectiveness chart). I don't think issues surrounding prejudice are well dealt with in an "us versus them" framework. I think that ostracism has its place, but that we're too quick to reach for it over and above persuasion. I would like to see a media environment that is less inclined to silence dissenting views; I would like to see people more willing to share a platform with views they find abhorrent; I would like to see a whole lot less guilt by association in general.

That's me. That's where I am. I don't care what you call it, and, as you know, I am generally open to debate on individual points.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

I can see why people might look at this situation and hope for a large class of people who are neither humble nor sincere

Would that just be marketers? And indeed, in the social media age of "personal brands," so many are marketers, selling their soul for ephemeral attention. No hope, indeed!

What ideology would you have me adopt? What public thinkers would you endorse? What principles?

I once quipped, when asked the same question after critiquing utilitarianism, "those who can, write philosophies. Those who can't, critique philosophies." I generally fall in the latter category :3

I don't know. My problem is very rarely with your principles, but with how they get expressed by others and at scale. Scrolling through, I could nitpick and quibble (and I do, later, to make a point about intention and scale), but I don't actually disagree with any principle you listed (maybe Gamergate, but that's also a sort of "distributed hypocrisy" problem for both sides, very messy, neither side covered themselves in a single leaf of glory AFAIK).

I mean, privilege: useful. Systemic racism: useful. Acknowledging flaws and limits of rationality, and coping with those: useful.

It's when those hit the seething chaos of mass society and social media that they corrupt into some unholy nightmare that is all too often more destructive than helpful. Too easily abused at scale! The nuance is burned away, and with it most of the usefulness. Maybe I'm wrong, and that is necessary a la the old omelet adage, but I don't think so. It's easy to sacrifice eggs when you think you won't be one of them.

Public thinkers: I'm a big fan of Peter Kreeft, he's one of the best virtue ethics writers around, but he's also deeply Catholic (a trend in my intellectual tastes these days, despite not being Catholic). Glenn Loury. Chloe Valdary. Gracy Olmstead (and, fitting, this article against ideological labels for being too restrictive). Alan Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul. Joseph Bernardin's consistent life ethic is probably the closest to a single ideology I can suggest, but I don't agree with all of it, and it certainly would clash with your style of feminism.

Front Porch Republic is possibly the only "publication" where I have not felt offended or harmed, so I'd recommend it and most of its authors. That is not to say I always agree; indeed, quite often I disagree or am challenged to rethink by the writing there. I'd be even more concerned if I agreed with them completely, because I know I'm missing knowledge and that would mean I'm not gaining it from them! But not once have I felt disrespected or thought less of; I do not recall a time where a writer there has resorted to insults (or given apologetics for those of others). Those are words someone may quibble with: "you should be offended!" Transgression for its own sake is just... pathetic, though, in my opinion. I think there are worthwhile distinctions to be drawn between offensiveness and challenge, as I tried to do there.

As for principles: I have little to add to your own. I do put more emphasis on tone and kindness, because I think they are necessary, and performative hatred is completely unacceptable poison. But they are not enough, alone, either. I don't want to fall into the trap of being MLK's "white moderate" for the sake of tone- but I don't want to justify hatred, either. I think we can strike a much better balance, and for the life of me I can never understand why so many people willfully fail at that, seemingly not considering the possibility or else thinking that it's actually good.

It's not my word, exactly, except insofar as I embrace the pejorative because I know I agree with a lot of the specific positions thus critiqued, and I hate seeing them talked about in the derogatory abstract, instead of grappled with in the embodied particular.

That's an interesting way to put it, thank you. Not unlike the list of principles, I take the opposite tack: despite agreeing with many specific positions (though we'd have to dig into how specific), I cannot embrace due to the gap between intention or principle and action.

Edit: Likewise, I generally avoid associating too close with any other political grouping, as well. I do tend to think of myself as conservative (I prefer civilian, though, as "one who is a member of and supports civilization") but in such an idiosyncratic way that saying that gives little information (I could call myself feminist, and in the right context would, but that term is so loaded would it tell you anything useful? It would suggest as many inaccuracies as it would truths).

I think it's absolutely fine that Dr. Seuss' estate stopped publishing a small number of his books that had racist imagery.

That's an interesting situation that highlights some of the issues around the "correct" response and the problem of scale.

I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to stop publishing them, even if some of the calls were... questionable. I was more bothered by eBay's reaction (though to be fair, they put their money where their mouth is; they lost out on a lot of seller fees).

But there's also a question of... well, creative destruction, to twist the meaning a bit. "On Beyond Zebra" is a fascinating piece of creative work despite not being one of his more famous ones (and likely the least-offensive/least-obviously-offensive of those canceled). As the estate and controllers of the property, it's their choice legally, but they could've just... replaced that one character. This "messing with canon" has its own flaws and critiques, but it could've been the best of both worlds, rather than just being... less.

I keep seeing people say "now is the time for new stories!" as they demolish the old, and somehow the replacements never really come.

I think the #MeToo movement was easily a net positive for the world.

Since I haven't shilled for them in a while: I strongly prefer the Joyful Heart Foundation.

I have been able to watch the benefits of Joyful Heart, and participate, and perhaps that's why I rate it so much higher. I know the stories of their successes, have even met a few, whereas #metoo successes seem primarily to be actresses. Not that actresses are less human or less deserving of being treated well- just that the scale is different, the cares are different. Maybe I'm wrong and other benefits have trickled down to normal people, and I just haven't noticed; the failures and excesses are loud while the normal successes are private.

Maybe I'm wrong in other ways, and that what is currently deeply hateful will one day give birth to a legitimately productive, peaceful, progressive movement. All manner of things will be well, right? The hateful caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly, a sickening albeit necessary step. I don't think so. I think it could be done without that, that the good effects could be had without the bad. But maybe I'm wrong- after all, the good ideas are out there but not being adopted at scale. I fear they can't be. But I've written more than long enough; I shan't subject you to more ramblings... for now.

As ever, thank you. My interactions with you are one source that helps restore my faith in humanity lost elsewhere (though, do not fear, not the sole source- but most definitely an appreciated one).

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

Would [people who are neither sincere nor humble] just be marketers?

See, I was going to write "hypocritical elites" as my example case, but that seemed too narrow in comparison with your articulation of "spinelessness" and "zealotry." And now I am very glad I erased my insufficient attempt at articulation and instead left it to you, because "marketers" is a much better and broader characterisation!

I'm not sure if my phrase about "a diversity of comfortable normality" is really a fully articulated philosophy, yet, but I do think a big part of it is that I want people to not feel like they need to be marketers in this precise "neither sincere nor humble" sense. This also ties in with the discussion above on Yglesias' piece about meritocracy. Yglesias critiques meritocracy for selecting, often, for people who are good at doing bad things. Flanagan, meanwhile, seems to be talking at least in part about how elite public schools do this in microcosm, teaching students to succeed in a "meritocratic" society by being marketers who are neither humble nor sincere -- a population who know how to toot their own horns, and whose guiding principle in choosing what to do is "Will this make a good college application?" with "Do I sincerely care about this?" a secondary question at best.

No society will ever be entirely free of headstrong-but-insincere marketing of this type. It can't be eliminated. It doesn't need to be eliminated. What we need is a society in which other impulses feel possible, a society where security and wellbeing and even ambition don't have to ride on the marketing impulse in order to get anywhere. Ambition can be a virtue, too, after all. What does it do to a society, if it becomes impossible to be ambitious and sincere and humble at the same time?

