On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:
I think, with racism and sexism and ‘isms’ generally, there’s a sort of confusion of terminology.
A “Racist1” is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she’s biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you’re a Racist1.
A “Racist2” is someone who’s kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the “Food Stamp President.” Someone you wouldn’t want your sister dating.
A “Racist3” is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won’t snap and kill someone. He’s clearly a social deviant.
People use the word “Racist” for all three things, and I think that’s the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, “Hey, I’m not a Racist3!” when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too—if you say “That Republican’s a racist” with the implication of “a jerk” and then backtrack and change the meaning to “vulnerable to unconscious bias”, then you’re arguing in bad faith. Never mind that some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3′s are in fact deployed against Racist2′s.
Someone who, following an honest best effort to evaluate the available evidence, concludes that some of the beliefs that nowadays fall under the standard definition of “racist” nevertheless may be true with probabilities significantly above zero.
Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people, and whose conclusion happens to reflect negatively on this person or group in some way. (Or, alternatively, someone who doesn’t believe that making such inferences is grossly immoral as a matter of principle.)
Both (1) and (2) fall squarely under the common usage of the term “racist,” and yet I don’t see how they would fit into the above cited classification.
Of course, some people would presumably argue that all beliefs in category (1) are in fact conclusively proven to be false with p~1, so it can be only a matter of incorrect conclusions motivated by the above listed categories of racism. Presumably they would also claim that, as a well-established general principle, no correct inferences in category (2) are ever possible. But do you really believe this?
That (1) only makes sense if there is a “standard” definition of racist (and it’s based on what people believe rather than/as well as what they do). The point of the celandine13 was indeed that there’s no such thing.
Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people
The evidence someone’s race constitutes about that person’s qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here. And given that we’re running on corrupted hardware, I suspect that someone who does try to “performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person” ends up subconsciously double-counting evidence and therefore end up with less accurate results than somebody who doesn’t. (As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off… well, I’ve never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)
I’m not talking about forensic evidence. Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour. Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.
Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour.
Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.
Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.
There’s this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.
...
I do not require any “moral justification” for acting on the truth as it it really is; truth is its own warrant. (A comment by him).
I facepalmed. Really, Eric? Sorry, I don’t think that a moral realist is perceptive enough to the nuances and ethical knots involved to be a judge on this issue. I don’t know, he might be an excellent scientist, but it’s extremely stupid to be so rash when you’re attempting serious contrarianism.
But you reveal a confusion in your own thinking. It is not “treating other human beings as less-than-equal” to make rational decisions in risk situations; it is only that if you make decisions which are irrationally biased.
Yep, let’s all try to overcome bias really really hard; there’s only one solution, one desirable state, there’s a straight road ahead of us; Kingdom of Rationality, here we come!
(Yvain, thank you a million times for that sobering post!)
Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.
You know, there are countries where the intentional homicide rate is smaller than in John Derbyshire’s country by nearly an order of magnitude.
Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.
There’s this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
That thing doesn’t exist in all countries. Plus, I think the reason why you don’t see that many two-digit-IQ people among (say) physics professors is not that they don’t make it, it’s that they don’t even consider doing that, so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.
so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.
That’s not the point. The point is that the black physics professor is less smart than the Jewish physics professor.
But the difference is smaller than for the median black person and the median Jewish person. (I said “even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it”, not “all of it”.)
The bell curve has both the mean and the deviation, you can have a ‘race’ with lower mean and larger standard deviation, and then you can e.g. filter by reliable accomplishment of some kind, such as solving some problem that smartest people in the world attempted and failed, you may end up with situation that the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation will have fewer people whom attain this, but those whom do, are on average smarter. Set bar even higher, and the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation has more people attaining it.
Also, the Gaussian distribution can stop being good approximation very far away from the mean.
edit: and to reply to grand grand parents: I bet i can divide the world into category that includes you, and a category that does not include you, in such a way that the category including you has substantially higher crime rate, or is otherwise bad. Actually if you are from US, I have a pretty natural ‘cultural’ category where your murder rate is about 5..10x of normal for such average income. Other category is the ‘racists’, i.e. the people whom use skin colour as evidence. Those people also have substantially bad behaviour. You of course want to use skin colour as evidence, and don’t want me to use your qualities as evidence. See if I care. If you want to use the skin colour as evidence, lumping together everyone that’s black, I want to use ‘use of skin colour as evidence’, lumping you together with all the nasty racists.
The bell curve has both the mean and the deviation, you can have a ‘race’ with lower mean and larger standard deviation
IIRC, no substantial difference was found in the standard deviations among races. (Whereas for genders, they have the same mean but males have larger sigma, so there are both more male idiots than female idiots and more male geniuses than female geniuses.)
Also, the Gaussian distribution can stop being good approximation very far away from the mean.
Isn’t IQ defined to be a Gaussian (e.g. IQ 160 just means ‘99.99683rd percentile among people your age’), rather than ‘whatever IQ tests measure’? If so, a better statement of that phenomenon would be “IQ tests are inaccurate for extreme values.”
See if I care. If you want to use the skin colour as evidence, lumping together everyone that’s black, I want to use ‘use of skin colour as evidence’, lumping you together with all the nasty racists.
I want to use ‘use of “use of skin colour as evidence” as evidence’ as evidence, but I’m not sure what that’s evidence for. :-)
IRC, no substantial difference was found in the standard deviations among races
Even a small difference translates into enormous ratio between numbers of people, several standard deviations from the mean...
Isn’t IQ defined to be a Gaussian
Yes, and it is defined to have specific standard deviation as well. That definition makes it unsuitable measure. The Gaussian distribution also arises from sum of multiple independent variables. The statement was about intelligence though, which is different thing from both “what IQ tests measure” and “how IQ is defined”.
Another huge failing of IQ is the non-measure of ability to build and use a huge search-able database of methods and facts. Building such database is a long-term memory task and can not be tested in short time span; the existing knowledge can’t be tested without massive influence by the background. Likewise, the IQ test lacks any problems that are actually difficult enough to have some solution methods that some people would know before the test, and some won’t.
Effectively, the IQ tests do not test for heavily parallel processing capability.
For example, I do believe that it would be possible to build ‘superhuman AI’ that runs on a cellphone and aces IQ tests, and could perhaps deceive a human in brief conversation. The same AI would never be able to invent a stone axe from scratch, let alone anything more complicated; it’d be nothing but a glorified calculator.
I want to use ‘use of “use of skin colour as evidence” as evidence’ as evidence, but I’m not sure what that’s evidence for. :-)
Well, the people who use skin colour as evidence, i would guess, are on average less well behaved than rest of society… so you can use it to guess someone’s criminality or other untrustworthiness.
Likewise, the IQ test lacks any problems that are actually difficult enough to have some solution methods that some people would know before the test, and some won’t.
Indeed, when I last took a few IQ tests I felt like I was being tested tested more for familiarity with concepts such as exclusiveOR, cyclical permutations, and similar basic discrete maths stuff than for processing power. (Of course, it does take insight to realize that such concepts are relevant to the questions and processing power to figure out the answer within the time frame of the test, but I think that if I had never heard about XOR or used Sarrus’ rule I would have scored much worse.)
ETA: This is also why I suspect that the correlations between race and IQ aren’t entirely genetic. If Einstein’s twin brother had grown up in a very poor region with no education...
Even a small difference translates into enormous ratio between numbers of people, several standard deviations from the mean...
A distribution with mean 100 and st. dev. 14 will exceed one with mean 90 and st. dev. 16 for all x between about 93 and about 170, and there aren’t that many people with IQs over 170 anyway.
But can we detect such a tiny difference as between std dev 14 and std dev 16 ? After we have to control for really many factors that are different between groups in question?
Also, that was my point, at the level of very high (one in million) intelligence, i.e. actual geniuses, the people you’d call genius without having to detect them using some test. I have a pet hypothesis about the last biological change which caused our technological progress. Little mixing with Neanderthals, raising the standard deviation somewhat.
The IQ test I think get useless past some point, when the IQ test savants that solve it at such level (but can’t learn very well for example, or can’t do problems well that require more of parallel processing), start to outnumber geniuses.
Well, the people who use skin colour as evidence, i would guess, are on average less well behaved than rest of society… so you can use it to guess someone’s criminality or other untrustworthiness.
You have the neonazis among those who use skin colour as evidence of criminality, but not among those who don’t. I don’t know of other differences that were demonstrated, my expectation for other effects is zero. I should expect the overall effect on order of at least the proportion of race motivated violence to overall violence; my expectation is somewhat higher than this though because I would guess that the near-neonazis are likewise more violent, including within-race crime.
I want to use ‘use of “use of skin colour as evidence” as evidence’ as evidence, but I’m not sure what that’s evidence for. :-)
Doh, missed the extra nesting. I doubt it’ll be evidence for much… both neonazis and liberal types use that as evidence, the former as evidence of ingroup-ness and the latter as evidence of badness, so I don’t see for what it would be discriminating.
I can’t remember whether I read this from someone else or came up with it on my own, but when people ask “do you oppose homosexual marriage” in questionnaires to find out political orientations, people answering “yes” will include both those who oppose homosexual marriage but are OK with heterosexual marriage, and those who oppose all marriage, and those groups are very different clusters in political space (paleo-conservatives the former, radical anarchists the latter). (Of course, the latter group is so much smaller than the former than if you’re doing statistics with large numbers of people this shouldn’t be such an issue.)
Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour.
