In high school, “success” is often based on very objective measures, like standardized tests, captaining a sports team, etc. But this isn’t true for everything, and the class that made me realize this was Dance 1. Aptitude in dance is well-defined in some loose sense, in fact my school has competitive dance teams that run merit-based, but the class offered by the school has to be different. Because of the nature of the subject, everyone comes into the class with varying levels of skill. Trying to find objective measures of skill doesn’t work anymore; it’s nearly impossible to compare a complete beginner to someone that has been dancing for 10+ years. The solution: grading effort.
From a learning point of view, evaluating based on effort makes sense and it's almost the same as grading someone on how much they have grown in the subject matter. This is one of the ideas behind gradeless classrooms, the idea being it is more fair to grade someone based on the performance improvement instead of the performance itself.
I see both sides here. On one hand, someone’s circumstances should be taken into consideration when evaluating some aspect of them. I think most can agree that it's more impressive to see someone become a first-generation professional athlete than for the child of a player to become one. But on the other hand, the real world is governed on pure, objective measures of success. Put simply: at the end of the day, it's the end of the day. But does it have to be?
Lots of government policies, often considered liberal or democratic, revolve around this idea of circumstance. They support government programs like universal healthcare and DEI that are targeted at helping people with less fortunate circumstances. This lines up with the extreme left-wing policies being related to communism. The opposite of this is the Republican party, which I think embodies the “end of the day” idea, and most of the examples I just mentioned apply. I was really excited when I generalized my experience from Dance to explain politics, but when I took a step back I realized that I hadn’t explained much at all.
Looking back, finding this connection was a way for me to draw parallels from politics to things I understood better, and these would help me develop full-fledged political beliefs. I think I was seeking an objective way to characterize politics, but the inherent nature of politics makes it difficult to find such an interpretation. This begs the question: what is politics?
Politics is often defined by bias, people support different policies based on their biases. Identifying political bias is really hard because it finds a way to weave itself subtly into the media. But using the “simplified model” of politics I described above, it becomes much easier to identify political bias. For example, it's clear through Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s autobiography, that he has conservative leanings. There are numerous moments where he supports the “end of day” argument, without ever talking about politics.
However, I think in most cases identifying bias is useless without acting on it. Usually, we try to remove bias to understand the crux of an argument. But, when you try to do this, you realize that politics is equivalent to bias. Political beliefs are defined by someone’s experiences, which is the same thing that defines bias. And this makes democracy so powerful, because it takes a collection of people who have vastly different biases and helps them come to a consensus.
When I was younger, there was part of democracy I didn’t understand fully. Why didn’t a majority of residents vote to oppress a minority? In a very simplified way, why didn’t 51% of people “vote off” the rest of the people? Well, that's exactly what happened, multiple times. Take racial oppression for example, even after the Civil War. It took so long for us to move beyond it despite the large scale protests and legal protections, simply because the “majority” had grown accustomed to power and wanted to maintain it. Once the civil rights movement had gained mass support, it tipped over 50%, and the respective policies were passed. The reason there wasn’t mass backlash after the decision was because the issue had become less polarized as the movement progressed, in other words there had been a significant build up that had changed many people’s minds. On the other hand, polarization is exactly why we saw mass backlash after the overturning of Roe v. Wade or the recent executive orders.
Let me take a step back. Most simply, politics can be represented by a spectrum, with the far left being liberal and the far right being conservative. Polarization means that most people are so far to the edge that they start to associate with a political ideology. Being far left-wing or right-wing isn’t a bad thing, but a problem arises when we start associating ourselves with a type of policy rather than the experiences that underlie that policy. I think it's really easy to associate with a party, especially with ideas like “voting red” or living in a “blue state,” but doing so undermines an individual’s own thinking and thus the whole democratic system.
What’s the point here? Politics doesn’t exist without bias, so we shouldn’t try to analyze and eliminate bias in politics. Instead, I think we should see if this bias is “authentic,” stemming from genuine experiences. Instead of asking for the “what” behind certain policies, we should look for the “why.” Instead of being influenced by the “what,” we should be influenced by the “why.” By reading Hillbilly Elegy, it becomes clear what experiences made JD Vance think the way he did in 2016. While reading, instead of being caught up in a political narrative, it's more important to think about how our experiences relate to that narrative. My experiences in Dance have shown me how unfair it can feel to be judged based on an objective measure, while my experiences with olympiads have shown me the value of one.
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