Clarissa's Blog

If you oppose DEI consider the following:
Student 1’s GPA is 3.9 but has rich parents, world class schooling & tutors
Student 2’s GPA is 3.8 but is poor & his neighborhood is filled w/ crime & bad schools
Should 2’s circumstances at least be considered in admission decisions?

https://x.com/RedmondBarry7/status/2111283548397195698

This does not exist anywhere on the planet. The whole situation is completely invented. However, I still want to answer the question as a matter of principle.

No, the “circumstances” should not be considered. When you sit down at a restaurant table, go into a hospital for surgery, take a seat in an airplane, or engage in any professional encounter with other people, you do not consider their “circumstances.” You don’t read everybody’s life story before buying tomatoes, renting an apartment, picking up a book, or scheduling a dental exam with, by or from them. It doesn’t matter how hard anybody tried. Only the result matters.

This is actually a great thing. It’s very liberating. It liberates us from the hubris of believing we can judge people’s lives on the basis of a couple of superficial characteristics. It liberates us from using other people as screens onto which we project our ego concerns. Having a boundary between the public and the private, the process and the result, is a great thing.

There is such a thing as temperament, which is completely physiological. A Latin American is a lot more hyper than a Scandinavian. A Ukrainian is more hyper than a Russian, but less so than a Latin American. A Swede or a German strikes me as too slow, while a Guatemalan is somewhat annoyingly too lively. I know somebody from Venezuela who is a deep introvert, but Anglos don’t perceive her as such because she is Latin American and so still much more sociable than an Anglo extrovert.

And it’s like that with everything. Every baseline is culturally mediated. What’s considered extremely pessimistic in one culture is completely normal in another. You can be a very agreeable American, but for a Hispanic, you might read as a curmudgeon.