When someone says something offensive to you—they’re racist, homophobic, sexist
Taboo, “racist, homophobic, sexist”. In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean “you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don’t like”.
For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders? Does it become racist/sexist if one attempts to speculate on the cause of these differences?
In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean “you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don’t like”.
“Gay people shouldn’t marry because it will undermine the very fabric of civilization”
“Women shouldn’t vote, because they don’t understand male concepts like War and Empire”
“Everyone knows Irish people get drunk on St. Patrick’s day!”
This is the sort of stuff that frequently arises in the world.
I would suggest you probably live in a very filtered environment. It’s cool, most people do. I’ve been trying to re-filter my own environment. But, trust me, these things are all still alive and kicking out there. Following the news, activist blogs, or just having friends who are oppressed in their daily life and talk about it, will quickly draw this sort of racist, homophobic, sexist comments to your attention.
If you really think this qualifies as “stating an unpleasant truth” then… wow.
I’d disagree. The connotations of Eugine’s statement was to dispute HaydnB’s original point, “When someone says something offensive to you—they’re racist, homophobic, sexist—it seems like you should be offended by that. ”
“Gay people shouldn’t marry because it will undermine the very fabric of civilization” “Women shouldn’t vote, because they don’t understand male concepts like War and Empire” “Everyone knows Irish people get drunk on St. Patrick’s day!”
Is your claim that these statements are obviously false or that they’re so offensive that they shouldn’t be stated even if they’re true?
I ADBOC with the last of them (except the “everyone knows” part—my mother didn’t know what the significance of St. Paddy’s was until I told her a few years ago).
BTW, this is something I’ve recently noticed—the vast majority of statements I’m offended by is of the form “All [people from some group that comprises a sizeable fraction of the human population, and doesn’t include the speaker] are [something non-tautological and unflattering].” (I am more offended if the group happens to include me, but not very much.) But remove the universal quantifier and, no matter how large the group is and how unflattering the thing is, the statement will lose almost all of its offensiveness in my eyes.
Internally I am generally the same, but I’ve come to realize that a rather sizable portion of the population has trouble distinguishing “all X are Y” and “some X are Y”, both in speaking and in listening. So if someone says “man, women can be so stupid”, I know that might well reflect the internal thought of “all women are idiots”. And equally, someone saying “all women are idiots” might just be upset because his girlfriend broke up with him for some trivial reason.
but I’ve come to realize that a rather sizable portion of the population has trouble distinguishing “all X are Y” and “some X are Y”, both in speaking and in listening.
And the belief in question acts more light “some/most X are Y” then “all X are Y”, i.e., the belief mostly get’s applied to X’s the person doesn’t know, when it makes sense to use the prior for X’s.
Yes, people who say “all X are Y” usually do know at least one person who happens to be an X and whom they don’t actually alieve is Y—but I think that in certain cases what’s going on is that they don’t actually alieve that person is an X, i.e. they’re internally committing a no true Scotsman. Now, I can’t remember anyone ever explicitly saying “All X are Y [they notice that I’m looking at them in an offended way] -- well, you’re not, but you’re not a ‘real’ X so you don’t count” (and if they did, I’d be tremendously offended), but I have heard things that sound very much like a self-censored version of that.
The reasoning you described reaches valid (object level) conclusions in the different cases under consideration, but you still prefer to analyze it as full of fallacies for some reason.
Huh, no. If an argument has premises “all X are Y” and “John is an X” and conclusion “John is not Y”, it is broken. Whether the conclusion happens to be true because one of the premises is false is irrelevant.
The argument’s stated premises were “X are Y”, you decided to interpret the ambiguous statement as “all X are Y” and then complain that it makes the argument formally false.
[...] but I have heard things that sound very much like a self-censored version of that.
What exactly do you count as a self-censored version of that? Pointing out that you’re an exceptional X, that you have characteristic Z, which correlates negatively with Y, or some such thing? If so, the answer is: well, of course, what do you expect?
If people make a generic generalization along the lines of “(all) X are Y”, then naturally, you have to be an exceptional X in order to be Y. One could say that it’s enough that you are Y, because then you are an exceptional X in virtue of that. But that’s not how generic generalizations work. People make such generalization usually not purely on the basis of statistical data, but because in their model, something about X causes Y (or they have a common cause). So if you’re X, but not Y, chances are you have additional characteristic Z, which is rare among Xs, and which counteracts X’s influence on Y.
It’s just like saying “dogs have four legs—well, not Fido, obviously, but he’s had an accident and one of his legs had to be amputated”. This kind of thing might sound a bit like a self-censored version of “but Fido isn’t a true dog”, but what it really says is “but Fido isn’t an ordinary dog”, which is entirely correct!
Maybe you’re aware of all this anyway, but I just thought it’d be worth pointing out.
In the context of human groups and human sub-groups, I’m not sure “ordinary” member of the group is used differently than “true” member of the group. Witness those who claim the community organizer is not “really” black because he did not live the ordinary life experiences of a black male child (i.e. he didn’t live in a poverty stricken inner city while growing up).
I’m inclined to argue, as some linguists would, that tabooing “ordinary” is impossible in this context, because people are intuitive essentialists, and that generic statements make reference to such postulated essences, which define what makes for an “ordinary” X. (Hence a lot of Aristotelian nonsense.)
This does, indeed, fit very well with your observation—with which I agree—that sometimes, the borderline between “ordinary” and “true/real” becomes blurred. However, I think one should still be wary of suspecting mentions of “extraordinary” of being censored no-true-Scotsman-arguments without further evidence.
For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders?
It depends on what relevance it has, and on what is being left out. Someone once told me that GW Bush must be smarter than Obama because he is white. That’s an intellectual fallacy even if it isn’t boo-word racism.
In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean “you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don’t like”.
In my experience, references to “human biodiversity” are frequently presented as if they are value neutral, but frequently aren’t because of
the factors mentioned above.
For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders?
The way I’d use the word, it depends on why you’re pointing them out. (Hint: if someone is pointing out that white people are more intelligent than black people in average for non-army1987::racist reasons, they’d most likely point out that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are even more intelligent in average.)
The wording is also important—“blacks are idiots” is no more of a reasonable way to put that than “females are midgets” is a reasonable way to state the fact that the average woman is shorter than the average man, so if someone is willing to say the former but not the latter, there’s likely something wrong.
(BTW, AFAIK men and women have the same average IQ (though different types of intelligence are weighed in a way deliberately chosen to make that the case), but the distribution of men’s IQs has a larger standard deviation.)
Yes and yes. We live in a world where people disregard qualifiers, so if you say “on tests of mathematical ability, men have higher variance in test scores, so the most talented mathematicians are disproportionately men” people will hear “men are better at math” and assume that average men are better than average women at math (this might also be true, but is not what you said). Basically, some people don’t distinguish between “most a are b” and “most b are a”, so you end up with people drawing conclusions that hurt other people with no real benefit. So as a general rule, we pretend that there are no between-group differences because if we don’t, people have a tendency to focus exclusively on between group differences and ignore within-group differences, which is worse.
We live in a world where people disregard qualifiers, so if you say “on tests of mathematical ability, men have higher variance in test scores, so the most talented mathematicians are disproportionately men” people will hear “men are better at math” and assume that average men are better than average women at math (this might also be true, but is not what you said).
I could make similar argument about a lot of things we do here, e.g., people hear “consequentialism” and think “the ends justify the means”, that doesn’t stop LW from promoting consequentialism.
So as a general rule, we pretend that there are no between-group differences because if we don’t, people have a tendency to focus exclusively on between group differences and ignore within-group differences, which is worse.
For example, suppose I want to hire the best mathematicians for a project, they’ll likely be disproportionately White or Asian men. Someone who followed your advise looking at the mathematicians I hire would conclude that I was racist and sexist in my hiring and we live in a society where the courts might very well back them. Thus the only way for me to avoid being considered a racist and sexist is to intentionally fudge the numbers based on race and sex, which itself requires that I know the truth about racial and gender differences so I know which way to fudge.
I could make similar argument about a lot of things we do here, e.g., people hear “consequentialism” and think “the ends justify the means”, that doesn’t stop LW from promoting consequentialism.
Nope, and some people will express disapproval of LWers who promote consequentialism. Being right doesn’t make you immune to social stigma.
Intentionally believing false things always carries a cost.
Yes, it does. So does unintentionally believing false things. This is definitely not a one-sided issue, as much as people like to pretend that is it. Anti-discrimination policies reduce one cost at the expense of raising another.
For example, suppose I want to hire the best mathematicians for a project, they’ll likely be disproportionately White or Asian men.
In the case that you both want to hire and are able to hire exceptional mathematicians, anti-discrimination policies are likely to hurt both parties involved. (In theory, laws regarding disparate impact wouldn’t actually affect you if you were hiring based on demonstrable mathematical prowess, but in practice business necessity would be hard to prove). The mathematicians are actually likely to be hurt considerably more, because without anti-discrimination policies, they would probably be in higher demand and thus able to ask for much higher pay.
The real problem comes in when employers decide that they need exceptional people but can’t actually identify these exceptional people. If filtering based on race was allowed, employers would use that (the best mathematicians are disproportionately white and asian, therefore if I hire a white or asian I’ll get an above-average mathematician).
Basically, you’re right except for the problem where humans mix up p(a|b) and p(b|a), which causes people to do stupid things (most of the people who win the lottery buy lots of tickets, so if I buy lots of tickets I’m likely to win the lottery). If you actually know what you’re hiring based on, anti-discrimination policies will prevent you from having 100% of your workforce be the very best, but even if only whites and asians had the required skills, you’re still looking at 77% of the population in the US, so it falls in the category of “annoyance” not “business killer”. In terms of fudging, you can detect statistically significant deviations just as well as someone looking at your hiring data. You don’t need to know beforehand.
Of course, if these things weren’t the case you’d still face social stigma for saying anything that sounds vaguely racist. Because while these two societal tendencies have strong effects in opposite directions, they’re not there by virtue of reasoned argument, and so removing one but not the other is likely to cause more harm than good (probably, I have no idea how one would go about removing either societal tendency to test that hypothesis). If both tendencies could be eliminated, that would be best, and here you probably can talk about it without much social stigma, but if you ask those questions in everyday life, you will be labeled as a racist.
Intentionally believing false things always carries a cost.
Yes, it does. So does unintentionally believing false things.
The difference is that if you unintentionally believe something false, you can update when you find new evidence; whereas once you start intentionally believing false things, you’ve declare all truth your enemy.
If you actually know what you’re hiring based on, anti-discrimination policies will prevent you from having 100% of your workforce be the very best, but even if only whites and asians had the required skills, you’re still looking at 77% of the population in the US, so it falls in the category of “annoyance” not “business killer”.
Depends on the size of the business and your margin. Most small businesses can’t afford to have 23% of there employees be dead weight, especially if they have to pay them the same as the others to avoid looking like they have racist pay policies.
Most small businesses can’t afford to have 23% of there employees be dead weight, especially if they have to pay them the same as the others to avoid looking like they have racist pay policies.
Most small businesses don’t need to hire the top 0.01% in any given skillset. The small businesses that do need to hire that exclusively and the small businesses that are strapped for cash are generally two distinct sets. In any case, without those policies, the top 0.01% could demand more money, and so the business wouldn’t be in much better of a position. It’s really the top 0.01% of workers who bear the majority of the cost of anti-discrimination policies, because they could negotiate better pay if the policies weren’t in place.
It is a tradeoff. Empirically, societies that oppose discrimination tend to do better (though there are obvious confounds and this doesn’t necessarily mean that the anti-discrimination policies improve outcomes—it may just mean that richer people prefer egalitarian policies more). In American culture, at least, you will generally be labeled as a racist if you imply that there might be between-group differences, whether or not you can back that up with good arguments.
The difference is that if you unintentionally believe something false, you can update when you find new evidence; whereas once you start intentionally believing false things, you’ve declare all truth your enemy.
By all means, keep in mind that the social fiction of perfect equality in ability across groups is unlikely to be true. But also keep in mind that it’s a polite fiction and you will be stigmatized if you point out that it’s unlikely to be true. The term “racist” usually refers to someone who doesn’t respect that social convention, and both of the statements you were questioning go against that social norm. “Racist” doesn’t mean “factually incorrect”, it means “low status and icky”.
Most small businesses don’t need to hire the top 0.01% in any given skillset.
The same logic applies if you want to hire people in the top 10%. Yes, there may very well be enough blacks in the 10% that if you had first choice among them you could hire enough to comply with disparate impact. However, in reality you’re competing for the few blacks in the top 10% with all the other businesses who also need to hire the top 10% and there aren’t enough to go around.
By all means, keep in mind that the social fiction of perfect equality in ability across groups is unlikely to be true. But also keep in mind that it’s a polite fiction and you will be stigmatized if you point out that it’s unlikely to be true. The term “racist” usually refers to someone who doesn’t respect that social convention, and both of the statements you were questioning go against that social norm. “Racist” doesn’t mean “factually incorrect”, it means “low status and icky”.
Yes and at LW our goal is to raise the sanity waterline.
How about also considering the costs, benefits, and comparative advantages when dealing with various topics? One does not get extra points for doing things the hard way. Instead of dealing with some topics directly, it would be better to discuss more meta, e.g. to teach people about the necessity of doing experiments and evaluating data statistically. This will prepare the way for people who will later try to deal with the problem more directly.
Now it may seem that when I see people doing a mistake, and I don’t immediately jump there and correct them, it is as if I lied by omission. But there are thousands of mistakes humans make, any my resources are limited, so I will end ignoring some mistakes either way.
Make sure you pick your battles because you believe you can win them and the gains will be worth it. Instead of picking the most difficult battle there is, simply because choosing the most difficult battle feels high-status… until you lose it.
Not all of them, it’s just that there aren’t enough non-dead weight non-white non-asians to go around for all the businesses who need competent employees while complying with disparate impact.
Not all of them, it’s just that there aren’t enough non-dead weight non-white non-asians to go around for all the businesses who need competent employees
How do you know? Not every business is a silicon valley start up that needs to be staffed almost entirely super smart people. The typical company is much more pyramidal. A lot of employers want a lot of employees who will happily work for the minimum wage.
while complying with disparate impact.
Whatever that means.. If you think US affiirmative action, or something, is the issue, then it cancels within the US. If you think it makes the US less competitive than polities that don’t have AA, then that’s only part of a bigger problem, because, given your assumptions, the US would be at a severe disadvantage compared to any given Asian
nation anyway. But it doesn’t appear to , so maybe factors other than DNA are important.. Who knows? We can only try to deduce what you might be saying from your hints and allegations.
The thing is society doesn’t “carry on as though people are equal”. Society, at least the more functional parts of society, treat things like affirmative action and disparate impact, as things to be routed around as much as possible because that’s necessary to get things done efficiently.
It would have been helpful to answer the question as stated. Not all societies have affirmative action and my polity doesn’t. Depending on ones background assumptions, affirmative action could be seen as restoring equality, or creating inequality. You seem to have assumed a take on that without arguing it. It would have been helpful to argue it, and not to treat “society” as synonymous with “US society”.
The real problem comes in when employers decide that they need exceptional people but can’t actually identify these exceptional people. If filtering based on race was allowed, employers would use that (the best mathematicians are disproportionately white and asian, therefore if I hire a white or asian I’ll get an above-average mathematician).
Basically, you’re right except for the problem where humans mix up p(a|b) and p(b|a),
“The best mathematicians are disproportionately white and asian, therefore if I hire a white or asian I’ll get an above-average mathematician” is Bayesianly correct if the race is the only thing you know about the candidates; but it isn’t (a randomly-chosen white or Asian person is very unlikely to be a decent mathematician), and the other information you have about the candidates most likely mostly screens off the information that race gives you about maths skills.
Hmm, so E(the Math SAT score that X deserves|the Math SAT score that X got is 800, and X is male) is just 4 points more than E(the Math SAT score that X deserves|the Math SAT score that X got is 800, and X is female). That doesn’t sound like terribly much to me, and I’d guess there are plenty of people who, due to corrupted mindware and stuff, would treat a male who got 800 better than a female who got 800 by a much greater extent than justified by that 4-point difference in the Bayesian posterior expected values. (Cf the person who told whowhowho that Obama must be dumber than Bush—surely we know much more about them than their races?)