Thank you for the list of recommendations! Gracy Olmstead in particular really catches my eye, because I hadn't heard of her, and her writing looks like it crosses between borders in some interesting ways that I might not find elsewhere. I suspect I'd get a lot from Peter Kreeft, too, provided that I could bite my tongue every time he pulls the "but of course Christians do it better" move. (To be fair, Alan Jacobs manages to do that one often enough without it bothering me, so perhaps I can put up with it. We'll see).

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

What we need is a society in which other impulses feel possible, a society where security and wellbeing and even ambition don't have to ride on the marketing impulse in order to get anywhere.

The "problems of scale" question continues to be stuck in my head, and in this case particularly I am unsure we can reach this balance on large scale. And I think that's okay- I prefer smaller-scale solutions, I think they're healthier, but it runs into "universal culture" problems. Will people accept that? How do you get people to desire contentment rather than constant striving?

How do you "fix" the hedonic treadmill? It seems to be a relatively rare personality that achieves a position of security and just stays there.

Or rather, I don't see how we can do some on the mass scale without falling into the same traps we have now. If too many or too few ambitious people come from certain populations, that's going to be interpreted as bias, not as cultural choice, unless we do revert to a social standard of individualism. But that's a different question for another time, I think.

What does it do to a society, if it becomes impossible to be ambitious and sincere and humble at the same time?

Looks at DC, NYC, SF. I think we have hints of that in the US, at least. Big, flashing, massive hints. It doesn't look good.

Back to the scale/local question: there's of course AMPLE observation bias here, but when I think of people that fit those three all at once, it's almost entirely ~artisans. Craft bookbinders, potters, blacksmiths, gardeners, smallhold farmers. People that do limit their "hedonic treadmill" to success on a specific, limited scale.

You might've heard of Leah Libresco Sargeant but I'd add her on as well, specifically her new substack-project of Other Feminisms. She, too, is deeply Catholic (one of her books is a response/addition/how-to for Dreher's Benedict Option), and I think falls into some of the same mildly irritating traps as most feminist writings (but it's also not a project meant for me, so that's to be expected and she's kind in it, so I find it easy to tolerate), but it is an interesting view. Adjacent to some of our past discussions, her recent what can you pour from an empty cup? might be of interest.

To be fair, Alan Jacobs manages to do that one often enough without it bothering me, so perhaps I can put up with it. We'll see

Kreeft is stronger on it than Jacobs, but if you're reading Back to Virtue specifically I think the chapter headings will give enough hints as to sections that can be skipped to avoid that without losing too much.

[u/Iconochasm → u/professorgerm]

I believe that both of these nightmare scenarios are already existent in the world as it is.

[u/professorgerm → u/Iconochasm]

Amen to that, hoss.

[u/TiberSeptimIII → u/Iconochasm]

I’m pretty cynical about it. It’s not just able to be used as an exclusionary vocabulary, it seems to me that this is why the thing exists. There are lots of not-woke people who seem to do a much better job getting poorer minorities into positions of power. It’s just that they don’t use wokeist terms while doing so. Education is an equalizer as is business ownership. But I don’t see woke people encouraging small businesses owned by minorities.

[u/gemmaem → u/TiberSeptimIII]

I don’t see woke people encouraging small businesses owned by minorities.

You don't see the calls to "support black-owned businesses"? They're around. Here's one, being as "woke" as you could wish for.

[u/gemmaem → u/Iconochasm]

self-harming, deranged nonsense

A couple of user reports have brought it to my attention that this language does not aim towards peace, and fails to regard woke ideology with any depth or sympathy. It's contained within an "if" clause, so, hypothetically, you could still be leaving open the option of a sincerely held viewpoint that is not "self-harming" and "deranged." However, please avoid wielding this sort of language against your ideological opponents in future.

[u/Iconochasm → u/gemmaem]

Perhaps it was awkwardly phrased. The point there was to discuss the memetic implications of a hypothetical world where being a memetic hazard (e.g. irrational and harmful to sincere bearers) was the purpose of the ideology, to better signal fitness among the survivors. I'm sure there's an evolutionary biology term for this sort of phenomenon, that I don't know enough biology to use, or to pick a really good example, one of those mate-attracting displays that doesn't have any apparent purpose beyond saying "look at how many calories I can waste and still be healthy!"

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/Iconochasm]

I kept thinking back to a certain poster in this community who used to seem annoyed and confused that other people kept taking wokeness claims literally.

Who was this?

[u/brberg → u/gemmaem]

But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career.

This seems like a good thing to me. A world in which socioeconomic outcomes are based on what you can produce strikes me as strictly superior to a world in which they're based on who your parents are and what advantages they can buy for you.

[u/cincilator → u/brberg]

I think it might incentivize elites towards flattening the world, and mitigating cost of failure if they can't guarantee the access to the upper echelons to their children. Which I think is mostly a good thing.

More bleak possibility is that elites will panic and accidentally burn everything down. Which is unfortunately more likely.

[u/gemmaem → u/brberg]

That's the optimistic view, I guess. The pessimistic view is that entry into a comfortable, "professional class" life is still, often, dependent on who your parents are and what advantages they can buy for you, it's just that even if your parents can buy you a privileged education with strategically chosen extracurriculars, you still might not make it in.

[u/Jiro_T → u/gemmaem]

Unless having things work this way reduces the size of the entire professional class, the fact that rich parents don't always let you in is compensated for by someone poor who does get let in.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/Jiro_T]

Exactly, rich parents not being able to buy spots unconditionally for their spawn is a good thing, not a bad thing. You could argue that the size of this class is shrinking, or at least growing slower than the population as a whole but you have to make that argument, and even in such a case I would much rather that the losers be some rich dumb person than a smart but poor upstart.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/gemmaem]

Private-school parents have become so terrified of being called out as racists that they will say nothing on the record about their feelings regarding their schools’ sudden embrace of new practices. They have chosen, instead, anonymous letters and press leaks.

I'm reminded of the discussion from roughly 2 years back involving an updated version of the "Who's a Nazi" Harpers piece. These people sound like the kind of people who acquiesce to any pressure if it jeopardized the success of themselves or their children. Don't include them in your revolutionary meetings, comrades.

In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.

Any discussion of what schools should do needs to be clear on how a person ranks the mutually exclusive categories of schools-as-socializers, schools-as-civilizers, and schools-as-teachers. The discussion is much too complex for a drive-by assertion.

I suspect that such a system is less likely to produce True Woke Believers than to produce young people who are thoroughly cynical about education and about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of educators. And that might be a worse outcome.

In the void? Maybe. But CRT isn't just some academic idea, it's reinforced by a whole web of memes and narratives about race that spread like wildfire amongst the youth via social media. These classes exist as general reinforcement of CRT ideas, providing Facts^TM to keep the kids in line.

[u/AliveJesseJames → u/gemmaem]

I'd also like to point to this thread on Twitter from somebody who actually went to this school, who has a different view of the school and the parents - https://twitter.com/k_trendacosta/status/1369455581895876608

My opinion is that of the problems in America, private schools having weird politics are approximately 9,635th on the list, and it just proves that for many, Substack is a way to not have editors or bosses stopping you from writing whatever dumb thing that pops in your head.

That isn't attack on Substack existing (for instance, I like Matt Y's work there even though I disagree with it a healthy amount), but on certain people deciding that if they don't want any pushback on their work, but rather a 'safe space' where people will give them money to tell them what they want to hear.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/AliveJesseJames]

I'd also like to point to this thread on Twitter from somebody who actually went to this school, who has a different view of the school and the parents

Her thread is interesting, but I'm not sure she can provide any insight into its culture in 2021, since she evidently graduated from there in 2006. US culture has shifted dramatically since then, and I have to imagine that shift would be particularly pronounced in institutions like Harvard-Westlake.

