Being offensively cynical is not identical to being wise. If traits which lowered social status were actually considered illnesses, changing them would be covered by insurance policies.
Few traits that determine social status are easy to manipulate. Those that are tend to get universally manipulated away, and nobody even thinks about them much.
For example for some reasons in this culture strong natural body smell decreases social status significantly. And because it’s so easy to manipulate, virtually everyone fixes this problem with regular showers, deodorants and such, to the point where it’s rare to find a person who doesn’t.
After all the easy ones get manipulated by everyone, the only determinants of social status that differentiate people are those that are difficult to manipulate—like being poor, or short, or ugly, or black. The situation only changes when technology makes manipulation easier, or signals change for any reason.
Few traits that determine social status are easy to manipulate.
You appear to have a single-scale, and thus completely inaccurate, concept of social status. I’d hesitate to label anything as “offensive,” because I don’t really believe in offense, but you appear to be seriously naive and misinformed if your comments here are intended even slightly seriously.
One of the strongest markers of social status is diction and pronunciation. It is not a perfect indicator, but one can often deduce someone’s social status from two minutes of conversation, simply by what words they use, the quality of their grammar, if they use expletives in casual conversation, if they have an accent, and other related indicators.
Diction is fairly easy to manipulate, particularly in childhood. People are nonetheless extremely resistant to changing their diction. Try correcting the grammar of anyone over six and see how it goes. Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups. If you speak like you went to Eton in the rural south, you are going have trouble fitting in with the local social order. If you speak like you’re from the rural South at Eton, you’re likely to have the same problem. Thus, there is clear evidence that there is a manipulable and powerful indicator of social status that does not get manipulated, principally because it is unlikely to improve social status within a selected peer group, and thus is seen as a part of a person’s identity.
This objection applies to your statement about race generally generally. An individual’s race does not affect their social status objectively or in a specific direction. Many non-whites derive higher status within their existing social circle due to their race. This is emphatically not confined to low-status individuals; I grudgingly use Clarence Thomas as a rather obvious demonstration of this fact—he would never have attained such an important and respectable position without being black.
The idea that an innate trait shared by millions of people that often forms a key part of their identities would be voluntarily altered were the opportunity provided suggests, first, that you do not know many black people, and, second, that you have an extremely oversimplified and naive view of race, culture, and social status.
Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups.
Tangent: This can be played for laughs. I recall a scene in the TV show Weeds in which a black marijuana grower is asking a black friend for a favor in the latter’s business-y place of work. The friend’s white boss sticks his head in the room to ask for a report, and the friend’s accent subtly shifts when replying to the request. After the boss leaves, the grower snerks at his friend for talking white.
I appreciate the link, but this isn’t a matter of whether being black lowers social status—what I disputed is the original assertion that illness is defined by the effect on social status.
You’re right that most people will undergo procedures to eliminate undesirable traits and create or enhance desirable ones—your body odor example is apt—but that’s a lifestyle choice.
It seems there’s a misunderstanding here. I was talking about sufficient, not necessary conditions. There are obviously proper types of “illness” like cancer, flu, and such.
And on top of that, treatable things that lower social status, are very often added to the list. Can you think of many counterexamples?
To be quite frank, my chief objection was that expressions like “such-and-such is a disease” have been cover for prejudices in the past—for example, regarding homosexuality. But more to the point, race is seen as an intrinsic property of the person which cannot be eliminated even if the actual markers of race are eliminated (witness the one-sixteenth rules) - which would make it a genetic disorder which can only be managed, not eliminated. A “blackness” which is treatable is so different from the modern, Western sociological phenomenon we call “race” that it doesn’t make sense to talk about it.
So it’s a poor example that makes people uncomfortable, in sum.
Few traits that determine social status are easy to manipulate.
You appear to have a single-scale, and thus completely inaccurate, concept of social status. I’d hesitate to label anything as “offensive,” because I don’t really believe in offense, but you appear to be seriously naive and misinformed if your comments here are intended even slightly seriously.
One of the strongest markers of social status is diction and pronunciation. It is not a perfect indicator, but one can often deduce someone’s social status from two minutes of conversation, simply by what words they use, the quality of their grammar, if they use expletives in casual conversation, if they have an accent, and other related indicators.
Diction is fairly easy to manipulate, particularly in childhood. People are nonetheless extremely resistant to changing their diction. Try correcting the grammar of anyone over six and see how it goes. Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups. If you speak like you went to Eton in the rural south, you are going have trouble fitting in with the local social order. If you speak like you’re from the rural South at Eton, you’re likely to have the same problem. Thus, there is clear evidence that there is a manipulable and powerful indicator of social status that does not get manipulated, principally because it is unlikely to improve social status within a selected peer group, and thus is seen as a part of a person’s identity.