I’m not sure if this is correct, but I sometimes wonder given how they’re surrounded by spin-doctors and other image manipulators how much we really know about prominent politicians, especially when the politician in question is new so you can’t look at his record.
My conclusion still holds if you simply need mathematicians in the top 10%, for example, only the analysis is slightly more complicated.
More than 1% of the world is racist.
Also, taboo “racist” unless you agree with faul_sname’s definition, in which case whether being a “racist” is a bad thing is precisely the question under discussion.
My conclusion still holds if you simply need mathematicians in the top 10%, for example, only the analysis is slightly more complicated.
So you agree that, in the original example, you’re more likely than not just being a racist? Because you certainly seem to be moving the goal post over to “top 10%” …
faul_sname’s definition
That link does not appear to point to a definition.
Does it become racist/sexist if one attempts to speculate on the cause of these differences?
Racism has three definitions:
1) The belief that there are implicit (read: genetic) differences between races which give rise to behavioral differences.
2) The belief that different races have different worth and/or aught to be treated differently because of these differences.
3) An actual act of treating a race differently which stems from explicit or implicit negative opinions about that race.
Sexism mostly lies only in the domain of (2) and (3) with (1) often seeming like a gray area because believing (1) almost always implies (2) or (3).
So you would be racist (1) if you proposed that the IQ differences are genetic.
The reason people say “you are being racist” is because people often implicitly do (3) and implicitly believe (1) and (2) without explicitly stating the belief. The intent behind telling someone they are racist is to make the underlying belief explicit.
The moral connotations of being racist/sexist continue to be implicitly bad or wrong. So now, if the person wishes to continue justifying the initial belief, they have to defend the moral good or factual correctness of certain types of racism / sexism.
To summarize the point: For the majority of individuals in your culture, System 1 is racist/sexist while System 2 believes racism and sexism are bad. The intent of saying “statement x is racist” is to initiate a shift to system 2.
You didn’t state your views, but if your system 2 holds some racist/sexist beliefs as well (as in, you actually think racial IQ differences are genetic) than you would misinterpret “you are racist” as being analogous to “I don’t like your argument”. What’s really happening is that the person who you are arguing with believes that your racism is coming out of system 1, and wants to notify system 2 of that fact.
(I know this is a bit of an abuse of dual process theory and a horrible oversimplification even otherwise but I’m trying to be at least somewhat succinct—apologies)
The problem is that if someone system 2 does hold the belief that “racism/sexism is bad” this causes them to evaluate arguments related to race/sex differences on the basis of trying to avoid being racist/sexist rather than on the merits of the argument. A lot of people (especially around here) also hold as a system 2 belief that arguments should be evaluated on their merits. My point in asking the question is to help people notice that these two system 2 beliefs are in conflict.
You are quite right. That’s why it is important to separate the various meanings behind racism and sexism.
For example. I spent the better part of high school researching intelligence and the factors that contribute to it, including race. I’ve given serious consideration to the idea that genetic racial differences in behavior might exist, and extensive research has given me a high confidence that they do not.
However, if I had concluded that racial differences did exist, then I would be a racist[1] but I would probably continue to believe that racism[2, 3] are wrong.
Also, I think it is fair to say that I currently am “sexist”[1] but not sexist [2, 3] - that is, I do believe there are behavioral differences between men and women that are genetic in origin, but I do not believe that this means that I want women to have a different set of rights and privileges, nor do I believe that they are inferior.
That’s because group [1] is a statement about reality, whereas [2] [3] have moral connotations. I think it is bad to be racist [2] or racist [3.] I consider racism [1] to simply be a misguided opinion which arises when a person does insufficient research into the topic. I don’t consider racism[1] to be immoral, and might become racist [1] if someone gave me sufficient evidence to accept that hypothesis. Similarly, I am sexist [1] but I think it is wrong to be sexist [2] or [3], and I might stop being sexist[1] given sufficient evidence.
In short. moral attitudes towards racism/sexism [2, 3] need not interfere with epistemic stances on racism/sexism [1], even though they unfortunately often do.
Edit: if you intend to argue the point we can, but it will be a separate discussion unrelated to rationality. The most salient pieces of evidence that settled the issue for me are 1) various adoption / mixed race studies and 2) a genetic analysis indicating that the percentage of European heritage is unrelated to IQ in African Americans. I think the mistake that most amateur researchers make on this topic is not taking maternal factors (in the womb, breastfeeding, etc) into account.
a misguided opinion which arises when a person does insufficient research into the topic.
It seems odd to attribute a false belief to insufficient research. Not false, exactly, but odd… like attributing the continued progression of an illness to insufficient medication. If X is a popular false belief, it seems there ought to be something to be said about why X is popular, just like there’s something to be said about why an illness progresses.
Doing a little bit of research will lead you to be fairly confident that racial differences are genetic, because the differences 1) do exist and 2) cannot be explained by sociological factors alone. Most people assume that if it is not sociological, it is genetic.
However, if you do a lot of research, which means taking into account maternal factors in the womb, epigenetics, nutrition...and if you further spend time researching how IQ tests work and what contributes to high IQ in general (not just with race), your confidence that racial differences are genetic will drop steeply.
It just happens to be a topic where the first impression upon reading the literature has a particular tendency to lead you to a wrong conclusion.
Ah, I see! “Does insufficient research” != “fails to do sufficient research” in this context. Neat. Sometimes it’s a miracle we communicate at all. Thanks for the clarification.
I suspect that a lot of people also come to racism[1] without doing any research at all, but I don’t disagree with anything you say here.
True, but those people don’t generally end up at lesswrong (I hope!)
by “insufficient research” I was trying to convey the difference between cursory research and in depth research. Am I using the word incorrectly? / is there a better fitting word that describes this?
Edit: ooh, you thought I meant “insufficient research” to mean that any amount of research would have helped, hence the analogy to to diseases and medicine—medicines do not cause disease, they cure it. Whereas I actually am saying that in this case, too little “medicine” can cause the disease.
Got it :)
I suspect most people who come to racism do so via the logic I mentioned in this comment.
Just to clarify the claim, because language can be slippery… if we chose humans at random and until we found 1000 who believe whites are superior to blacks, and we looked at their history, I expect the majority of them came to that position prior to reviewing empirical correlations between race and IQ among a statistically significant population. I understand you to be saying that you expect the majority came to that position only after reviewing empirical correlations between race and IQ among a statistically significant population, either personally or through reading the reports of others.
Wait… I took “come to racism” to refer to people who used to be non-racist[1], but become racist[1] as adults. OTOH, many (most?) randomly-chosen racists[1] probably have been so ever since they’ve had any opinion either way on the matter, which they probably uncritically absorbed from their sociocultural environment while growing up and have had it cached ever since. These two groups of racists[1] are probably very different (just like you wouldn’t expect converts to Islam to be representative of Muslims in general—would you?); in particular, I suspect that most racists are the way you describe here, but most “converts to racism” are the way Eugine_Nier says. (See also “Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism” by Yvain.)
I took “come to racism” to refer to people who used to be non-racist[1], but become racist[1] as adults.
Yeah, with that unpacking, I find the claim much more plausible.
many (most?) randomly-chosen racists[1] probably have been so ever since they’ve had any opinion either way on the matter, which they probably uncritically absorbed from their sociocultural environment while growing up and have had it cached ever since.
Yeah, that’s my expectation.
These two groups of racists[1] are probably very different
No doubt.
most “converts to racism” are the way Eugine_Nier says.
I find that much more plausible than the claim that most racists[1] are the way Eugine_Nier says.
I’m not sure I believe it even so (as compared to, say, converting to racism after a traumatic experience with a member of race X), but at this point I’m just telling just-so stories about hypothetical people I don’t have much experience with, so I don’t put much weight in my own intuitions.
I understand you to be saying that you expect the majority came to that position only after reviewing empirical correlations between race and IQ among a statistically significant population, either personally or through reading the reports of others.
We can get into debates about what constitutes “statistically significant” but yeah I suspect most of the racists[1] around today came to that conclusion after reviewing correlations between race and intelligence (and related behaviors) in most cases from their own experience using their system I.
For my own part, most of the people I’ve met personally whom I’ve identified as racist[1] with regards to white and black people have not met very many black people at all, so I doubt that’s true of them for any reasonable standard of statistical significance (1).
But of course the racists I’ve knowingly met might not be representative of racists more generally.
(1) Many were also racist[1] with regards to the superiority of whites to other non-white races, such as Native Americans and Asians, as well as with regards to the superiority of “whites” to other identifiable subcultures that include Caucasians, such as gays and Jews. All of which contributes to my sense that they are not arriving at their beliefs based on observation at all.
The south (at least during Jim Crow) wasn’t nearly as segregated as the north in terms of where people lived, so white southerners had many occasions to observe their black neighbors.
In fact it’s not at all hard to notice the correlation between say race and a lot of behavior traits, for example the the black neighborhood is the one where you’re more likely to get mugged. I’m not sure about Asians, as for Jews is their complaint that Jews are stupid or that they’re secretly running the world?
as for Jews is their complaint that Jews are stupid or that they’re secretly running the world?
It wasn’t that Jews are stupid. Mostly it seemed to be that Jews are evil, which I suppose one could argue isn’t a question of superiority at all, though it sure felt like one. I actually haven’t run into the secret-world-domination thing in person very often at all, though I’m of course acquainted with the trope.
And sure, I’m perfectly willing to believe that the south during Jim Crow was less geographically segregated than the north, and thus provided more opportunities for inter-group observation.
It wasn’t that Jews are stupid. Mostly it seemed to be that Jews are evil, which I suppose one could argue isn’t a question of superiority at all, though it sure felt like one.
That’s my point. They’re complaints about different out-groups are limited by what their system I’s would find plausible.
Just to make sure I understand your claim: as I understand it, you would predict that if we raised the people I’m referring to in an environment where “Jews are stupid” was (perhaps artificially) a prevailing social belief, they would tend to reject that belief as they came to observe Jews, because their system Is would find that belief implausible, because Jews are not in fact stupid (relative to people-like-them, as a class). But if we raised them in an environment where “blacks are stupid” was a prevailing social belief, they would not tend to reject that belief as they came to observe blacks, because their system Is would find that belief plausible, because blacks are in fact stupid (relative to people-like-them, as a class).
Yes?
Would you also expect that if we raised them in an environment where “Jews are evil” was a prevailing social belief, they would not reject that belief as they came to observe Jews, because their system Is would find that belief plausible, because Jews are in fact evil (relative to people-like-them, as a class)? Or does the principle not generalize like that?
As for Jews, I’m not sure they know many Jews, but they’ve probably noticed that a lot of Jews are in high positions in Academia, Finance and Politics. This is inconsistent with them being stupid but not with them being evil.
they’ve probably noticed that a lot of Jews are in high positions in Academia, Finance and Politics. This is inconsistent with them being stupid
For all that such people know, Jews might be conspiring to help each other into high positions even though they aren’t unusually smart compared to gentiles.
What you describe is more or less the standard negative stereotype of Jews (basically being Slytherines), and in any case what you describe is closer to the common notion of ‘evil’ than ‘stupid’.
Again; you are observing correlations between socio-economic status and behaviour, and socio economic status happens to coincide with race in the US. African nations are not inhabited by legions of muggers all mugging each other, and there is no gene for mugging.
Not specifically. There are certainly genes for aggression, impulse control, empathy, violence and sociopathy in general. I make no claims about the distribution thereof by race but this (connoted) argument is terrible. For the intents and purposes used here yes, there are ‘genes for mugging’.
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods.
An intrinsic relation between race and social behavior is in the realm of possibility, but there are highly relevant social factors to take into account here even when you’ve adjusted for economic status. In low income black neighborhoods, law enforcement tends to adopt a much more adversarial relationship with the population than in white neighborhoods, such that black people are much more likely to be arrested and convicted relative to their actual crime rates, and are subject to frequent stops and searches on extremely tenuous bases. Speaking for myself, I suspect I’d have much less respect for the law if I grew up in an environment that reinforced the impression that law enforcement was out to get me from the start.
there are highly relevant social factors to take into account here even when you’ve adjusted for economic status
Indeed, central/southern Italy is not particularly genetically diverse AFAIK and yet certain cities are safer than others by probably several orders of magnitude, for all kinds of reasons.
Or that even successful instances of law enforcement tend to get shut down by self-proclaimed anti-racists. Or the fact that most blacks are raised by single mothers.
This is not the only cause. The problem is that it’s considered taboo to propose any explanation for the difference whether genetic or cultural that doesn’t pin the blame entirely on white “racism”.
That is a problem, but there is in fact quite a lot of racism, such that it does indeed account for quite a lot of problems.
While there are some parts of the book I take issue with (and I suspect you’d take issue with even more,) you might want to take a look at this book for lot of figures on “proactive policing” genuinely resulting in a relative arrest rate highly disproportionate to the crime rate.
African nations are not inhabited by legions of muggers all mugging each other
Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.
As a metaphor, legions of muggers almost fits somewhere dysfunctional like Somalia. But legion of muggers is a metaphor, not an accurate description of warlord-ism. And anyway, Somalia is hardly representative of Africa in general.
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods
...in the US.
Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.
It’s not at all good. A few rich people exploiting a lot of poor ones is not the same as a few poor people robbing a few wealthier ones. And,it is not as if the politics of most African countries now is so very different from the politics of most European ones up until a few centuries ago; There’s no gene for fair government either.
That’s barely half an argument. You would need to believe that there are significant between-group differences AND that they are significant AND that they should be relevant to policy or decision making in some way. You didn’t argue the second two points there, and you haven’t elsewhere.
You would need to believe that there are [statistically] significant between-group differences AND that they are [actually] significant AND that they should be relevant to policy or decision making in some way.
I’m with you on the first two, but if the trait is interesting enough to talk about (intelligence, competence, or whatever), isn’t that enough for consideration in policy making? If it isn’t worth considering in making policy, why are we talking about the trait?
Politics isn’t a value-free reflection of nature. The disvalue of reflecting a fact politically might outweigh the value. For instance, people aren’t the same in their political judgement, but everyone gets one vote, for instance.
So if we don’t base our politics on facts, what should we base it on? This isn’t a purely rhetorical question, I can think of several ways to answer it (each of which also has other implications) and am curious what your answer is.
As for your example, that’s because one-man-one-vote is a more workable Schelling point since otherwise you have the problem of who decides which people have better political judgement.
As for your example, that’s because one-man-one-vote is a more workable Schelling point since otherwise you have the problem of who decides which people have better political judgement.
You include a copy of the Cognitive Reflection Test or similar in each ballot and weigh votes by the number of correct answers to the test.
(This idea isn’t original to me, BTW—but I can’t recall anyone expressing it on the public Internet at the moment.)
You include a copy of the Cognitive Reflection Test or similar in each ballot and weigh votes by the number of correct answers to the test.
This doesn’t quite solve the Schelling point problem. You start getting questions about why that particular test and not some other. You will also get problems related to Goodheart’s law.
You start getting questions about why that particular test and not some other.
Well… People might ask that about (say) university admission tests, and yet in practice very few do so with a straight face. (OTOH, more people consider voting a sacrosanct right than studying.)
ETA: now that I think about that, this might be way more problematic in a country less culturally homogeneous than mine—I’m now reminded of complaints in the US that the SAT is culturally biased.
You will also get problems related to Goodheart’s law.
Keeping the choice of questions secret until the election ought to mitigate that.
now that I think about that, this might be way more problematic in a country less culturally homogeneous than mine—I’m now reminded of complaints in the US that the SAT is culturally biased.
Also in the US the SAT is only one of the factors effecting admissions.
Keeping the choice of questions secret until the election ought to mitigate that.
Only partially. Also what about the people whose design the questions?
This is a purely terminological point: A substantial percentage of the folks in this forum think moral propositions are a kind of fact. I think they are wrong, but my usage (moral values are not empirical facts) is an idiosyncratic usage in this venue.