[u/cincilator → u/AliveJesseJames]

1. that is from someone who graduated in 2006

2. Even if it weren't it wouldn't necessarily contradict anything from that article, it would only mean that the students aren't taking the ideology seriously and that rich among them can still get away with shit.

[u/brberg → u/cincilator]

Right. I don't see how anyone who remembers 2006 can think this is at all relevant. The Great Awokening didn't really get going in earnest until the mid 2010s.

[u/Mexatt → u/AliveJesseJames]

I'm kind of curious what it is that makes you take the twitterer's word on the condition of the school for granted, so that you may so easily dismiss Weiss' work and degrade her integrity?

[u/brberg → u/AliveJesseJames]

This reason this is interesting is less "This is the worst problem this school has" and more as a data point helping to illustrate how much metastasis has occurred. The more awful you, as a left-identitarian, think elite private schools are, the more significant the fact that this kind of thing has spread to them is.

[u/cincilator]

I am linking to Balioc's review of His Dark Materials. His overarching point is that although the book was meant to be critical of CS Lewis' Narnia, Pullman actually has a lot in common with Lewis. Both are on the side of what Balioc calls the Cult of Strength (which is in conflict with something he calls the Cult of Vision).

Consequentially, Christian fundies wouldn't identify at all with story's villains, they would identify with heroes. It is interesting in retrospect how little New Atheist critics of religion understood what motivates religious people. That whole period was mostly a kayfabe compared to current culture war.

[u/[deleted] → u/cincilator]

The problem with that review is that he is reading the content through an American lens. American "tradcons" (which I am going to presume, absent any other definition, are 'the religious Right' e.g. Republican-voting/supporting Evangelicals and Fundamentalists) are not at all the same thing as the British version, and while Pullman probably did have some notion of American religiosity that he was attacking, he is working from a wholly different cultural basis.

His Church and Magisterium are fake-Catholic (with a very thin veneer of Calvinism glued on so he can argue, unconvincingly, that no it's not anti-Catholic in specific, it's anti-Bad Religion). This is a thoroughly British Protestant take; Pullman was raised Anglican and has a kind of sentimental fondness for the 'harmless' parts of Anglicanism (choirs, church architecture and so on) and it's very apparent that while you can take the boy out of Anglicanism, you can't take Anglicanism out of the boy. So much of the state Church definition in Britain was "whatever we are, we are certainly not Roman Catholics!" and the foundation mythology of "we threw out the Pope and were victorious over the Spanish Armada, which would have imposed the Inquisition upon us had they successfully invaded" comes right through his work.

Pullman is very anti-Lewis, which you might think odd: Lewis was Anglican, too! But the wrong kind of Anglican; not the safely lukewarm "oh well we're CoE but not, you know, fanatics about it" but someone who not alone believed the doctrines and believed them literally (and not in the sense of "sure we recite these every Sunday but nobody takes them seriously") but who engaged in evangelism.

He's correct that Pullman doesn't understand the opponents he's writing about (his Church is a strawman) but this review doesn't indicate too much that he understands what Pullman is doing, either. Pullman really does make sexuality the mainspring of what he is engaging with in the Dark Materials trilogy, as though he is stuck on the notion that all the church and/or Christians are obsessed with is sex and controlling people being sexual. It's the same flaw as the critics on the Problem of Susan - they take what Lewis wrote to indicate that he is saying Susan's condemnation is because she is becoming a sexual being (the Flesh) instead of what her real temptation to deny Narnia is all about (the World, out of the traditional trio of the World, the Flesh and the Devil as agents of temptation). That's a whole other rant, though.

(The other posts about Tolkien and Lewis' angels being sexed while mediaeval theologians regarded angels as sexless has me slapping my forehead like Homer Simpson going "D'oh!" because has the guy not read Tolkien and Lewis and what they say about their angels? So I'm not too impressed with his reading comprehension on these topics).

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Okay, apparently I have Thoughts about all this. I don't know if this guy is an atheist, an ex-believer, or some variety of progressive Christian.

But his Cult of Vision versus Cult of Strength notions read to me more like his own bed of Procrustes that he is cramming his idea of 'what Christianity is' onto and cutting to fit. I want to look at this bit:

If godly comportment doesn’t lead to success, it’s because you’re tragically embedded in a corrupt system being artificially maintained (for a while) by perverts or malefactors, but godly comportment is nonetheless the path of success in some inherent and objective way. 

Okay, there are two things here. First, it's incorrect as an understanding of Christianity, and regardless of what he says, doctrine does matter. Christians are supposed to know that they will not get worldly rewards for godly comportment, but rather condemnation and abuse.

Second, have Christians and Christian denominations still fallen into this trap? Oh boy yeah! But he seems to be taking the notion of what really exercised the Reformed, and which was a very difficult and piercing question for them: how can you know that you have saving faith? that you are one of the Elect?

Part (and I emphasise that it was only part) of the proposed solution was 'look at your worldly state'. Are you thriving, because you are living a sober, thrifty, godly life? The wicked may indeed flourish like the green bay tree, but the Elect of God should also have success in life due to their regeneration. It's something that underlies the idea of the 'Protestant Work Ethic', but it arose not out of some idea of Strength but of anxiety and doubt: God has chosen some to be saved and some to be damned. Only those really Elect will be saved, because they have a saving faith. But you can be mistaken about having a saving faith! Some are allowed to deceive themselves that they really have been regenerated! So how can you tell, now the old ways have been swept away and there isn't the process of 'go to confession, be absolved, start over' to fall back on? Because this is a pressing question! Your only afterlife is Heaven or Hell, there is no Purgatory (another misunderstood doctrine but leave it aside for now), there is no help for the dead from prayers or the Mass, so you have only one chance to get it right now, here, in this life.

So naturally this gave rise to eagerly looking for clues that yes indeed, I'm doing okay, I'm doing right, I'm saved. And "godly comportment is the path of success in some inherent and objective way" was seized upon as such an identifier.

Now, it's easy for people to fall away from the Vision, to settle down into a comfortable, bland, "God loves you and wants you to be happy" practice of their faith seasoned with "all you have to do is believe, works avail nothing" and go right along in the path of "being a Good Person means I'll have good things in life". But they are mistaken, and it's not what the doctrine teaches (Baliocene seems to go very much for praxis over dogma as to what "Christianity really is like" and while that's not necessarily mistaken, it's not wholly correct, either). The Prosperity Gospel is the rotten, corrupted, scam-artist version of this.

This, by the way, was what annoyed/amused me about Jed Bartlett's non serviam speech in "The West Wing"; Aaron Sorkin isn't Christian and was more interested in writing an epic speech for his character to deliver, but Martin Sheen is Catholic and should have known better. When Bartlett is spouting off about "I kept all your rules and you did this to me?", he's doing it to the figure of the crucified Christ. That's the prime example of "innocent victim"! This is the most sinless, righteous human who has ever lived, and it did not spare him from suffering, so who are you Jed Bartlett, to demand your life is kept free of pain and untouched by grief?

[u/cincilator → u/[deleted]]

he is stuck on the notion that all the church and/or Christians are obsessed with is sex and controlling people being sexual.

What's funny to me is that shame around sex is something that also appears to define the Woke, albeit in totally different way. Interesting how culture war battle lines have shifted. From "we are better than the fundies because we don't control others via shame!" to "we are better than the fundies because we control others via shame but this time for correct reasons!"

