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This discussion is incomplete unless it also comprehends that the definition of white supremacy (or x-phobia, patriarchy, misogyny) in elite and academic circle

This discussion is incomplete unless it also comprehends that the definition of white supremacy (or x-phobia, patriarchy, misogyny) in elite and academic circles has expanded incredibly, to the point where it bears no relation to any reasonable person's understanding of these terms. Despite this, apparently well-intentioned people try to have conversations about these concepts, but the terms no longer have shared meaning. It's not clear whether SSC is being denounced for associating with cross-burners, or just with those who believe merit exists. In elite discourse, both of those positions are now white supremacy.

sjg007 6y ago
Umm.. there's definitely evidence of white supremacy in scientific research, especially older work now discredited.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jessedhillon 6y ago
  Did I say otherwise?
rayiner 6y ago
And for people who think it’s just some wackadoos who use “white supremacy” in this way, behold FCPS (the school board in the Virginia county where I grew up). https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/anti-racist-teacher-harasses-minority-parents https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/anti-racist-teacher-haras.... People railing against the “white supremacy” of a high school (the one I went to) that’s overwhelmingly Asian. This isn’t Berkeley California. It’s a historically Republican county that went for Bush against Gore and only narrowly went for Kerry four years later.
- jessedhillon 6y ago
  Similarly, this is an astonishing (and infuriating) interview with SF board of ed president Gabriella Lopez: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Even for SF, this is extreme. Side note, for years I used to see the name "rayiner" and roll my eyes at the "reactionary libertarian" opinions expressed. In the past year though, I myself have come much closer to where you've consistently been. Part of it is the rapid leftward drift of major institutions -- media, workplace, education -- during the Trump years, and the distinct absence of any kind of critical discussion of this phenomenon. The other part is probably that I'm now at the point of having children soon. Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. In this case, it should matter a lot less that the school board is composed of lunatics, or that the NYT is trending towards naked culture war propagandism.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I think it's clearly better for our incompetent leaders to have less power than more, but better still would be to have competent leaders with adequate and no more power.
  - geofft 6y ago
    > Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. I agree with this too! Which is why I think it's important the article calls out the institutional power of YC and the risk of it being captured by extremists! Frankly, leave the question of connection to white supremacy (under whatever definition) aside - as someone who was a regular Less Wrong reader, seeing Y Combinator and the other agents of Silicon Valley power go "All right, we will invest heavily in building a friendly AI under our definition of friendly," just by itself, is kind of a worst-case scenario. I don't think the interests of Valley investors are quite fully aligned the interests of humanity at large, but it's Valley investors that have the most ability to make AGI happen, and they've decided to start work. The only reason I don't find it terrifying is that I don't really agree with the Rationalists' arguments about it. But they do, and they're smart people.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  I went to TJ too. Asra loves to make this argument but it is BS. TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students. The article you linked is gruesomely biased.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students You’ve got it exactly backward. “Historically” “white people” didn’t need to use standardized tests to exclude non-whites. They just did it. Standardized testing was used to distinguish among white people (just as it’s been used in China since 650 CE to distinguish among Chinese people). In fact, the opposite is true. Standardized testing is pretty much the only thing that has allowed non-white groups to advance in white societies. There’s only a handful of societies where ethnic minorities have come to out-earn the majority population. Almost without exception it’s been the result of standardized testing creating level playing fields for people who lack the social capital that would otherwise be necessary for advancement.