In short, I’m not sure if you are disagreeing with the local consensus, or simply using a different vocabulary. Until you and your interlocutors are using the same vocabulary, continuing disagreement is unlikely to be productive.
In short, I think basically everyone agrees that public policy is the product of the combination of scientific fact (including historical fact and sociological fact) and moral values. But because of disagreements on the meta-ethical and philosophy of science level, there is widespread disagreement on what my applause light sentence means in practice.
Your post is very susceptible to the construction:
Only moral values are relevant to policy decisions. Empirical facts are not relevant to policy decisions.
You could object that this is not a charitable reading. But in the context of this discussion, it is hard to tell how to read you charitably while ensuring that you would still endorse the interpretation.
You didn’t define what you mean by “narrowly construed” facts, but from context it seems like you’re saying I don’t like these particular facts therefore I want an excuse to ignore them.
Then where did you get the evidence to assert it with such high confidence? (This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question.)
Also, is this really the best example you could come up with? The problem with this example is that even if the fact in question is true, there are still good game theoretic/decision theoretic reasons not to respond to blackmail.
[shrugs]. You construed riots in a sweepingly negative way as “blackmail”. The fact that I do not agree does not mean I am construing them in a sweepingly positive way. This is as a pattern you have repeated throughout this discussion, and it illustrates how politics mindkills.
If a policy is good, a riot against it is blackmail. If a policy is bad, you shouldn’t be pursuing it riot or no riot. Thus the hypothetical existence of riots shouldn’t affect which policies one pursues. Frankly, I have hard time believing “leading to riots” is your true rejection of the policies in question.
If a policy is good, a riot against it is blackmail. If a policy is bad, you shouldn’t be pursuing it riot or no riot. Thus the hypothetical existence of riots shouldn’t affect which policies one pursues.
That is a dangerous belief for a leader to hold. I’d prefer leaders that don’t have that belief. In fact it should be taken as granted that leaders who do not respond to the expectation that the people will oppose their actions will be killed or otherwise rendered harmless through whichever actions are suitable to the political environment.
If you want social science to be taken seriously, you do your cause a disservice by asserting social science is different in kind from so-called “hard science.”
Edit: In fact, Eugine_Nier’s argument here is that social science is not rigorous enough to be worth considering. You don’t advance true belief by asserting that social science does not need to be rigorous.
And just in case it isn’t clear, the ability to replicate an experiment is not required for a scientific field to be rigorous. (Just look at astro-physics: It isn’t like we can cue up a supernova on command to test our hypothesis). It is preferable, but not necessary.
In fact, Eugine_Nier’s argument here is that social science is not rigorous enough to be worth considering.
No, my argument was that much of modern social science (and especially modern anthropology which is bad even by social science standards) is more concerned with politics than truth. See here for JulianMorrison practically admitting as much and then trying to argue that this is a good thing. And quite frankly the tone of your comment is also not encouraging in that respect.
See here for JulianMorrison practically admitting as much and then trying to argue that this is a good thing.
I think that’s a highly disingenuous reading of JulianMorrison’s statement. JulianMorrison never stated that it was a good thing, only that it was a necessary thing in the face of political realities. In an evolutionary environment where only the Dark Arts are capable of surviving, would you rather win or die?
Essentially, we all need to remember that speaking the truth has a variable utility cost that depends on environment. If the perceived utility of speaking the truth publically is negative, then you invoke the Bayesian Conspiracy and don’t speak the truth except in private.
In this post JulianMorrison was, at least partially, trying to inform you that there is in fact something like a Bayesian Conspiracy within the Social Sciences—that there are social truths that are understood from within the discipline (or at least, from within parts of the discipline) that can’t be discussed with outsiders, because non-rational people will use the knowledge in ways with a highly negative net utility. He was also trying to test you to see if you could be trusted with initiation into that Bayesian Conspiracy. (You failed the test, btw—which is something you might realize with pride or chagrin, depending on your political allegiances.)
In this post JulianMorrison was, at least partially, trying to inform you that there is in fact something like a Bayesian Conspiracy within the Social Sciences—that there are social truths that are understood from within the discipline (or at least, from within parts of the discipline) that can’t be discussed with outsiders, because non-rational people will use the knowledge in ways with a highly negative net utility.
I don’t think I’d identify the activist subculture with the social sciences, at least in the case JulianMorrison was talking about. If there’s an academic community whose members publish relatively unfiltered research within their fields but don’t usually talk to the public unless they are also activists, and also an activist community whose members are much more interested in spreading the word but aren’t always too interested in spreading up-to-date science (charitably, because they believe some avenues of research to be suffering from bias or otherwise suspect), then we get the same results without having to invoke a conspiracy. This also has the advantage of explaining why it’s possible to read about ostensibly forbidden social truths by, e.g., querying the right Wikipedia page.
Whether this accurately models any particular controversial subject is probably best left as an exercise.
Hold on a moment. I think the labels are accurate descriptions of the phenomena. There’s hostility to this kind of discussion, so sometimes the only winning move is not to play. But if the labels (heternormativity, privilege, social construction, rape culture) are not describing social phenomena, then we should find accurate labels.
And if experts use the labels right, but [Edit: sympathetic] laypeople do not, then we should chide the laypeople until they use them right. Agreement with my preferred policies does not make you wise, because arguments are not soldiers.
In short, I think I win on the merits, so let’s not get caught up in procedural machinations.
And if experts use the labels right, but laypeople do not, then we should chide the laypeople until they use them right. Agreement with my preferred policies does not make you wise, because arguments are not soldiers.
That assumes that we have sufficient status that our chiding the laypeople will win. The problem with social phenomena is that discussions about social phenomena are themselves social phenomena, so your statements have social cost that may be independent of their truth value. If you want to rationally strive towards maximum utility, you need to recognize and deal with the utility costs inherent in discussing facts with agents whose strategies involve manipulating consensus, and who themselves may not care as much about avoiding the Dark Arts as you seem to.
Secondly:
labels (heternormativity, privilege, social construction, rape culture)
I currently tend to believe that these are somewhat accurate labels—that is, they accurately define semantic boundaries around phenomena that do in fact exist, and that we do in fact have some actual understanding of. But if your audience sees them as fighting words, then they will see your arguments as soldiers. If you want to have a rational discussion about this, you need to be able to identify who else is willing to have a rational discussion about this, and at what level. Remember that on lesswrong, signaling rationality is a status move, so just because someone displays signals that indicate rationality doesn’t mean that they are in fact rational about a particular subject, especially a political one.
Ah. I see all my comments everywhere on the site are getting voted down again. Politics is the mind-killer, indeed.
Ok, serious question, folks:
What would it take to negotiate a truce on lesswrong, such that people could have differing opinions about what is or isn’t appropriate social utility maximization without getting into petty karma wars with each other?
Ah. This got downvoted too. Is there any way for me to stop this death-spiral and flag for empathy? Please?
I endorse interpreting net downvotes as information: specifically, the information that more people want less contributions like whatever’s being downvoted than want more contributions like it.
I can then either ignore that stated preference and keep contributing what I want to contribute (and accept any resulting downvotes as ongoing confirmation that of the above), or I can conform to that stated preference. I typically do the latter but I endorse the former in some cases.
The notion of a “truce” whereby I get to contribute whatever I choose and other people don’t use the voting mechanism to express their judgments of it doesn’t quite make sense to me.
All of that said, I agree with you that there exist various social patterns to which labels have been attached in popular culture, where those labels are shibboleths in certain subcultures and anti-shibboleths (“fighting words,” as you put it) in others. I find that if I want to have a useful discussion about those patterns within those subcultures, I often do best to not use those labels.
I endorse interpreting net downvotes as information: specifically, the information that more people want less
contributions like whatever’s being downvoted than want more contributions like it.
Except your interpretation is at least partially wrong—people mass downvote comments based on author, so there is no information about the quality of a particular post (it’s more like (S)HE IS A WITCH!). A better theory is that karma is some sort of noisy average between what you said, and ‘internet microaggression,’ and probably some other things—there is no globally enforced usage guidelines for karma.
I personally ignore karma. I generally write two types of posts: technical posts, and posts on which there should be no consensus. For the former, almost no one here is qualified to downvote me. For the latter, if people downvote me, it’s about the social group not correctness.
There are plenty of things to learn on lesswrong, but almost nothing from the karma system.
Oh, I completely agree that the reality is a noisy average as you describe. That said, for someone with the goals ialdabaoth describes themselves as having, I continue to endorse the interpretation strategy I describe. (By contrast, for someone with the goal-structure you describe, ignoring karma is a fine strategy.)
Do you think it likely that “social activism” and “liberalism” are fighting words in this board’s culture?
Huh. Are “Do you think it likely that ‘social activism’ and ‘liberalism’ are fighting words in this board’s culture?” fighting words in this board’s culture?
Depends on how they’re used, but yes, there are many contexts where I would probably avoid using those words here and instead state what I mean by them. Why do you ask?
Edit: the question got edited after I answered it into something not-quite-grammatical, so I should perhaps clarify that the words I’m referring to here are ‘social activism’ and ‘liberalism’ .
One approach is to identify high-status contributors and look for systematic differences between your way of expressing yourself and theirs, then experiment with adopting theirs.
Be that as it may (or mayn’t), that’s a clever way of making the intended message more palatable, including yourself in the deprecation. But you’re right. Aren’t we all pathetic, eh?
Look at your most upvoted contributions (ETA: or better, look at contributions with a positive score in general—see replies to this comment). Look at your most downvoted contributions. Compare and contrast.
Most downvoted, yes, but on the positive side I’d instead suggest looking at your comments one or two sigma east of average and no higher: they’re likely to be more reproducible. If they’re anything like mine, your most highly upvoted posts are probably high risk/high reward type comments—jokes, cultural criticism, pithy Deep Wisdom—and it’ll probably be a lot harder to identify and cultivate what made them successful.
A refinement of this is to look at the pattern of votes around the contributions as well, if they are comments. Comparing the absolute ranking of different contributions is tricky, because they frequently reflect the visibility of the thread as much as they do the popularity of the comment. (At one time, my most-upvoted contributions were random observations on the Harry Potter discussion threads, for example.)
Rationality quotes might be a helpful way of figuring out how to get upvoted, but it is not particularly helpful in figuring out how to be more competent.
(nods) Then yeah, I’d encourage you to avoid using those words and instead state what you mean by them. Which may also result in downvotes, depending on how people judge your meaning.
No I didn’t, I argued that in a different context, it’s dangerous to discuss your beliefs openly with outsiders. And I wasn’t even trying to defend that behavior, I was offering an explanation for it.
...and you’re using rhetorical tactics. Why do you consider this a fight? Why is it so important that I lose?
I’ll agree to have lost if that will help. Will it help?
Interesting, so do you disprove of the behavior in question. If so why do you still identify it’s practitioners as “your side”?
Issues can be complex, you know. They can be simpler than ‘green’ vs. ‘blue’.
I wasn’t trying to. I was pointing out the problems with basing a movement on ‘pious lies’.
Which is still a gross mischaracterization of what was being discussed, but that mischaracterizing process is itself part of the rhetorical tactic being employed. I’m afraid I can no longer trust this communication channel.
I wasn’t trying to. I was pointing out the problems with basing a movement on ‘pious lies’.
Which is still a gross mischaracterization of what was being discussed,
How so? Near as I can tell from an outside view my description is a decent summary of your and/or Julian’s position. I realize that from the inside it feels different because the lies feel justified, well ‘pious lies’ always feel justified to those who tell them.
I’m afraid I can no longer trust this communication channel.
You’re the one who just argued (and/or presented Julian’s case) that I was not to be trusted with the truth. If anything, I’m the one who has a right to complain that this communication channel is untrustworthy.
If anything, I’m the one who has a right to complain that this communication channel is untrustworthy.
And yet you’re still using it. What are you attempting to accomplish? What do you think I was attempting to accomplish? (I no longer need to know the answers to these questions, because I’ve already downgraded this channel to barely above the noise threshold; I’m expending the energy in the hopes that you ask yourself these questions in a way that doesn’t involve assuming that all our posts are soldiers fighting a battle.)
And yet you’re still using it. What are you attempting to accomplish?
(..)
I’m expending the energy in the hopes that you ask yourself these questions in a way that doesn’t involve assuming that all our posts are soldiers fighting a battle.
Same here with respect to the questions I asked here, here, and here. The fact that you were willing to admit to the lies gave me hope that we might have something resembling a reasonable discussion. Unfortunately it seems you’d rather dismiss my questions as ‘rhetoric’ than question the foundations of your beliefs. I realize the former choice is easier but if you’re serious about wanting to anilyze your beliefs you need to do the latter.
For the sake of others watching, the fact that you continue to use phrases like “willing to admit to the lies” should be a telling signal that something other than truth-seeking is happening here.
For the sake of others watching, the fact that you continue to use phrases like “willing to admit to the lies” should be a telling signal that something other than truth-seeking is happening here.
Something other than truth-seeking is happening here. But the use of that phrase does not demonstrate that—your argument is highly dubious. Since the subject at the core seems to be about prioritizing between epistemic accuracy and political advocacy it can be an on topic observation of fact.
If a phrase such as “pursuing goals other than pure truth-seeking” were used rather than “noble lies”, I would agree with you. But he appears to deliberately attempt to re-frame any argument that he doesn’t like in the most reprehensible way possible, rather than attempting to give it any credit whatsoever. He’s performing all sorts of emotional “booing” and straw-manning, rather than presenting the strongest possible interpretation of his opponent’s view and then attacking that. And when someone attempts to point that out to him, he immediately turns around and attempts to accuse them of doing it, rather than him.
It’s possible to have discussions about this without either side resorting to “this is how evil you’re being” tactics, or without resorting to “you’re resorting to ‘this is how evil you’re being’ tactics” tactics, or without resorting to “you’re resorting to ‘you’re resorting to {this is how evil you’re being} tactics’ tactics” tactics. Unfortunately, it’s a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma—whoever defects first tends to win, because humans are wired such that rhetoric beats honest debate.
But he appears to deliberately attempt to re-frame any argument that he doesn’t like in the most reprehensible way possible, rather than attempting to give it any credit whatsoever. He’s performing all sorts of emotional “booing” and straw-manning, rather than presenting the strongest possible interpretation of his opponent’s view and then attacking that. And when someone attempts to point that out to him, he immediately turns around and attempts to accuse them of doing it, rather than him.
That is approximately how I would summarize the entire conversation.
It’s possible to have discussions about this without either side resorting to “this is how evil you’re being” tactics, or without resorting to “you’re resorting to ‘this is how evil you’re being’ tactics” tactics, or without resorting to “you’re resorting to ‘you’re resorting to {this is how evil you’re being} tactics’ tactics” tactics.
Theoretically, although those most capable of being sane when it comes to this kind of topic are also less likely to bother.
Unfortunately, it’s a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma—whoever defects first tends to win, because humans are wired such that rhetoric beats honest debate.
Often, yes. It would be a gross understatement to observe that I share your lament.
If a phrase such as “pursuing goals other than pure truth-seeking” were used rather than “noble lies”, I would agree with you.
Specifically, the method of pursuing said goals in question is by making and promoting false statements. This is precisely what the phrase ‘noble lie’ means. This is the kind of thing that would be bad enough even if the authority of “Science” weren’t being invoked by the people making said false statements. Yes, the phrase “noble lie” has negative connotations, there are very good reasons for that.
Incidentally, at the time that I write this comments none of your most recent comments are net-negative, most are net-positive, including the one I’m responding to. Does knowing that make t easier for you to contribute without worrying too much about your social status here?
The net variability is the problem, not merely the bulk downvoting. All this sort of situation does is demonstrate that the karma system is untrustworthy. Since the karma system was the easiest way to determine whether what I’m saying is considered worth listening to by the community, I have to find secondary indicators. Unfortunately, most of those require feedback, and explicitly asking for that feedback often results in bulk downvoting.
I’m one of those people who has to be very careful to modulate my tone so that what I’m trying to say is understood by my audience; if all of the available feedback mechanisms are known to have serious problems, I’m not sure how to proceed.
It does make sense, and the karma system is most assuredly untrustworthy, in the sense you mean it here. (I would say “noisy.:) Asking for feedback is also noisy, as it happens.