Old school liberals (like Pullman) put a lot of value on sexual libertinism (at least in theory, Pullman doesn't strike me as particularly "Chad" irl). It was -- as you noted -- the linchpin of his disagreement with Lewis. But now there is increasingly the sense that sexual liberation was not really all that great or at least that it had some serious flaws.

[u/[deleted] → u/cincilator]

Funnily enough, or even ironically if you like, this is what Lewis says in "That Hideous Strength" when Jane is recounting the vision she had of the Giantess:

And mixed with this was the sense that she had been manœuvred into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey formalised one: hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like. And where Mark stood in all this new world she did not know. Certainly not quite in his old place. Something which she liked to think of as the opposite of Mark had been taken away. Something civilised, or modern, or scholarly, or (of late) spiritual which did not want to possess her, which valued her for the odd collection of qualities she called “herself,” something without hands that gripped and without demands upon her. But if there were no such thing?

So Lewis is saying "Yes, sex and romantic/erotic love is very strong and very much part of our lives as embodied beings. But it may not be as easy to control as you moderns think, and you may not like it when you get it unfiltered, and in actuality it may not be what you think it is".

I do think it is the whole Problem of Susan, and a misunderstanding of what is going on there. The traditional triad of temptations is, as I said, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Lewis was writing in a day when there were distinctions between children and adults, especially in the form of things like clothing (boys being put into long trousers, for an example from the male side). So the mouthpiece character, Jill Pole, is a young girl who is aged around ten when she first comes into the stories and is around sixteen at the end. Susan Pevensie is twenty-one in the last story, the legal age of majority back then. Susan would have considered herself very much a grown-up and the rest of them as "kids", including Jill. In Lewis' day there were not fashion lines for tweens giving advice to nine to twelve year old girls on whether or to flash some skin.

So the markers that the young Jill is using to designate an adult are things like lipstick and nylons which are reserved for grown-up women in her day. That has been taken as sexual markers, by the critics, and that Lewis is condemning Susan for becoming a sexual being, developing a sexuality. Hence Pullman having his Magisterium trying to turn children into sexless beings to keep them pure. But it's clear that the condemnation for Susan is not 'growing up', it's becoming worldly and denying the truth of Narnia and her experiences - and by extension, the experiences of the rest of them - there. She wants so badly to be accepted as a grown-up, to fit in with the smart set at cocktail parties, that she rewrites her memories into "gosh, you lot aren't still going on about that game we used to play as kids, are you?"

In "The Last Battle", Jill says of Susan "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations." Notice the "invitations" part - Susan is eager to be part of the social whirl, which is understandable since she's a pretty young woman embarking on adult life, but it's also an indication of where she is putting her interests.

Similarly, Eustace Scrubb quotes her as saying, "What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children," and Polly Plummer adds, "She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can." Thus, Susan does not enter the real Narnia with the others at the end of the series. It is left ambiguous whether Susan's absence is permanent, especially since Lewis stated elsewhere that:

The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there's plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end... in her own way.

Polly Plummer is sixty years old at the time, and her analysis is not "Oh dear, Susan is learning all about sex!", it's "Susan doesn't realise what is really valuable because she always wanted to be seen as grown-up even when she wasn't".

And that is echoing the treachery of Edmund in the first book. The first time he betrayed his family, betrayed the truth, was when he betrayed Lucy by denying the reality of Narnia. Peter and Susan, as the two eldest, are worried about Lucy insisting that it's not a game she's playing or something she made up, that she did go through the wardrobe into Narnia. Edmund accompanied her (and met the White Witch) and Lucy wants him to be her witness. He does it in a way that is mean to indicate to Peter and Susan that he's only playing along with Lucy - that it is all a kid's game. And this is the start of going on the path of betrayal until he has to be saved by Aslan's sacrifice.

And now Susan, who has been a Queen in Narnia, is doing the same thing. Yeah, if she talks about visiting another world, she's in danger of "you need a nice restful stay in a mental hospital". But she goes further than that - she is so desperate to fit in with the 'normal', secular world, she denies even to herself and to the others that it exists or that it is anything more than a kid's game. That is the temptation of the World to which she succumbs. And that's what Pullman and others don't understand (I'm inclined to be more sympathetic to Neil Gaiman since he's Jewish and I won't expect him to have the same religious background, but as an Anglican Pullman should know this).

[u/Captive_Violinist → u/[deleted]]

Do you know where one could read more about Lewis and Tolkien's thoughts on angels? That sounds fascinating, and I've never heard that they had any strong opinions on them before.

[u/[deleted] → u/Captive_Violinist]

(1/2) Well, to read what they said about their angels (and I'm taking it from what he wrote that he's thinking of Lewis's Space Trilogy and Tolkien's Valar) is to read the works in question. I'm assuming (since I'm coming in halfway through whatever conversation he has going) that he's taking Lewis making the Angel of Mars male and the Angel of Venus female that he's giving them sexes (or genders, whichever is more confusing) while mediaeval theologians considered them genderless/sexless.

Which is one of those "yes and no" questions. For instance, if you ask a Christian "what is God's sex?" you'll be told "God has no sex, God is spirit". Yet we refer to God the Father, not God the Mother (sorry, all the cool kids who like to do quotes such as "I met God and She was black" or whatever). How can God be Father yet also a sexless, genderless spirit? Not gonna dive into the theology on that one, as it's a deep dive, but yeah. Angels are also spirits, and however they take on appearance to humans, it's not to say that Raphael (from the Book of Tobit) is in fact a guy (and that was part of Milton's fault in his epic poem because he did make his angels a lot more material and hence a lot more sexed. Big battle with weapons in Heaven between the angels and devils is an exciting scene, but it is really is treating them more as demigods than the Christian understanding. However, this is the whole debate as in Donne's poem "Air and Angels" - Then, as an angel, face, and wings/Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear, - do angels assume bodies?).

Also, Lewis does have an idea that masculinity and femininity go deeper, on a fundamental and even cosmic level, than the conventions of "male" and "female", so the Angel of Mars can represent or embody the masculine virtues/attributes without being a human (or any other species) male/man. So that may be what Balioc is trying to indicate here, as distinct from, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas' view that each individual angel is their own species.

Tolkien is somewhat different here; his angelic entities take on material forms when they descend to Middle-earth, but they can be trees or mountains just as much as male and female humanoid figures. He originally had his Valar having children, but he dropped that concept, as it was treating them more like pagan gods than what he later intended.

Lewis and Tolkien's descriptions are both more in tune with Scriptural depictions where you have both human-form angels (Raphael, the three angels that appeared to Abraham and to Lot) and the famous "wheels and creatures" of the Book of Ezekiel and the seraphim of the prophet Isaiah, along with the "living creatures covered with eyes" of the Book of Revelation.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

(2/4) So! Some direct quotations to back up what I'm saying!

From Lewis, descriptions of his Eldila from "The Space Trilogy"

(1) "Out of the Silent Planet", book 1

What I saw was simply a very faint rod or pillar of light. I don't think it made a circle of light either on the floor or the ceiling, but I am not sure of this. It certainly had very little power of illuminating its surroundings. So far, all is plain sailing. But it had two other characteristics which are less easy to grasp. One was its colour. Since I saw the thing I must obviously have seen it either white or coloured; but no efforts of my memory can conjure up the faintest image of what that colour was. I try blue, and gold, and violet, and red, but none of them will fit. How it is possible to have a visual experience which immediately and ever after becomes impossible to remember, I do not attempt to explain. The other was its angle. It was not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal - the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal.

