This is actually hilarious. I can understand an "everything in moderation approach".
But in this case, it was just a "fuck it, I don't care it breaks my rule"
You can probably predict my response, which is that black and
Hispanic students get lower test scores and do worse on various other
forms of college preparedness, so it’s not a failure on colleges’ part
that they are admitted at lower rates.
Wtf. Im not in the US and even I know that this is bs, black and
hispanic students do worse because they live in worse precollege
education neighbourhoods. Iirc the budget a school gets is tied to
property taxes. (Im assuming I dont have to explain why this hurts
black/hispanic people more). Which is like a social justice 101
argument. So either he doesn’t know this, or he thinks it is irrelevant
because racial IQ is real. (Or it does not apply to California and all
people get equal pre college education no matter their background, feel
free to correct me, but im doubtful, esp in the bay area).
E: and that nobody explains this to dear leader should tell you
everything you need to know about the amount of leftwing people left in
ssc. Motherfucking white rationalists…
E2: Also I guess this appearing on reddit and not on the blog means
Scott is no longer a blogger but just a redditor. (This is such a
weasely way, just blog on the main site, admit that the whole NYT thing
was overblown and a nothingburger)
> Iirc the budget a school gets is tied to property taxes.
This is a popular misconception but not really the case. Most schools are funded from state taxes as well. In general, underperforming schools spend *more* per-student than excellent ones. For example, New York public schools publish their data online and Stuyvesant, the "best" high school in NYC is among the lowest of the thousand or so schools in terms of budget per student.
All the extra money doesn't mean it's a better education, of course. Most struggling schools have a higher proportion of special needs children, more English as a second language requirements, have to provide more free lunches, have increased security needs, etc, etc. And then the "better" schools have more engaged parents who often volunteer at functions, less teacher turnover, and so on.
All this to say: it's complicated, but the idea that schools get all their money from property taxes, and so good schools spend a lot more money than bad schools, is mostly wrong. And I think it's an important misconception to clear up since if it were the case, the solution of just throwing more money at the problem would be the first thing to try. But we've tried it, it hasn't really worked, and so we need to try other things.
Aha thanks, guess I was wrong on that one. And yes, it is never as easy as 'just throw money at it' recent experiments in Dutch UBI also show that UBI isn't effective (what was measured was 'getting people back to work' for effectiveness iirc, it was for people who were long term unemployed) if it wasn't combined with some personal help assistance as well.
Yes, i stopped reading his post after it got to the whole 'i want to abolish college'. There is only so much time we have in life, and we should not spend it all reading peoples shitty opinions. (That is also why I dont read moldbug), esp not as there are so many books to read in life.
But thanks for pointing it out. I had no idea his actual rebuttal was stupider than I thought. He actually thinks you can overcome bad high schooling by college education, and suddenly come out ahead. That is insane, you cant be tutored in all the things you missed in 10 years of education while also doing a full time education and then suddenly start performing 'really well'.
I'm not saying it is pointless to bring them to uni, I'm calling out his metric for saying 'school quality doesn't matter'. You get how this is different right? Scott is using a stupid metric to claim something doesn't matter which cannot even prove the thing doesn't matter.
And what the fuck is that whole 'lets get them away from their parents' drivel about? How did you get that from my post at all? Are you a mottehead or something?
> riiight, you're just saying that "bad high schooling can't be overcome by college education"
I'm not. I'm saying that it will have an effect on eventual grade which doesn't go away. Lets take licking lead paint as an example, if you lick lead paint (im sure you are familiar) you will get brain damage, and will do less well in school. This will have an effect on your grades. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go to university, or that you can't learn things. It just is an effect which doesn't go away, and if I said 'ie they were being held back by licking lead paint, once they got into college they would perform really well' it would be really stupid, as there will be a 'lead paint licker' effect, even if they do well in college. You can't 'undo' this by college education.
> "oh, all rationalists are racist shitbags who are thinking about The Bell Curve all the time"
Lol, nice strawman, not like I have not expressed often in the past I'm not sure if Scott is a race realist or not. I have my doubts yes, esp as he never seems to take a stance (and the motte is very much 14 words)
> 'some groups don't value education'
He brought it up in relation to schools being underpaid. I might have a bad attention span, but you are rationalizing. (This is also always the default 'I can't be a racist, im just worried about hippy hoppy culture, and ... baseball caps with the front not bend??' stance (nice motte/bailey of course)).