At some point, it becomes worthwhile to work out how to proceed given noisy and unreliable feedback.
For example, one useful principle if I think the feedback is net-reliable in the aggregate but has high variability is to damp down sensitivity to individual feedback-items and instead attend to the trend over time once it stabilizes. Conversely, if I think the feedback is unreliable even in the aggregate, it’s best to ignore it altogether.
Yeah, that’s what I try to do in the abstract. In-the-moment, the less rational parts of my brain tend to bump up urgency and try to convince me that I don’t have time to ignore the data and wait for the aggregate, and when I try to pause for reflection, those same parts of my brain tend to ratchet up the perceived urgency again and convince me that I don’t have time to examine whether I have the time to examine whether those parts of my brain are lying to me less or more than the data.
I’m working on a brainhack to mitigate that, but it’s slow going. Once I have something useful I hope to post an article on it.
those same parts of my brain tend to ratchet up the perceived urgency again and convince me that I don’t have time to examine whether I have the time to examine whether those parts of my brain are lying to me
Because I’ve had enough of my posts voted down below the reply threshold that it destroyed the ability to continue the conversation, and for me having an idea debated back-and-forth is a necessary component of my mental process. Also, karma is used on this site to indicate whether I should be saying what I’m saying, so when everything I said for the past two weeks gets downvoted within 5 minutes of making a statement, even things utterly unrelated to that statement, I feel the need to raise an alarm to ensure that I’m interpreting signals correctly.
for me having an idea debated back-and-forth is a necessary component of my mental process.
If it is, then it is. But from the outside, this sounds like a rationalization for you to choose to do something that you find emotionally harmful. You have no obligation to participate in conversation that you find emotionally harmful.
That assumes that we have sufficient status that our chiding the laypeople will win.
I intended that to refer only to laypeople who agree with the labels, but are using them wrong. The people who are choosing our side because it seems high status, not because they think it is right. Those folks are dangerous in a lot of ways.
But if your audience sees them as fighting words, then they will see your arguments as soldiers.
Well, yes. This venue is not safe for these types of discussions—our interlocutor is an important reason why. I do it because I’m trying to dispel the appearance of a silent majority.
I think it is totally understandable to decide that the only winning (socially safe) move is not to engage in the conversation here. It’s not like it will make a huge difference—so choosing yourself first is very appropriate and NOT even a little bit worthy of blame.
This venue is not safe for these types of discussions
In what way?
our interlocutor is an important reason why.
All I’m doing is criticizing your arguments and providing counter-arguments. Or are you only willing to discuss these things among people who agree with you?
This sounds like an overly convenient excuse to avoid having to confront the implications of said truths. Restrict them to only people who won’t ask awkward questions and tell everyone else pious lies.
You need to establish some truths before worrying about the consequences. Scientific facts need controls, for instance. When have you shown any interest in controlling for the effects of environment?
When have you shown any interest in controlling for the effects of environment?
I never said I knew what caused the racial differences in question. There are certainly policy issues where the cause is relevant (incidentally addressing it requires admitting that the differences exist), there are issues where it’s less relevant.
Incidentally, in the example I sited in the great-grandparent it was the anthropologists who had declared that official policy was to deny all environmental explanations.
In this post JulianMorrison was, at least partially, trying to inform you that there is in fact something like a Bayesian Conspiracy within the Social Sciences—that there are social truths that are understood from within the discipline (or at least, from within parts of the discipline) that can’t be discussed with outsiders, because non-rational people will use the knowledge in ways with a highly negative net utility. He was also trying to test you to see if you could be trusted with initiation into that Bayesian Conspiracy.
How do you and Julian know that you are indeed in the “inner ring” of this conspiracy and/or that it’s actual purpose is what you think it is? How sure are you that this conspiracy even has any clue what it’s doing and hasn’t started to believe its own lies? Do you have an answer to the questions I asked here?
How do you and Julian know that you are indeed in the “inner ring” of this conspiracy and/or that it’s actual purpose is what you think it is? How sure are you that this conspiracy even has any clue what it’s doing and hasn’t started to believe its own lies? Do you have an answer to the questions I asked here?
On a case-by-case basis, you do experiments. You double-check them. You entertain alternate hypotheses. You accept that it’s entirely possible that things aren’t the way you think they are. You ask yourself what the likely social consequences of your actions are and if you’re comfortable with them, and then ask yourself how you know that. In short, you act like a rationalist.
(And you certainly don’t just downvote everyone who proposes a model that you don’t like.)
How do you and Julian know that you are indeed in the “inner ring” of this conspiracy and/or that it’s actual purpose is what you think it is? How sure are you that this conspiracy even has any clue what it’s doing and hasn’t started to believe its own lies? Do you have an answer to the questions I asked here?
is more concerned with politics than truth...is more concerned with politics than truth.
And that’s a bad thing? Trying to translate Hard Science directly into real-world action without considering the ethical, social and political consequences would be disastrous. We need something like social science.
is more concerned with politics than truth...is more concerned with politics than truth.
And that’s a bad thing?
If your goal is having an accurate model of the world, yes. If you’re goal is something else, you’re still better of with an accurate model of them world.
Edit: If you want to do politics, that’s also important, just don’t pretend you’re doing science even “soft science”.
We had this discussion before. You told me that the social activist labels are boo lights. But whether something is an applause light or a boo light in a particular community doesn’t mean it is not an accurate label for a phenomena.
“Democracy” is an applause light in the venues I generally hang out in (and I assume the same for you). That does not mean that democracy is not a real phenomena. And the fact that some folks in this venue don’t approve of democracy does not mean they think that the phenomena “democracy” as defined by relevant experts does not exist. In fact, a serious claim that democracy is bad or good first requires believing it occurs.
The general rule is that it is both the writer’s responsibility to be clear and the reader’s responsibility to decipher them. You know, responsibility is not a pie to be divided (warning: potentially mind-killing link), Postel’s law, the principle of charity, an’ all that.
In general, yes. In particular, I’m trying to give whowhowho constructive criticism, and he does not seem to think it is constructive.
warning: potentially mind-killing link
Lol. That’s almost literally the worst example to use for a de-escalating discussion about shares of responsibility.
Edit: On further reflection, Postel’s law is an engineering maxim not appropriate to social debate, and it should be well established that the principle of charity is polite, but not necessarily truth-enhancing.
It’s the reader’s responsibility to read your words, and read all your words, and not to imagine other words. Recently, someone paraphrased a remark of mine with two “maybe”’s I had used deleted and a “necessarily” I hadn’t used inserted. Was that my fault?
As an attorney, my experience is that the distinction between literal words and communicated meaning is very artificial. One canon of statutory construction is the absurdity principle (between two possible meanings, pick the one that isn’t absurd). But that relies on context beyond the words to figure out what is absurd. Eloquent version of this point here.
Now the thing with that logic is that 97% of the world is made up of idiots (Probably a little higher than that, actually.)
I do agree that it’s their fault if they misquote it, not your own, but let’s say you put an unclear statement in a self help book. Those books are generally read by the, ah, lower 40th percentile (Or around thereabouts), or just by really sad people- either way, they’re more emotionally unstable than normal.
Now that we have the perfect conditions for a blowup, let’s say you said something like ‘It’s your responsibility to be happy’ in that book, meaning that you and only you can make yourself happy. Your emotionally unstable reader, however, read it as it was said and took a huge hit to their self-confidence.
Do you see how it isn’t always the reader’s job?
In the great-great-grandparent you make the extremely strong assertion that some facts have such bad implications that reflecting on them causes more harm than good, this raises the question of how can you know which facts have this property without reflecting on them?
Like ethics and practicallity.
Also what do you mean by “ethics”? Do you mean the ethics in the LW-technical sense of ethical injunction or in the non-technical sense of morality?
Well the fact that race is correlated with things like IQ is pretty well established empirically, and there is no obvious a priori reason to prefer environmental to genetic explanations.
Not a priori, but there has been at least one study performed on black children adopted by white families, this one, which comes to the conclusion that environment plays a key role. In all honesty, I haven’t even read the study, because I can’t find the full text online, but if more studies like it are performed and come to similar conclusions, then that could be taken as evidence of a largely environmental explanation.
Yes, and I have had numerous twin studies cited at me that purport to show that genetics plays a key role. I can’t vouch for the quality of either but it is clear that the research is likely to remain inconclusive for quite so time.
Really? I’ve seen twin studies that purport a genetic explanation for IQ differences between individuals, but never between racial groups. If you’ve saved a link to a study of the latter type, I’d be really interested to read it.
Well, Down’s Syndrome, for example, clearly affects IQ. There’s a big genetic IQ difference that is only really relevant to individuals. There aren’t Down’s-magnitude intelligence variations between races.
In general, there is wide variation in intelligence among people within any particular ethnic group. Showing these to be genetic doesn’t seem to be too hard either, since you can find individuals of the same ethnic group having been raised in similar environments. On the other hand, the difference in average IQ between races is quite small, compared to the individual within-race differences. To show how much of this was genetic would require controlling for environment, which one can even now expect to be notably different between races.
To put it simply, it’s easy to demonstrate genetic influence, when the effects are of a magnitude such that one can just rule out environment as being the critical factor. Which is not the case for racial differences.
Obviously, you can expect there to exist on average a non-zero genetic component between races, since their genetic material has had time to drift apart. But that’s neither here nor there when you want to know how much.
The point is that even if the heritable component of (say) intelligence among white people formed a bell curve, and the heritable component of intelligence among black people formed a bell curve, a priori you’d expect the two curves to be pretty much the same.
Ok, I’m confused. Under what scenario is it at all plausible for individual IQ differences but not racial IQ differences to be genetic?
Circumstances which look arbitrarily contrived and absurd upon examination but should be acknowledged as at least technically possible. ie. The distributions of IQ within each race are miraculously identical because contrary to expectations the universe really is Fair regarding this one complex trait (but not others).
Or one where the differences are small, or trivial. I don’t think this is “miraculous” or “implausible”. Before the invention of agriculture, about seven to twelve thousand years ago, I’m not sure what pressures there could have been on Europeans to develop higher intelligence than Africans, so in contrast to physical differences, many of which have well-established links to specific climates, intellectual genetic differences would probably be attributable to genetic drift and >~10,000 years of natural selection.
To be clear, my position isn’t that I have good evidence for this, merely that I don’t know and I don’t assign this scenario as low a prior probability as you seem to.
I know of no situation where the race of an individual is the only factor, or the most significant factor in making a decision. Feel free to counterargue.
And I was presenting the argument that it doesn’t matter. There is no good reason to base political, social or legal policy on it It’s always overwhelmed by other factors.
In the grandparent you said that the race of an individual is rarely the only factor. On the other hand, in aggregate it’s possible for the other factors to wash out and we are left with race as the main factor.
Are you arguing for or against public policy based on race?
I’m not sure whether we should or not. However, given that we currently have race-based policies and this is likely to continue for quite some time, they might as well be based on accurate beliefs about race.
IOW, you’re assuming that changing the US’s race-based policies so that they be based on accurate beliefs would be less hard than letting go of them altogether?
Let’s just be clear on where the status quo is. Eugine_Nier has mentioned disparate impact analysis several times. In addition to that is the far more important disparate treatment prohibition.
In the US, a worker can get fired even if it is not for cause. If you boss thinks you are a terrible worker, you can be fired even if you could prove your boss is wrong and you actually are a great worker. But you boss would be liable for wrongful termination if the boss said “I think [blacks / whites / Germans / Russians] are likely to be bad at your job, and you are [black / white / German / Russian], so you’re fired.” Likewise, an employer can’t refuse to hire on that basis.
Proving that is a separate issue, but having no public policy based on race implies repeal of both disparate impact prohibitions and disparate treatment prohibitions (and lots of other stuff, but it’s complicated).
In practice firing a black worker even if he is a terrible worker leaves employers open to wrongful termination suits. Whereas it’s harder to prove that with not hiring a black worker, so frequently the safest route for employers (especially small employers) is to find excuses to avoid hiring black workers rather then risk getting stuck with a bad employee that you can’t fire.
In practice, complying with laws has costs, some of which fall on innocent and semi-innocent third parties. As a lawyer, this is not news to me. The question is whether the benefits of implementing those social policies outweighs the costs. Clarence Thomas, a black Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States thinks the answer is no.
But that is a very different question from asking, as a matter of first principles, whether certain kinds of discrimination are allowed even if the facts don’t support the discrimination. In the United States, most discrimination of this kind is allowed, and restrictions on the factors employers and others may consider are fairly narrow (race, gender, religion, national origin—not ok. youth, poverty, moral character, basically anything else—ok).
Accurate beliefs about what? If a group (however defined) has been subject to negative discrimination, however arbitrary,
then there is an argument for treating them to a period of positive discrimination to compensate. That has nothing
to do with how jusitfied the original negative discrimination was.
But “black people in 1960” (for example) isn’t the same group as “black people today”, as many of the former are dead now and many of the latter hadn’t been born in 1960, and it’s not obvious to me that it makes sense to treat people according on who their grandparents were.
It is morally right to do so. But society is deeply conflicted about doing so (for reasons good and bad), so I’m not sure that “typical” is an accurate description of how often it happens.
Regardless of the frequency of compensation, you really should address head on why you think society should do so. The fact that society occasionally does provide such compensation is barely the beginning of the discuss of whether it should and says almost nothing about how much compensation should be provided, or who should pay.
I am not arguing that Affirmative Action/Positice Discrimination is necessarily right. Just that it doesn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with any facts about DNA.
If actually significant differences in competence have a genetic component, then public policy should reflect that difference. Particularly if the differences are easy / cheap to identify anyway. (I don’t think this is true about race / ethnicity, but that’s a different issue).
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.
I suspect that g is not interestingly different between race / ethnicity, and that the IQ test, which seeks to measure g, is culturally biased. But if there is a difference in g that cannot be attributed to environment, then we should consider it in making policy.
In the real world, I think all the important observed difference is culturally driven, so this nod towards facts doesn’t change my policy preferences. I think the facts are in my favor. I just think that we should be explicit about how policy should change if the facts turn out to be different.
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.
Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
You didn’t answer my question about treating other things as equal. If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd’t that be taken into account?
Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
Staying out of the racial-politics discussion, but my answer to this question generally is that it’s expensive.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc.… instead we establish age-based cutoffs and allow the occassional outlier. We understand perfectly well that these cutoffs are arbitrary and don’t actually reflect anything about the affected individuals; at best they reflect community averages but often not even that, but we do it anyway because we want to establish some threshold and evaluating individuals costs too much.
But, sure, bring the costs down far enough (or treat costs as distinct from propriety) and the proper public policy is to separately evaluate individuals.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc...
On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..
Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
Let’s compare two different types of employment discrimination law (in the US). For simplicity, let’s ignore the burden of proof.
Racial Discrimination: It is illegal to consider an employee’s (or potential employee’s) race when making an employment decision. If a person is fired, but would not have been fired if the person were a different race, the employer has committed wrongful termination. (Substitute “hire,” “promote,” or basically any other employment decision—the rule is unchanged).
Disability Discrimination: First, the disabled employee must be able to perform the job, with or without accommodations. Then, the employer must make reasonable (but not unreasonable) accommodations.
I think it is reasonably clear that disability discrimination law is more individualized. If there really were differences based on race / ethnicity, then I think racial discrimination law ought to look more like disability discrimination law. But I think there aren’t such differences, so I think the law as written is basically right.
If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd’t that be taken into account?
Seems like this is a question of baseline. Who said we should respect rioting? Or rioting is likely to result from treating people differently based on their actual genetic differences.
Just to be clear, I don’t practice employment law. I practice a very narrow kind of child disability law. Reading this post does not make me your lawyer.
It could mean you don’t translate scientific findings about groups directly into policy without considering ethical and practical implications. It could mean that treating people as individuals should be the default. It could mean there is nonetheless a case for treating people as groups where they were discriminated against as groups in the past.
And why do I need to be told “that there exist genetic differences between races that give rise to behavioral difference”. I have said nothing about affirmative action/positive discrimination one way or the other. You raised that issue. But you didn’t say how they two relate.