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      The proposals that Asra and friends decry as racist are random lotteries. How can a standardized test level the playing field more than that? The proposals further eliminate features that are either largely unrelated to academic capability or are tightly bound to access to wealth or attending the right gifted programs.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        Performance in standardized tests is not “tightly bound to wealth.” Most of the Asians at the NYC test-based schools, for example, are lower income: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyvesant-admissions-controversy-fact-or-fiction/585460 https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyve.... It’s true most people at TJ are solidly upper middle class, but so are most families in Fairfax County (the median family income of the whole county is $150,000). It’s not like families at TJ are richer than those at McLean, Great Falls, Langley, etc. Random lotteries don’t level the playing field, they eliminate opportunities for people to distinguish themselves. Societies that eschew objective metrics don’t just have radically flat mobility, they have rigid social frameworks based on non-objective indicators. Imagine the “holistic admissions” factors colleges use to exclude Asians (“leadership personality” or whatever) applied on a wider scale.
- geofft 6y ago
  I've seen you post this same debate about a certain high school's entrance exams before in these sorts of threads, and it continues to be as much of off-topic flamebait as it was last time. Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy." And, in turn, the article is making a specific claim that Nick Land's writings are embraced by white supremacists. We can figure out whether that claim is true or not, and under what definition of "white supremacists," directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land says: "Land has promoted the Atomwaffen-affiliated Order of Nine Angles that adheres to the ideology of neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing O9A's works as "highly-recommended"." If someone in this thread actually disputes that Nick Land's writings are inspirational to cross-burning white supremacists, which is what I read the NYT article to be saying, let's debate that.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy." It’s the same definition being used by both: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html. It’s probably only a minority of people with graduate degrees who use the terminology this way, but this group is highly represented both among people who read and write for the NYT and on school boards in wealthy, highly educated suburbs like the one I’m talking about. It’s directly relevant to the discussion up thread. The post I was responding to pointed out that this expansive definition of “white supremacy” makes it hard to have these discussions. It’s impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land to figure out which kind of “white supremacy” people are talking about. I don’t take the poster up-thread above to be arguing Nick Land isn’t a “white supremacist” in the narrow sense of the word. He’s just observing that the confusing created by the terminology (confusing that is, as far as I can tell, a deliberate consequence of the word choice) makes these sorts of discussions difficult.
    - geofft 6y ago
      It's difficult because the two of you are choosing to make it difficult! Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask? What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well - you haven't argued that the NYT is wrong (either in this subthread or anywhere else in this comment section), you're arguing that the NYT cannot possibly make arguments worth listening to. Elsewhere you're mocking the NYT Editorial Board. Maybe they're worth mocking, but it has nothing to do with the merits of this article! It's beneath you, and it's beneath this site. Maybe it works. But it only works because it's ruining reasoned discourse and scoring cheap points about those people at the NYT and how we don't like them. The debate is - ironically - no longer about the ideas the NYT is claiming and instead about the people and their proximity to other people we don't like.