> Immigrant origin ones do really great
Yes, people who come from wealth (wealth enough to immigrate) usually do better.
> just a solution
Double lol, sure buddy, that was the intent. It wasn't a bad faith attempt to make some sort of genocidal 'lets take their kids away' strawman. Go eat a bag of smelly dicks.
e: [holy shit](https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/d2r9wg/people_who_dont_care_for_their_kids_should_be/)
Why do you think Scotty is some great philosopher? Is it just the “rationalist” aesthetic? Because he isn’t particularly unique or interesting. Neither are your views, tbh.
It’s just authoritarian paternalism, “rationalists” think that your lot knows best and you can reshape the world into a perfect meritocracy where people with “actual merit”, like you all, will be rewarded with the success you deserve and the minorities and downtrodden who you consider are getting too much societal attention and support and shunted off to the side like they deserve. It isn’t new or interesting, the world doesn’t owe you shit, the word “meritocracy” was created satirically by a Labour Party leader to describe a dystopian system and status isn’t being taken away from you towards the undeserving.
> It’s funny how you assume so much. I actually learned about The Rise of Meritocracy from SSC and https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/ influenced my thinking quite a lot
That explains a lot, learning from the washed-up Tory son instead of the Socialist father
I don't think affirmative action is about finding the people who would do best in college, but about getting a more diverse group into the college and about trying to fix the unfair distribution of outcomes in society across races which was caused by lasting effects of racist policies in recent history. Scott seems to be treating it as a failure of affirmative action if it lets in a poor minority into a college who does worse in it than a better-off person would, but that doesn't follow.
> it’s kind of laughable to assume, that I - a white guy from eastern Europe would have some magical solution
Then why comment about American racial relations and the solutions being used at all? You don’t live here nor do you know how society works in the US, why comment at all? I won’t talk about Balkan ethnic issues with this much assumed confidence because I haven’t been there, what makes you think you understand how the US works?
The United States is a real country with real people living their lives and has real issues, not some grand hypothetical battleground of ideology. If you don’t even live in the country and don’t know the issues apart from reading it through media... maybe don’t argue so stridently, yeah?
> You are with your disdain for Tories probably British
Wrong, I haven’t been to the UK in my life.
Don’t argue with someone with no intention of changing their mind. I’ll stop, so should you
Yes racial justice is exactly the same as ensuring Biden supporter’s
children are in your school… you know… aesthetics!
Additionally, the idea that poor high schools hold kids back, but
then they’d do well in college is… well insane. Does this man know
nothing about the human brain?
You can tell a lot about what’s wrong with the insides of someone by
the assumptions they make about their adversaries. Apparently Scott has
absolutely no understanding of racial justice, what’s been done to
people, and why one should care let alone even try to undo some of the
damage.
And this man has a license to prescribe pharma to people and controls
how long they remain in forced custody. My god.
> Additionally, the idea that poor high schools hold kids back, but then they’d do well in college is... well insane. Does this man know nothing about the human brain?
Isn't he agreeing with you on that one? See below:
>If minorities were academically better than their test scores predicted - ie they were being held back by bad high schools, but once they got into college they would perform really well - then I would agree we should have affirmative action, on the grounds mentioned above. AFAIK this isn't true, and high school success predicts future achievement for minorities according to the same prediction rules as for everyone else, but if I'm wrong about this let me know.
He's basically saying we should send the kids to college who we expect to perform best academically, without concern for what racial or other identity breakdown that produces.
How can high school performance be a good predictor if some high schools are better than others?
Your quoted paragraph implies quality of high school doesn’t matter?
What I understand both Scott and /u/codemuncher to be saying is sort of the opposite - if you don't get a good high school education it hurts your ability to do well in college, so we shouldn't expect students who did poorly at bad high schools to suddenly do as well as kids who did well at good high schools when they're put in the same college environment. Could be wrong about either though.
Personally I am somewhat skeptical of the role of school quality in all this. To me it looks more like growing up in poverty really fucks people up in a variety of ways, one of which is that they tend to do worse in school. So the solution isn't to somehow get schools to produce the same outcomes for poor students, but to end poverty.
Yep. As I've often said, you get a bunch of people who decide they're going to sit down and reduce everything to Cartesian first principles and they end up reinventing racism, sexism, and libertarianism, but with a robot god and some made up bullshit specialized vocabulary.
Scott seems utterly deranged in his reasoning for every single one of
his voting recommendations. I am fascinated, rationalist epistemology
seems to completely break people’s brains, rewire them back badly and
make them speak and think like aliens. Very similar to the postmodern
epistemology that lot hates IMO.