And why do I need to be told “that there exist genetic differences between races that give rise to behavioral difference”. I have said nothing about affirmative action/positive discrimination one way or the other. You raised that issue. But you didn’t say how they two relate.
I’m not sure whether the cause is genetic or cultural but there are most definitely behavioral differences between the races. Furthermore, the fact that it’s politically impossible to talk about this is causing a lot of problems. Consider the state of US cities with large black populations as discussed in this blog post by Walter Mead. The behavior in question is probably purely cultural since historic “white ethnic” political machines lead to the same problems, on the other hand the fact that this political machine is black means most people would rather pretend the problem doesn’t exist than talk about it and risk getting called “racist”.
For another example, consider the campaign to force Rhodesia to accept majority rule. Given the subsequent history of Zimbabwe this campaign almost certainly resulted in a worse situation for everyone involved.
First, off you needed about 5 “in the US”’s above.
Second: you’re part of the problem. If you want to discuss socio-cultural-polical problems in the US, discuss them
as such. Say “we have problems with populations of the urban poor”. We have problems with the urban poor too, and they don’t coincide with race. Given the way you have described the problem above, your initial approach of kicking off discussion of the problem by talking about genetic differences is exactly the wrong one -- it will block off sensible discussion, and it isn’t the real issue anyway.
Furthermore, the fact that it’s politically impossible to talk about this [..] in this blog post by Walter Mead.
Sure seems possible for Mr Mead.
For another example, consider the campaign to force Rhodesia to accept majority rule. Given the subsequent history of Zimbabwe this campaign almost certainly resulted in a worse situation for everyone involved.
Your point being what? That democracy is always bad? That Africans can’t ever govern themselves? That liberals are always wrong? You can’t come to any of those sweeping conclusions from the one example of
Zimbabwe. It’s an exception.
Taboo, “racist, homophobic, sexist”. In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean “you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don’t like”.
For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders? Does it become racist/sexist if one attempts to speculate on the cause of these differences?
“Gay people shouldn’t marry because it will undermine the very fabric of civilization” “Women shouldn’t vote, because they don’t understand male concepts like War and Empire” “Everyone knows Irish people get drunk on St. Patrick’s day!”
This is the sort of stuff that frequently arises in the world.
I would suggest you probably live in a very filtered environment. It’s cool, most people do. I’ve been trying to re-filter my own environment. But, trust me, these things are all still alive and kicking out there. Following the news, activist blogs, or just having friends who are oppressed in their daily life and talk about it, will quickly draw this sort of racist, homophobic, sexist comments to your attention.
If you really think this qualifies as “stating an unpleasant truth” then… wow.
I don’t think frequently means ‘more than 50% of the time’, so it is possible for both of you to be right.
I’d disagree. The connotations of Eugine’s statement was to dispute HaydnB’s original point, “When someone says something offensive to you—they’re racist, homophobic, sexist—it seems like you should be offended by that. ”
Is your claim that these statements are obviously false or that they’re so offensive that they shouldn’t be stated even if they’re true?
I ADBOC with the last of them (except the “everyone knows” part—my mother didn’t know what the significance of St. Paddy’s was until I told her a few years ago).
The last one should be read as “ALL” Irish people, my bad :)
BTW, this is something I’ve recently noticed—the vast majority of statements I’m offended by is of the form “All [people from some group that comprises a sizeable fraction of the human population, and doesn’t include the speaker] are [something non-tautological and unflattering].” (I am more offended if the group happens to include me, but not very much.) But remove the universal quantifier and, no matter how large the group is and how unflattering the thing is, the statement will lose almost all of its offensiveness in my eyes.
Internally I am generally the same, but I’ve come to realize that a rather sizable portion of the population has trouble distinguishing “all X are Y” and “some X are Y”, both in speaking and in listening. So if someone says “man, women can be so stupid”, I know that might well reflect the internal thought of “all women are idiots”. And equally, someone saying “all women are idiots” might just be upset because his girlfriend broke up with him for some trivial reason.
And the belief in question acts more light “some/most X are Y” then “all X are Y”, i.e., the belief mostly get’s applied to X’s the person doesn’t know, when it makes sense to use the prior for X’s.
Yes, people who say “all X are Y” usually do know at least one person who happens to be an X and whom they don’t actually alieve is Y—but I think that in certain cases what’s going on is that they don’t actually alieve that person is an X, i.e. they’re internally committing a no true Scotsman. Now, I can’t remember anyone ever explicitly saying “All X are Y [they notice that I’m looking at them in an offended way] -- well, you’re not, but you’re not a ‘real’ X so you don’t count” (and if they did, I’d be tremendously offended), but I have heard things that sound very much like a self-censored version of that.
I generally avoid criticizing reasoning that reliably reaches correct conclusions.
I’m not sure what the relevance of that to my comment is.
The reasoning you described reaches valid (object level) conclusions in the different cases under consideration, but you still prefer to analyze it as full of fallacies for some reason.
Huh, no. If an argument has premises “all X are Y” and “John is an X” and conclusion “John is not Y”, it is broken. Whether the conclusion happens to be true because one of the premises is false is irrelevant.
The argument’s stated premises were “X are Y”, you decided to interpret the ambiguous statement as “all X are Y” and then complain that it makes the argument formally false.
Re-read the fifth word of this comment. (Or am I missing something?)
You may want to (re)read this comment to see/remember how this discussion started.
What exactly do you count as a self-censored version of that? Pointing out that you’re an exceptional X, that you have characteristic Z, which correlates negatively with Y, or some such thing? If so, the answer is: well, of course, what do you expect?
If people make a generic generalization along the lines of “(all) X are Y”, then naturally, you have to be an exceptional X in order to be Y. One could say that it’s enough that you are Y, because then you are an exceptional X in virtue of that. But that’s not how generic generalizations work. People make such generalization usually not purely on the basis of statistical data, but because in their model, something about X causes Y (or they have a common cause). So if you’re X, but not Y, chances are you have additional characteristic Z, which is rare among Xs, and which counteracts X’s influence on Y.
It’s just like saying “dogs have four legs—well, not Fido, obviously, but he’s had an accident and one of his legs had to be amputated”. This kind of thing might sound a bit like a self-censored version of “but Fido isn’t a true dog”, but what it really says is “but Fido isn’t an ordinary dog”, which is entirely correct!
Maybe you’re aware of all this anyway, but I just thought it’d be worth pointing out.
Perhaps taboo “ordinary” and “true”?
In the context of human groups and human sub-groups, I’m not sure “ordinary” member of the group is used differently than “true” member of the group. Witness those who claim the community organizer is not “really” black because he did not live the ordinary life experiences of a black male child (i.e. he didn’t live in a poverty stricken inner city while growing up).
I’m inclined to argue, as some linguists would, that tabooing “ordinary” is impossible in this context, because people are intuitive essentialists, and that generic statements make reference to such postulated essences, which define what makes for an “ordinary” X. (Hence a lot of Aristotelian nonsense.)
This does, indeed, fit very well with your observation—with which I agree—that sometimes, the borderline between “ordinary” and “true/real” becomes blurred. However, I think one should still be wary of suspecting mentions of “extraordinary” of being censored no-true-Scotsman-arguments without further evidence.
Obviously false. I just stated them, so they’re not de-facto offensive; they’re offensive when you assert such an obvious falsehood as TRUE.
Can I here the evidence that caused you to assign such low probability to them.
It depends on what relevance it has, and on what is being left out. Someone once told me that GW Bush must be smarter than Obama because he is white. That’s an intellectual fallacy even if it isn’t boo-word racism.
In my experience, references to “human biodiversity” are frequently presented as if they are value neutral, but frequently aren’t because of the factors mentioned above.
The way I’d use the word, it depends on why you’re pointing them out. (Hint: if someone is pointing out that white people are more intelligent than black people in average for non-army1987::racist reasons, they’d most likely point out that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are even more intelligent in average.)
The wording is also important—“blacks are idiots” is no more of a reasonable way to put that than “females are midgets” is a reasonable way to state the fact that the average woman is shorter than the average man, so if someone is willing to say the former but not the latter, there’s likely something wrong.
(BTW, AFAIK men and women have the same average IQ (though different types of intelligence are weighed in a way deliberately chosen to make that the case), but the distribution of men’s IQs has a larger standard deviation.)
Yes and yes. We live in a world where people disregard qualifiers, so if you say “on tests of mathematical ability, men have higher variance in test scores, so the most talented mathematicians are disproportionately men” people will hear “men are better at math” and assume that average men are better than average women at math (this might also be true, but is not what you said). Basically, some people don’t distinguish between “most a are b” and “most b are a”, so you end up with people drawing conclusions that hurt other people with no real benefit. So as a general rule, we pretend that there are no between-group differences because if we don’t, people have a tendency to focus exclusively on between group differences and ignore within-group differences, which is worse.
I could make similar argument about a lot of things we do here, e.g., people hear “consequentialism” and think “the ends justify the means”, that doesn’t stop LW from promoting consequentialism.
Intentionally believing false things always carries a cost.
For example, suppose I want to hire the best mathematicians for a project, they’ll likely be disproportionately White or Asian men. Someone who followed your advise looking at the mathematicians I hire would conclude that I was racist and sexist in my hiring and we live in a society where the courts might very well back them. Thus the only way for me to avoid being considered a racist and sexist is to intentionally fudge the numbers based on race and sex, which itself requires that I know the truth about racial and gender differences so I know which way to fudge.
Nope, and some people will express disapproval of LWers who promote consequentialism. Being right doesn’t make you immune to social stigma.
Yes, it does. So does unintentionally believing false things. This is definitely not a one-sided issue, as much as people like to pretend that is it. Anti-discrimination policies reduce one cost at the expense of raising another.
In the case that you both want to hire and are able to hire exceptional mathematicians, anti-discrimination policies are likely to hurt both parties involved. (In theory, laws regarding disparate impact wouldn’t actually affect you if you were hiring based on demonstrable mathematical prowess, but in practice business necessity would be hard to prove). The mathematicians are actually likely to be hurt considerably more, because without anti-discrimination policies, they would probably be in higher demand and thus able to ask for much higher pay.
The real problem comes in when employers decide that they need exceptional people but can’t actually identify these exceptional people. If filtering based on race was allowed, employers would use that (the best mathematicians are disproportionately white and asian, therefore if I hire a white or asian I’ll get an above-average mathematician).
Basically, you’re right except for the problem where humans mix up p(a|b) and p(b|a), which causes people to do stupid things (most of the people who win the lottery buy lots of tickets, so if I buy lots of tickets I’m likely to win the lottery). If you actually know what you’re hiring based on, anti-discrimination policies will prevent you from having 100% of your workforce be the very best, but even if only whites and asians had the required skills, you’re still looking at 77% of the population in the US, so it falls in the category of “annoyance” not “business killer”. In terms of fudging, you can detect statistically significant deviations just as well as someone looking at your hiring data. You don’t need to know beforehand.
Of course, if these things weren’t the case you’d still face social stigma for saying anything that sounds vaguely racist. Because while these two societal tendencies have strong effects in opposite directions, they’re not there by virtue of reasoned argument, and so removing one but not the other is likely to cause more harm than good (probably, I have no idea how one would go about removing either societal tendency to test that hypothesis). If both tendencies could be eliminated, that would be best, and here you probably can talk about it without much social stigma, but if you ask those questions in everyday life, you will be labeled as a racist.
When does that occur? What happened to resume″s, qualifications and tests?
The difference is that if you unintentionally believe something false, you can update when you find new evidence; whereas once you start intentionally believing false things, you’ve declare all truth your enemy.
Depends on the size of the business and your margin. Most small businesses can’t afford to have 23% of there employees be dead weight, especially if they have to pay them the same as the others to avoid looking like they have racist pay policies.
Most small businesses don’t need to hire the top 0.01% in any given skillset. The small businesses that do need to hire that exclusively and the small businesses that are strapped for cash are generally two distinct sets. In any case, without those policies, the top 0.01% could demand more money, and so the business wouldn’t be in much better of a position. It’s really the top 0.01% of workers who bear the majority of the cost of anti-discrimination policies, because they could negotiate better pay if the policies weren’t in place.
It is a tradeoff. Empirically, societies that oppose discrimination tend to do better (though there are obvious confounds and this doesn’t necessarily mean that the anti-discrimination policies improve outcomes—it may just mean that richer people prefer egalitarian policies more). In American culture, at least, you will generally be labeled as a racist if you imply that there might be between-group differences, whether or not you can back that up with good arguments.
By all means, keep in mind that the social fiction of perfect equality in ability across groups is unlikely to be true. But also keep in mind that it’s a polite fiction and you will be stigmatized if you point out that it’s unlikely to be true. The term “racist” usually refers to someone who doesn’t respect that social convention, and both of the statements you were questioning go against that social norm. “Racist” doesn’t mean “factually incorrect”, it means “low status and icky”.
The same logic applies if you want to hire people in the top 10%. Yes, there may very well be enough blacks in the 10% that if you had first choice among them you could hire enough to comply with disparate impact. However, in reality you’re competing for the few blacks in the top 10% with all the other businesses who also need to hire the top 10% and there aren’t enough to go around.
Yes and at LW our goal is to raise the sanity waterline.
Yes, it is.
How about also considering the costs, benefits, and comparative advantages when dealing with various topics? One does not get extra points for doing things the hard way. Instead of dealing with some topics directly, it would be better to discuss more meta, e.g. to teach people about the necessity of doing experiments and evaluating data statistically. This will prepare the way for people who will later try to deal with the problem more directly.
Now it may seem that when I see people doing a mistake, and I don’t immediately jump there and correct them, it is as if I lied by omission. But there are thousands of mistakes humans make, any my resources are limited, so I will end ignoring some mistakes either way.
Make sure you pick your battles because you believe you can win them and the gains will be worth it. Instead of picking the most difficult battle there is, simply because choosing the most difficult battle feels high-status… until you lose it.
It’s worth noting that many people also ignore the smallness of effects. It probably doesn’t end up mattering much, not worth arguing...
Exqueeze me, but since when did “not white or asian” equate to “dead weight”?
Not all of them, it’s just that there aren’t enough non-dead weight non-white non-asians to go around for all the businesses who need competent employees while complying with disparate impact.
So much for “23%”.
How do you know? Not every business is a silicon valley start up that needs to be staffed almost entirely super smart people. The typical company is much more pyramidal. A lot of employers want a lot of employees who will happily work for the minimum wage.
Whatever that means.. If you think US affiirmative action, or something, is the issue, then it cancels within the US. If you think it makes the US less competitive than polities that don’t have AA, then that’s only part of a bigger problem, because, given your assumptions, the US would be at a severe disadvantage compared to any given Asian nation anyway. But it doesn’t appear to , so maybe factors other than DNA are important.. Who knows? We can only try to deduce what you might be saying from your hints and allegations.
Why, is business an entirely zero-sum game within the US?
Some indeces of business performance are, such as relative rank.
Is the False Thing “people are equal” or “it is best for society to carry on as though people are equal”.?
The thing is society doesn’t “carry on as though people are equal”. Society, at least the more functional parts of society, treat things like affirmative action and disparate impact, as things to be routed around as much as possible because that’s necessary to get things done efficiently.
It would have been helpful to answer the question as stated. Not all societies have affirmative action and my polity doesn’t. Depending on ones background assumptions, affirmative action could be seen as restoring equality, or creating inequality. You seem to have assumed a take on that without arguing it. It would have been helpful to argue it, and not to treat “society” as synonymous with “US society”.
Ironically this is a case where p(a|b) is in fact a good proxy for p(b|a) and and the kind of filtering you’re objecting to is in fact the correct thing to do from a Bayesian perspective.
See also: Offended by conditional probability
“The best mathematicians are disproportionately white and asian, therefore if I hire a white or asian I’ll get an above-average mathematician” is Bayesianly correct if the race is the only thing you know about the candidates; but it isn’t (a randomly-chosen white or Asian person is very unlikely to be a decent mathematician), and the other information you have about the candidates most likely mostly screens off the information that race gives you about maths skills.
Read the comment I linked to and possibly subsequent discussion if you’re interested in these things.