What if verbal ability and quantitative ability are often decoupled?
I wasn’t talking about “verbal ability” (which, to the extent that can be found out in ten minutes, correlates more with where someone grew up than with IQ), but about what they say, e.g. their reaction to finding out that I’m a physics student (though for this particular example there are lots of confounding factors), or what kinds of activities they enjoy.
If you’re able to drive the conversation like that, you can get information about IQ, and that information may have a larger impact than race. But to “screen off” evidence means making that evidence conditionally independent- once you knew their level of interest in physics, race would give you no information about their IQ. That isn’t the case.
Imagine that all races have Gaussian IQ distributions with the same standard deviation, but different means, and consider just the population of people whose IQs are above 132 (‘geniuses’ for this comment). In such a model, the mean IQ of black geniuses will be smaller than the mean IQ of white geniuses which will be smaller than the mean IQ of Jewish geniuses- so even knowing a lower bound for IQ won’t screen off the evidence provided by race!
Huh, sure, if the likelihood is a reversed Heaviside step. If the likelihood is itself a Gaussian, then the posterior is a Gaussian whose mean is the weighed average of that of the prior and that of the likelihood, weighed by the inverse squared standard deviations. So even if the st.dev. of the likelihood was half that of the prior for each race, the difference in posterior means would shrink by five times.
Right- there’s lots of information out there that will narrow your IQ estimate of someone else more than their race will, like that they’re a professional physicist or member of MENSA, but evidence only becomes worthless when it’s independent of the quantity you’re interested in given the other things you know.
You have a theory that a certain kind of building is highly prone to fire. You see a news report that mentions that a building of that kind has burnt down on Main Street. The news report supports your theory—unless you were a witness to the fire the previous night.
I’m talking about how valuable the evidence is to you, the theory-promoter. If you were there, then the news report tells you nothing you didn’t already know.
In this case, if the news report is consistent with my recollections, it seems that is evidence of the reliability of the news, and of the reliability of my memory, and additional evidence that the event actually occurred that way.
Yeah, true. But having been there the previous night, and making good observations the previous night, certainly makes the news report go from pretty strong evidence to almost nothing.
EDIT: Really the important thing I think, is that if your observations are good enough than the evidence from the news report is “worthless”, in the sense that you shouldn’t pay to find out whether there was a news report that backs up your observations. It’s not worth the time it takes to hear it..
Maybe I’m missing your point altogether, but it seems this is only true if the only thing I care about is the truth of that one theory of mine. If I also care about, for example, whether news reports are typically reliable, then suddenly the news report is worth a lot more.
Suppose A gives me information about B, and B gives me information about C; they’re dependent. (Remember, probabilistic dependence is always mutual.) A gives me information about C (through B) only if I don’t know B. If I know B, then A is conditionally independent of C, and so learning A tells me nothing about C.
(As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off… well, I’ve never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)
Minor note, this appears to actually not be the case. Most studies have no correlation between race and penis size. See for example here. The only group that there may be some substantial difference is that Chinese babies may have smaller genitalia after birth but this doesn’t appear to hold over to a significant difference by the time the children have reached puberty. Relevant study.
Huh, according to this map the average Congolese penis is nearly twice as long as the average South Korean penis. (ISTR that stretched flaccid length doesn’t perfectly correlate with erect length.)
Indeed as strange as it might sound (but not to those who know what he usually blogs about) Steve Sailer seems to genuinely like black people more than average and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a test showed he wasn’t biased against them or was less biased than the average white American.
He also dosen’t seem like racist2 from the vast majority of his writing, painting him as racist3 is plain absurd.
Historically, proposing policies that are set to help the specific strengths of a minority group are not generally indicative of actually positive feelings about those groups.
The IAT is the best measure of ‘genuinely like X people’ we have now, though that’s not saying much. (I believe the only place he published it is VDare, which is currently down.)
Historically, proposing policies that are set to help the specific strengths of a minority group are not generally indicative of actually positive feelings about those groups.
What are the competing hypotheses and competing observations, here?
It seems to me the natural interpretation for “genuine” is “unconscious,” and if that post is relevant, it seems that it argues for more relative importance for the IAT over stated positions and opinions.
Really? It does seem useful to communicate with the liberal-minded without feeling personally insulted or thinking they’re going way overboard on political correctness. But only liberals and those who think like them seem prone to thinking “Everyone is full of EVIL PREJUDICE except my tribe”.
But only liberals and those who think like them seem prone to thinking “Everyone is full of EVIL PREJUDICE except my tribe”
When I saw this, I could not help but think what an apt demonstration it was of a green accusing the blues of holding a uniquely prejudiced point of view because they are blues, while he, being a green, is of course immune to any such sentiment.
Are you saying that the demographic you are talking about is special in using prejudice as the marker of evilness (as opposed to religious affiliation or whatever), or in taking that sort of attitude at all?
Sort of the latter. Conservatives tend to think people evil for supporting things like gay marriage and abortion—things that all sides agree are supported by one side and opposed by the other. Or to think people fundamentally good, but naive and misguided—everyone agrees poverty is bad, but conservatives think food stamps make it worse, so they oppose liberals who support food stamps.
People who reject both labels seem to regard both conservatives and liberals as cute little bumbling fools who want to do good and thus deserve a pat on the head and a lollipop.
I haven’t spent nearly as much time in conservative circles as in liberal ones, but there is a distinctive pattern among liberals that I would not expect to observe anywhere else: “Let’s solve sexism by putting kittens in a blender!” “Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea.” “You evil sexist!”.
Leaving as untouched as I possibly can while still participating in this discussion at all the political labeling question here, I am interested in your thoughts as to the structural similarities and differences between the hypothetical conversation you cite about sexism, and a conversation like:
“Let’s make God happy by putting kittens in a blender!” “Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea.” ”You evil atheist!”
or
“Let’s improve our capitalist economy by putting kittens in a blender!” “Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea.” ”You evil communist!”
I’ve spent a lot of time on the conservative side (between the guns, being in the Military and working in/around the Defense Industry, and in general being a tradition oriented more-or-less libertarian) and many of them aren’t any different.
“Gay Marriage will ruin the institution”
“Uh. How many times have you been divorced?”
“COMMUNIST!”
(no, not literally, but YKWIM)
Heck, even the Implicit Association Test assumes that if you’re “liberal” on Gun Control (whatever that means) you’re also Liberal on Gay Marriage and Abortion. Anyone wanna make some assumptions on the Implicit Associations of the writers of that test?
Good answer. Does it work that way in practice? I wouldn’t be able to predict whether the halo effect would overcome the sympathy influence and win out in effective total favoritism.
Beats me. I expect there’s a lot of noise here; I was more making a nod towards the standard trope than actually proposing an answer. “The one with less earning power” is also an answer that comes to mind.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that in most jurisdictions where same-sex divorce is no longer so novel as to be singular, the tendency would be to approximate splitting assets down the middle. But I’m no more than .35 confident of that, and even that much depends on a very ad-hoc definition of “no longer so novel.”
It is probably a very bad idea for me to make my first post in reply to something that is blatantly political, on a site which quite actively discourages it, but I’m not very rational. You see, I would probably consider myself more of a liberal than a conservative. I have even attended meetings of feminist organizations, which means that I am a very irrational type of bumbling fool. Nevertheless, I assure you that I would indeed question the ethics of putting kittens in blenders. I would also question the effectiveness of putting kittens in blenders as a means to solve sexism. However, I have never seen such a position proposed before and would be rather shocked to be called an “evil sexist”, even by radical feminists who I do not tend to agree with, for opposing the practice.
Perhaps everything you say is true. Perhaps there is something in liberals that makes us more tribal than the average human being. I would freely admit to being more irrational than rational most of the time. When someone not of my tribe says something I find horrific, my emotions tend to make me go “damn their entire tribe for only they would think such things”, rather than “I disagree with the point this individual is making, though I am sure it is not held by everyone else in his tribe and I am sure there are converse examples of people who have reached the same conclusion in my tribe”.
I see that the inferences you have drawn from your experience at a large number of liberal events and a large number of conservative events have led you to the conclusion that “ONLY liberals and those that think like them seem prone to thinking “everyone is full of evil prejudice except my tribe”. I would have thought that a statement of such strength, particularly since it uses the word ONLY, would require much more than the anecdotal experiences of one individual in order to justifiably reject the null hypothesis. Perhaps you have done many statistical studies on this that I am unaware of. Perhaps you have assumed knowledge of your studies is common among Less Wrong contributors (and I would admit that the average LW contributor is smarter than me, so it’s not too much of a stretch). Indeed, you may have constructed your priors in a completely impartial manner and may indeed be completely justified in assuming the truth of your alternative hypothesis. Nevertheless, I am a little skeptical of the reliability of the methods you used for arriving at the conclusion of attributing this quality to “ONLY liberals and those who think like them”,as opposed to “MOSTLY liberals and those who think like them”
Unsurprisingly, I have a number of issues with that sentence which are not just political. The set which includes “liberals and those who think like them” is not very well defined. I imagine a liberal thinks more like a conservative than a dog thinks like a liberal or a conservative. Consequently, your set could be defined to include everything within the set “conscious human beings”, as conscious human beings are certainly things which tend to think like other human beings. However, it is very clear from context that this is not what you mean. Do libertarians think like liberals? I imagine many libertarians would say “yes, on a lot of things, but not on many other things. On other things, I tend to think like a conservative”. but, clearly, your additional qualifier of “those who think like them” was included specify that you were not talking about only liberals. Do socialists think like liberals? I imagine a conservative would often say “yes, they do. They both tend to want more government intervention”. Conversely, I think a socialist might say “no, liberals believe in private ownership of the means of production. I believe that system is inherently unjust”. The vast majority of anarchists, as the forms of anarchism which have their origins in the labour movement, i.e. those advocating social anarchism are still the most common form of anarchism from a worldwide perspective. These anarchists would in fact see themselves as thinking more like orthodox Marxists than US conservatives. They would differ very strongly over the “statist” notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but would have similar long term ends. This puts the conservative who defines his conservatism as an ideology of “less government” in contrast to liberals and socialists in an odd position. You see, if he is not of a very extreme persuasion and is a believer in western democracy in its current form, it would probably be safe to say that he thinks more like liberals and democratic socialists than he thinks like a revolutionary social anarchist. So, defining who exactly thinks like a liberal, but is not actually a liberal is not an easy task. I believe there is a great deal of literature in linguistics and the philosophy of language dealing with the concept of “like” how difficult it actually is to categorize one thing as beinglike another thing. Trying to define an agent whichthinks like another agent seems, if anything, even more difficult.