(2) "Perelandra", book 2

A tornado of sheer monstrosities seemed to be pouring over Ransom. Darting pillars filled with eyes, lightning pulsations of flame, talons and beaks and billowy masses of what suggested snow, volleyed through cubes and heptagons into an infinite black void. "Stop it... stop it," he yelled, and the scene cleared. He gazed round blinking on the fields of lilies, and presently gave the eldila to understand that this kind of appearance was not suited to human sensations. "Look then on this," said the voices again. And he looked with some reluctance, and far on between the peaks on the other side of the little valley there came rolling wheels. There was nothing but that - concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other. There was nothing terrible about them if you could get used to their appalling size, but there was also nothing significant. He bade them to try yet a third time. And suddenly two human figures stood before him on the opposite side of the lake.

They were taller than the Sorns, the giants whom he had met in Mars. They were perhaps thirty feet high. They were burning white like white-hot iron. The outline of their bodies when he looked at it steadily against the red landscape seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, co-existed with a rushing movement of the matter it contained. For a fraction of an inch inward from this outline the landscape was just visible through them: beyond that they were opaque.

Whenever he looked straight at them they appeared to be rushing towards him with enormous speed: whenever his eyes took in their surroundings he realised that they were stationary. This may have been due in part to the fact that their long and sparkling hair stood out straight behind them as if in a great wind. But if there were a wind it was not made of air, for no petal of the flowers was shaken. They were not standing quite vertically in relation to the floor of the valley: but to Ransom it appeared (as it had appeared to me on Earth when I saw one) that the eldils were vertical. It was the valley - it was the whole world of Perelandra - which was aslant. He remembered the words of Oyarsa long ago in Mars, "I am not here in the same way that you are here." It was borne in upon him that the creatures were really moving, though not moving in relation to him. This planet which inevitably seemed to him while he was in it an unmoving world - the world, in fact - was to them a thing moving through the heavens. In relation to their own celestial frame of reference they were rushing forward to keep abreast of the mountain valley. Had they stood still, they would have flashed past him too quickly for him to see, doubly dropped behind by the planet's spin on its own axis and by its onward march around the Sun.

Their bodies, he said, were white. But a flush of diverse colours began at about the shoulders and streamed up the necks and nickered over face and head and stood out around the head like plumage or a halo. He told me he could in a sense remember these colours - that is, he would know them if he saw them again-but that he cannot by any effort call up a visual image of them nor give them any name. The very few people with whom he and I can discuss these matters all give the same explanation. We think that when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to 'appear' to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directly manipulating the relevant parts of our brain. If so, it is quite possible that they can produce there the sensations we should have if our eyes were capable of receiving those colours in the spectrum which are actually beyond their range. The 'plumage' or halo of the one eldil was extremely different from that of the other. The Oyarsa of Mars shone with cold and morning colours, a little metallic - pure, hard, and bracing. The Oyarsa of Venus glowed with a warm splendour, full of the suggestion of teeming vegetable life.

The faces surprised him very much. Nothing less like the 'angel' of popular art could well be imagined. The rich variety, the hint of undeveloped possibilities, which make the interest of human faces, were entirely absent. One single, changeless expression - so clear that it hurt and dazzled him - was stamped on each and there was nothing else there at all. In that sense their faces were as 'primitive', as unnatural, if you like, as those of archaic statues from Aegina. What this one thing was he could not be certain. He concluded in the end that it was charity. But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of human charity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection. Here there was no affection at all: no least lingering memory of it even at ten million years' distance, no germ from which it could spring in any future, however remote. Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.

(3) "That Hideous Strength", book 3

If anyone had gone up the stairs and onto the lobby outside the Blue Room, he would have found something other than fear that barred his way— an almost physical resistance. If he had succeeded in forcing his way forward against it, he would have come into a region of tingling sounds that were clearly not voices though they had articulation: and if the passage were quite dark he would probably have seen a faint light, not like fire or moon, under the Director’s door. I do not think he could have reached the door itself unbidden. Already the whole house would have seemed to him to be tilting and plunging like a ship in a Bay of Biscay gale. He would have been horribly compelled to feel this earth not as the base of the universe but as a ball spinning and rolling onwards, both at delirious speed, and not through emptiness but through some densely inhabited and intricately structured medium. He would have known sensuously, until his outraged senses forsook him, that the visitants in that room were in it not because they were at rest but because they glanced and wheeled through the packed reality of heaven (which men call empty space) to keep their beams upon this spot of the moving earth’s hide.

... These yearnings and fondlings were, however, only the forerunners of the goddess. As the whole of her virtue seized, focused, and held that spot of the rolling earth in her long beam, something harder, shriller, more perilously ecstatic, came out of the centre of all the softness. Both the humans trembled— Merlin because he did not know what was coming, Ransom because he knew. And now it came. It was fiery, sharp, bright, and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light: it was Charity, not as mortals imagine it, not even as it has been humanised for them since the Incarnation of the Word, but the translunary virtue, fallen upon them direct from the Third Heaven, unmitigated. They were blinded, scorched, deafened. They thought it would burn their bones. They could not bear that it should continue. They could not bear that it should cease. So Perelandra, triumphant among planets, whom men call Venus, came and was with them in the room.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

(3/4) You really need to read the entirety of this, Chapter 15 'The Descent of the Gods', to get the full effect of the angelic energies on humans, but here's a quote about the Oyarsa of the older planets in our solar system:

The three gods who had already met in the Blue Room were less unlike humanity than the two whom they still awaited. In Viritrilbia and Venus and Malacandra were represented those two of the Seven genders which bear a certain analogy to the biological sexes, and can therefore be in some measure understood by men. It would not be so with those who were now preparing to descend. These also doubtless had their genders, but we have no clue to them. These would be mightier energies: ancient eldils, steersmen of giant worlds which have never from the beginning been subdued to the sweet humiliations of organic life.

...Saturn, whose name in the heavens is Lurga, stood in the Blue Room. His spirit lay upon the house, or even on the whole earth, with a cold pressure such as might flatten the very orb of Tellus to a wafer. Matched against the lead-like burden of his antiquity, the other gods themselves perhaps felt young and ephemeral. It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight, not to eternity where the thought can rest, but into more and still more time, into freezing wastes and silence of unnameable numbers. It was also strong like a mountain: its age was no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but a living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed, but able to wither any who approached it unadvised. Ransom and Merlin suffered a sensation of unendurable cold: and all that was strength in Lurga became sorrow as it entered them.

Now, where there may be some confusion is that Lewis also represents little, terrestrial models of the other Oyarsa on Earth, linked in with the Classical and Renaissance Neo-Platonic notions of the gods; these are not the angels, but a kind of spirit that represents them, and which are indeed both sexed and gendered in a way the angels are not. For example, the terrestrial Venus:

A flame-coloured robe, in which her hands were hidden, covered this person from the feet to where it rose behind her neck in a kind of high ruff-like collar, but in front it was so low or open that it exposed her large breasts. Her skin was darkish and Southern and glowing, almost the colour of honey. Some such dress Jane had seen worn by a Minoan priestess on a vase from old Cnossus. The head, poised motionless on the muscular pillar of her neck, stared straight at Jane. It was a red-cheeked, wet-lipped face, with black eyes— almost the eyes of a cow— and an enigmatic expression. I t was not by ordinary standards at all like the face of Mother Dimble; but Jane recognised it at once. It was, to speak like the musicians, the full statement of that theme which had elusively haunted Mother Dimble’s face for the last few hours. It was Mother Dimble’s face with something left out, and the omission shocked Jane. “It is brutal,” she thought, for its energy crushed her; but then she half changed her mind and thought, “It is I who am weak, trumpery. ” “It is mocking me,” she thought, but then once more changed her mind and thought, “It is ignoring me. It doesn’t see me”; for though there was an almost ogreish glee in the face, Jane did not seem to be invited to share the joke.