sjg007 6y ago

Umm.. there's definitely evidence of white supremacy in scientific research, especially older work now discredited.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jessedhillon 6y ago
Did I say otherwise?

rayiner 6y ago

And for people who think it’s just some wackadoos who use “white supremacy” in this way, behold FCPS (the school board in the Virginia county where I grew up). https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/anti-racist-teacher-harasses-minority-parents https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/anti-racist-teacher-haras.... People railing against the “white supremacy” of a high school (the one I went to) that’s overwhelmingly Asian. This isn’t Berkeley California. It’s a historically Republican county that went for Bush against Gore and only narrowly went for Kerry four years later.

jessedhillon 6y ago
Similarly, this is an astonishing (and infuriating) interview with SF board of ed president Gabriella Lopez: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Even for SF, this is extreme. Side note, for years I used to see the name "rayiner" and roll my eyes at the "reactionary libertarian" opinions expressed. In the past year though, I myself have come much closer to where you've consistently been. Part of it is the rapid leftward drift of major institutions -- media, workplace, education -- during the Trump years, and the distinct absence of any kind of critical discussion of this phenomenon. The other part is probably that I'm now at the point of having children soon. Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. In this case, it should matter a lot less that the school board is composed of lunatics, or that the NYT is trending towards naked culture war propagandism.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I think it's clearly better for our incompetent leaders to have less power than more, but better still would be to have competent leaders with adequate and no more power.
- geofft 6y ago
  > Either way, I now feel that the most sane and practical thing to advocate for is that there should be less institutional power available to be captured by extremists. I agree with this too! Which is why I think it's important the article calls out the institutional power of YC and the risk of it being captured by extremists! Frankly, leave the question of connection to white supremacy (under whatever definition) aside - as someone who was a regular Less Wrong reader, seeing Y Combinator and the other agents of Silicon Valley power go "All right, we will invest heavily in building a friendly AI under our definition of friendly," just by itself, is kind of a worst-case scenario. I don't think the interests of Valley investors are quite fully aligned the interests of humanity at large, but it's Valley investors that have the most ability to make AGI happen, and they've decided to start work. The only reason I don't find it terrifying is that I don't really agree with the Rationalists' arguments about it. But they do, and they're smart people.
UncleMeat 6y ago
I went to TJ too. Asra loves to make this argument but it is BS. TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students. The article you linked is gruesomely biased.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > TJ can engage in precisely the same systems that have historically excluded everybody but white people while still ending up dominated by south and east asian students You’ve got it exactly backward. “Historically” “white people” didn’t need to use standardized tests to exclude non-whites. They just did it. Standardized testing was used to distinguish among white people (just as it’s been used in China since 650 CE to distinguish among Chinese people). In fact, the opposite is true. Standardized testing is pretty much the only thing that has allowed non-white groups to advance in white societies. There’s only a handful of societies where ethnic minorities have come to out-earn the majority population. Almost without exception it’s been the result of standardized testing creating level playing fields for people who lack the social capital that would otherwise be necessary for advancement.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    The proposals that Asra and friends decry as racist are random lotteries. How can a standardized test level the playing field more than that? The proposals further eliminate features that are either largely unrelated to academic capability or are tightly bound to access to wealth or attending the right gifted programs.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Performance in standardized tests is not “tightly bound to wealth.” Most of the Asians at the NYC test-based schools, for example, are lower income: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyvesant-admissions-controversy-fact-or-fiction/585460 https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyve.... It’s true most people at TJ are solidly upper middle class, but so are most families in Fairfax County (the median family income of the whole county is $150,000). It’s not like families at TJ are richer than those at McLean, Great Falls, Langley, etc. Random lotteries don’t level the playing field, they eliminate opportunities for people to distinguish themselves. Societies that eschew objective metrics don’t just have radically flat mobility, they have rigid social frameworks based on non-objective indicators. Imagine the “holistic admissions” factors colleges use to exclude Asians (“leadership personality” or whatever) applied on a wider scale.
geofft 6y ago
I've seen you post this same debate about a certain high school's entrance exams before in these sorts of threads, and it continues to be as much of off-topic flamebait as it was last time. Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy." And, in turn, the article is making a specific claim that Nick Land's writings are embraced by white supremacists. We can figure out whether that claim is true or not, and under what definition of "white supremacists," directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land says: "Land has promoted the Atomwaffen-affiliated Order of Nine Angles that adheres to the ideology of neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing O9A's works as "highly-recommended"." If someone in this thread actually disputes that Nick Land's writings are inspirational to cross-burning white supremacists, which is what I read the NYT article to be saying, let's debate that.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > Whatever the actions of a school board in Virginia, it's at best indirectly connected with how the NYT defines "white supremacy." It’s the same definition being used by both: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html. It’s probably only a minority of people with graduate degrees who use the terminology this way, but this group is highly represented both among people who read and write for the NYT and on school boards in wealthy, highly educated suburbs like the one I’m talking about. It’s directly relevant to the discussion up thread. The post I was responding to pointed out that this expansive definition of “white supremacy” makes it hard to have these discussions. It’s impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land to figure out which kind of “white supremacy” people are talking about. I don’t take the poster up-thread above to be arguing Nick Land isn’t a “white supremacist” in the narrow sense of the word. He’s just observing that the confusing created by the terminology (confusing that is, as far as I can tell, a deliberate consequence of the word choice) makes these sorts of discussions difficult.
  - geofft 6y ago
    It's difficult because the two of you are choosing to make it difficult! Perhaps it's impossible to follow the discussion above without Googling Nick Land, spending ten seconds skimming his Wikipedia page, and seeing the word "Atomwaffen" and reading the rest of the sentence. But you're interested in truth, aren't you? Are those ten seconds so much to ask? What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well - you haven't argued that the NYT is wrong (either in this subthread or anywhere else in this comment section), you're arguing that the NYT cannot possibly make arguments worth listening to. Elsewhere you're mocking the NYT Editorial Board. Maybe they're worth mocking, but it has nothing to do with the merits of this article! It's beneath you, and it's beneath this site. Maybe it works. But it only works because it's ruining reasoned discourse and scoring cheap points about those people at the NYT and how we don't like them. The debate is - ironically - no longer about the ideas the NYT is claiming and instead about the people and their proximity to other people we don't like.