Meditations and Learnings

Meditations and Learnings

The Vision Rorschach Test: Blind Auditions

In gauging whether or not one tends toward a Constrained or Unconstrained vision, the bias-free classical music auditions may serve as an ideal Rorschach test. Before blind auditions, there was reason to suspect that judges weren’t selecting classical musicians on their talents alone: they appeared to be influenced by ethnicity and sex. For those with the Unconstrained vision, the lack of discrimination did not produce the desired result. African Americans were still not as great a proportion of the orchestra they wanted, and here comes the test:

Is equality a process or result based characteristic?
If process-based, blind auditions were ideal. If result-based, they were still promoting inequality.

Many who identify as “leftist” in their politics fall into the latter camp - that of the Unconstrained vision. They believe that humans can account for the myriad subsequent order consequences and tweak outcomes to improve society.

Those who value processes and systems have a Constrained vision. Knowledge is distributed among the many, and no individual or collective is omniscient enough to account for everything and make decisions accordingly.