> every single one of his voting recommendations
Dunno, letting felons vote seems fine to me tbh. Repealing tax cuts for bigger businesses also seems fine etc. being pro uber is nuts of course, esp when earlier you worry about the rent control effect on the poor. Rent control bad, indentured servitude with extra steps good. (actual stem cell researchers are also pushing back on his 'stem cell research is not producing anything' stance)
> plural
I think he imagines he now speaks for all bay area rationalists.
I would be very reticent to talk about a "postmodern epistemology" at all. You can barely find 2 "postmodernists" who agree on anything to rub together, and characterizing it as having one epistemology is like saying the entire Enlightenment has one epistemology.
Not exactly an epistemology, but postmodernism studiers have rewired their brains into something alien IMO. The way they speak and think is very unnerving to me (the overuse of adjectives, the complete ironic detachment, “deconstruction”).
It’s why I really dislike rationalism too, it’s like they’ve rewired their brains away from “normal” sane thinking and I find that very uncanny
'Deconstruction' is characteristic of Derrida only. Most people in the know would not consider Derrida a "postmodernist." He's a post structuralist, yes, but beyond that he lacks really any connection to other "postmodernists." The tradition he writes in is that of literary theory, rather than straight philosophy like the other "pomos." Deconstructionists also tend to have disdain for "pomos," see for example Gayatri Spivak.
I keep using the term in scare quotes because I do not really believe it means anything. In his book *Against Postmodernism* Alex Callinicos tries to define it and is basically forced to offer a list of thinkers he considers postmodernists. Even the traditional definition of "suspicion toward metanarratives" or "suspicion toward the Enlightenment" breaks down when you realize a lot of the thinkers lumped in as postmodernists are actually in favor of the Enlightenment, they just happen to believe that we are living in some kind of unique "postmodern" era right now. There are occasional commonalities between thinkers but not enough to characterize a movement (Deleuze and Foucault for example).
I happen to quite like a lot of the thinkers considered postmodern, and I think your comment demonstrates that you most likely have not read them. Foucault is a really careful historian who calls into question our ideas of progress. We would like to think that we are getting more civilized, but is that really true? His prose is quite clear and serious. Donna Haraway is a feminist who wants to show how the patriarchy depends on binaries, and that a fractionalization of identity is occurring as a result of changing technology, potentially holding the key to liberation. Richard Rorty often referred to himself as a post analytic philosopher, and his work is a careful analysis of traditional binaries like Mind/body or finite/infinite.
If you want to read something that may change your view of postmodernists a little bit, I suggest looking into some of Foucault's lectures, or reading *Manifesto for Cyborgs* by Haraway.
I wouldn't really call foucault a careful historian. historians are mostly not impressed by his scholarship on a lot of topics, although his influence on gay studies is widely acknowledged
This is true actually, he was not a careful historian and this is just a conventional take in the field. He is cited and read for his conceptual vocabulary, new ways of thinking, etc. We read a lot of him in my grad classes and the professor started the seminars by noting this and that we were to read him for other reasons. People in the know are aware of this and that he really didn't even think of himself as a historian. I can link a Reddit thread about it and you can Google related terms and find all kinds of stuff on this subject. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1edywk/what_weaknesses_do_historians_find_in_michel/?st=JM0NTLEV&sh=28394b98
Doesn't really diminish his work or it's value (well I guess it does for historians of the subjects he writes about), but one really cannot characterize him as a careful or rigorous historian according to conventions of the field for a long time now.
> If you want to read something that may change your view of postmodernists a little bit... reading *Manifesto for Cyborgs* by Haraway
I don't think that will have the effect that you think it will have.
I’m not talking about the intellectuals (I’m too small brain to understand) but the postmodernist grad students and profs on Twitter and elsewhere. I’m calling it postmodernist because that’s the closest word I can think of for that group, but they speak and think in such an alienating and bizarre manner
could you give me an example so I know who you're talking about?
I get really triggered when ppl rag on postmodernism without knowing a thing about it lol sorry
like [this image](https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/next_gen_learning/Perfectionism%20Sense%20of%20Urgency%20Defensiveness%20Quantity%20Over%20Quality%20Worship%20of%20the%20Written%20Word%20Only%20One%20Right%20Way%20Paternalism%20Either_Or%20Thinking.png) that got shared around recently saying “objectivity” and “perfectionism” and other qualities are markers of white supremacist culture. Stuff like this is so bizarre I cannot understand the thought process of people like this at all
(IIRC these exact qualities got ragged on as sexist at the height of \#MeToo too)
with a very quick Google search I found www.dismantlingracism.org
it appears that the section "White Supremacy Culture" is what you're looking for. Now, you can go and look at the reasoning instead of trying to guess at what it might be.