Hmm, so E(the Math SAT score that X deserves|the Math SAT score that X got is 800, and X is male) is just 4 points more than E(the Math SAT score that X deserves|the Math SAT score that X got is 800, and X is female). That doesn’t sound like terribly much to me, and I’d guess there are plenty of people who, due to corrupted mindware and stuff, would treat a male who got 800 better than a female who got 800 by a much greater extent than justified by that 4-point difference in the Bayesian posterior expected values. (Cf the person who told whowhowho that Obama must be dumber than Bush—surely we know much more about them than their races?)
I’m not sure if this is correct, but I sometimes wonder given how they’re surrounded by spin-doctors and other image manipulators how much we really know about prominent politicians, especially when the politician in question is new so you can’t look at his record.
99% of projects do not need the top 1%. More than 1% of the world is racist.
Why should I believe you actually need the top 1%, when the statistics say there’s a greater than 50% chance that you’re actually just racist?
My conclusion still holds if you simply need mathematicians in the top 10%, for example, only the analysis is slightly more complicated.
Also, taboo “racist” unless you agree with faul_sname’s definition, in which case whether being a “racist” is a bad thing is precisely the question under discussion.
So you agree that, in the original example, you’re more likely than not just being a racist? Because you certainly seem to be moving the goal post over to “top 10%” …
That link does not appear to point to a definition.
You still haven’t defined what you mean by “racist”.
Racism has three definitions:
1) The belief that there are implicit (read: genetic) differences between races which give rise to behavioral differences.
2) The belief that different races have different worth and/or aught to be treated differently because of these differences.
3) An actual act of treating a race differently which stems from explicit or implicit negative opinions about that race.
Sexism mostly lies only in the domain of (2) and (3) with (1) often seeming like a gray area because believing (1) almost always implies (2) or (3).
So you would be racist (1) if you proposed that the IQ differences are genetic.
The reason people say “you are being racist” is because people often implicitly do (3) and implicitly believe (1) and (2) without explicitly stating the belief. The intent behind telling someone they are racist is to make the underlying belief explicit.
The moral connotations of being racist/sexist continue to be implicitly bad or wrong. So now, if the person wishes to continue justifying the initial belief, they have to defend the moral good or factual correctness of certain types of racism / sexism.
To summarize the point: For the majority of individuals in your culture, System 1 is racist/sexist while System 2 believes racism and sexism are bad. The intent of saying “statement x is racist” is to initiate a shift to system 2.
You didn’t state your views, but if your system 2 holds some racist/sexist beliefs as well (as in, you actually think racial IQ differences are genetic) than you would misinterpret “you are racist” as being analogous to “I don’t like your argument”. What’s really happening is that the person who you are arguing with believes that your racism is coming out of system 1, and wants to notify system 2 of that fact.
(I know this is a bit of an abuse of dual process theory and a horrible oversimplification even otherwise but I’m trying to be at least somewhat succinct—apologies)
The problem is that if someone system 2 does hold the belief that “racism/sexism is bad” this causes them to evaluate arguments related to race/sex differences on the basis of trying to avoid being racist/sexist rather than on the merits of the argument. A lot of people (especially around here) also hold as a system 2 belief that arguments should be evaluated on their merits. My point in asking the question is to help people notice that these two system 2 beliefs are in conflict.
You are quite right. That’s why it is important to separate the various meanings behind racism and sexism.
For example. I spent the better part of high school researching intelligence and the factors that contribute to it, including race. I’ve given serious consideration to the idea that genetic racial differences in behavior might exist, and extensive research has given me a high confidence that they do not.
However, if I had concluded that racial differences did exist, then I would be a racist[1] but I would probably continue to believe that racism[2, 3] are wrong.
Also, I think it is fair to say that I currently am “sexist”[1] but not sexist [2, 3] - that is, I do believe there are behavioral differences between men and women that are genetic in origin, but I do not believe that this means that I want women to have a different set of rights and privileges, nor do I believe that they are inferior.
That’s because group [1] is a statement about reality, whereas [2] [3] have moral connotations. I think it is bad to be racist [2] or racist [3.] I consider racism [1] to simply be a misguided opinion which arises when a person does insufficient research into the topic. I don’t consider racism[1] to be immoral, and might become racist [1] if someone gave me sufficient evidence to accept that hypothesis. Similarly, I am sexist [1] but I think it is wrong to be sexist [2] or [3], and I might stop being sexist[1] given sufficient evidence.
In short. moral attitudes towards racism/sexism [2, 3] need not interfere with epistemic stances on racism/sexism [1], even though they unfortunately often do.
Edit: if you intend to argue the point we can, but it will be a separate discussion unrelated to rationality. The most salient pieces of evidence that settled the issue for me are 1) various adoption / mixed race studies and 2) a genetic analysis indicating that the percentage of European heritage is unrelated to IQ in African Americans. I think the mistake that most amateur researchers make on this topic is not taking maternal factors (in the womb, breastfeeding, etc) into account.
It seems odd to attribute a false belief to insufficient research. Not false, exactly, but odd… like attributing the continued progression of an illness to insufficient medication. If X is a popular false belief, it seems there ought to be something to be said about why X is popular, just like there’s something to be said about why an illness progresses.
Ah, let me clarify.
Doing a little bit of research will lead you to be fairly confident that racial differences are genetic, because the differences 1) do exist and 2) cannot be explained by sociological factors alone. Most people assume that if it is not sociological, it is genetic.
However, if you do a lot of research, which means taking into account maternal factors in the womb, epigenetics, nutrition...and if you further spend time researching how IQ tests work and what contributes to high IQ in general (not just with race), your confidence that racial differences are genetic will drop steeply.
It just happens to be a topic where the first impression upon reading the literature has a particular tendency to lead you to a wrong conclusion.
Ah, I see! “Does insufficient research” != “fails to do sufficient research” in this context.
Neat. Sometimes it’s a miracle we communicate at all.
Thanks for the clarification.
I suspect that a lot of people also come to racism[1] without doing any research at all, but I don’t disagree with anything you say here.
True, but those people don’t generally end up at lesswrong (I hope!)
by “insufficient research” I was trying to convey the difference between cursory research and in depth research. Am I using the word incorrectly? / is there a better fitting word that describes this?
Edit: ooh, you thought I meant “insufficient research” to mean that any amount of research would have helped, hence the analogy to to diseases and medicine—medicines do not cause disease, they cure it. Whereas I actually am saying that in this case, too little “medicine” can cause the disease. Got it :)
No, I meant—reads edit—right.
Hmmm.....
That depends on what you mean by “any research at all”. I suspect most people who come to racism do so via the logic I mentioned in this comment.
Just to clarify the claim, because language can be slippery… if we chose humans at random and until we found 1000 who believe whites are superior to blacks, and we looked at their history, I expect the majority of them came to that position prior to reviewing empirical correlations between race and IQ among a statistically significant population. I understand you to be saying that you expect the majority came to that position only after reviewing empirical correlations between race and IQ among a statistically significant population, either personally or through reading the reports of others.
Have I understood you correctly?
Wait… I took “come to racism” to refer to people who used to be non-racist[1], but become racist[1] as adults. OTOH, many (most?) randomly-chosen racists[1] probably have been so ever since they’ve had any opinion either way on the matter, which they probably uncritically absorbed from their sociocultural environment while growing up and have had it cached ever since. These two groups of racists[1] are probably very different (just like you wouldn’t expect converts to Islam to be representative of Muslims in general—would you?); in particular, I suspect that most racists are the way you describe here, but most “converts to racism” are the way Eugine_Nier says. (See also “Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism” by Yvain.)
Ah!
Yeah, with that unpacking, I find the claim much more plausible.
Yeah, that’s my expectation.
No doubt.
I find that much more plausible than the claim that most racists[1] are the way Eugine_Nier says.
I’m not sure I believe it even so (as compared to, say, converting to racism after a traumatic experience with a member of race X), but at this point I’m just telling just-so stories about hypothetical people I don’t have much experience with, so I don’t put much weight in my own intuitions.
We can get into debates about what constitutes “statistically significant” but yeah I suspect most of the racists[1] around today came to that conclusion after reviewing correlations between race and intelligence (and related behaviors) in most cases from their own experience using their system I.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
For my own part, most of the people I’ve met personally whom I’ve identified as racist[1] with regards to white and black people have not met very many black people at all, so I doubt that’s true of them for any reasonable standard of statistical significance (1).
But of course the racists I’ve knowingly met might not be representative of racists more generally.
(1) Many were also racist[1] with regards to the superiority of whites to other non-white races, such as Native Americans and Asians, as well as with regards to the superiority of “whites” to other identifiable subcultures that include Caucasians, such as gays and Jews. All of which contributes to my sense that they are not arriving at their beliefs based on observation at all.
The south (at least during Jim Crow) wasn’t nearly as segregated as the north in terms of where people lived, so white southerners had many occasions to observe their black neighbors.
In fact it’s not at all hard to notice the correlation between say race and a lot of behavior traits, for example the the black neighborhood is the one where you’re more likely to get mugged. I’m not sure about Asians, as for Jews is their complaint that Jews are stupid or that they’re secretly running the world?
It wasn’t that Jews are stupid. Mostly it seemed to be that Jews are evil, which I suppose one could argue isn’t a question of superiority at all, though it sure felt like one. I actually haven’t run into the secret-world-domination thing in person very often at all, though I’m of course acquainted with the trope.
And sure, I’m perfectly willing to believe that the south during Jim Crow was less geographically segregated than the north, and thus provided more opportunities for inter-group observation.
That’s my point. They’re complaints about different out-groups are limited by what their system I’s would find plausible.
Just to make sure I understand your claim: as I understand it, you would predict that if we raised the people I’m referring to in an environment where “Jews are stupid” was (perhaps artificially) a prevailing social belief, they would tend to reject that belief as they came to observe Jews, because their system Is would find that belief implausible, because Jews are not in fact stupid (relative to people-like-them, as a class). But if we raised them in an environment where “blacks are stupid” was a prevailing social belief, they would not tend to reject that belief as they came to observe blacks, because their system Is would find that belief plausible, because blacks are in fact stupid (relative to people-like-them, as a class).
Yes?
Would you also expect that if we raised them in an environment where “Jews are evil” was a prevailing social belief, they would not reject that belief as they came to observe Jews, because their system Is would find that belief plausible, because Jews are in fact evil (relative to people-like-them, as a class)? Or does the principle not generalize like that?
This is basically correct.
As for Jews, I’m not sure they know many Jews, but they’ve probably noticed that a lot of Jews are in high positions in Academia, Finance and Politics. This is inconsistent with them being stupid but not with them being evil.
For all that such people know, Jews might be conspiring to help each other into high positions even though they aren’t unusually smart compared to gentiles.
What you describe is more or less the standard negative stereotype of Jews (basically being Slytherines), and in any case what you describe is closer to the common notion of ‘evil’ than ‘stupid’.
Again; you are observing correlations between socio-economic status and behaviour, and socio economic status happens to coincide with race in the US. African nations are not inhabited by legions of muggers all mugging each other, and there is no gene for mugging.
Not specifically. There are certainly genes for aggression, impulse control, empathy, violence and sociopathy in general. I make no claims about the distribution thereof by race but this (connoted) argument is terrible. For the intents and purposes used here yes, there are ‘genes for mugging’.
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods.
Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.
An intrinsic relation between race and social behavior is in the realm of possibility, but there are highly relevant social factors to take into account here even when you’ve adjusted for economic status. In low income black neighborhoods, law enforcement tends to adopt a much more adversarial relationship with the population than in white neighborhoods, such that black people are much more likely to be arrested and convicted relative to their actual crime rates, and are subject to frequent stops and searches on extremely tenuous bases. Speaking for myself, I suspect I’d have much less respect for the law if I grew up in an environment that reinforced the impression that law enforcement was out to get me from the start.
Indeed, central/southern Italy is not particularly genetically diverse AFAIK and yet certain cities are safer than others by probably several orders of magnitude, for all kinds of reasons.
Or that even successful instances of law enforcement tend to get shut down by self-proclaimed anti-racists. Or the fact that most blacks are raised by single mothers.
This is not the only cause. The problem is that it’s considered taboo to propose any explanation for the difference whether genetic or cultural that doesn’t pin the blame entirely on white “racism”.
That is a problem, but there is in fact quite a lot of racism, such that it does indeed account for quite a lot of problems.
While there are some parts of the book I take issue with (and I suspect you’d take issue with even more,) you might want to take a look at this book for lot of figures on “proactive policing” genuinely resulting in a relative arrest rate highly disproportionate to the crime rate.
As a metaphor, legions of muggers almost fits somewhere dysfunctional like Somalia. But legion of muggers is a metaphor, not an accurate description of warlord-ism. And anyway, Somalia is hardly representative of Africa in general.
Also DR Congo, Zimbabwe, to name two of the more well-known examples.
...in the US.
It’s not at all good. A few rich people exploiting a lot of poor ones is not the same as a few poor people robbing a few wealthier ones. And,it is not as if the politics of most African countries now is so very different from the politics of most European ones up until a few centuries ago; There’s no gene for fair government either.
That’s barely half an argument. You would need to believe that there are significant between-group differences AND that they are significant AND that they should be relevant to policy or decision making in some way. You didn’t argue the second two points there, and you haven’t elsewhere.
I’m with you on the first two, but if the trait is interesting enough to talk about (intelligence, competence, or whatever), isn’t that enough for consideration in policy making? If it isn’t worth considering in making policy, why are we talking about the trait?
Politics isn’t a value-free reflection of nature. The disvalue of reflecting a fact politically might outweigh the value. For instance, people aren’t the same in their political judgement, but everyone gets one vote, for instance.
So if we don’t base our politics on facts, what should we base it on? This isn’t a purely rhetorical question, I can think of several ways to answer it (each of which also has other implications) and am curious what your answer is.
As for your example, that’s because one-man-one-vote is a more workable Schelling point since otherwise you have the problem of who decides which people have better political judgement.
You include a copy of the Cognitive Reflection Test or similar in each ballot and weigh votes by the number of correct answers to the test.
(This idea isn’t original to me, BTW—but I can’t recall anyone expressing it on the public Internet at the moment.)
This doesn’t quite solve the Schelling point problem. You start getting questions about why that particular test and not some other. You will also get problems related to Goodheart’s law.
Well… People might ask that about (say) university admission tests, and yet in practice very few do so with a straight face. (OTOH, more people consider voting a sacrosanct right than studying.)
ETA: now that I think about that, this might be way more problematic in a country less culturally homogeneous than mine—I’m now reminded of complaints in the US that the SAT is culturally biased.
Keeping the choice of questions secret until the election ought to mitigate that.
Also in the US the SAT is only one of the factors effecting admissions.
Only partially. Also what about the people whose design the questions?
High-stakes testing, like the SAT, where voters - I mean, test-takers—have vastly more incentive to cheat, seem to do fine.
Come to think of it, the problem is that the people designing the SAT’s have fewer incentives to bias them then people designing the election tests.
I was arguing against basing policy on (narrowly construed) facts alone.
This is a purely terminological point: A substantial percentage of the folks in this forum think moral propositions are a kind of fact. I think they are wrong, but my usage (moral values are not empirical facts) is an idiosyncratic usage in this venue.
In short, I’m not sure if you are disagreeing with the local consensus, or simply using a different vocabulary. Until you and your interlocutors are using the same vocabulary, continuing disagreement is unlikely to be productive.
In short, I think basically everyone agrees that public policy is the product of the combination of scientific fact (including historical fact and sociological fact) and moral values. But because of disagreements on the meta-ethical and philosophy of science level, there is widespread disagreement on what my applause light sentence means in practice.
Well, I did say “narrowly construed” facts.
Your post is very susceptible to the construction:
You could object that this is not a charitable reading. But in the context of this discussion, it is hard to tell how to read you charitably while ensuring that you would still endorse the interpretation.
I don’t see why anyone would read “not on facts alone” as “not on facts at all”.
You didn’t define what you mean by “narrowly construed” facts, but from context it seems like you’re saying I don’t like these particular facts therefore I want an excuse to ignore them.
I will point out, for a third time, that “not on (narrowly construed) facts alone” does not mean “not on facts at all”.