Did you perhaps come up with a technical definition of for the set of people defined as “liberal or thinks like a liberal”. Did you create questionnaires with a number of propositions associated with the ideology “liberalism” and give them to people in the circles you mentioned, so that you could, to some extent, identify those who were of the set “think like liberals” in non-liberal groups. Perhaps you used a ratio of 13 positive answers to 20 negative answers as a minimum benchmark for those who “think like[ liberals]”. Were there questions on these sheets which were similar in form to “if you could stop sexism by putting kittens in a blender, would you put kittens in a blender?” and “in such circumstances, would you treat anyone stopping you from putting kittens in a blender as the enemy?”. If people in the “liberals and those who think like them group” did answer positively to both of those questions, I would be fairly surprised.
But maybe you have just let political hyperbole get in the way of presenting a potentially more persuasive argument. There is probably a good case to be made for comparatively stronger tribal sentiments in liberals. After all, individualism is a fundamental part of modern day conservatism, but is no longer considered a key component of liberalism. Now liberals are associated with more collectivist values. Consequently, it would not be surprising if studies showed that liberals had emotionally stronger collectivist tendencies than conservatives. Indeed, I think one could be justified in assuming a prior probability of greater than .5 that more collectivist tendencies would be found in liberals than in conservatives if we use the US definition of those terms.
In conclusion, if you had just said something along the lines of “In my own experience, individuals of a liberal political persuasion tend to have stronger views concerning moral judgment of their opponents. Has anyone else noticed this or am I the only one? If not, are there probable cognitive causes behind this”? At least that would have seemed more rational. It would have seemed more like something that belongs on Less Wrong. Presenting your argument in that form might have spared you some of that negative karma. If emotions were not getting in your way, maybe you would have noticed that your argument would seem out of place on this website, particularly when you decided to capitalize EVIL PREJUDICE. You might also have realized that when your accusation levied at a political group was questioned, you merely resorted to stronger hyperbole involving kittens in blenders. Your argument had become a soldier and you decided that you should try to save it by resorting to an argument that was even more absurd and hyperbolic.
I’ve looked at some of your previous contributions and you are clearly intelligent, so I don’t doubt that you probably had a valid point to make. You just could have made it better. You must have noticed that some of your statements just don’t fit the accepted rules of discourse on this site.
I never interpreted MixedNuts’ statement as entailing that liberals have stronger tribal sentiments. Rather, I interpreted it as being that accusing others of prejudice, and jumping on people who oppose proposed solutions to combat prejudice even if the solutions aren’t very good, are distinctly liberal tribal phenomena. A comparable tribal behavior that you would be likely to see among conservatives, but unlikely to see among liberals, would be accusing people of being “unpatriotic.”
Point taken. In hindsight I also seem to have gotten a bit carried away with the above post. I would, however, hold that there are many social/political/religious groups that have a remarkable tendency to see everyone except themselves as remarkably prejudiced because their worldview is not shared. Nevertheless, continuing down this road is not likely to be very productive.
I vote that we abandon ship and shift our attentions back to topics like rationality techniques, game theory, friendly AI and meta-ethics, where we can think more clearly.
So if a minority takes the Implicitly Association Test and finds out their biased against the dominant “race” in their area, are they a Racist1, or not?
I would also really question the validity of the Implicit Association Test. It says “Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for White People compared to Black People.”, which given that blacks have been severely under-represented my social sub-culture for the last 27 years(Punk/Goth), the school I graduated from (Art School), and my professional environments (IT) for the last 20 years is probably not inaccurate.
However, it also says “Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for Herman Cain compared to Barack Obama.” Which is nonsense. I have a STRONG preference for Herman Cain over Barack Obama.
So if a minority takes the Implicitly Association Test and finds out their biased against the dominant “race” in their area, are they a Racist1, or not?
Looks like we need more “racism”s :D A common definition of racism that reflects the intuitions you bring up is “racism is prejudice plus power,” (e.g., here) which isn’t very useful from a decision-making point of view but which is very useful when looking at this racism as a functional thing experienced by the some group.
Surely one of the definitions of “racist” should contain something about thinking that some races are better than others. Or is that covered under “neo-Nazi”?
Not really it is perfectly possible to be explicitly aware of one’s racial preferences and not really be bothered by having such preferences, at least no more than one is bothered by liking salty food or green parks, yet not be a Nazi or prone to violence.
Indeed I think a good argument can be made not only that large number of such people lived in the 19th and 20th century, but that we probably have millions of them living today in say a place like Japan.
And that they are mostly pretty decent and ok people.
Edit: Sorry! I didn’t see the later comments already covering this. :)
Negative subconscious attitudes aren’t the same thing as (though they might cause or be caused by) conscious opinions that such-and-such people are inferior in some way.
If one has conscious racist opinions, or is conscious that one has unconscious racist opinions (has taken the IAT but doesn’t explicitly believe negative things about blacks) but doesn’t act on them, it’s probably because one doesn’t endorse them. I’d class such a person as a Racist1.
I don’t think not being an “insensitive jerk” is the same as not acting on one’s opinions.
For example, if I think that people who can’t do math shouldn’t be programmers, and I make sure to screen applicants for math skills, that’s acting on my opinions. If I make fun of people with poor math skills for not being able to get high-paying programmer jobs, that’s being an insensitive jerk.
That’s true. I was taking “racist opinions” to mean “incorrect race-related beliefs that favor one group over another”. If people who couldn’t do math were just as good at programming as people who could, and you still screened applicants for math skills, that would be a jerk move. If your race- or gender- or whatever-group-related beliefs are true, and you act on them rationally (e.g. not discriminating with a hard filter when there’s only a small difference), then you aren’t being any kind of racist by my definition.
ETA: did anyone downvote for a reason other than LocustBeamGun’s?
If people who couldn’t do math were just as good at programming as people who could, and you still screened applicants for math skills, that would be a jerk move.
(ETA: I didn’t downvote, but) I wouldn’t call gender differences in math “small”—the genders have similar average skills but their variances are VERY different. As in, Emmy Noether versus ~everyone else.
And if there is a great difference between groups it would be more rational to apply strong filters (except for example people who are bad at math, conveniently, aren’t likely to become programmers). Perhaps the downvoter(s) thought you only presented the anti-discrimination side of the issue.
I think in most cases the average is more important in deciding how much to discriminate. But I deleted the relevant phrase because I’m not sure about that specific case and my argument holds about the same amount of water without it as with it.
EDIT:
Perhaps the downvoter(s) thought you only presented the anti-discrimination side of the issue.
Huh, I was intending to say that it’s acceptable to discriminate on real existing differences, to the extent that those differences exist. Not sure how to fix my comment to make that less ambiguous, so just saying it straight out here.
Indeed. For some reason I’m not sure of, I instinctively dislike Chinese people, but I don’t endorse this dislike and try to acting upon it as little as possible (except when seeking romantic partners—I think I do get to decide what criteria to use for that).
Can you expand on the difference you see between acting on your (non-endorsed) preferences in romantic partners, and acting on those preferences in, for example, friends?
I don’t understand how not having any Chinese friends at the moment precludes you from expanding on the differences between acting on your dislike of Chinese people when seeking romantic partners and acting on it in other areas of your life, such as maintaining friendships.
Yes, the commenters on that post mostly don’t agree with him.
That said, I would summarize most of the exchange as: ”Why are we OK with A, but we have a problem with B?” ″Because A is OK and B is wrong!”
Which isn’t quite as illuminating as I might have liked.
I don’t understand how not having any Chinese friends at the moment precludes you from expanding on the differences between acting on your dislike of Chinese people when seeking romantic partners and acting on it in other areas of your life, such as maintaining friendships.
Since I’m not maintaining any friendships with Chinese people, I can’t see what it would even mean for me to act on my dislike of Chinese people in maintaining friendships. As for ‘other areas of my life’, this means that if I attempt to interact with a Chinese-looking beggar the same way I’d behave I’d interact with an European-looking beggar, to read a paper by an author with a Chinese-sounding name the same way I’d read one by an author with (say) a Polish-sounding name, and so on. (I suspect I might have misunderstood your question, though.)
Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of “better” and wanting to commit genocide?
Most obvious plausible available meaning for ‘better’ that fits: “Most satisfies my average utilitarian values”.