This objection applies to your statement about race generally generally. An individual’s race does not affect their social status objectively or in a specific direction. Many non-whites derive higher status within their existing social circle due to their race. This is emphatically not confined to low-status individuals; I grudgingly use Clarence Thomas as a rather obvious demonstration of this fact—he would never have attained such an important and respectable position without being black.
The idea that an innate trait shared by millions of people that often forms a key part of their identities would be voluntarily altered were the opportunity provided suggests, first, that you do not know many black people, and, second, that you have an extremely oversimplified and naive view of race, culture, and social status.
In case you don’t believe being black lowers your social status in this culture, even four year old black children know it.
I’d like to see that experiment replicated in South-Saharan Africa, where “albinos” (white people) are persecuted as witches and said to have magical powers.
Being albino is completely unrelated to being “White”. “White” and “Black” are not skin albedo designations, it’s purely coincidental that they sound like that.
I’m sure if blackness could be treated, it would be consider an illness.
Does anyone remember a scene from the short-lived tv show Gideon’s Crossing? I never watched it, but they hyped one episode ad nauseum by showing this one very relevant clip, which remember as follows:
A black doctor is trying convince a deaf woman to let her daughter get cochlear implants to cure her deafness.
Mother: You’re saying that hearing people are better than deaf people.
Doctor: No, I’m saying it’s easier.
Mother: Would your life be easier if you were white?
I don’t think it’s just social status. I’m thinking of Ashley X as an example of this—her size and reproductive status don’t seem to have anything to do with her social standing.
It did, but outside the disability activism area is itself a very large space that different people will be familiar with different parts of. There is no common culture; it’s almost surprising the extent to which we (think we) can even talk to each other.
No it wouldn’t. You’re crazy if you really think this. Anyone who tried to classify blackness as an illness would immediately be called racist (accurately) and become a hated social pariah, like a neo-nazi.
Anyone who espoused that view openly, sure. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, in ways that weren’t considered socially unacceptable. Looking ‘more’ black is already fairly widely ‘treated’ on an individual level by cosmetics and hair treatments, from what I’ve read, and that doesn’t get much outcry. I’ve also read that ‘more black-looking’ black people have trouble finding mates, even among the black community. If that’s accurate (and I have no idea, honestly) it could also be counted as another form of ‘treatment’, in a long term sense, by way of natural(?) selection.
Push to get rid of their low status traits usually comes from low status people, or parents who don’t want their children to stay low status (or people who sell them the treatment).
People already use some highly harmful substances to make their skin paler. Paler skin requires doesn’t give even a tiny fraction of benefits of being really “white”, and side effects are far greater than what I proposed. By extrapolation if there was a magic pill you could take to make yourself permanently Caucasian without any significant side effects, plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly. Of course we are unlikely to see this being tested, as such procedure seems unlikely to occur.
Except the reasoning on the OkCupid blog is completely worthless because of this little note:
We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.
In other words, they fucking control for physical attractiveness. If men found e.g. Black women more physically attractive en masse, their charts wouldn’t reflect that. What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.
What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.
Perhaps either falsification in beauty rankings (‘that black chick isn’t too hot, but for a black chick she’s pretty good, so I will give her a high rating even though I’d likely ignore her’), or the exact opposite (“she’s hot, but I’d rather an equally hot white chick”); oh the irony...
Why in the world does this make it worthless? They’ve discovered an effect above and beyond any possible aesthetic trends in the assorted races; if they hadn’t included that control, the data could be written off with “well, maybe white men are just all so ridiculously attractive, of course people write them back”.
If you want to predict someone’s actual response rate, the model is fine—you can get an accurate prediction by plugging in that person’s information into the model, provided they’re in the attractiveness stratum of the data pool used to fit the model. But for OkCupid’s claimed causal inference, we’re interested in counterfactual inquiries like, “What sort of response rate would black woman X get if she were white?” But we can’t twiddle just the race variable in the model to get the answer: if X were white, her attractiveness rating would be different too, and she might end up in a different stratum than the one addressed by the model. Since there are no results for that counterfactual stratum, the model cannot address the counterfactual, i.e., it can’t be used to make causal claims.
