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Mixed Caste Children in Doet

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strifeoftruthwithfalsehood:

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megasilverfist:

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Go by the father’s caste, go by the mother’s, go by the caste of the parent with the matching gender. It is all completely arbitrary. With those systems you can have a “blue” child with green hair and a fascination with theoretical physics. 

 
Here in Doet, we go by the child’s hair color. Hair color is a clear caste indicator, much more so than the caste of either parent. The parents have until the age of one to make the official determination and the government releases official hair-color charts to help decide ambiguous cases.  For the rare, truly-ambiguous color, it is up to the parents to determine the child’s caste, but by the age of one there are behavioral clues. So even in these very rare cases the final decision it is less arbitrary then going by parental lineage. There is one exception of course, if a child has a red parent and non-red hair (an edge case among edge cases), that child will be red. This seems slightly illogical, but the politics behind it are obvious. 

 
The only disadvantage is that, initially, the parents have to buy a credit for the more expensive of their two castes. However, if the child turns out to be a member of the cheaper caste, the parents receive a refund.
Doet’s system is logical and should be adopted by all of the countries with the various arbitrary systems that can so easily leave a child stranded in the wrong caste.

I mean obviously.  The castes have their names for a reason.  I feel a bit bad for the like one kid a generation thats stuck being red with clean hair, but better safe than sorry.

If you’re already going to let parents decide their child’s caste based upon said child’s general proclivities in the case of ambiguity in mixed caste couples, why do you have to take the shortcut of deciding it by hair color in the first place? Why not just let mixed caste couples choose their child’s caste based upon that child’s personality and initially displayed aptitudes? Using hair color in these sorts of cases is better than going ‘it’s always the mother’ or whatever, but it feels like your country is standing on the line labeled ‘sensible mixed caste policy’ and consciously saying ‘nah, we’re good’ when it comes to stepping over it.

Hair color is an indicator, a signal; it isn’t a determiner. If a blue and a green have a child with blue hair, that child is more likely to have blue interests, but if you’re measuring ‘likeliness to be interested in this caste’s activities’, why not just measure it directly?

A one year old’s “interests" and “aptitudes" are only slightly more indicative of their adult interests and aptitudes than random chance and will be strongly influenced by the caste of whichever parent is their primary caretaker. 

 
Hair color has a stronger correlation with caste than childhood interests. We allow the parents to use childhood interests in these cases because it is better than choosing entirely at random. 

I could see this argument if you waited until past the first two years of schooling, but to determine which schooling the child should receive, you need to know their caste.

Could I see the study you’re getting that from? Because I’m skeptical about ‘hair color strongly correlates with caste’ studies from a country where… hair color determines caste, instead of the other way around like somewhere sane? That seems like it would be confounding? Maybe I’m missing something here?

Aside from that, I’m skeptical about the merits of early childhood education being caste segregated in the first place; I recall reading one study (from Doet, even!) where they didn’t teach any math until they were nearly three at a purple school, and they (the purples) caught up to their peers within a couple seasons. That isn’t terrible strong evidence, but it does seem generally indicative that early childhood education in specialized subjects isn’t as important as we think it is.

Would you find ‘everybody learns the same thing till they’re two, and then people go into specialized tracks and the parents of mixed caste children choose their child’s caste and get refunded and all that’ terribly objectionable as a policy? It seems substantially superior to doing it just by hair color, because just intuitively it seems harder to get people sorted wrongly doing it by aptitude.

With something as closely tied as hair color and caste, cause and effect are difficult to determine. However, this study [1], done in Doet, finds that 84% of the population are satisfied with their caste or feel it is the best one for them, with the other 16% reporting a variety of factors for their dissatisfaction including their caste’s average standard of living and the expense of child credits. If you look in the research methods you will find that individuals of mixed caste backgrounds were not included, meaning all of the subjects in this study had hair color that matched their caste, which gives some evidence for a strong positive correlation between hair color and what people feel is their “correct” caste. 

I am unclear what you mean by “hair color determines caste in  stead of the other way around, like somewhere sane”. Hair color is historically the original caste indicator and I know of no countries where caste determination happens independently of hair color. The countries where individuals frequently have hair color that contradicts their caste typically do so because of mixed caste marriages and the illogical rules for the caste determination of children resulting from those marriages. A study focusing on mixed caste children, their hair color, and what they feel is their “correct” caste would help settle this, but I was unable to find one. 

On to your other point. Since you did not cite your sources, I had to do a little digging, but was able to find the paper you mentioned here [2]. I understand your point and I wouldn’t find it terribly objectionable as an existing policy. However, I disagree that is seems substantially superior. Mixed caste children are a very small portion of the population. If you assume assigning castes by hair color is as random as assigning them by parental lineage, that still means that approximately 50% of mixed caste children will be in the correct caste. If hair color is a better indicator than random chance, as seems to be the case, that means that the majority of mixed caste children are in the correct caste. Therefore, if the early segregation of education offers even slight benefits for the average individual, it will outweigh even major benefits for the very few mixed-caste individuals who would be put in the wrong case by the current system. Even if the early segregation of education offers no benefits, the high switching cost required to put your proposed system into place might still outweigh the benefits your system would provide for the few mixed caste children.

[1] Citation for the caste satisfaction study.
[2] Citation for the study where purple Doet children were not taught math until the age of three.

What do you do about multigenerational mixed caste marriages? If an orange and a purple have a kid with throwback green hair matching Grandma, but they didn’t buy a green credit…