(Yes, most brands of simple utilitarianism reduce to psychopathy—but since people still advocate them we can consider the meaning at least ‘available’.)
A “Racist0” is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.
Also I don’t see why calling Obama the “Food Stamp President” or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a “Racist2″ unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.
I’m honestly confused. You don’t see why calling Obama a “Food Stamp President” is different from criticizing his economic policy?
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton—even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama’s economic policies.
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton—even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama’s economic policies.
Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.
Given the way that public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States, do you think that “Food Stamp President” has the same implications as some other critique of Obama’s economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama’s race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?
“public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States”
Taking your word on that, what “other critique of Obama’s economic policies” are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?
Basic economics says that what you pay for, you get more of. Therefore, when you extend long-term unemployment benefits, you get more long-term unemployment.
or
The current tax rate is too far to the right on the Laffer curve
or
The health insurance purchase mandate is unprecedented, UnAmerican, and unConstitutional
edit: or
People who pay no net income tax (because of low income and earned income tax credits) are drains on American society
(end edit)
without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama’s race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama’s economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.
Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as “public welfare codes for...” I don’t see how that one wouldn’t have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in “Obamacare.”
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I’ll agree that there’s no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.
The term “welfare president” has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.
I’m really curious now, though. What’s your opinion about the intended connotations of the phrase “food stamp President”? Do you think it’s intended primarily as a way of describing Obama’s economic policies? His commitment to preventing hunger? His fondness for individual welfare programs? Something else?
Or, if you think the intention varies depending on the user, what connotations do you think Gingrich intended to evoke with it?
Or, if you’re unwilling to speculate as to Gingrich’s motives, what connotations do you think it evokes in a typical resident of, say, Utah or North Dakota?
The direct meaning is reference to the fact that food stamp use has soured during his presidency. For generally, a reference to his governing style which includes anti-business policies and expanding entitlements.
I’m going to be charitable and assume that by “direct meaning” you mean to refer to the intended connotations that I asked about. Thanks for the answer.
That seems improbable. To pick the first example I Googled off of the Atlantic webside: Chart of the Day: Obama’s Epic Failure on Judicial Nominees contains some substantive criticism of Obama—can you show me where it contains “code words” of this kind?
It’s not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.
I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here: EN: By finding enough “code words” you can make any criticism of Obama racist. RZ: What about this criticism? EN: By declaring “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” to be racist “code words”, you can make that criticism racist. RZ: But “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” aren’t racist code words! EN: Right. Neither is “food stamps”.
Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo “code word”—for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people.
I think “nigh-unfalsifiable” is unfair in general when it comes to the use of code words, but I’m not familiar with the facts of the particular case under discussion.
In fact, I fully expect that (for example) an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people, and if I did not find that result I would have to seriously rethink my belief that “food stamps” is a dog-whistle in the particular case under discussion; it’s not unfalsifiable at all.
But I can’t figure out any way to falsify the claim that “by finding enough ‘code words’ you can make any criticism of Obama racist,” nor even the implied related claim that it’s equally easy to do so for all texts. Especially in the context of this discussion, where the experimental test isn’t actually available. All Eugene_Nier has to do is claim that arbitrarily selected words in the article you cite are equally racially charged, and claim—perhaps even sincerely—to detect no difference between the connotations of different words.
I wouldn’t actually use IAT to find these kind of connections—I would look at the use of phrases in other contexts by other people, and I would look at the reactions to the phrases in those contexts.
To take a historical example from Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson: in the 1862 riots against the draft, one of the banners that rioters carried read, “The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was”. That this allusion to the Constitution is an allusion to the legality of slavery under said Constitution is supported by one of the other banners carried by the same groups of rioters: “We won’t fight to free the nigger”. If, in 1862, a candidate for state office out in the Midwest were to repeat (or even, depending on the exact words, paraphrase) that phrase about the Constitution, I think the charge of “code word” would be well-placed.
I agree that looking at deployment of phrases is a useful way of finding code words, but it is always vulnerable to “cherry-picking.” The second banner you mentioned might or might not have been representative of the movement.
Consider the hypothetical protest filled with “Defend the Constitution, Strike Down Obamacare” posters, which should not be tainted by other posters saying “Keep government out of Medicare”(1) but it is hard to describe an ex ante principle explaining how distinctions should be made.
(1) For non-Americans: Medicare is widely popular government health insurance program for the elderly.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that “race” provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn’t update very well upon learning these things. For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”; it’s probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.
For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”
I’m not sure that what you have in mind here is screening, at least in the causal diagrams sense. If I’m not mistaken, learning that someone is a college graduate screens off race for the purpose of predicting the causal effects of college graduation, but it doesn’t screen off race for the purpose of predicting causes of college graduation (such as intelligence) and their effects. You’re right, though, that even in the latter case learning that someone is a college graduate decreases the size of the update from learning their race. (At least given realistic assumptions. If 99% of cyan people have IQ 80 and 1% have IQ 140, and 99% of magenta people have IQ 79 and 1% have IQ 240, learning that someone is a college graduate suddenly makes it much more informative to learn their race. But that’s not the world we live in; it’s just to illustrate the statistics.)
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that “race” provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race,
Which are generally much harder to observe.
For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one’s performance. (Though I’ve heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
Additionally, it seems that there’s a lot of ‘different justification, same conclusion’ with regards to claims about black people. For instance, “black people are inherently stupid and lazy” becomes “black people don’t have to meet the same standards for education”. The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don’t like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one’s performance. (Though I’ve heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
A quick google search isn’t giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who’re admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies is that they often will put someone in a slightly higher level school (say Berkeley rather than Davis) than they really should be in and which because of their background they are unprepared for. Not necessarily intellectually—they could be very bright, but in terms of things like study skills and the like.
There is sufficient data to suggest this should be looked at more thoroughly. In general it is better for someone to graduate from a “lesser” school than to drop out of a better one.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies
Which policies were those again? Teetotalism, something to do with faith in a greater power, apologising to folks and, let’s see… 1,2,3… at least 9 others.
(ie. I put it that “AA” doesn’t work as a credible acronym. There are at least two far more obvious meanings for “AA policies” that must be ruled out before something to do with smart children gets considered as a hypothesis.)
I apologize. I was being lazy and assumed that since it was used multiple times above that folks following the conversation would get it from context. I didn’t realize that this conversation would so disquiet some people that they would get hung up on that, rather than addressing what many people think is a moderately serious problem, if not for society, then for the students who are basically being set up to fail.
But by all means let’s first have this silly little pissing match about not being able to track abbreviations through a conversation. It’s far more important.
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate? (Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don’t hear “my father also went here” the same way as “I got in partly because of my race”, then there’s a different factor at work here.)
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate?
In the extreme case where being above a given level of competence deterministically causes graduation, you’re correct and AA makes no difference; the likelihood (but not necessarily the prior or posterior probability) of different competence levels for a college graduate is independent of race. In the extreme case where graduation is completely random, you’re wrong and AA affects the evidence provided by graduation in the same way as it affects the evidence provided by admission. Reality is likely to be somewhere in between (I’m not saying it’s in the middle).
(Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don’t hear “my father also went here” the same way as “I got in partly because of my race”, then there’s a different factor at work here.)
It depends on the actual distribution of legacy and AA graduates.
and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time
I’d say that the point of admissions is less to weed out people who’ll succeed from people who’ll waste the school’s time than to weed out people who’ll reflect poorly on the status of the school. Colleges raise their status by taking better students, so their interests are served not by taking students down to the lower limit of those who can meet academic requirements, but by being as selective as they can afford to be. Schools will even lie about the test scores of students they actually accept, among other things, to be seen as more selective.
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they’ve been accused of. It’s not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim—I hope you’re familiar with Lee Atwater’s very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition?
No, they just declare each individual instance ‘racist’ no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as ‘racist’ being the most prominent example.
A “Racist0” is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.
That’s the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like “race traitor” is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine’s phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
(N.B. that if this definition wasn’t question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
That’s the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like “race traitor” is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine’s phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
Possibly, I couldn’t quite figure out Mixed Nuts’ definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.
(N.B. that if this definition wasn’t question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
Well they aren’t. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:
A “Racist0” is someone who rationally believes that priors aren’t equal over races.
Apart from race, isn’t this a problem with English or language in general? We use the same words for varying degrees of a certain notion, and people cherry pick the definitions that they want to cogitate for response. If I call someone a conservative, is it a compliment or an insult? That depends on both of our perceptions of the word conservative as well as our outlook on ourselves as political beings; however, beyond that, I could mean to say that the person is fiscally conservative, but as the current conservative candidates are showing conservatism to be far-right extremism, the person may think, “Hey! I’m not one of those guys.”
I think if someone wants to argue with you, you’d be hard-pressed to speak eloquently enough to provide an impenetrable phrase that does not open itself to a spectrum of interpretation.
Sure. “Conservative” isn’t a fixed political position. Quite often, it’s a claim about one’s political position: that it stands for some historical good or tradition. A “conservative” in Russia might look back to the good old days of Stalin whereas a “conservative” in the U.S. would not appreciate the comparison. It’s also a flag color; your “fiscal conservative” may merely not want to wave a flag of the same color as Rick Santorum’s.
Depends if the differences in assigned moral values are large enough they can easily approach Nazi pretty quickly. As a thought experiment consider how many dolphins would you kill to save a single person?