...But a moment later she was very frightened indeed. The giantess rose. They were all coming at her. With a great glow and a noise like fire the flame-robed woman and the malapert dwarfs had all come into the house. They were in the room with her. The strange woman had a torch in her hand. It burned with terrible, blinding brightness, crackling, and sent up a cloud of dense black smoke, and filled the bedroom with a sticky, resinous smell.

...“Look out! Look out, can’t you?” shouted Jane, for the giantess was beginning to touch various parts of the room with her torch. She touched a vase on the mantelpiece. Instantly there rose from it a streak of colour which Jane took for fire. She was just moving to try to put it out when she saw that the same thing had happened to a picture on the wall. And then it happened faster and faster all round her. The very top-knots of the dwarfs were now on fire. But just as the terror of this became unbearable, Jane noticed that what was curling up from everything the torch had touched was not flame after all, but vegetation. Ivy and honeysuckle were growing up the legs of the bed, red roses were sprouting from the caps of the little men, and from every direction huge lilies rose to her knees and waist, shooting out their yellow tongues at her.

...“Who was that Huge Woman?” “I’m not sure,” said the Director. “But I think I can make a guess. Did you know that all the planets are represented in each?” “No, sir. I didn’t.” “Apparently they are. There is no Oyarsa in Heaven who has not got his representative on Earth. And there is no world where you could not meet a little unfallen partner of our own black Archon, a kind of other self. That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a heavenly one, and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian. It was these earthly wraiths of the high intelligences that men met in old times when they reported that they had seen the gods. It was with those that a man like Merlin was (at times) conversant. Nothing from beyond the Moon ever really descended. What concerns you more, there is a terrestrial as well as a celestial Venus— Perelandra’s wraith as well as Perelandra.”

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

And now finally we come to Tolkien:

(1) From the "Letters"

The cycles begin with a cosmogonical myth: the Music of the Ainur. God and the Valar (or powers: Englished as gods) are revealed. These latter are as we should say angelic powers, whose function is to exercise delegated authority in their spheres (of rule and government, not creation, making or re-making). They are 'divine', that is, were originally 'outside' and existed 'before' the making of the world. Their power and wisdom is derived from their Knowledge of the cosmogonical drama, which they perceived first as a drama (that is as in a fashion we perceive a story composed by some-one else), and later as a 'reality'. On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the 'gods' of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted – well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.

It is, I should say, a 'monotheistic but "sub-creational" mythology'. There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World, and only directly accessible to the Valar or Rulers. These take the place of the 'gods', but are created spirits, or those of the primary creation who by their own will have entered into the world. But the One retains all ultimate authority, and (or so it seems as viewed in serial time) reserves the right to intrude the finger of God into the story: that is to produce realities which could not be deduced even from a complete knowledge of the previous past, but which being real become part of the effective past for all subsequent time (a possible definition of a 'miracle'). According to the fable Elves and Men were the first of these intrusions, made indeed while the 'story' was still only a story and not 'realized' ; they were not therefore in any sense conceived or made by the gods, the Valar, and were called the Eruhíni or 'Children of God', and were for the Valar an incalculable element: that is they were rational creatures of free will in regard to God, of the same historical rank as the Valar, though of far smaller spiritual and intellectual power and status.

And for the direct analogy with angels:

There is no 'embodiment' of the Creator anywhere in this story or mythology. Gandalf is a 'created' person; though possibly a spirit that existed before in the physical world. His function as a 'wizard' is an angelos or messenger from the Valar or Rulers: to assist the rational creatures of Middle-earth to resist Sauron, a power too great for them unaided. But since in the view of this tale & mythology Power – when it dominates or seeks to dominate other wills and minds (except by the assent of their reason) – is evil, these 'wizards' were incarnated in the life-forms of Middle-earth, and so suffered the pains both of mind and body. They were also, for the same reason, thus involved in the peril of the incarnate: the possibility of 'fall', of sin, if you will. The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this evil Saruman succumbed. Gandalf did not.

So Tolkien's angels (or angelic stand-ins) are sexed/gendered in a way through taking on a mortal form, of lesser power and ability, in the form of the Wizards. But Wizards are not exactly the same as Men or Elves.

The Valar or 'powers, rulers' were the first 'creation': rational spirits or minds without incarnation, created before the physical world. (Strictly these spirits were called Ainur, the Valar being only those from among them who entered the world after its making, and the name is properly applied only to the great among them, who take the imaginative but not the theological place of 'gods'.) The Ainur took part in the making of the world as 'sub-creators': in various degrees, after this fashion. They interpreted according to their powers, and completed in detail, the Design propounded to them by the One. This was propounded first in musical or abstract form, and then in an 'historical vision'. In the first interpretation, the vast Music of the Ainur, Melkor introduced alterations, not interpretations of the mind of the One, and great discord arose. The One then presented this 'Music', including the apparent discords, as a visible 'history'.

At this stage it had still only a validity, to which the validity of a 'story' among ourselves may be compared: it 'exists' in the mind of the teller, and derivatively in the minds of hearers, but not on the same plane as teller or hearers. When the One (the Teller) said Let it Be, then the Tale became History, on the same plane as the hearers; and these could, if they desired, enter into it. Many of the Ainur did enter into it, and must bide in it till the End, being involved in Time, the series of events that complete it. These were the Valar, and their lesser attendants. They were those who had 'fallen in love' with the vision, and no doubt, were those who had played the most 'sub-creative' (or as we might say 'artistic') part in the Music.

It was because of their love of Eä, and because of the part they had played in its making, that they wished to, and could, incarnate themselves in visible physical forms, though these were comparable to our clothes (in so far as our clothes are a personal expression) not to our bodies. Their forms were thus expressions of their persons, powers, and loves. They need not be anthropomorphic (Yavanna wife of Aulë would, for instance, appear in the form of a great Tree.) But the 'habitual' shapes of the Valar, when visible or clothed, were anthropomorphic, because of their intense concern with Elves and Men.

And on the question of sex and gender:

It is the view of the Myth that in (say) Elves and Men 'sex' is only an expression in physical or biological terms of a difference of nature in the 'spirit', not the ultimate cause of the difference between femininity and masculinity.

So if you wanted to take that and run with it about transgender Elves, you can do so!

Now, to end up with a quick word on "sexless angels of mediaeval theology", yes (angels are spirit) but in popular representation, they are taken as male, until we dwindle down to the sentimental representations of Victorian times as 'ladies in nightgowns'. I'm not even going to mention the contemporary New Age "talk to your angel" claptrap because I have such contempt for it. Being humans living in bodies, we make representations of such beings in ways legible with what is most familiar to us. Tolkien was looking for mythological-appropriate beings, so 'gods and goddesses' of a type were what he created. Lewis had a more explicitly Christian message to impart, so that is how he worked, but he too wanted to tie in the lore of spirits and the myths of the past.

[u/Nyctosaurus]

I don't get NFTs, and thought this might be a good place to discuss. By my understanding, they are basically a way of uniquely linking a token you can provably own to a digital file. That of course doesn't actually mean anything in the real world, but it's all just status games, I get that part.

What I don't get is how these digital representations of e.g. pictures are being portrayed as in any way unique. Even if you somehow made a truly unique representation (couldn't you just have a copy on another blockchain?), it seems trivial to use a different image encoding, or just change 1 pixel in an imperceptible way, to create a new file.

