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.

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.

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.

I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science. My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome. And this was decades ago. It is much worse today.

My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.

Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).

The problems with TJ also extend beyond admissions. 8th period is dead. History education at the school was always awful and tied to the AP curriculum but it has further slipped against STEM. Colleges seem to be taking note, with admissions to what were previously backup schools like UVA now becoming much more difficult for TJ grads.

In the absence of objective criteria holistic evaluation (and worse) is what you’ll get. Not necessarily at TJ, but at the next steps, and if these ideas are applied generally.

> This eliminates the need to "distinguish themselves" among everybody with increasingly ridiculous prep processes.

I have never understood this demonization of the prep process. Yes, kids start prepping for TJ admissions in middle school. So what? Asians do the same thing to prepare for high stakes testing in their home countries too. Test prep isn’t free, but the average family income in Fairfax County is over six figures for every racial group. (Asians actually have significantly lower average income than whites in the county.) Test prep is not an unaffordable expense for most families in the county.

Given that test prep is mostly affordable for the families in question (and given that studies show it doesn’t help much) it seems to me that people are really complaining about cultural changes brought about by an immigrant group. They don’t like asian culture where childhood is single-mindedly dedicated to education (ideally an education in a narrow range of acceptable fields like STEM). Now I don’t consider that “racist” or “xenophobic” (I think natives have a right to protect their culture) but that’s what it is.

> I remember doing this crap. Weekend test prep. Signing up for science magazines just so you could stick it on your resume for why you loved science.

So?

> My parents were informed in preschool of decisions they should make to make magnet schools a feasible outcome.

This is a conversation my wife and I have about our kids. (Though we decided private rather than magnet school.) They’re 8, 2, and the third is due in June.

> My family has some personal experience with this as we were pretty deeply involved in local activism to change the way that letters of recommendation were used to send people to GT programs (many decades ago) after it became clear that the letters were introducing all sorts of bias.

That’s a good change.

> Yet Asra has personally called several of my old friends racists for seeking the lottery option. We must just hate south and east asian people. We must be brainwashed by leftist colleges (despite graduating a decade or longer ago).

In Kendi’s formulation of “racism,” the lottery approach is racist against Asians. It will exclude half to two thirds or so of the Asians who would otherwise have gotten in under a test-based model.

I think Asra is too quick to cry racism. I think the activists are just idealistic and misguided. That said, it’s not like the sentiment of white people not wanting to have to “compete with super study Asians” doesn’t exist. E.g. back in the day Wall Street would hire white guys from Ivy League crew teams, and today classes are overwhelmed by Asians with STEM degrees. As to colleges, they’ve been leftist since long before decades ago...

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 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.

It’s the same definition being used by both: 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.

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.

No, it’s difficult because the New York Times has chosen to adopt a phrase that has a well-understood usage with respect to violent extremists, and use it to refer to literally all other white people. If you don’t want people to complain you’re being confusing then don’t do that.

> 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?

Imagine if the New York Times had chosen to call all traditionalist/conservative Muslims “jihadists.” That’s exactly what the Times is doing with “white supremacy.” Should we all just play along, and Google to see if someone actually wants to kill non-believers, or whether they just support the tradition of gender-segregated prayer?

> What you're doing is plainly poisoning the well

Poisoning the well is a form of ad hominem where you invoke an unrelated fact to detail a discussion. In discussing a newspaper article about white supremacy, it’s not poisoning the well to point out that the newspaper’s deliberate editorial choices have made it impossible to understand what’s being discussed without doing your own research. It’s totally relevant.

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.

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.