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)
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?
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.