On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:
-celandine13
How about:
Someone who, following an honest best effort to evaluate the available evidence, concludes that some of the beliefs that nowadays fall under the standard definition of “racist” nevertheless may be true with probabilities significantly above zero.
Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people, and whose conclusion happens to reflect negatively on this person or group in some way. (Or, alternatively, someone who doesn’t believe that making such inferences is grossly immoral as a matter of principle.)
Both (1) and (2) fall squarely under the common usage of the term “racist,” and yet I don’t see how they would fit into the above cited classification.
Of course, some people would presumably argue that all beliefs in category (1) are in fact conclusively proven to be false with p~1, so it can be only a matter of incorrect conclusions motivated by the above listed categories of racism. Presumably they would also claim that, as a well-established general principle, no correct inferences in category (2) are ever possible. But do you really believe this?
That (1) only makes sense if there is a “standard” definition of racist (and it’s based on what people believe rather than/as well as what they do). The point of the celandine13 was indeed that there’s no such thing.
The evidence someone’s race constitutes about that person’s qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here. And given that we’re running on corrupted hardware, I suspect that someone who does try to “performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person” ends up subconsciously double-counting evidence and therefore end up with less accurate results than somebody who doesn’t. (As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off… well, I’ve never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)
I have seen accusations for racism as responses to people pointing that out.
Also, according to the U.S. Supreme Court even if race is screened off, you’re actions can still be racist or something.
In real life, you don’t have the luxury of gathering forensic evidence on everyone you meet.
I’m not talking about forensic evidence. Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour. Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.
Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.
There’s this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
...
I facepalmed. Really, Eric? Sorry, I don’t think that a moral realist is perceptive enough to the nuances and ethical knots involved to be a judge on this issue. I don’t know, he might be an excellent scientist, but it’s extremely stupid to be so rash when you’re attempting serious contrarianism.
Yep, let’s all try to overcome bias really really hard; there’s only one solution, one desirable state, there’s a straight road ahead of us; Kingdom of Rationality, here we come!
(Yvain, thank you a million times for that sobering post!)
You know, there are countries where the intentional homicide rate is smaller than in John Derbyshire’s country by nearly an order of magnitude.
That thing doesn’t exist in all countries. Plus, I think the reason why you don’t see that many two-digit-IQ people among (say) physics professors is not that they don’t make it, it’s that they don’t even consider doing that, so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.
That’s not the point. The point is that the black physics professor is less smart than the Jewish physics professor.
But the difference is smaller than for the median black person and the median Jewish person. (I said “even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it”, not “all of it”.)
The bell curve has both the mean and the deviation, you can have a ‘race’ with lower mean and larger standard deviation, and then you can e.g. filter by reliable accomplishment of some kind, such as solving some problem that smartest people in the world attempted and failed, you may end up with situation that the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation will have fewer people whom attain this, but those whom do, are on average smarter. Set bar even higher, and the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation has more people attaining it. Also, the Gaussian distribution can stop being good approximation very far away from the mean.
edit: and to reply to grand grand parents: I bet i can divide the world into category that includes you, and a category that does not include you, in such a way that the category including you has substantially higher crime rate, or is otherwise bad. Actually if you are from US, I have a pretty natural ‘cultural’ category where your murder rate is about 5..10x of normal for such average income. Other category is the ‘racists’, i.e. the people whom use skin colour as evidence. Those people also have substantially bad behaviour. You of course want to use skin colour as evidence, and don’t want me to use your qualities as evidence. See if I care. If you want to use the skin colour as evidence, lumping together everyone that’s black, I want to use ‘use of skin colour as evidence’, lumping you together with all the nasty racists.
IIRC, no substantial difference was found in the standard deviations among races. (Whereas for genders, they have the same mean but males have larger sigma, so there are both more male idiots than female idiots and more male geniuses than female geniuses.)
Isn’t IQ defined to be a Gaussian (e.g. IQ 160 just means ‘99.99683rd percentile among people your age’), rather than ‘whatever IQ tests measure’? If so, a better statement of that phenomenon would be “IQ tests are inaccurate for extreme values.”
I want to use ‘use of “use of skin colour as evidence” as evidence’ as evidence, but I’m not sure what that’s evidence for. :-)
Even a small difference translates into enormous ratio between numbers of people, several standard deviations from the mean...
Yes, and it is defined to have specific standard deviation as well. That definition makes it unsuitable measure. The Gaussian distribution also arises from sum of multiple independent variables. The statement was about intelligence though, which is different thing from both “what IQ tests measure” and “how IQ is defined”.
Another huge failing of IQ is the non-measure of ability to build and use a huge search-able database of methods and facts. Building such database is a long-term memory task and can not be tested in short time span; the existing knowledge can’t be tested without massive influence by the background. Likewise, the IQ test lacks any problems that are actually difficult enough to have some solution methods that some people would know before the test, and some won’t.
Effectively, the IQ tests do not test for heavily parallel processing capability.
For example, I do believe that it would be possible to build ‘superhuman AI’ that runs on a cellphone and aces IQ tests, and could perhaps deceive a human in brief conversation. The same AI would never be able to invent a stone axe from scratch, let alone anything more complicated; it’d be nothing but a glorified calculator.
Well, the people who use skin colour as evidence, i would guess, are on average less well behaved than rest of society… so you can use it to guess someone’s criminality or other untrustworthiness.
Indeed, when I last took a few IQ tests I felt like I was being tested tested more for familiarity with concepts such as exclusiveOR, cyclical permutations, and similar basic discrete maths stuff than for processing power. (Of course, it does take insight to realize that such concepts are relevant to the questions and processing power to figure out the answer within the time frame of the test, but I think that if I had never heard about XOR or used Sarrus’ rule I would have scored much worse.)
ETA: This is also why I suspect that the correlations between race and IQ aren’t entirely genetic. If Einstein’s twin brother had grown up in a very poor region with no education...
A distribution with mean 100 and st. dev. 14 will exceed one with mean 90 and st. dev. 16 for all x between about 93 and about 170, and there aren’t that many people with IQs over 170 anyway.
But can we detect such a tiny difference as between std dev 14 and std dev 16 ? After we have to control for really many factors that are different between groups in question?
Also, that was my point, at the level of very high (one in million) intelligence, i.e. actual geniuses, the people you’d call genius without having to detect them using some test. I have a pet hypothesis about the last biological change which caused our technological progress. Little mixing with Neanderthals, raising the standard deviation somewhat.
The IQ test I think get useless past some point, when the IQ test savants that solve it at such level (but can’t learn very well for example, or can’t do problems well that require more of parallel processing), start to outnumber geniuses.
What sort of effect size do you expect here? Why?
You have the neonazis among those who use skin colour as evidence of criminality, but not among those who don’t. I don’t know of other differences that were demonstrated, my expectation for other effects is zero. I should expect the overall effect on order of at least the proportion of race motivated violence to overall violence; my expectation is somewhat higher than this though because I would guess that the near-neonazis are likewise more violent, including within-race crime.
Doh, missed the extra nesting. I doubt it’ll be evidence for much… both neonazis and liberal types use that as evidence, the former as evidence of ingroup-ness and the latter as evidence of badness, so I don’t see for what it would be discriminating.
I can’t remember whether I read this from someone else or came up with it on my own, but when people ask “do you oppose homosexual marriage” in questionnaires to find out political orientations, people answering “yes” will include both those who oppose homosexual marriage but are OK with heterosexual marriage, and those who oppose all marriage, and those groups are very different clusters in political space (paleo-conservatives the former, radical anarchists the latter). (Of course, the latter group is so much smaller than the former than if you’re doing statistics with large numbers of people this shouldn’t be such an issue.)
What if verbal ability and quantitative ability are often decoupled?
I wasn’t talking about “verbal ability” (which, to the extent that can be found out in ten minutes, correlates more with where someone grew up than with IQ), but about what they say, e.g. their reaction to finding out that I’m a physics student (though for this particular example there are lots of confounding factors), or what kinds of activities they enjoy.
If you’re able to drive the conversation like that, you can get information about IQ, and that information may have a larger impact than race. But to “screen off” evidence means making that evidence conditionally independent- once you knew their level of interest in physics, race would give you no information about their IQ. That isn’t the case.
Imagine that all races have Gaussian IQ distributions with the same standard deviation, but different means, and consider just the population of people whose IQs are above 132 (‘geniuses’ for this comment). In such a model, the mean IQ of black geniuses will be smaller than the mean IQ of white geniuses which will be smaller than the mean IQ of Jewish geniuses- so even knowing a lower bound for IQ won’t screen off the evidence provided by race!
Huh, sure, if the likelihood is a reversed Heaviside step. If the likelihood is itself a Gaussian, then the posterior is a Gaussian whose mean is the weighed average of that of the prior and that of the likelihood, weighed by the inverse squared standard deviations. So even if the st.dev. of the likelihood was half that of the prior for each race, the difference in posterior means would shrink by five times.
Right- there’s lots of information out there that will narrow your IQ estimate of someone else more than their race will, like that they’re a professional physicist or member of MENSA, but evidence only becomes worthless when it’s independent of the quantity you’re interested in given the other things you know.
Can you give an example of evidence becoming worthless? (I can’t think of any.)
You have a theory that a certain kind of building is highly prone to fire. You see a news report that mentions that a building of that kind has burnt down on Main Street. The news report supports your theory—unless you were a witness to the fire the previous night.
If you were promoting the theory before that point, the police may still have some pointed questions to ask you.