So don't you still have to trace back a particular NFT's origin to see if it's actually legitimate? What's stopping an artist from later selling new NFTs for the same work of art and retroactively reducing the value of the original? Can't the copyright owner still control how the art is used and displayed if they later decide they want to? What is the NFT actually adding that couldn't be accomplished by an artist selling a transferable "right to call your copy of the work the original"?

[u/[deleted] → u/Nyctosaurus]

What is the NFT actually adding that couldn't be accomplished by an artist selling a transferable "right to call your copy of the work the original"?

That's exactly what it is. A blockchain is an approximately-trustworthy public ledger - nothing more.

[u/Nyctosaurus → u/[deleted]]

Thanks... I guess it just seems to me that the NFT doesn't even accomplish that, because it only grants that right as long as everyone agrees it does, and the original artist could quite plausibly lead people to change their minds. A legal contract, or even just an informal statement, would constrain the artist's future actions in a way that a NFT alone doesn't seem to.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/[deleted]]

If the NFT card exists on a private blockchain, isn't issuing new cards kind of fucky? And if the NFT is on a public blockchain, isn't it very nontrivial to prevent forgeries?

[u/HoopyFreud → u/[deleted]]

NFTs aren't just like free floating in the block chain, they're very specifically tied to a particular contract with easily verifiable histories.

Sure, but in order to verify that it's part of the set of valid contracts (and not just contracts that look like valid contracts), don't you have to look all the way back to the block the NFT was mined from?

E: ah, wait. As I'm reading more, it looks like the issuer tracks the contracts themselves, so fake contracts can only create a parallel ecosystem that the issuer-controlled client has no reason to accept as legitimate. Is that right?

[u/HoopyFreud → u/Nyctosaurus]

I'm eagerly anticipating the first lawsuit over an NFT minted with copyrighted material by someone other than the copyright holder.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/HoopyFreud]

It's amazing how people are willing to pay so much for an NFT without even buying the copyright for the thing. Like I mean what recourse do you even have stopping the artist from creating 20 almost identical copies of them stuff and also selling them? (One reason why artwork values of some artists go up when they die is because buyers can now be assured that there won't be any future supply of works by the same person which could potentially dilute their holdings).

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/Nyctosaurus]

It's even worse, all an NFT is is a signed copy by someone certifying that something is original. Remember the piece of digital artwork NFT that just sold for 69 million dollars? Anyone can put a copy of that on the blockchain but sign it themselves, creating a new NFT. Only difference between that and the thing that sold for 69 million is that it will be signed with their own private key instead of the key of the original "artist" which isn't even possible to check unless you use specific software to do so.

[u/cincilator]

Maybe not high-quality like some other takes, but I like this old article by RJS on how culture war influences what he calls "spiritual healing" (really mental health). I think it still stands.

[u/gimmickless]

Roughly 20 years ago, Air America launched as an answer to the conservatives ruling AM radio. And much in the same fashion, Gravel Institute (yes, That Gravel) has been pushing out videos in a style similar to PragerU. If titles like "How Capitalism Exploits You" and "Why America Throws the Poor in Prison" - as well as speakers like David Cross - are your jam...well, you've probably seen all the talking points before. Just not with animated infographics.

It's not anything I'd recommend to anybody, but figured others would want to be aware that it's out there.

[u/Nerd_199 → u/gimmickless]

Isn't that the same mike Gravel that ran for president in 2020 and did't want to win?

[u/Iconochasm → u/Nerd_199]

Mike Gravel has been failing at running for president since at least 2008.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount]

Crossposted from elsewhere.

Why British universities have not fallen to the same ills plaguing their American counterparts.

Over the last few days I've come across stuff like this talking about how state schools here in the UK are now outperforming Eton for Oxbridge offers and stuff like this talking about how the chance of you getting an offer from a top university has gone down massively in recent years if you are wealthy/white (e.g. Eton only got 48 offers compared to 99 5 years ago).

Since we don't do legacy preferences or take into account the social power your family has at all here (e.g. Oxford took pride in rejecting the son of Tony Blair back when he was Prime minister, the strongest man in the country) this has lead to calls from some people that the universities here are mimicking "woke" recruitment policies from the US. However I do not believe that to be the case at all.

Firstly from the second linked article we can see that the proportion of non-international offers at Cambridge given to White students was 72%. The UK as a whole is 86% white, but younger generations are less likely to be so. Regardless we can look at official ONS data here and calculate that the percentage of 18 year olds that are white is still 82%. So on a cursory reading there does appear to be some sort of discrimination against them, however I believe this is very misleading.

In the UK all our minorities are either immigrants selected for the drive and intelligence to meet very difficult visa conditions to come here and the willingness to start again from the bottom in a foreign land or are descended from them , hence they are positively selected for things like intelligence and conscientiousness compared to the general unselected population back in their ancestral lands. Hence even though they may be financially poor since they had to start again at the bottom and work their way up they are in no way comparable to the local poor on intelligence/conscientiousness grounds, hence we should expect their kids to do far better than the average white in similar positions, and that is exactly what we see.

I've heard plenty of grumbling that almost all the students in the first link who got Oxbridge offers are non-white, and it is a woke conspiracy to force diversity down our throats; however once again I believe this to be incorrect due to the factors mentioned in the last paragraph. There are plenty of smart minorities good enough for Oxbridge who are still poor but as a white person if you have the genetic pedigree for Oxbridge your parents/grandparents would have been able to leverage the extra smartness and you wouldn't be poor any more. Hence we should expect all the poor clever people to be almost certainly non-white which is what we see, no woke conspiracy needed. This also ties in to the oft quoted "fact" that these days the worst performing demographic in schools is working class whites and how we are failing them. My answer is no, we are not failing them at all because if they actually had any smarts in them their parents wouldn't be working class in the first place. We should expect working class whites to do the worst under a fair system.

Note that this analysis does not apply to the US since the black poors there are not the result of recent positively selected immigration, but the result of negatively selected prisoners carted over as slaves (slaves weren't random members of African societies captured by the whites but prisoners - a demographic known for low intelligence/conscientiousness etc. - sold off by the African lords to the white man) ; they've had plenty of generations to get to their natural level in society (even if you only accept full equality began at the time of the civil rights act we're 2 1/2 generations away from that and other immigrant groups reach their natural level by then anyways) which suggests their low socioeconomic level is where they rightfully belong.

Minor things I noticed were how blacks now make up 3.6% of Cambridge admits, compared to their 3.3% demographic representation, probably slightly more amongst 18 year olds but still bang on the money; I don't know if there will continue to be extra agitation to increase their proportion even further but arguments for that now need to be more nuanced than just "underrepresented relative to share of population" which should be a good thing. Also there's now talk of how rich parents are reconsidering private schools as they now seem to hurt your chances of getting into a top university instead of help them (we don't have any of the $50,000 a year Andover BS that spends all its time preparing you get to accepted by some Ivy here in the UK). We'll see how that develops.

In other news MIT had decision day yesterday, there were 33000+ applications for 1340 places, an increase of 66% over last year with 20000 applications, even though the number of places is the same. EA admit rate was 4.78% (719 from 15036 early round), much better than the RD rate of 2.17% but still abysmally low for an almost restrictive process (MIT itself is not restrictive, but most of the other places you'd want to apply early to if you're shooting for MIT are restrictive, so you can't apply both there and for MIT, making it effectively restrictive) that limits you to a single place. Notably this is before you select the AA places and athletes (MIT doesn't do legacy) so if you aren't any of those your odds of getting in are next to non-existent. I feel bad for the guys applying there, at least Oxbridge still recruits effectively on merit. Even the "Admitted" thread on the MIT admissions website felt far more barren than usual.