Can you say what, if anything, you don't understand about that pdf? It's very clearly stated. We might quibble over the word choices---someone could say that "objectivity" isn't the best description for the value white supremacy culture over-emphasizes---but that's not a big deal
I think it’s a very wrong and incoherent worldview. YMMV, but we’re random redditors, nobody’s going to change their mind here
Also most of what’s described is not white supremacy culture, it’s just “merit”-obsessed culture. I’m from India, this describes the corporate and academic culture in India (and most of Asia) none of which can be, by definition, white supremacist.
If you don't want to engage, that's fine! We're here to sneer, not to learn
I don't think the pamphlet was a positive statement of a worldview, just a critique of the excesses of a different worldview. It's very difficult for someone to state, in certain and clear terms, what their worldview is, so I don't expect a positive statement.
I agree that many of the traits are not unique to white supremacist culture. But they're still typical of white supremacist culture, and they aren't universal, and they seem pretty bad. A parallel: it's typical of fascists to worship a strong man at the center of their movement. This trait is not unique to fascism, but it's typical of it, and if I were listing the psychological underpinnings of fascism, it's one of the things I would list.
That theory can be explained without sounding like an insane irony-poisoned loon though, but postmodernism rewrites you until you cannot sound like anything else from what I’ve seen
That's actually a terrible response because there are so many other things that are wrong before you even get to the point where that should matter and it just surrenders all of them.
You can care about people and still find arguments about why things like affirmative action are not actually helping - so then they just have to say you're caring about the wrong people.
The thing is their arguments are garbage and should be treated as such.
I mean, sure, but independent of the many, many other issues, what I see as a fundamental problem with types like these is that they tie themselves into knots to justify their apathy towards other people. It shows itself in their tortured logic and cherry-picked sources and as long as they're starting from that source feeling, they will never listen to any reasoned argument as to why they're wrong because they did not logic themselves into it into the first place.
Thick smug predicted for the California Central Valley tomorrow. Visibility <5 metres.
Rationalism: “I made up a rule, and I’m not sure how to apply it here, so I’ll just go with my gut.”
Is this not the bog-standard right-wing argument, just more insufferably long-winded?
Wtf. Im not in the US and even I know that this is bs, black and hispanic students do worse because they live in worse precollege education neighbourhoods. Iirc the budget a school gets is tied to property taxes. (Im assuming I dont have to explain why this hurts black/hispanic people more). Which is like a social justice 101 argument. So either he doesn’t know this, or he thinks it is irrelevant because racial IQ is real. (Or it does not apply to California and all people get equal pre college education no matter their background, feel free to correct me, but im doubtful, esp in the bay area).
E: and that nobody explains this to dear leader should tell you everything you need to know about the amount of leftwing people left in ssc. Motherfucking white rationalists…
E2: Also I guess this appearing on reddit and not on the blog means Scott is no longer a blogger but just a redditor. (This is such a weasely way, just blog on the main site, admit that the whole NYT thing was overblown and a nothingburger)
My god what a damn idiot.
Yes racial justice is exactly the same as ensuring Biden supporter’s children are in your school… you know… aesthetics!
Additionally, the idea that poor high schools hold kids back, but then they’d do well in college is… well insane. Does this man know nothing about the human brain?
You can tell a lot about what’s wrong with the insides of someone by the assumptions they make about their adversaries. Apparently Scott has absolutely no understanding of racial justice, what’s been done to people, and why one should care let alone even try to undo some of the damage.
And this man has a license to prescribe pharma to people and controls how long they remain in forced custody. My god.
When you are fully insulated from consequence and hardship, I suppose everything starts to look like pure aesthetics
[deleted]
Scott seems utterly deranged in his reasoning for every single one of his voting recommendations. I am fascinated, rationalist epistemology seems to completely break people’s brains, rewire them back badly and make them speak and think like aliens. Very similar to the postmodern epistemology that lot hates IMO.
(also why does he refer to himself in plural?)
The best response to this, I think, is this: I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.
I’d like to abolish Scott-shaped things.
Yikes.