I’m talking about how valuable the evidence is to you, the theory-promoter. If you were there, then the news report tells you nothing you didn’t already know.
I understood your point. I was simply making a joke.
In this case, if the news report is consistent with my recollections, it seems that is evidence of the reliability of the news, and of the reliability of my memory, and additional evidence that the event actually occurred that way.
No?
Yeah, true. But having been there the previous night, and making good observations the previous night, certainly makes the news report go from pretty strong evidence to almost nothing.
EDIT: Really the important thing I think, is that if your observations are good enough than the evidence from the news report is “worthless”, in the sense that you shouldn’t pay to find out whether there was a news report that backs up your observations. It’s not worth the time it takes to hear it..
Hm.
Maybe I’m missing your point altogether, but it seems this is only true if the only thing I care about is the truth of that one theory of mine. If I also care about, for example, whether news reports are typically reliable, then suddenly the news report is worth a lot more.
But, sure, given that premise, I agree.
Suppose A gives me information about B, and B gives me information about C; they’re dependent. (Remember, probabilistic dependence is always mutual.) A gives me information about C (through B) only if I don’t know B. If I know B, then A is conditionally independent of C, and so learning A tells me nothing about C.
So essentially… a new fact is useless only if it’s a subset of knowledge you already have?
That seems like a fine way to put it.
Minor note, this appears to actually not be the case. Most studies have no correlation between race and penis size. See for example here. The only group that there may be some substantial difference is that Chinese babies may have smaller genitalia after birth but this doesn’t appear to hold over to a significant difference by the time the children have reached puberty. Relevant study.
Huh, according to this map the average Congolese penis is nearly twice as long as the average South Korean penis. (ISTR that stretched flaccid length doesn’t perfectly correlate with erect length.)
Oddly salient for such a trivial result. Should a study qualify for an Ig Nobel if you can use it to settle bar bets?
Where would someone like Steve Sailer fit in this classification?
Indeed as strange as it might sound (but not to those who know what he usually blogs about) Steve Sailer seems to genuinely like black people more than average and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a test showed he wasn’t biased against them or was less biased than the average white American.
He also dosen’t seem like racist2 from the vast majority of his writing, painting him as racist3 is plain absurd.
What evidence leads to this conclusion?
He published his IAT results and he’s proposed policies that play to the strengths of blacks.
Historically, proposing policies that are set to help the specific strengths of a minority group are not generally indicative of actually positive feelings about those groups.
The IAT is the best measure of ‘genuinely like X people’ we have now, though that’s not saying much. (I believe the only place he published it is VDare, which is currently down.)
What are the competing hypotheses and competing observations, here?
...for a particular value of genuine. (See this, BTW.)
It seems to me the natural interpretation for “genuine” is “unconscious,” and if that post is relevant, it seems that it argues for more relative importance for the IAT over stated positions and opinions.
This is missing Racist4:
Someone whose preferences result in disparate impact.
...and also useful for those among us who don’t identify as “liberal-minded.”
Really? It does seem useful to communicate with the liberal-minded without feeling personally insulted or thinking they’re going way overboard on political correctness. But only liberals and those who think like them seem prone to thinking “Everyone is full of EVIL PREJUDICE except my tribe”.
When I saw this, I could not help but think what an apt demonstration it was of a green accusing the blues of holding a uniquely prejudiced point of view because they are blues, while he, being a green, is of course immune to any such sentiment.
Why is it that wherever I see “greens and blues” mapped to real-world politics, “green” are the liberals and “blue” are the conservatives? example.
EDIT: I misread your comment.
Are you saying that the demographic you are talking about is special in using prejudice as the marker of evilness (as opposed to religious affiliation or whatever), or in taking that sort of attitude at all?
Sort of the latter. Conservatives tend to think people evil for supporting things like gay marriage and abortion—things that all sides agree are supported by one side and opposed by the other. Or to think people fundamentally good, but naive and misguided—everyone agrees poverty is bad, but conservatives think food stamps make it worse, so they oppose liberals who support food stamps.
People who reject both labels seem to regard both conservatives and liberals as cute little bumbling fools who want to do good and thus deserve a pat on the head and a lollipop.
I haven’t spent nearly as much time in conservative circles as in liberal ones, but there is a distinctive pattern among liberals that I would not expect to observe anywhere else: “Let’s solve sexism by putting kittens in a blender!” “Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea.” “You evil sexist!”.
Leaving as untouched as I possibly can while still participating in this discussion at all the political labeling question here, I am interested in your thoughts as to the structural similarities and differences between the hypothetical conversation you cite about sexism, and a conversation like:
“Let’s make God happy by putting kittens in a blender!”
“Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea.”
”You evil atheist!”
or
“Let’s improve our capitalist economy by putting kittens in a blender!”
“Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea.”
”You evil communist!”
I’ve spent a lot of time on the conservative side (between the guns, being in the Military and working in/around the Defense Industry, and in general being a tradition oriented more-or-less libertarian) and many of them aren’t any different.
“Gay Marriage will ruin the institution” “Uh. How many times have you been divorced?” “COMMUNIST!” (no, not literally, but YKWIM)
Heck, even the Implicit Association Test assumes that if you’re “liberal” on Gun Control (whatever that means) you’re also Liberal on Gay Marriage and Abortion. Anyone wanna make some assumptions on the Implicit Associations of the writers of that test?
It certainly ruins some aspects. How will the state know which partner to favor in the divorce proceedings if both are the same sex?
The shorter one.
Being 1.6m, I support this decision.
EDIT: Take that, veil of ignorance!
Why not the cuter one?
That works too. A more serious answer here.
Good answer. Does it work that way in practice? I wouldn’t be able to predict whether the halo effect would overcome the sympathy influence and win out in effective total favoritism.
Beats me. I expect there’s a lot of noise here; I was more making a nod towards the standard trope than actually proposing an answer. “The one with less earning power” is also an answer that comes to mind.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that in most jurisdictions where same-sex divorce is no longer so novel as to be singular, the tendency would be to approximate splitting assets down the middle. But I’m no more than .35 confident of that, and even that much depends on a very ad-hoc definition of “no longer so novel.”
It is probably a very bad idea for me to make my first post in reply to something that is blatantly political, on a site which quite actively discourages it, but I’m not very rational. You see, I would probably consider myself more of a liberal than a conservative. I have even attended meetings of feminist organizations, which means that I am a very irrational type of bumbling fool. Nevertheless, I assure you that I would indeed question the ethics of putting kittens in blenders. I would also question the effectiveness of putting kittens in blenders as a means to solve sexism. However, I have never seen such a position proposed before and would be rather shocked to be called an “evil sexist”, even by radical feminists who I do not tend to agree with, for opposing the practice.
Perhaps everything you say is true. Perhaps there is something in liberals that makes us more tribal than the average human being. I would freely admit to being more irrational than rational most of the time. When someone not of my tribe says something I find horrific, my emotions tend to make me go “damn their entire tribe for only they would think such things”, rather than “I disagree with the point this individual is making, though I am sure it is not held by everyone else in his tribe and I am sure there are converse examples of people who have reached the same conclusion in my tribe”.
I see that the inferences you have drawn from your experience at a large number of liberal events and a large number of conservative events have led you to the conclusion that “ONLY liberals and those that think like them seem prone to thinking “everyone is full of evil prejudice except my tribe”. I would have thought that a statement of such strength, particularly since it uses the word ONLY, would require much more than the anecdotal experiences of one individual in order to justifiably reject the null hypothesis. Perhaps you have done many statistical studies on this that I am unaware of. Perhaps you have assumed knowledge of your studies is common among Less Wrong contributors (and I would admit that the average LW contributor is smarter than me, so it’s not too much of a stretch). Indeed, you may have constructed your priors in a completely impartial manner and may indeed be completely justified in assuming the truth of your alternative hypothesis. Nevertheless, I am a little skeptical of the reliability of the methods you used for arriving at the conclusion of attributing this quality to “ONLY liberals and those who think like them”,as opposed to “MOSTLY liberals and those who think like them”
Unsurprisingly, I have a number of issues with that sentence which are not just political. The set which includes “liberals and those who think like them” is not very well defined. I imagine a liberal thinks more like a conservative than a dog thinks like a liberal or a conservative. Consequently, your set could be defined to include everything within the set “conscious human beings”, as conscious human beings are certainly things which tend to think like other human beings. However, it is very clear from context that this is not what you mean. Do libertarians think like liberals? I imagine many libertarians would say “yes, on a lot of things, but not on many other things. On other things, I tend to think like a conservative”. but, clearly, your additional qualifier of “those who think like them” was included specify that you were not talking about only liberals. Do socialists think like liberals? I imagine a conservative would often say “yes, they do. They both tend to want more government intervention”. Conversely, I think a socialist might say “no, liberals believe in private ownership of the means of production. I believe that system is inherently unjust”. The vast majority of anarchists, as the forms of anarchism which have their origins in the labour movement, i.e. those advocating social anarchism are still the most common form of anarchism from a worldwide perspective. These anarchists would in fact see themselves as thinking more like orthodox Marxists than US conservatives. They would differ very strongly over the “statist” notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but would have similar long term ends. This puts the conservative who defines his conservatism as an ideology of “less government” in contrast to liberals and socialists in an odd position. You see, if he is not of a very extreme persuasion and is a believer in western democracy in its current form, it would probably be safe to say that he thinks more like liberals and democratic socialists than he thinks like a revolutionary social anarchist. So, defining who exactly thinks like a liberal, but is not actually a liberal is not an easy task. I believe there is a great deal of literature in linguistics and the philosophy of language dealing with the concept of “like” how difficult it actually is to categorize one thing as beinglike another thing. Trying to define an agent whichthinks like another agent seems, if anything, even more difficult.
