Emily Oster on a CDC study; Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts; Amy Wax seems unFIT, and Heather Mac Donald less so; Zvi bets his virus predictions; Freddie deBoer on social change; Coleman Hughes, rapper
"My view is that, whatever the culture of origin, the process of immigrating to America selects for people who are inclined toward American characteristics and values."
Razib published a Twitter thread (since deleted) lamenting the fact, in his observation, that South Asian immigrants are unusually eager to pretend they've been victimized by America and Americans despite their economic success here. But he characteristically won't take the next obvious step, which would be to recognize that it's not in America's interest to admit immigrants who are so prone to adopt an adversarial stance towards their adopted country. (Arnold argued last year that it's a terrible idea to hire people who tend to see themselves as victims. Wouldn't that apply to immigration, too?)
"But the people promoting race as essential, as in Critical Race Theory, make it more difficult for individual blacks and whites to form close relationships.
A very important point, in my opinion."
Also true and important for relations between men and women, something you never see mentioned, for the obvious, typical reasons, when people write about the purported "sex recession". There are many contributors, but two big ones are the increasingly severe Average Is Over factor in the sexual marketplace, and the introduction of this kind of ideological poison into the cultural waters.
"I do not believe that Amy Wax should suffer for her opinions." Everyone should suffer or be rewarded for their opinions in SOME way. The problem is how. There ought to be some incentive to use a person's desired pronoun. I just should not be losing tenure.
Immigrants overwhelmingly come to America to move from poor countries to a rich country. The % of immigrants coming from much poorer countries is very high as a % of the total. There is very little immigration coming from already rich countries to America. Europe has much the same issue, the poor Muslims aren't moving there because they want to assimilate to European values, they want the cash.
So I'd say we are selecting for people that want an immediate boost in living standards, and it's not clear they particularly care about "American values". For one, they tend to segregate into their own communities (ethnic neighborhoods, ethnic churches and social gatherings, etc). But for another one ought to ask which American values we are talking about.
For instance, it's pretty obvious that upper middle class Asian professionals living in urban cities on the coast are assimilating to...upper middle class American professionals living in urban cities on the coast. So basically, progressive values. It's pointless to discuss what they might assimilate to if they became construction tradesmen in Houston, because that isn't what they came here to do.
Now those Hispanic construction tradesmen in Houston are indeed assimilating somewhat towards the norms of local whites, hence 40% of them voted for Trump which is higher then Hispanics overall, but its still a lot less then the 66% of Texas whites that voted for Trump.
Anyway, I've spent a lot of my life around Asians. In my high school they outnumbered whites about 10:1. The county live in now has a very high Asian concentration too. And I lived in Asia for a short time. Like most stereotypes, I think that that little snippet you quote of Wax sounds about right. I think this is especially true of certain subgroups of Asians.
As to Asians not liking woke, they dislike the aspects of woke that hurt Asians. If they could be designated a genuine victim group rather than white adjacent, they wouldn't care. You rarely see them stick up for the principals or when whites are mistreated, just when their specific axe is being gored on a specific issue. It's always nice to talk to a Korean shitlord, but overall I expect Asians to be allies of progressivism if only because it helps them get into Harvard and they don't care what they have to burn down to get there.
"My view is that, whatever the culture of origin, the process of immigrating to America selects for people who are inclined toward American characteristics and values."
A little, sure. But both selection and assimilation can crash against natural limits.
For example, women have obviously been part of America since there's been an America, and yet they still somehow have a naturally and stubbornly different distribution of personalities and preferences than American men. And, however much selection and assimilation may have helped to mitigate the impact, when women have been integrated into formerly male-dominated fields - as you've pointed out repeatedly - the very fact of that integration is what shifts the mean characteristics of members of those fields, which in turn inevitably changes the focus and working of those fields. "Feminization". The progressives will even implicitly admit this is precisely what happens to fields in the context of hoping for and celebrating it.
Now, if you believe in feminization, and you are willing to assume for the sake of argument that something like the Big Five Personality factors are both partially heritable and that population groups vary in their statistical distributions of such factors, then it's just not that big of a leap to conclude that different levels of immigration from different parts of the world could have similar impacts.
A lot of fiercely-independently-minded intellectuals I respect are clearly disagreeable types who got that way because they were born that way. Disagreeable types have their own downsides, certainly. But, if you replace them with a lot of agreeable conformist types - for example by the selection process tending to weed out all the free radicals - then you will get a very different intellectual culture characterized by stagnation, involution, and rigid orthodoxy. Oh wait ...