In that case the correct response is the present the relevant additional facts, not attempt to suppress the facts that are too “narrowly construed”.
“if we implement such-and-such policies, people will riot” is a fact of a sort, but not the sort that is discovered in a laboratory.
Then where did you get the evidence to assert it with such high confidence? (This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question.)
Also, is this really the best example you could come up with? The problem with this example is that even if the fact in question is true, there are still good game theoretic/decision theoretic reasons not to respond to blackmail.
I am glad that the tyrants of the past did not know of them, or you and I would not now enjoy freedom and democracy.
Yes, and I’m also glad Hitler’s megalomania interfered with the effectiveness of the German army.
Are you also glad the Eisenhower did when he sent the national guard to enforce integration?
[shrugs]. You construed riots in a sweepingly negative way as “blackmail”. The fact that I do not agree does not mean I am construing them in a sweepingly positive way. This is as a pattern you have repeated throughout this discussion, and it illustrates how politics mindkills.
If a policy is good, a riot against it is blackmail. If a policy is bad, you shouldn’t be pursuing it riot or no riot. Thus the hypothetical existence of riots shouldn’t affect which policies one pursues. Frankly, I have hard time believing “leading to riots” is your true rejection of the policies in question.
That is a dangerous belief for a leader to hold. I’d prefer leaders that don’t have that belief. In fact it should be taken as granted that leaders who do not respond to the expectation that the people will oppose their actions will be killed or otherwise rendered harmless through whichever actions are suitable to the political environment.
history
If you want social science to be taken seriously, you do your cause a disservice by asserting social science is different in kind from so-called “hard science.”
Edit: In fact, Eugine_Nier’s argument here is that social science is not rigorous enough to be worth considering. You don’t advance true belief by asserting that social science does not need to be rigorous.
And just in case it isn’t clear, the ability to replicate an experiment is not required for a scientific field to be rigorous. (Just look at astro-physics: It isn’t like we can cue up a supernova on command to test our hypothesis). It is preferable, but not necessary.
No, my argument was that much of modern social science (and especially modern anthropology which is bad even by social science standards) is more concerned with politics than truth. See here for JulianMorrison practically admitting as much and then trying to argue that this is a good thing. And quite frankly the tone of your comment is also not encouraging in that respect.
I think that’s a highly disingenuous reading of JulianMorrison’s statement. JulianMorrison never stated that it was a good thing, only that it was a necessary thing in the face of political realities. In an evolutionary environment where only the Dark Arts are capable of surviving, would you rather win or die?
Essentially, we all need to remember that speaking the truth has a variable utility cost that depends on environment. If the perceived utility of speaking the truth publically is negative, then you invoke the Bayesian Conspiracy and don’t speak the truth except in private.
In this post JulianMorrison was, at least partially, trying to inform you that there is in fact something like a Bayesian Conspiracy within the Social Sciences—that there are social truths that are understood from within the discipline (or at least, from within parts of the discipline) that can’t be discussed with outsiders, because non-rational people will use the knowledge in ways with a highly negative net utility. He was also trying to test you to see if you could be trusted with initiation into that Bayesian Conspiracy. (You failed the test, btw—which is something you might realize with pride or chagrin, depending on your political allegiances.)
I don’t think I’d identify the activist subculture with the social sciences, at least in the case JulianMorrison was talking about. If there’s an academic community whose members publish relatively unfiltered research within their fields but don’t usually talk to the public unless they are also activists, and also an activist community whose members are much more interested in spreading the word but aren’t always too interested in spreading up-to-date science (charitably, because they believe some avenues of research to be suffering from bias or otherwise suspect), then we get the same results without having to invoke a conspiracy. This also has the advantage of explaining why it’s possible to read about ostensibly forbidden social truths by, e.g., querying the right Wikipedia page.
Whether this accurately models any particular controversial subject is probably best left as an exercise.
Hold on a moment. I think the labels are accurate descriptions of the phenomena. There’s hostility to this kind of discussion, so sometimes the only winning move is not to play. But if the labels (heternormativity, privilege, social construction, rape culture) are not describing social phenomena, then we should find accurate labels.
And if experts use the labels right, but [Edit: sympathetic] laypeople do not, then we should chide the laypeople until they use them right. Agreement with my preferred policies does not make you wise, because arguments are not soldiers.
In short, I think I win on the merits, so let’s not get caught up in procedural machinations.
That assumes that we have sufficient status that our chiding the laypeople will win. The problem with social phenomena is that discussions about social phenomena are themselves social phenomena, so your statements have social cost that may be independent of their truth value. If you want to rationally strive towards maximum utility, you need to recognize and deal with the utility costs inherent in discussing facts with agents whose strategies involve manipulating consensus, and who themselves may not care as much about avoiding the Dark Arts as you seem to.
Secondly:
I currently tend to believe that these are somewhat accurate labels—that is, they accurately define semantic boundaries around phenomena that do in fact exist, and that we do in fact have some actual understanding of. But if your audience sees them as fighting words, then they will see your arguments as soldiers. If you want to have a rational discussion about this, you need to be able to identify who else is willing to have a rational discussion about this, and at what level. Remember that on lesswrong, signaling rationality is a status move, so just because someone displays signals that indicate rationality doesn’t mean that they are in fact rational about a particular subject, especially a political one.
Ah. I see all my comments everywhere on the site are getting voted down again. Politics is the mind-killer, indeed.
Ok, serious question, folks:
What would it take to negotiate a truce on lesswrong, such that people could have differing opinions about what is or isn’t appropriate social utility maximization without getting into petty karma wars with each other?
Ah. This got downvoted too. Is there any way for me to stop this death-spiral and flag for empathy? Please?
Mercy? Uncle?
I endorse interpreting net downvotes as information: specifically, the information that more people want less contributions like whatever’s being downvoted than want more contributions like it.
I can then either ignore that stated preference and keep contributing what I want to contribute (and accept any resulting downvotes as ongoing confirmation that of the above), or I can conform to that stated preference. I typically do the latter but I endorse the former in some cases.
The notion of a “truce” whereby I get to contribute whatever I choose and other people don’t use the voting mechanism to express their judgments of it doesn’t quite make sense to me.
All of that said, I agree with you that there exist various social patterns to which labels have been attached in popular culture, where those labels are shibboleths in certain subcultures and anti-shibboleths (“fighting words,” as you put it) in others. I find that if I want to have a useful discussion about those patterns within those subcultures, I often do best to not use those labels.
Except your interpretation is at least partially wrong—people mass downvote comments based on author, so there is no information about the quality of a particular post (it’s more like (S)HE IS A WITCH!). A better theory is that karma is some sort of noisy average between what you said, and ‘internet microaggression,’ and probably some other things—there is no globally enforced usage guidelines for karma.
I personally ignore karma. I generally write two types of posts: technical posts, and posts on which there should be no consensus. For the former, almost no one here is qualified to downvote me. For the latter, if people downvote me, it’s about the social group not correctness.
There are plenty of things to learn on lesswrong, but almost nothing from the karma system.
Oh, I completely agree that the reality is a noisy average as you describe. That said, for someone with the goals ialdabaoth describes themselves as having, I continue to endorse the interpretation strategy I describe. (By contrast, for someone with the goal-structure you describe, ignoring karma is a fine strategy.)
Huh. Are “Do you think it likely that ‘social activism’ and ‘liberalism’ are fighting words in this board’s culture?” fighting words in this board’s culture?
Depends on how they’re used, but yes, there are many contexts where I would probably avoid using those words here and instead state what I mean by them. Why do you ask?
Edit: the question got edited after I answered it into something not-quite-grammatical, so I should perhaps clarify that the words I’m referring to here are ‘social activism’ and ‘liberalism’ .
Because I want to discuss and analyze my beliefs openly, but I don’t want to lose social status on this site if I don’t have to.
A deeper observation and question: I appear to be stupid at the moment. Where can I go to learn to be less socially stupid on this site?
One approach is to identify high-status contributors and look for systematic differences between your way of expressing yourself and theirs, then experiment with adopting theirs.
Ya lol works awsome, look at my awsome bla-bla (lol!) ye mighty, and despair.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Alas, you and I are not in the same league as Yvain, TheOtherDave, fubarobfusco, or Jack.
Be that as it may (or mayn’t), that’s a clever way of making the intended message more palatable, including yourself in the deprecation. But you’re right. Aren’t we all pathetic, eh?
Look at your most upvoted contributions (ETA: or better, look at contributions with a positive score in general—see replies to this comment). Look at your most downvoted contributions. Compare and contrast.
Most downvoted, yes, but on the positive side I’d instead suggest looking at your comments one or two sigma east of average and no higher: they’re likely to be more reproducible. If they’re anything like mine, your most highly upvoted posts are probably high risk/high reward type comments—jokes, cultural criticism, pithy Deep Wisdom—and it’ll probably be a lot harder to identify and cultivate what made them successful.
A refinement of this is to look at the pattern of votes around the contributions as well, if they are comments. Comparing the absolute ranking of different contributions is tricky, because they frequently reflect the visibility of the thread as much as they do the popularity of the comment. (At one time, my most-upvoted contributions were random observations on the Harry Potter discussion threads, for example.)
Not to mention Rationality Quotes threads...
Rationality quotes might be a helpful way of figuring out how to get upvoted, but it is not particularly helpful in figuring out how to be more competent.
Edit: Oops. Misunderstood the comment.
Actually, I was agreeing with TheOtherDave. (I’ve edited my comment to quote the part of its parent I was elaborating upon; is that clearer now?)
(nods) Then yeah, I’d encourage you to avoid using those words and instead state what you mean by them. Which may also result in downvotes, depending on how people judge your meaning.
And yet you’ve just argued that your beliefs should not be discussed openly with outsiders.
No I didn’t, I argued that in a different context, it’s dangerous to discuss your beliefs openly with outsiders. And I wasn’t even trying to defend that behavior, I was offering an explanation for it.
...and you’re using rhetorical tactics. Why do you consider this a fight? Why is it so important that I lose?
I’ll agree to have lost if that will help. Will it help?
I don’t see the difference in context. (This isn’t rhetoric, I honestly don’t see the difference in context.)
Interesting, so do you disapprove of the behavior in question. If so why do you still identify it’s practitioners as “your side”?
I wasn’t trying to. I was pointing out the problems with basing a movement on ‘pious lies’.
Issues can be complex, you know. They can be simpler than ‘green’ vs. ‘blue’.
Which is still a gross mischaracterization of what was being discussed, but that mischaracterizing process is itself part of the rhetorical tactic being employed. I’m afraid I can no longer trust this communication channel.
How so? Near as I can tell from an outside view my description is a decent summary of your and/or Julian’s position. I realize that from the inside it feels different because the lies feel justified, well ‘pious lies’ always feel justified to those who tell them.
You’re the one who just argued (and/or presented Julian’s case) that I was not to be trusted with the truth. If anything, I’m the one who has a right to complain that this communication channel is untrustworthy.
And yet you’re still using it. What are you attempting to accomplish? What do you think I was attempting to accomplish? (I no longer need to know the answers to these questions, because I’ve already downgraded this channel to barely above the noise threshold; I’m expending the energy in the hopes that you ask yourself these questions in a way that doesn’t involve assuming that all our posts are soldiers fighting a battle.)
Same here with respect to the questions I asked here, here, and here. The fact that you were willing to admit to the lies gave me hope that we might have something resembling a reasonable discussion. Unfortunately it seems you’d rather dismiss my questions as ‘rhetoric’ than question the foundations of your beliefs. I realize the former choice is easier but if you’re serious about wanting to anilyze your beliefs you need to do the latter.
For the sake of others watching, the fact that you continue to use phrases like “willing to admit to the lies” should be a telling signal that something other than truth-seeking is happening here.
Something other than truth-seeking is happening here. But the use of that phrase does not demonstrate that—your argument is highly dubious. Since the subject at the core seems to be about prioritizing between epistemic accuracy and political advocacy it can be an on topic observation of fact.
If a phrase such as “pursuing goals other than pure truth-seeking” were used rather than “noble lies”, I would agree with you. But he appears to deliberately attempt to re-frame any argument that he doesn’t like in the most reprehensible way possible, rather than attempting to give it any credit whatsoever. He’s performing all sorts of emotional “booing” and straw-manning, rather than presenting the strongest possible interpretation of his opponent’s view and then attacking that. And when someone attempts to point that out to him, he immediately turns around and attempts to accuse them of doing it, rather than him.
It’s possible to have discussions about this without either side resorting to “this is how evil you’re being” tactics, or without resorting to “you’re resorting to ‘this is how evil you’re being’ tactics” tactics, or without resorting to “you’re resorting to ‘you’re resorting to {this is how evil you’re being} tactics’ tactics” tactics. Unfortunately, it’s a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma—whoever defects first tends to win, because humans are wired such that rhetoric beats honest debate.
That is approximately how I would summarize the entire conversation.
Theoretically, although those most capable of being sane when it comes to this kind of topic are also less likely to bother.
Often, yes. It would be a gross understatement to observe that I share your lament.
Specifically, the method of pursuing said goals in question is by making and promoting false statements. This is precisely what the phrase ‘noble lie’ means. This is the kind of thing that would be bad enough even if the authority of “Science” weren’t being invoked by the people making said false statements. Yes, the phrase “noble lie” has negative connotations, there are very good reasons for that.
Incidentally, at the time that I write this comments none of your most recent comments are net-negative, most are net-positive, including the one I’m responding to. Does knowing that make t easier for you to contribute without worrying too much about your social status here?
No, and here’s my reasoning:
The net variability is the problem, not merely the bulk downvoting. All this sort of situation does is demonstrate that the karma system is untrustworthy. Since the karma system was the easiest way to determine whether what I’m saying is considered worth listening to by the community, I have to find secondary indicators. Unfortunately, most of those require feedback, and explicitly asking for that feedback often results in bulk downvoting.
I’m one of those people who has to be very careful to modulate my tone so that what I’m trying to say is understood by my audience; if all of the available feedback mechanisms are known to have serious problems, I’m not sure how to proceed.
Does that make any sense?
It does make sense, and the karma system is most assuredly untrustworthy, in the sense you mean it here. (I would say “noisy.:) Asking for feedback is also noisy, as it happens.
At some point, it becomes worthwhile to work out how to proceed given noisy and unreliable feedback.
For example, one useful principle if I think the feedback is net-reliable in the aggregate but has high variability is to damp down sensitivity to individual feedback-items and instead attend to the trend over time once it stabilizes. Conversely, if I think the feedback is unreliable even in the aggregate, it’s best to ignore it altogether.
Yeah, that’s what I try to do in the abstract. In-the-moment, the less rational parts of my brain tend to bump up urgency and try to convince me that I don’t have time to ignore the data and wait for the aggregate, and when I try to pause for reflection, those same parts of my brain tend to ratchet up the perceived urgency again and convince me that I don’t have time to examine whether I have the time to examine whether those parts of my brain are lying to me less or more than the data.
I’m working on a brainhack to mitigate that, but it’s slow going. Once I have something useful I hope to post an article on it.
This is wonderfully put.
Serious question: why even care about karma? Just say what you want.
Because I’ve had enough of my posts voted down below the reply threshold that it destroyed the ability to continue the conversation, and for me having an idea debated back-and-forth is a necessary component of my mental process. Also, karma is used on this site to indicate whether I should be saying what I’m saying, so when everything I said for the past two weeks gets downvoted within 5 minutes of making a statement, even things utterly unrelated to that statement, I feel the need to raise an alarm to ensure that I’m interpreting signals correctly.
If it is, then it is. But from the outside, this sounds like a rationalization for you to choose to do something that you find emotionally harmful. You have no obligation to participate in conversation that you find emotionally harmful.
I intended that to refer only to laypeople who agree with the labels, but are using them wrong. The people who are choosing our side because it seems high status, not because they think it is right. Those folks are dangerous in a lot of ways.
Well, yes. This venue is not safe for these types of discussions—our interlocutor is an important reason why. I do it because I’m trying to dispel the appearance of a silent majority.
I think it is totally understandable to decide that the only winning (socially safe) move is not to engage in the conversation here. It’s not like it will make a huge difference—so choosing yourself first is very appropriate and NOT even a little bit worthy of blame.
