Politicians who are crafting policy are certainly a different category.

Many well-intentioned people do get stuff wrong when it comes to racism or sexism. It's a complex topic with shifting definitions and evolving standards.

100 years ago, academia was at the forefront of racism due to some flawed philosophies and bad science. Should we really expect the average layperson to be ahead of those scholars just because some time has passed and they hear "racism is bad" a thousand times? No. The education needs to happen, and being wrong is a starting place.

There's also been a general failure by academia to explain modern racial concepts. Many people don't understand why it's OK to discriminate against asians in college admissions, for instance.

> Many people don't understand why it's OK to discriminate against asians in college admissions, for instance.

I don't understand that either.

It requires you to go with a very different axiom of equity over equality, basically. Asians do well at exams for some reason, therefore to ensure that there is an equitable distribution, we then sacrifice the level playing ground of equality in favour of the outcome driven goal of equity.

And then one day, for no reason at all, we end up living in Harrison Bergeron-like dystopia.

Wouldn't equity require not descriminating against Asians?

No.

Equality focuses on normalizing the distribution of resources, while equity distributes resources to normalize the outcome.

Equality, given a group of people, would aim to put them on a level playing ground by allocating the same level of resources to each. Equity however, would allocate resources to try and achieve similar outcomes across the people. People performing worse would thus get more resources in equity, but would receive the same amount.

The two are thus mutually incompatible. To a certain extent, some games can be played with the definition, such as what to include under the "level playing field". An example here would be the inclusion of natural talent and propensity for work that is generally considered innate. Should this be

> The two are thus mutually incompatible.

I disagree, there can be conflicts between the two goals when resources are limited, but I think systems can be defined that support both.

College admissions is a strange place to promote the idea of equity since it is a fundementally inequitable process that is designed to find people with advantages and give them bigger advantages.

By introducing race based discrimination into college admissions you are reducing equality in a way that that doesn't create a more equitable situation. Anti-asian racism will handicap these students in other parts of their professional life so using the argument of "promoting equity" to discriminate against them in college admissions as well seems purely pernicious.

If you truely want to improve college equity, you need to first make changes to what is required for success at college and then adjust the admissions process to find candidates that can succeed.

Sorry for the slow reply:

> Many well-intentioned people do get stuff wrong when it comes to racism or sexism. It's a complex topic with shifting definitions and evolving standards.

In my specific example, there was nothing well-intentioned our complex about it. He was off by a factor of more than 5x. When his error was pointed out, and it is something trivially confirmed, he didn't fix it.

Yes.

The scariest thing about Trump is not that he lied like crazy. It is that he really had an audience, and that audience is reasonably close to half the country. If you're a progressive, it is worth spending some time thinking about how to reach out to and get support from that half of the country. Because attempting to govern without them is a guaranteed disaster.

That ship has sailed. The progressives have been playing the strategy 'if we just follow the rules of the game, eventually they will play along'. But the populists completely threw out the rulebook a number of years ago, they no longer want to play the same game. And now there is a new breed of younger progressives coming into power who recognize that and also want to throw out the rulebook. Interesting times coming.

Yes, and if you read https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky/d... you'll realize that once democratic norms have broken down on both sides of the aisle, the next thing that happens is the replacement of democracy by a totalitarian state.