At any rate, the trouble with American 'characteristics and values' is that we increasingly don't have them in common, not with the recent past, and not with each other either. Which values are those? Liberty? Faith? Self-reliance? Lol. The consensus is pretty thin, and it seems to me Americans have been entrenched in a contest of rival sets of values for a long time.
Which leads to a common problem. To the extent there is assimilation, it is now usually to the mean of one's specific class, education level, particular group identities, with integration not being general but to distinct sub-populations.
For example, one worry you can read from Somalian or Haitian immigrant parents in Minnesota or Miami respectively is that their kids will assimilate and adopt some undesirable characteristics and values, not from the local population in general, but specifically from the local black underclass into which they are most likely to integrate and to whose influences they would be most sensitive.
Blacks have been part of America since the beginning too, and whoever or whatever you prefer to blame for it, that experience shows us that assimilation is not such an overwhelmingly powerful and automatic force that one can simply take it for granted.
<blockquote>I think we simply can’t trust that a solution to a social problem that requires behavioral changes among Americans is actually a solution. Because when the citizenry doesn’t trust the government, the major institutions of civic life, or each other, hate the half of the country on the other side of the partisan divide, and think life is getting worse despite economic and technological growth, what force is going to compel them to sacrifice for the greater good?</blockquote>
The lack of that ability is the main feature -- not bug -- of America as a system. Both parties, but lately mostly Democrats and their tame media, grab power by alleging one phony emergency after another. The people have to get over believing in them, and to do that, we must get over the habit of trusting either politicians, media, or bureaucrats any farther than we can throw them. Then we must redesign our system to take as many of their opinions OUT of decision loops as possible.
> Let’s put the CDC in receivership. Have a court appoint an oversight board, and let no public statement come out of the CDC without approval of said board.
Can you name the institution or court you'd think can find a reasonable board for this? And where that board comes from? I'm a little disappointed that "make this fundamentally misaligned overpowered group slightly better" is the line, rather than "reduce the power through competition and less-invasive policy".
If I told my boss a co-worker’s “ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, and mindless social engineering” bothered me, would it advance my career? How about if I said the same thing about all my Asian co-workers.
Oster's is a helpful about CDC. "Receivership" is not. Why would one additional layer of bureaucracy help?
"My view is that, whatever the culture of origin, the process of immigrating to America selects for people who are inclined toward American characteristics and values."
Razib published a Twitter thread (since deleted) lamenting the fact, in his observation, that South Asian immigrants are unusually eager to pretend they've been victimized by America and Americans despite their economic success here. But he characteristically won't take the next obvious step, which would be to recognize that it's not in America's interest to admit immigrants who are so prone to adopt an adversarial stance towards their adopted country. (Arnold argued last year that it's a terrible idea to hire people who tend to see themselves as victims. Wouldn't that apply to immigration, too?)
"But the people promoting race as essential, as in Critical Race Theory, make it more difficult for individual blacks and whites to form close relationships.
A very important point, in my opinion."
Also true and important for relations between men and women, something you never see mentioned, for the obvious, typical reasons, when people write about the purported "sex recession". There are many contributors, but two big ones are the increasingly severe Average Is Over factor in the sexual marketplace, and the introduction of this kind of ideological poison into the cultural waters.
"I do not believe that Amy Wax should suffer for her opinions." Everyone should suffer or be rewarded for their opinions in SOME way. The problem is how. There ought to be some incentive to use a person's desired pronoun. I just should not be losing tenure.
Immigrants overwhelmingly come to America to move from poor countries to a rich country. The % of immigrants coming from much poorer countries is very high as a % of the total. There is very little immigration coming from already rich countries to America. Europe has much the same issue, the poor Muslims aren't moving there because they want to assimilate to European values, they want the cash.
So I'd say we are selecting for people that want an immediate boost in living standards, and it's not clear they particularly care about "American values". For one, they tend to segregate into their own communities (ethnic neighborhoods, ethnic churches and social gatherings, etc). But for another one ought to ask which American values we are talking about.
For instance, it's pretty obvious that upper middle class Asian professionals living in urban cities on the coast are assimilating to...upper middle class American professionals living in urban cities on the coast. So basically, progressive values. It's pointless to discuss what they might assimilate to if they became construction tradesmen in Houston, because that isn't what they came here to do.