In what way?
All I’m doing is criticizing your arguments and providing counter-arguments. Or are you only willing to discuss these things among people who agree with you?
This sounds like an overly convenient excuse to avoid having to confront the implications of said truths. Restrict them to only people who won’t ask awkward questions and tell everyone else pious lies.
You need to establish some truths before worrying about the consequences. Scientific facts need controls, for instance. When have you shown any interest in controlling for the effects of environment?
I never said I knew what caused the racial differences in question. There are certainly policy issues where the cause is relevant (incidentally addressing it requires admitting that the differences exist), there are issues where it’s less relevant.
Incidentally, in the example I sited in the great-grandparent it was the anthropologists who had declared that official policy was to deny all environmental explanations.
How do you and Julian know that you are indeed in the “inner ring” of this conspiracy and/or that it’s actual purpose is what you think it is? How sure are you that this conspiracy even has any clue what it’s doing and hasn’t started to believe its own lies? Do you have an answer to the questions I asked here?
On a case-by-case basis, you do experiments. You double-check them. You entertain alternate hypotheses. You accept that it’s entirely possible that things aren’t the way you think they are. You ask yourself what the likely social consequences of your actions are and if you’re comfortable with them, and then ask yourself how you know that. In short, you act like a rationalist.
(And you certainly don’t just downvote everyone who proposes a model that you don’t like.)
Can you describe some of the experiments you did?
And that’s a bad thing? Trying to translate Hard Science directly into real-world action without considering the ethical, social and political consequences would be disastrous. We need something like social science.
If your goal is having an accurate model of the world, yes. If you’re goal is something else, you’re still better of with an accurate model of them world.
Edit: If you want to do politics, that’s also important, just don’t pretend you’re doing science even “soft science”.
We had this discussion before. You told me that the social activist labels are boo lights. But whether something is an applause light or a boo light in a particular community doesn’t mean it is not an accurate label for a phenomena.
“Democracy” is an applause light in the venues I generally hang out in (and I assume the same for you). That does not mean that democracy is not a real phenomena. And the fact that some folks in this venue don’t approve of democracy does not mean they think that the phenomena “democracy” as defined by relevant experts does not exist. In fact, a serious claim that democracy is bad or good first requires believing it occurs.
I don’t really have a very productive response.
The general rule is that your responsibility is to be clear—it is not your reader’s responsibility to decipher you.
The general rule is that it is both the writer’s responsibility to be clear and the reader’s responsibility to decipher them. You know, responsibility is not a pie to be divided (warning: potentially mind-killing link), Postel’s law, the principle of charity, an’ all that.
In general, yes. In particular, I’m trying to give whowhowho constructive criticism, and he does not seem to think it is constructive.
Lol. That’s almost literally the worst example to use for a de-escalating discussion about shares of responsibility.
Edit: On further reflection, Postel’s law is an engineering maxim not appropriate to social debate, and it should be well established that the principle of charity is polite, but not necessarily truth-enhancing.
ETA: What’s unclear about “not on facts alone”?
It’s the reader’s responsibility to read your words, and read all your words, and not to imagine other words. Recently, someone paraphrased a remark of mine with two “maybe”’s I had used deleted and a “necessarily” I hadn’t used inserted. Was that my fault?
Beware of expecting short inferential distances.
One has to grasp literal meaning before inference even kicks in.
As an attorney, my experience is that the distinction between literal words and communicated meaning is very artificial. One canon of statutory construction is the absurdity principle (between two possible meanings, pick the one that isn’t absurd). But that relies on context beyond the words to figure out what is absurd. Eloquent version of this point here.
If people insist on drawing inferences from what was never intended as a hint...what can you do?
‘On hearing of the death of a Turkish ambassador, Talleyrand is supposed to have said: “I wonder what he meant by that?”’
Now the thing with that logic is that 97% of the world is made up of idiots (Probably a little higher than that, actually.) I do agree that it’s their fault if they misquote it, not your own, but let’s say you put an unclear statement in a self help book. Those books are generally read by the, ah, lower 40th percentile (Or around thereabouts), or just by really sad people- either way, they’re more emotionally unstable than normal. Now that we have the perfect conditions for a blowup, let’s say you said something like ‘It’s your responsibility to be happy’ in that book, meaning that you and only you can make yourself happy. Your emotionally unstable reader, however, read it as it was said and took a huge hit to their self-confidence. Do you see how it isn’t always the reader’s job?
Strangely enough, I never said it was...
For your reference, I have no idea what Lauryn is talking about.
You didn’t answer my question.
If we dont’ base policy on (narrowly construed, laboratory-style) facts alone, we use other things in additiojn. Like ethics and practicallity.
In the great-great-grandparent you make the extremely strong assertion that some facts have such bad implications that reflecting on them causes more harm than good, this raises the question of how can you know which facts have this property without reflecting on them?
Also what do you mean by “ethics”? Do you mean the ethics in the LW-technical sense of ethical injunction or in the non-technical sense of morality?
Try as it might, my system II has yet to see such an argument with non-negligible merit.
Well the fact that race is correlated with things like IQ is pretty well established empirically, and there is no obvious a priori reason to prefer environmental to genetic explanations.
Not a priori, but there has been at least one study performed on black children adopted by white families, this one, which comes to the conclusion that environment plays a key role. In all honesty, I haven’t even read the study, because I can’t find the full text online, but if more studies like it are performed and come to similar conclusions, then that could be taken as evidence of a largely environmental explanation.
Here it is (pdf link).
Many thanks!
Yes, and I have had numerous twin studies cited at me that purport to show that genetics plays a key role. I can’t vouch for the quality of either but it is clear that the research is likely to remain inconclusive for quite so time.
Really? I’ve seen twin studies that purport a genetic explanation for IQ differences between individuals, but never between racial groups. If you’ve saved a link to a study of the latter type, I’d be really interested to read it.
Ok, I’m confused. Under what scenario is it at all plausible for individual IQ differences but not racial IQ differences to be genetic?
Well, Down’s Syndrome, for example, clearly affects IQ. There’s a big genetic IQ difference that is only really relevant to individuals. There aren’t Down’s-magnitude intelligence variations between races.
In general, there is wide variation in intelligence among people within any particular ethnic group. Showing these to be genetic doesn’t seem to be too hard either, since you can find individuals of the same ethnic group having been raised in similar environments. On the other hand, the difference in average IQ between races is quite small, compared to the individual within-race differences. To show how much of this was genetic would require controlling for environment, which one can even now expect to be notably different between races.
To put it simply, it’s easy to demonstrate genetic influence, when the effects are of a magnitude such that one can just rule out environment as being the critical factor. Which is not the case for racial differences.
Obviously, you can expect there to exist on average a non-zero genetic component between races, since their genetic material has had time to drift apart. But that’s neither here nor there when you want to know how much.
I keep hearing people say that and always wanted to ask which statistics are being compared.
Not about intelligence specifically, but I believe this was the first (well-known) paper making the claim: http://www.philbio.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Lewontin-The-Apportionment-of-Human-Diversity.pdf
The point is that even if the heritable component of (say) intelligence among white people formed a bell curve, and the heritable component of intelligence among black people formed a bell curve, a priori you’d expect the two curves to be pretty much the same.
(Lewontin’s other conclusion, that “race” is “biologically meaningless”, is separate and doesn’t work because what small racial differences there are are statistically clustered: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstract;jsessionid=831B49767DB713DADCD9A1199D7ADC49.d02t02)
Circumstances which look arbitrarily contrived and absurd upon examination but should be acknowledged as at least technically possible. ie. The distributions of IQ within each race are miraculously identical because contrary to expectations the universe really is Fair regarding this one complex trait (but not others).
Or one where the differences are small, or trivial. I don’t think this is “miraculous” or “implausible”. Before the invention of agriculture, about seven to twelve thousand years ago, I’m not sure what pressures there could have been on Europeans to develop higher intelligence than Africans, so in contrast to physical differences, many of which have well-established links to specific climates, intellectual genetic differences would probably be attributable to genetic drift and >~10,000 years of natural selection. To be clear, my position isn’t that I have good evidence for this, merely that I don’t know and I don’t assign this scenario as low a prior probability as you seem to.
I know of no situation where the race of an individual is the only factor, or the most significant factor in making a decision. Feel free to counterargue.
Huh? What does that have to do with my argument?
In case it wasn’t clear I was presenting an argument that there exist genetic differences between races that give rise to behavioral differences.
And I was presenting the argument that it doesn’t matter. There is no good reason to base political, social or legal policy on it It’s always overwhelmed by other factors.
And yet we do, the “anti-racists” insist on it.
In the grandparent you said that the race of an individual is rarely the only factor. On the other hand, in aggregate it’s possible for the other factors to wash out and we are left with race as the main factor.
Run that one past me again. Are you arguing for or against public policy based on race?
I’m not sure whether we should or not. However, given that we currently have race-based policies and this is likely to continue for quite some time, they might as well be based on accurate beliefs about race.
IOW, you’re assuming that changing the US’s race-based policies so that they be based on accurate beliefs would be less hard than letting go of them altogether?
Let’s just be clear on where the status quo is. Eugine_Nier has mentioned disparate impact analysis several times. In addition to that is the far more important disparate treatment prohibition.
In the US, a worker can get fired even if it is not for cause. If you boss thinks you are a terrible worker, you can be fired even if you could prove your boss is wrong and you actually are a great worker. But you boss would be liable for wrongful termination if the boss said “I think [blacks / whites / Germans / Russians] are likely to be bad at your job, and you are [black / white / German / Russian], so you’re fired.” Likewise, an employer can’t refuse to hire on that basis.
Proving that is a separate issue, but having no public policy based on race implies repeal of both disparate impact prohibitions and disparate treatment prohibitions (and lots of other stuff, but it’s complicated).
In practice firing a black worker even if he is a terrible worker leaves employers open to wrongful termination suits. Whereas it’s harder to prove that with not hiring a black worker, so frequently the safest route for employers (especially small employers) is to find excuses to avoid hiring black workers rather then risk getting stuck with a bad employee that you can’t fire.
In practice, complying with laws has costs, some of which fall on innocent and semi-innocent third parties. As a lawyer, this is not news to me. The question is whether the benefits of implementing those social policies outweighs the costs. Clarence Thomas, a black Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States thinks the answer is no.
But that is a very different question from asking, as a matter of first principles, whether certain kinds of discrimination are allowed even if the facts don’t support the discrimination. In the United States, most discrimination of this kind is allowed, and restrictions on the factors employers and others may consider are fairly narrow (race, gender, religion, national origin—not ok. youth, poverty, moral character, basically anything else—ok).
Accurate beliefs about what? If a group (however defined) has been subject to negative discrimination, however arbitrary, then there is an argument for treating them to a period of positive discrimination to compensate. That has nothing to do with how jusitfied the original negative discrimination was.
But “black people in 1960” (for example) isn’t the same group as “black people today”, as many of the former are dead now and many of the latter hadn’t been born in 1960, and it’s not obvious to me that it makes sense to treat people according on who their grandparents were.
If someone was wrongfully executed, killed in a medical bliunder, etc, it is typically their families who are compensated.
It is morally right to do so. But society is deeply conflicted about doing so (for reasons good and bad), so I’m not sure that “typical” is an accurate description of how often it happens.
Regardless of the frequency of compensation, you really should address head on why you think society should do so. The fact that society occasionally does provide such compensation is barely the beginning of the discuss of whether it should and says almost nothing about how much compensation should be provided, or who should pay.
To put it slightly differently, Eugine_Nier is not wrong when he asserts anti-discrimination laws impose significant cost on society as a whole. I think the benefits are worth the costs, but that is a fact-bound inquiry, not a statement of first principles.
I am not arguing that Affirmative Action/Positice Discrimination is necessarily right. Just that it doesn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with any facts about DNA.
If actually significant differences in competence have a genetic component, then public policy should reflect that difference. Particularly if the differences are easy / cheap to identify anyway. (I don’t think this is true about race / ethnicity, but that’s a different issue).
Otherwise, our preferred policies won’t work in the Least Convenient Possible World.
Are you assuming all other things are equal? They never are.
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.
I suspect that g is not interestingly different between race / ethnicity, and that the IQ test, which seeks to measure g, is culturally biased. But if there is a difference in g that cannot be attributed to environment, then we should consider it in making policy.
In the real world, I think all the important observed difference is culturally driven, so this nod towards facts doesn’t change my policy preferences. I think the facts are in my favor. I just think that we should be explicit about how policy should change if the facts turn out to be different.
Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
You didn’t answer my question about treating other things as equal. If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd’t that be taken into account?
*
Staying out of the racial-politics discussion, but my answer to this question generally is that it’s expensive.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc.… instead we establish age-based cutoffs and allow the occassional outlier. We understand perfectly well that these cutoffs are arbitrary and don’t actually reflect anything about the affected individuals; at best they reflect community averages but often not even that, but we do it anyway because we want to establish some threshold and evaluating individuals costs too much.
But, sure, bring the costs down far enough (or treat costs as distinct from propriety) and the proper public policy is to separately evaluate individuals.
On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..
Or at least, they can do so with minimal investment. Agreed.
I’m not sure what the relationship between job interviews and public policy is, though.
Let’s compare two different types of employment discrimination law (in the US). For simplicity, let’s ignore the burden of proof.
Racial Discrimination: It is illegal to consider an employee’s (or potential employee’s) race when making an employment decision. If a person is fired, but would not have been fired if the person were a different race, the employer has committed wrongful termination. (Substitute “hire,” “promote,” or basically any other employment decision—the rule is unchanged).
Disability Discrimination: First, the disabled employee must be able to perform the job, with or without accommodations. Then, the employer must make reasonable (but not unreasonable) accommodations.
I think it is reasonably clear that disability discrimination law is more individualized. If there really were differences based on race / ethnicity, then I think racial discrimination law ought to look more like disability discrimination law. But I think there aren’t such differences, so I think the law as written is basically right.
Seems like this is a question of baseline. Who said we should respect rioting? Or rioting is likely to result from treating people differently based on their actual genetic differences.
Just to be clear, I don’t practice employment law. I practice a very narrow kind of child disability law. Reading this post does not make me your lawyer.
What does this mean in practice? Does this mean employers should be free to hire any individual they choose?
It could mean you don’t translate scientific findings about groups directly into policy without considering ethical and practical implications. It could mean that treating people as individuals should be the default. It could mean there is nonetheless a case for treating people as groups where they were discriminated against as groups in the past.
And are they?
And why do I need to be told “that there exist genetic differences between races that give rise to behavioral difference”. I have said nothing about affirmative action/positive discrimination one way or the other. You raised that issue. But you didn’t say how they two relate.
I’m not sure whether the cause is genetic or cultural but there are most definitely behavioral differences between the races. Furthermore, the fact that it’s politically impossible to talk about this is causing a lot of problems. Consider the state of US cities with large black populations as discussed in this blog post by Walter Mead. The behavior in question is probably purely cultural since historic “white ethnic” political machines lead to the same problems, on the other hand the fact that this political machine is black means most people would rather pretend the problem doesn’t exist than talk about it and risk getting called “racist”.
For another example, consider the campaign to force Rhodesia to accept majority rule. Given the subsequent history of Zimbabwe this campaign almost certainly resulted in a worse situation for everyone involved.
First, off you needed about 5 “in the US”’s above.
Second: you’re part of the problem. If you want to discuss socio-cultural-polical problems in the US, discuss them as such. Say “we have problems with populations of the urban poor”. We have problems with the urban poor too, and they don’t coincide with race. Given the way you have described the problem above, your initial approach of kicking off discussion of the problem by talking about genetic differences is exactly the wrong one -- it will block off sensible discussion, and it isn’t the real issue anyway.
Sure seems possible for Mr Mead.
Your point being what? That democracy is always bad? That Africans can’t ever govern themselves? That liberals are always wrong? You can’t come to any of those sweeping conclusions from the one example of Zimbabwe. It’s an exception.
Mead is just some random blogger. Witness the reaction that occurred when Philadelphia magazine published an article on a similar topic.
No, that’s the problem.
By the way affirmative action is by no means the only race-based policy, just the one simplest to describe.
In what what are they not?