Did you perhaps come up with a technical definition of for the set of people defined as “liberal or thinks like a liberal”. Did you create questionnaires with a number of propositions associated with the ideology “liberalism” and give them to people in the circles you mentioned, so that you could, to some extent, identify those who were of the set “think like liberals” in non-liberal groups. Perhaps you used a ratio of 13 positive answers to 20 negative answers as a minimum benchmark for those who “think like[ liberals]”. Were there questions on these sheets which were similar in form to “if you could stop sexism by putting kittens in a blender, would you put kittens in a blender?” and “in such circumstances, would you treat anyone stopping you from putting kittens in a blender as the enemy?”. If people in the “liberals and those who think like them group” did answer positively to both of those questions, I would be fairly surprised.
But maybe you have just let political hyperbole get in the way of presenting a potentially more persuasive argument. There is probably a good case to be made for comparatively stronger tribal sentiments in liberals. After all, individualism is a fundamental part of modern day conservatism, but is no longer considered a key component of liberalism. Now liberals are associated with more collectivist values. Consequently, it would not be surprising if studies showed that liberals had emotionally stronger collectivist tendencies than conservatives. Indeed, I think one could be justified in assuming a prior probability of greater than .5 that more collectivist tendencies would be found in liberals than in conservatives if we use the US definition of those terms.
In conclusion, if you had just said something along the lines of “In my own experience, individuals of a liberal political persuasion tend to have stronger views concerning moral judgment of their opponents. Has anyone else noticed this or am I the only one? If not, are there probable cognitive causes behind this”? At least that would have seemed more rational. It would have seemed more like something that belongs on Less Wrong. Presenting your argument in that form might have spared you some of that negative karma. If emotions were not getting in your way, maybe you would have noticed that your argument would seem out of place on this website, particularly when you decided to capitalize EVIL PREJUDICE. You might also have realized that when your accusation levied at a political group was questioned, you merely resorted to stronger hyperbole involving kittens in blenders. Your argument had become a soldier and you decided that you should try to save it by resorting to an argument that was even more absurd and hyperbolic.
I’ve looked at some of your previous contributions and you are clearly intelligent, so I don’t doubt that you probably had a valid point to make. You just could have made it better. You must have noticed that some of your statements just don’t fit the accepted rules of discourse on this site.
I never interpreted MixedNuts’ statement as entailing that liberals have stronger tribal sentiments. Rather, I interpreted it as being that accusing others of prejudice, and jumping on people who oppose proposed solutions to combat prejudice even if the solutions aren’t very good, are distinctly liberal tribal phenomena. A comparable tribal behavior that you would be likely to see among conservatives, but unlikely to see among liberals, would be accusing people of being “unpatriotic.”
Point taken. In hindsight I also seem to have gotten a bit carried away with the above post. I would, however, hold that there are many social/political/religious groups that have a remarkable tendency to see everyone except themselves as remarkably prejudiced because their worldview is not shared. Nevertheless, continuing down this road is not likely to be very productive.
I vote that we abandon ship and shift our attentions back to topics like rationality techniques, game theory, friendly AI and meta-ethics, where we can think more clearly.
Yeah, it was probably a bad idea, but damn I enjoyed reading it.
Attending to specificity and the sneaking in of connotations has benefits that are not limited to dealing with accusations of “EVIL PREJUDICE”.
So if a minority takes the Implicitly Association Test and finds out their biased against the dominant “race” in their area, are they a Racist1, or not?
I would also really question the validity of the Implicit Association Test. It says “Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for White People compared to Black People.”, which given that blacks have been severely under-represented my social sub-culture for the last 27 years(Punk/Goth), the school I graduated from (Art School), and my professional environments (IT) for the last 20 years is probably not inaccurate.
However, it also says “Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for Herman Cain compared to Barack Obama.” Which is nonsense. I have a STRONG preference for Herman Cain over Barack Obama.
Looks like we need more “racism”s :D A common definition of racism that reflects the intuitions you bring up is “racism is prejudice plus power,” (e.g., here) which isn’t very useful from a decision-making point of view but which is very useful when looking at this racism as a functional thing experienced by the some group.
Surely one of the definitions of “racist” should contain something about thinking that some races are better than others. Or is that covered under “neo-Nazi”?
I’m pretty sure that’s covered under Racist1. Note the word “negative”.
Though it’s odd that Racist1 specifically refers to “minorities”. The entire suite seems to miss folks that favor a “minority” race.
Not really it is perfectly possible to be explicitly aware of one’s racial preferences and not really be bothered by having such preferences, at least no more than one is bothered by liking salty food or green parks, yet not be a Nazi or prone to violence.
Indeed I think a good argument can be made not only that large number of such people lived in the 19th and 20th century, but that we probably have millions of them living today in say a place like Japan.
And that they are mostly pretty decent and ok people.
Edit: Sorry! I didn’t see the later comments already covering this. :)
Negative subconscious attitudes aren’t the same thing as (though they might cause or be caused by) conscious opinions that such-and-such people are inferior in some way.
Ah yes—it’s extra-weird that someone isn’t allowed in that framework to have conscious racist opinions but not be a jerk about it.
If one has conscious racist opinions, or is conscious that one has unconscious racist opinions (has taken the IAT but doesn’t explicitly believe negative things about blacks) but doesn’t act on them, it’s probably because one doesn’t endorse them. I’d class such a person as a Racist1.
I don’t think not being an “insensitive jerk” is the same as not acting on one’s opinions.
For example, if I think that people who can’t do math shouldn’t be programmers, and I make sure to screen applicants for math skills, that’s acting on my opinions. If I make fun of people with poor math skills for not being able to get high-paying programmer jobs, that’s being an insensitive jerk.
That’s true. I was taking “racist opinions” to mean “incorrect race-related beliefs that favor one group over another”. If people who couldn’t do math were just as good at programming as people who could, and you still screened applicants for math skills, that would be a jerk move. If your race- or gender- or whatever-group-related beliefs are true, and you act on them rationally (e.g. not discriminating with a hard filter when there’s only a small difference), then you aren’t being any kind of racist by my definition.
ETA: did anyone downvote for a reason other than LocustBeamGun’s?
Not to mention a bad business decision.
That too, thanks for pointing it out.
(ETA: I didn’t downvote, but) I wouldn’t call gender differences in math “small”—the genders have similar average skills but their variances are VERY different. As in, Emmy Noether versus ~everyone else.
And if there is a great difference between groups it would be more rational to apply strong filters (except for example people who are bad at math, conveniently, aren’t likely to become programmers). Perhaps the downvoter(s) thought you only presented the anti-discrimination side of the issue.
I think in most cases the average is more important in deciding how much to discriminate. But I deleted the relevant phrase because I’m not sure about that specific case and my argument holds about the same amount of water without it as with it.
EDIT:
Huh, I was intending to say that it’s acceptable to discriminate on real existing differences, to the extent that those differences exist. Not sure how to fix my comment to make that less ambiguous, so just saying it straight out here.
Indeed. For some reason I’m not sure of, I instinctively dislike Chinese people, but I don’t endorse this dislike and try to acting upon it as little as possible (except when seeking romantic partners—I think I do get to decide what criteria to use for that).
Can you expand on the difference you see between acting on your (non-endorsed) preferences in romantic partners, and acting on those preferences in, for example, friends?
As for this specific case, I don’t happen to have any Chinese friend at the moment, so I can’t.
More generally, see some of the comments on this Robin Hanson post: not many of them seem to agree with him.
I don’t understand how not having any Chinese friends at the moment precludes you from expanding on the differences between acting on your dislike of Chinese people when seeking romantic partners and acting on it in other areas of your life, such as maintaining friendships.
Yes, the commenters on that post mostly don’t agree with him.
That said, I would summarize most of the exchange as:
”Why are we OK with A, but we have a problem with B?”
″Because A is OK and B is wrong!”
Which isn’t quite as illuminating as I might have liked.
Since I’m not maintaining any friendships with Chinese people, I can’t see what it would even mean for me to act on my dislike of Chinese people in maintaining friendships. As for ‘other areas of my life’, this means that if I attempt to interact with a Chinese-looking beggar the same way I’d behave I’d interact with an European-looking beggar, to read a paper by an author with a Chinese-sounding name the same way I’d read one by an author with (say) a Polish-sounding name, and so on. (I suspect I might have misunderstood your question, though.)
Depends on what you mean by “better”. There’s a difference between taking the data on race and IQ seriously, and wanting to commit genocide.
(blink)
Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of “better” and wanting to commit genocide?
That’s the question I was implicitly asking Oscar.
Most obvious plausible available meaning for ‘better’ that fits: “Most satisfies my average utilitarian values”.
(Yes, most brands of simple utilitarianism reduce to psychopathy—but since people still advocate them we can consider the meaning at least ‘available’.)
Fair enough.
Sure, I just thought it was weird that the definitions given barely even mentioned race.
You left out one common definition.
Also I don’t see why calling Obama the “Food Stamp President” or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a “Racist2″ unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.
I’m honestly confused. You don’t see why calling Obama a “Food Stamp President” is different from criticizing his economic policy?
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton—even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama’s economic policies.
Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.
