Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.
If you mean “the most useful pieces of information you could possibly have” that sounds obviously wrong (I mean, if I had to choose whether to hire someone for some job, and I could either know their race, class and subculture or how good they would be at that job, why shouldn’t I choose the latter?), and if you mean “the most useful pieces of information when judging a person you know nothing else about” that’s true but tautological, so what do you actually mean? I guess something like ‘among some set X of possible pieces of information you could know about someone, race, class and subculture are the most useful’, but it’s not clear at all to me what set X would be.
FWIW, I understood this to mean that they are the highest ROI pieces of information… that is, their value compared to the effort to obtain them is high, relative to other information (like how good someone would be at this job). I think that’s false, also, but it seems coherent enough.
If you mean “the most useful pieces of information you could possibly have” that sounds obviously wrong (I mean, if I had to choose whether to hire someone for some job, and I could either know their race, class and subculture or how good they would be at that job, why shouldn’t I choose the latter?), and if you mean “the most useful pieces of information when judging a person you know nothing else about” that’s true but tautological, so what do you actually mean? I guess something like ‘among some set X of possible pieces of information you could know about someone, race, class and subculture are the most useful’, but it’s not clear at all to me what set X would be.
FWIW, I understood this to mean that they are the highest ROI pieces of information… that is, their value compared to the effort to obtain them is high, relative to other information (like how good someone would be at this job).
I think that’s false, also, but it seems coherent enough.
I don’t have contact with past me, so I can’t help you interpret that statement. TheOtherDave seems to have a reasonable interpretation.