Rationalist-adjacent. This is my Tumblr page.

di–es—can-ic-ul-ar–es:

triviallytrue:

I’m trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn’t a political priority to me.

It’s good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly “fair” system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won’t have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you’ll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would’ve been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I’m just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of “their people” and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes “your people” for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn’t true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it’s hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say “society is racist, so I guess it’s okay for Harvard to be racist too.” By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it’s hard for me to write about this without feeling like it’s all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.

I think it’s obvious that most of the left is in overcorrection as a response to colorblindness. Declaring victory prematurely is seen more as a conservative strategy for preserving privilege or gaslighting their enemies or other undesirables, but it’s to the point where I dont even think the plurality of leftists agree with colorblindness as a normative goal for an optimal future!

This sucks ass. Leftists should reclaim colorblindness, because colorblindness is obviously morally superior to the competition!

But anyway. Harvard should be an SAT-conditional sortition. Everyone with an SAT score above a threshold is equally weighted in the lottery

Went on a hike today in a path that is near my apartment.

image

theopjones:

Job searching is still really annoying, over a month since getting laid off, and applying to a lot of things, and phone screens/interviews – but nothing good yet.

It feels a lot like a failure.

It also just feels like I’ve been caught in a downward spiral for the past year and a half with one big disaster after another. Having the health issues/hospital visit, the issue with the bad roommate, and now getting laid off

Job searching is still really annoying, over a month since getting laid off, and applying to a lot of things, and phone screens/interviews – but nothing good yet.

It feels a lot like a failure.

self-winding:

brazenautomaton:

samueldays:

image

tumblr as a website is in a way the opposite of making up a guy to get mad at, it will instantiate the guy you are mad at even if the guy was imaginary just last week

welcome to my goddamn life

It doesn’t help that people use “capitalism” and “industrialism” pretty much interchangeably.

If we accept the very broad way that people tend to use that word (“the way all human production and consumption is currently organized,” i.e. “markets where goods and services are paid for with money as opposed to bartering or working the land for a nobleman who nominally offers protection in exchange for your labor, but you don’t really get a choice”), the alternatives are basically:

1.  A pre-capitalist system such as feudalism, subsistence farming, nomadic hunting and gathering, etc.

2.  A totalitarian command economy.

3.  Some blend of capitalism and one of these other things.

I have yet to hear anyone suggest a fourth alternative that is not a totally utopian fantasy where we’re all a harmonious hivemind.

centrally-unplanned:

rustingbridges:

liskantope:

northshorewave:

Coming alarmingly close to 10,000 posts.

That’s impressive. I don’t know how anyone manages it actually, unless they’re Argumate and specialize in brief zingers which they then reblog year after year.

This happens to be precisely my 1800th post, and I’ve been active on this platform for over 8 years.

whenever any idiot idea enters my mind I simply let it out, that’s how

I am almost at 5k posts - and they all are bangers, you are welcome.

7k

theopjones:

Hmm. I suspect I’m about to get my first offer for a role I applied for (a IT/software dev technical writer), but that it’s going to be a pretty lowball salary (~$50,000/yr) compared to both what I’ve been paid in the past, and what I’m seeing listed on other similar roles (80-90k is more like what I’d expect,  my guess is that this is why the hiring manager seems fairly desperate to fill it soon). 

Its basically with Google, but through one of their staffing companies instead of being a direct employee – I’ve had some bad experiences with that type of thing in the past (I briefly worked with Apple through a staffing company), but it was a bad experience.

Probably not going to accept, but there is some temptation here, just to remove the uncertainty of job searching/having no income. But it would probably be a bad idea to settle for this. 

I decided to turn it down – hopefully, I made the right decision. In the offer there were a lot of other surprises, as is somewhat typical of my interactions with these staffing companies.

Hmm. I suspect I’m about to get my first offer for a role I applied for (a IT/software dev technical writer), but that it’s going to be a pretty lowball salary (~$50,000/yr) compared to both what I’ve been paid in the past, and what I’m seeing listed on other similar roles (80-90k is more like what I’d expect,  my guess is that this is why the hiring manager seems fairly desperate to fill it soon). 

Its basically with Google, but through one of their staffing companies instead of being a direct employee – I’ve had some bad experiences with that type of thing in the past (I briefly worked with Apple through a staffing company), but it was a bad experience.

Probably not going to accept, but there is some temptation here, just to remove the uncertainty of job searching/having no income. But it would probably be a bad idea to settle for this.