You haven’t answered my question:
Given the way that public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States, do you think that “Food Stamp President” has the same implications as some other critique of Obama’s economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama’s race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?
“public welfare codes for both “lazy” and “black” in the United States”
Taking your word on that, what “other critique of Obama’s economic policies” are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?
A political opponent of Obama might say:
or
or
edit: or
(end edit)
without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama’s race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama’s economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.
Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as “public welfare codes for...” I don’t see how that one wouldn’t have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in “Obamacare.”
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I’ll agree that there’s no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.
The term “welfare president” has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.
Here is another example of my point that one can claim any criticism of Obama is racist if one is sufficiently motivated.
Well, yes by finding enough “code words” you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
Yes, that’s certainly true.
I’m really curious now, though. What’s your opinion about the intended connotations of the phrase “food stamp President”? Do you think it’s intended primarily as a way of describing Obama’s economic policies? His commitment to preventing hunger? His fondness for individual welfare programs? Something else?
Or, if you think the intention varies depending on the user, what connotations do you think Gingrich intended to evoke with it?
Or, if you’re unwilling to speculate as to Gingrich’s motives, what connotations do you think it evokes in a typical resident of, say, Utah or North Dakota?
The direct meaning is reference to the fact that food stamp use has soured during his presidency. For generally, a reference to his governing style which includes anti-business policies and expanding entitlements.
I’m going to be charitable and assume that by “direct meaning” you mean to refer to the intended connotations that I asked about. Thanks for the answer.
That seems improbable. To pick the first example I Googled off of the Atlantic webside: Chart of the Day: Obama’s Epic Failure on Judicial Nominees contains some substantive criticism of Obama—can you show me where it contains “code words” of this kind?
It’s not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.
I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here:
EN: By finding enough “code words” you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
RZ: What about this criticism?
EN: By declaring “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” to be racist “code words”, you can make that criticism racist.
RZ: But “epic”, “confirmation mess”, and “death blow” aren’t racist code words!
EN: Right. Neither is “food stamps”.
Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo “code word”—for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people.
I think “nigh-unfalsifiable” is unfair in general when it comes to the use of code words, but I’m not familiar with the facts of the particular case under discussion.
I agree in the general case.
In fact, I fully expect that (for example) an IAT would find stronger associations between “food stamps” and black people than between “epic” and black people, but would not find stronger associations between “food stamps” and white people than between “epic” and white people, and if I did not find that result I would have to seriously rethink my belief that “food stamps” is a dog-whistle in the particular case under discussion; it’s not unfalsifiable at all.
But I can’t figure out any way to falsify the claim that “by finding enough ‘code words’ you can make any criticism of Obama racist,” nor even the implied related claim that it’s equally easy to do so for all texts. Especially in the context of this discussion, where the experimental test isn’t actually available. All Eugene_Nier has to do is claim that arbitrarily selected words in the article you cite are equally racially charged, and claim—perhaps even sincerely—to detect no difference between the connotations of different words.
I wouldn’t actually use IAT to find these kind of connections—I would look at the use of phrases in other contexts by other people, and I would look at the reactions to the phrases in those contexts.
To take a historical example from Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson: in the 1862 riots against the draft, one of the banners that rioters carried read, “The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was”. That this allusion to the Constitution is an allusion to the legality of slavery under said Constitution is supported by one of the other banners carried by the same groups of rioters: “We won’t fight to free the nigger”. If, in 1862, a candidate for state office out in the Midwest were to repeat (or even, depending on the exact words, paraphrase) that phrase about the Constitution, I think the charge of “code word” would be well-placed.
I agree that looking at deployment of phrases is a useful way of finding code words, but it is always vulnerable to “cherry-picking.” The second banner you mentioned might or might not have been representative of the movement.
Consider the hypothetical protest filled with “Defend the Constitution, Strike Down Obamacare” posters, which should not be tainted by other posters saying “Keep government out of Medicare”(1) but it is hard to describe an ex ante principle explaining how distinctions should be made.
(1) For non-Americans: Medicare is widely popular government health insurance program for the elderly.
Agreed—it’s not a mechanical judgment.
Yup, looking at venues in which a phrase gets used is another way to establish likely connections between phrases and ideologies.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that “race” provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn’t update very well upon learning these things. For example, “X is a college graduate, and is black” doesn’t tell you all that much more than “X is a college graduate”; it’s probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.
I’m not sure that what you have in mind here is screening, at least in the causal diagrams sense. If I’m not mistaken, learning that someone is a college graduate screens off race for the purpose of predicting the causal effects of college graduation, but it doesn’t screen off race for the purpose of predicting causes of college graduation (such as intelligence) and their effects. You’re right, though, that even in the latter case learning that someone is a college graduate decreases the size of the update from learning their race. (At least given realistic assumptions. If 99% of cyan people have IQ 80 and 1% have IQ 140, and 99% of magenta people have IQ 79 and 1% have IQ 240, learning that someone is a college graduate suddenly makes it much more informative to learn their race. But that’s not the world we live in; it’s just to illustrate the statistics.)
Which are generally much harder to observe.
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one’s performance. (Though I’ve heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
Additionally, it seems that there’s a lot of ‘different justification, same conclusion’ with regards to claims about black people. For instance, “black people are inherently stupid and lazy” becomes “black people don’t have to meet the same standards for education”. The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don’t like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)
A quick google search isn’t giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who’re admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies is that they often will put someone in a slightly higher level school (say Berkeley rather than Davis) than they really should be in and which because of their background they are unprepared for. Not necessarily intellectually—they could be very bright, but in terms of things like study skills and the like.
There is sufficient data to suggest this should be looked at more thoroughly. In general it is better for someone to graduate from a “lesser” school than to drop out of a better one.
Which policies were those again? Teetotalism, something to do with faith in a greater power, apologising to folks and, let’s see… 1,2,3… at least 9 others.
(ie. I put it that “AA” doesn’t work as a credible acronym. There are at least two far more obvious meanings for “AA policies” that must be ruled out before something to do with smart children gets considered as a hypothesis.)
I apologize. I was being lazy and assumed that since it was used multiple times above that folks following the conversation would get it from context. I didn’t realize that this conversation would so disquiet some people that they would get hung up on that, rather than addressing what many people think is a moderately serious problem, if not for society, then for the students who are basically being set up to fail.
But by all means let’s first have this silly little pissing match about not being able to track abbreviations through a conversation. It’s far more important.
No slight intended and I hope you’ll pardon my tangential reply. I know you weren’t the first to introduce the acronym.
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who’ll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone’s time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate? (Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don’t hear “my father also went here” the same way as “I got in partly because of my race”, then there’s a different factor at work here.)
In the extreme case where being above a given level of competence deterministically causes graduation, you’re correct and AA makes no difference; the likelihood (but not necessarily the prior or posterior probability) of different competence levels for a college graduate is independent of race. In the extreme case where graduation is completely random, you’re wrong and AA affects the evidence provided by graduation in the same way as it affects the evidence provided by admission. Reality is likely to be somewhere in between (I’m not saying it’s in the middle).
It depends on the actual distribution of legacy and AA graduates.
I’d say that the point of admissions is less to weed out people who’ll succeed from people who’ll waste the school’s time than to weed out people who’ll reflect poorly on the status of the school. Colleges raise their status by taking better students, so their interests are served not by taking students down to the lower limit of those who can meet academic requirements, but by being as selective as they can afford to be. Schools will even lie about the test scores of students they actually accept, among other things, to be seen as more selective.
I think it’s more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they’ve been accused of. It’s not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim—I hope you’re familiar with Lee Atwater’s very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
No, they just declare each individual instance ‘racist’ no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as ‘racist’ being the most prominent example.
That’s the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like “race traitor” is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine’s phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
(N.B. that if this definition wasn’t question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
Possibly, I couldn’t quite figure out Mixed Nuts’ definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.
Well they aren’t. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:
Apart from race, isn’t this a problem with English or language in general? We use the same words for varying degrees of a certain notion, and people cherry pick the definitions that they want to cogitate for response. If I call someone a conservative, is it a compliment or an insult? That depends on both of our perceptions of the word conservative as well as our outlook on ourselves as political beings; however, beyond that, I could mean to say that the person is fiscally conservative, but as the current conservative candidates are showing conservatism to be far-right extremism, the person may think, “Hey! I’m not one of those guys.”
I think if someone wants to argue with you, you’d be hard-pressed to speak eloquently enough to provide an impenetrable phrase that does not open itself to a spectrum of interpretation.
Sure. “Conservative” isn’t a fixed political position. Quite often, it’s a claim about one’s political position: that it stands for some historical good or tradition. A “conservative” in Russia might look back to the good old days of Stalin whereas a “conservative” in the U.S. would not appreciate the comparison. It’s also a flag color; your “fiscal conservative” may merely not want to wave a flag of the same color as Rick Santorum’s.
What about a “Racist4”, someone who assign different moral values to people of different races all other things being equal?
Based on a couple interviews I’ve seen with unabashed Racist3s, I think that they would tend to fulfill that criterion.
Edit: Requesting clarification for downvote?
That would be a paleo-nazi. Not many of them around, anymore, and those that are don’t get away with much.
Why make up a new word? Paleoconservatives and smarter white nationalists (think Jared Taylor ) seem to often fit the bill.
Depends if the differences in assigned moral values are large enough they can easily approach Nazi pretty quickly. As a thought experiment consider how many dolphins would you kill to save a single person?