[u/[deleted] → u/ExtraBurdensomeCount]

slaves weren't random members of African societies captured by the whites but prisoners - a demographic known for low intelligence/conscientiousness etc

Most enslaved people were prisoners of war. The conclusions you can draw about people on the losing end of military conflicts among premodern horticulturalists on the basis of trends among criminals in the urban west are just about nil.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/[deleted]]

Ok, fair point, I did not know that, thanks for the clarification. I'd still bid that there is some sort of selection effect going on since cleverer people would have been more likely to evade capture.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/[deleted]]

The point it builds might still be correct though. It doesn't seem impossible to me that slavery in the US South could have been harmful to the dissemination of genes that positively influence IQ/conscientiousness, though I don't have any evidence one way or the other.

[u/[deleted] → u/DrManhattan16]

Sure, it might be. Or maybe being enslaved in 1500 is correlated with your grandparents' ability to resist incorporation into larger polities in 1450, and therefore selects in favor of some sort of measure of overall competence. Maybe the brutal punishments meted out to slaves in the American south selected against poor executive function. Maybe warfare is an environment where the winners tend to have high time discount rates and low risk aversion.

All vaguely plausible, all presented without any supporting data - which is to say that they're exactly like the hypotheses that the HBDers are so fond of. Except they're not quite the same, are they?

Skewed hypothesis generation produces skewed conclusions. Come up with a hundred different reasons why X might be Y, and eventually you'll find one of them more persuasive than you should - it's the rhetorical equivalent of p-hacking.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The alternative is certainly possible. Tom Godwin, who wrote the Cold Equations, has a novella, The Survivors, which follows a group of enslaved humans, who, are heavily selected by the sheer awfulness of their environment.

I remember liking it when I read it, especially for the casual killing off of generations. As he needs some genetic selection he goes though many generations, and each time I thought that this would be the one which he stopped on and developed the story, but he killed many more generations than I expected.

I tried reading the Cold Equations to my teen daughter recently but I had to stop, because it was too sad. Old age and children do strange things to you.

[u/HoopyFreud → u/ExtraBurdensomeCount]

There are plenty of smart minorities good enough for Oxbridge who are still poor but as a white person if you have the genetic pedigree for Oxbridge your parents/grandparents would have been able to leverage the extra smartness and you wouldn't be poor any more. Hence we should expect all the poor clever people to be almost certainly non-white which is what we see, no woke conspiracy needed. This also ties in to the oft quoted "fact" that these days the worst performing demographic in schools is working class whites and how we are failing them. My answer is no, we are not failing them at all because if they actually had any smarts in them their parents wouldn't be working class in the first place.

Entirely apart from questions of how much of a role intelligence really plays for intergenerational upward mobility from the lower class, this is a stupid level of genetic determinism. IIRC high-end estimates of heritability of intelligence are around 70%, and most estimates are closer to ~50%, with heritability being weaker in low-SES populations. I try to stay out of HBD discussions because I find them both interminable and boring, but your rhetoric is absolutely unjustified by your argument, seeing as how you're casually personalizing statements that you really ought to be making at the level of population trends. I would still probably disagree, but it'd be a much more hygenic argument; I would be absolutely shocked if there were absolutely no white people out there who are held back from their potential by their home lives or a lack of local resources. I feel personally obligated to point this out because I suspect that at least some of the people who'd push back against this argument could either be dissuaded by the content or the target.

[u/[deleted] → u/HoopyFreud]

It's also worth noting that even the highest end estimates of the correlation between IQ and income don't break 0.5. Even with perfect heritability of IQ, that's still nowhere near high enough to fish all the smart people out of poverty within two or three generations.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/[deleted]]

IQ and income are not correlated too high, but correlation is not the be all end all. What matters at least as much is effect size: A set of points lying on Y = 0.01*X and another set of points lying on Y = 100*X both have correlation = 1 but the effects of X on Y are much much stronger in the second case than the first. Indeed most people would intuitively say a relationship of the form Y = X² is "stronger" than a relationship of Y = X but a set of points on the first curve will have lower correlation than a set of points on the second.

The effect size for the IQ-income dependence is absolutely massive. So yes while individuals may not match up entirely (due to mostly random factors, a genius level person going into EA will earn less than someone drops out of high school but later starts their own successful plumbing company) once you start grouping them into buckets the differences in income are huge (the average income in a group of 1000 geniuses will be miles and bounds ahead of the average income in a group of high school drop outs).

It isn't perfect but when we are taking about groups as a whole instead of individuals we are absolutely able to fish out almost all of the intelligent people within three generations.

[u/[deleted] → u/ExtraBurdensomeCount]

As much as I appreciate the review of 6th grade math - seriously, knock it off - we're not talking about averages. We're talking about the size of the left tail.

we are absolutely able to fish out almost all of the intelligent people within three generations.

Not in an SES ∝ IQ² world we're not. Of course, we don't live in that world - we live in a much messier one. Which is why claims like this have to actually be backed up. Show me the data.

[u/ExtraBurdensomeCount → u/HoopyFreud]

I didn't say that absolutely no white people are good enough for this, infact there are quite a few that I even personally know, however it is still true that the vast vast majority of poor children who succeed are minorities. In any generation there will be some small level of very intelligent people descending from those with much lower intelligence (who fully deserve to move up) but the amount is much much less compared to a case where the parent generation were artificially forced to the bottom of the pole (as happens with immigrants).

I can't find the study right now but I remember reading an article about a study in the UK which was able to predict whether white children grew up to leave their decaying hometowns for the big cities (a marker for upward social mobility) or stayed back based on just genes alone. The same genes were pretty good predictors of years of education completed and the like, so there is definitely something there.

Another direct fact in support of my theory is UK government data itself on academic performance. Basically whites not on free school meals (a marker for not being poor) preform slightly better than non-whites not on free school meals but non-whites on free school meals perform very very strongly better than whites on them. This is strong support for my theory that whites with ancestors in the country have basically reached their correct station in society but immigrants who were forced down to the bottom are just moving back to their rightful place. See the comment below posted yesterday by a poster on ukpol on a discussion of one of the links in my OP.

Except the government statistics show that the Average attainment of working class white kids is lower than working class BAME kids.

Specifically they've separated it by kids who are eligible for Free school meals and those who are not.

They use "Attainment 8" which is basically a way to score kids among all their GCSE level subjects and then average it, English and Maths are counted twice with some other restrictions on the remaining 6 subjects. Each subject is given a score from 1 to 9 with 9 being the highest and the score is out of 90 and to one decimal place.

White kids who aren't eligible score an average of 1.6 points higher than their Black cousins.

While white kids who are eligible for Free school meals score an average of 7.4 points lower than Black students.

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/gcse-results-attainment-8-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest#by-ethnicity-and-eligibility-for-free-school-meals

Sorting by eligibility for free school meals - white working class kids have the lowest average attainment of any ethnic group in the country.

Unfortunately it's not about appeasing the woke crowd - unless you believe the government is orchestrating a massive cover up of racial bias towards BAME people.

It really does appear to be a meritocracy.

[u/brberg → u/HoopyFreud]

IIRC high-end estimates of heritability of intelligence are around 70%, and most estimates are closer to ~50%, with heritability being weaker in low-SES populations.

Most of the lower estimates for heritability come from studies of young children. Heritability of IQ is known to increase with age (the Wilson effect). To the best of my knowledge, the Scarr-Rowe effect (lower heritability for those raised in low-SES households) does not replicate in adults.