George A. Yancey on anti-racism; Wilfred Reilly on affirmative action; Emily Oster talks with Russ Roberts; Richard Hanania on Jonathan Rauch; Razib Khan on The Scout Mindset
"Can we continue to uphold as good the principles, practices, and reward systems of the institutions that make up what Rauch calls the Constitution of Knowledge, even though... white males tend to be disproportionately successful in climbing to the higher ranks within those institutions?"
I would push back on this statement. As Eric Kaufmann points out, Whites are not disproportionately represented in many of these institutions:
"[Google's] workforce is only 4 per cent Hispanic and 2 per cent African-American. Whites, at 56 per cent, are not over-represented, despite the ‘mostly white’ headlines that tend to follow the release of its human resources reports. Asians make up 35 per cent of Google staff and have been steadily eroding white share despite forming just 5 per cent of the US population." (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities)
no Haidt quote. From Hanania: "Rauch’s intellectual inspirations are: we get references to Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Haidt, John Locke, David Hume, Galileo, Thomas Kuhn, Émile Durkheim, George Orwell, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Popper, Montesquieu, James Madison, Socrates, and so on. Liberals like Rauch have simply been unable to reconcile their respect for traditional institutions with their support for diversity. Their implicit argument—that these great things happened to be created by white men only through some accident that has no implication for how they function today—does not seem very credible. The far Left, by contrast, has an easy answer to this conundrum: deconstruct the institutions and demand something more representative to replace them."
Also "Like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and other moderate liberals, he considers diversity of viewpoints central to an epistemologically healthy system of knowledge creation. Yet he also believes in institutions that by necessity raise up some voices and exclude others. . . Given that we all agree some views and perspectives should be excluded from knowledge-producing processes, the question simply becomes, “which ones?” Rauch would like a place for conservatives; the woke would not. This doesn’t seem to be an issue of deep principle, but a question of where we draw the line."
When you say "Rauch would like a place for conservatives", does that actually include Deplorables, or is it limited (as I suspect) to never-Trumpers?
As to "where we draw the line", there had better emerge some clear criteria for this, if we want to avoid the brewing quasi- civil war.
The Kyle R. verdict may've been a dodge of one bullet, but the reaction of so many Dems/ Wokesters shows that, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing".
Lawyer turned crime novelist George Higgins once said, "I build [my stories] the way I used to build a trial, a criminal trial. The witnesses come along, and each recites what portion of reality he knows about. At the end. . . you then call upon the jury to reach its own moral decision, its own ethical judgments about the way the characters have behaved . . . I don’t want to make any judgments for the reader. That’s the reader’s job.”
While aggregating parties with conflicting motives and accounts is indeed an effective means of converting soldier-like inputs into scout-like outcomes, many people are now rejecting the principles that such institutional processes are predicated upon. Individuals should be able to speak "their truth" without any regard to another person's portion of reality or objective fact and neutral mechanisms concerned with producing good outcomes are not as emotionally satisfying as policies explicitly tied to good intentions.
Complimenting your "folk version" of economic issues, I highly recommend Pascal Boyer
and Michael Bang Petersen's paper "Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model"
http://pascalboyer.net/articles/2018BoyerPetersenFolk-Econ.pdf
"Can we continue to uphold as good the principles, practices, and reward systems of the institutions that make up what Rauch calls the Constitution of Knowledge, even though... white males tend to be disproportionately successful in climbing to the higher ranks within those institutions?"
I would push back on this statement. As Eric Kaufmann points out, Whites are not disproportionately represented in many of these institutions:
"[Google's] workforce is only 4 per cent Hispanic and 2 per cent African-American. Whites, at 56 per cent, are not over-represented, despite the ‘mostly white’ headlines that tend to follow the release of its human resources reports. Asians make up 35 per cent of Google staff and have been steadily eroding white share despite forming just 5 per cent of the US population." (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities)
"Haidt, try to avoid choosing between these two positions...."
Can someone give a Haidt quote to this effect, rather than requiring us to pony up to get past a (Claremont) paywall?
no Haidt quote. From Hanania: "Rauch’s intellectual inspirations are: we get references to Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Haidt, John Locke, David Hume, Galileo, Thomas Kuhn, Émile Durkheim, George Orwell, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Popper, Montesquieu, James Madison, Socrates, and so on. Liberals like Rauch have simply been unable to reconcile their respect for traditional institutions with their support for diversity. Their implicit argument—that these great things happened to be created by white men only through some accident that has no implication for how they function today—does not seem very credible. The far Left, by contrast, has an easy answer to this conundrum: deconstruct the institutions and demand something more representative to replace them."
Also "Like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and other moderate liberals, he considers diversity of viewpoints central to an epistemologically healthy system of knowledge creation. Yet he also believes in institutions that by necessity raise up some voices and exclude others. . . Given that we all agree some views and perspectives should be excluded from knowledge-producing processes, the question simply becomes, “which ones?” Rauch would like a place for conservatives; the woke would not. This doesn’t seem to be an issue of deep principle, but a question of where we draw the line."
Thanx much for these details.
When you say "Rauch would like a place for conservatives", does that actually include Deplorables, or is it limited (as I suspect) to never-Trumpers?
As to "where we draw the line", there had better emerge some clear criteria for this, if we want to avoid the brewing quasi- civil war.
The Kyle R. verdict may've been a dodge of one bullet, but the reaction of so many Dems/ Wokesters shows that, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing".
Lawyer turned crime novelist George Higgins once said, "I build [my stories] the way I used to build a trial, a criminal trial. The witnesses come along, and each recites what portion of reality he knows about. At the end. . . you then call upon the jury to reach its own moral decision, its own ethical judgments about the way the characters have behaved . . . I don’t want to make any judgments for the reader. That’s the reader’s job.”
While aggregating parties with conflicting motives and accounts is indeed an effective means of converting soldier-like inputs into scout-like outcomes, many people are now rejecting the principles that such institutional processes are predicated upon. Individuals should be able to speak "their truth" without any regard to another person's portion of reality or objective fact and neutral mechanisms concerned with producing good outcomes are not as emotionally satisfying as policies explicitly tied to good intentions.