Now those Hispanic construction tradesmen in Houston are indeed assimilating somewhat towards the norms of local whites, hence 40% of them voted for Trump which is higher then Hispanics overall, but its still a lot less then the 66% of Texas whites that voted for Trump.
Anyway, I've spent a lot of my life around Asians. In my high school they outnumbered whites about 10:1. The county live in now has a very high Asian concentration too. And I lived in Asia for a short time. Like most stereotypes, I think that that little snippet you quote of Wax sounds about right. I think this is especially true of certain subgroups of Asians.
As to Asians not liking woke, they dislike the aspects of woke that hurt Asians. If they could be designated a genuine victim group rather than white adjacent, they wouldn't care. You rarely see them stick up for the principals or when whites are mistreated, just when their specific axe is being gored on a specific issue. It's always nice to talk to a Korean shitlord, but overall I expect Asians to be allies of progressivism if only because it helps them get into Harvard and they don't care what they have to burn down to get there.
"My view is that, whatever the culture of origin, the process of immigrating to America selects for people who are inclined toward American characteristics and values."
A little, sure. But both selection and assimilation can crash against natural limits.
For example, women have obviously been part of America since there's been an America, and yet they still somehow have a naturally and stubbornly different distribution of personalities and preferences than American men. And, however much selection and assimilation may have helped to mitigate the impact, when women have been integrated into formerly male-dominated fields - as you've pointed out repeatedly - the very fact of that integration is what shifts the mean characteristics of members of those fields, which in turn inevitably changes the focus and working of those fields. "Feminization". The progressives will even implicitly admit this is precisely what happens to fields in the context of hoping for and celebrating it.
Now, if you believe in feminization, and you are willing to assume for the sake of argument that something like the Big Five Personality factors are both partially heritable and that population groups vary in their statistical distributions of such factors, then it's just not that big of a leap to conclude that different levels of immigration from different parts of the world could have similar impacts.
A lot of fiercely-independently-minded intellectuals I respect are clearly disagreeable types who got that way because they were born that way. Disagreeable types have their own downsides, certainly. But, if you replace them with a lot of agreeable conformist types - for example by the selection process tending to weed out all the free radicals - then you will get a very different intellectual culture characterized by stagnation, involution, and rigid orthodoxy. Oh wait ...
At any rate, the trouble with American 'characteristics and values' is that we increasingly don't have them in common, not with the recent past, and not with each other either. Which values are those? Liberty? Faith? Self-reliance? Lol. The consensus is pretty thin, and it seems to me Americans have been entrenched in a contest of rival sets of values for a long time.
Which leads to a common problem. To the extent there is assimilation, it is now usually to the mean of one's specific class, education level, particular group identities, with integration not being general but to distinct sub-populations.
For example, one worry you can read from Somalian or Haitian immigrant parents in Minnesota or Miami respectively is that their kids will assimilate and adopt some undesirable characteristics and values, not from the local population in general, but specifically from the local black underclass into which they are most likely to integrate and to whose influences they would be most sensitive.
Blacks have been part of America since the beginning too, and whoever or whatever you prefer to blame for it, that experience shows us that assimilation is not such an overwhelmingly powerful and automatic force that one can simply take it for granted.
Freddie deBoer writes,
<blockquote>I think we simply can’t trust that a solution to a social problem that requires behavioral changes among Americans is actually a solution. Because when the citizenry doesn’t trust the government, the major institutions of civic life, or each other, hate the half of the country on the other side of the partisan divide, and think life is getting worse despite economic and technological growth, what force is going to compel them to sacrifice for the greater good?</blockquote>
The lack of that ability is the main feature -- not bug -- of America as a system. Both parties, but lately mostly Democrats and their tame media, grab power by alleging one phony emergency after another. The people have to get over believing in them, and to do that, we must get over the habit of trusting either politicians, media, or bureaucrats any farther than we can throw them. Then we must redesign our system to take as many of their opinions OUT of decision loops as possible.
> Let’s put the CDC in receivership. Have a court appoint an oversight board, and let no public statement come out of the CDC without approval of said board.
Can you name the institution or court you'd think can find a reasonable board for this? And where that board comes from? I'm a little disappointed that "make this fundamentally misaligned overpowered group slightly better" is the line, rather than "reduce the power through competition and less-invasive policy".
If I told my boss a co-worker’s “ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, and mindless social engineering” bothered me, would it advance my career? How about if I said the same thing about all my Asian co-workers.