The problem is that if you’re trying to detect racism, the variables you’re controlling for had better be independent of racism, which in this case they obviously aren’t. Actual racism could go either way and still be consistent with their findings. At the very least I’d like to see the data before and after applying the control; this would give us more information, but probably wouldn’t let the OkCupid team make sweeping generalizations about me like “White guys are shitty” (actual quote).
Attractiveness is wildly subjective. If people find the features of minority races to be less attractive than the features of white people, that just is a type of racism. Any possible objective standard of physical attractiveness (candidates include symmetry, youth, koinophilia relative to the world population, health) would have only the weakest possible correlation with race.
Nearby in this thread, gwern gave an example of how an attractiveness rating can be influenced by factors other than actual subjective attractiveness to the rater… and how those factors can be related to, yes, race. If after reading his comment you’ll still think you know an unambiguous way to interpret the post-control data that OkCupid published, I’d really like to hear it. To me the whole situation looks more like a trainwreck.
They also ignore massive selection effects. Most significant, and obvious, is the fact that most OKCupid users are white. If I were a black or Asian person interested only in other people of my race, it would be much wiser for me to find a site dedicated to finding people of my race, which exist. If I’m white and I only want to date white people, there are so many that I’ll be just fine.
They were measuring person-attractiveness, not picture-attractiveness.
Reply rates depend on what person’s profile says, how they act in messaging etc. A black person with similar picture-attractiveness and height will be much less overall attractive than a white person.
Feel free to ask them for uncorrected data, or picture-attractiveness by race, the effect might very well turn out to be even stronger.
There are certainly some blacks who value lighter skin and straighter hair, but saying that they really want to become white makes as much sense as saying that a white woman who gets a tan really wants to become black. Two other major problems:
plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
This does not follow. It would depend on what subgroup took it and which did not. I also think you seriously need to go talk to some actual black people before you make this claim.
There’s earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you’re “Black”. It’s naive to think that people would stay “Black” voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.
You assume that, holding all else constant, but changing people’s skin color, all these things would go away. This actually sounds like cartoonish, 18th-century-style racism to me. I would love to see some theoretical description of the problems faced by blacks such that merely changing their skin color/facial features would solve most or all of these problems—I rather believe they’re caused by complex social, cultural, and economic factors that are ultimately independent of race. You could carve out a subsection of whites with similar characteristics, if you picked the right selection criteria.
Using cosmetics to lighten skin is NOT the same as trying to “heal blackness”. White people often darken their skin with chemicals (sunless tanning). This is NOT because they don’t want to be white, or because they are trying to “heal whiteness”. This is just a cosmetic change. In the United States at least, blackness is a boolean data type. You either are black or not. Being 25% black=Black all the way. Lightening skin is not about decreasing blackness.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
I’m glad you’re mentioning it, I didn’t as I thought it was far too clear the opposite way.
So, in spite of very high cost (estimated $45k-$105k) of cochlear implants, very low quality of sound (described by some as human language sounding like “a croaking dalek with laryngitis”), requirement of surgery with possibility of complications, unpredictability of results, very short battery life (1-3 days), requirement of bulky external equipment (this problem is getting gradually solved) etc., popularity of cochlear implants exploded from 49k users worldwide in 2002 to 150k users in 2008.
I’d be willing to bet any money in prediction markets at imminent death of the “deaf culture” in a few generations (or for practical reasons some proxy like popularity of cochlear implants, percentage of deaf children in developing country learning sign languages etc.)
Some people from the “deaf culture” are protesting because they built their identity on this back when it was not treatable (so “not an illness”). Now as it’s treatable it’s considered an illness by the society, most importantly by parents of deaf children, and people who recently lost hearing. That’s exactly the shift I predicted.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white
Not to spam it everywhere, but here’s an exchange that summarizes the parallels between the two cases.
Note that this happened with, for instance, Italian immigrants to the US. There was a huge industry in teaching immigrants to look/act/talk more like Americans. This probably resulted from anti-Italian discrimination, especially during WWII.
Functionally? As far as I can tell, it’s when the majority of people (or, people with power over the people in question) decide they prefer people without that trait.
But when it comes to traits that determine social status, people benefit from keeping lower status people—lower status. For instance, I wouldn’t want anyone shorter than me—that I don’t care about—becoming any taller; that puts me at a disadvantage.
I think a better way to determine a treatable defect: When the majority of people feel sorry for you because of the traits you have and therefore feel compelled to treat those traits. [I believe you’re saying the same thing, but I added the sympathy part]. This raises the issue of what traits should reach this threshold of sympathy. As we know, a human emotion is not the best marker for doing the utilitarian thing to do. There must be a different, more objective metric that determines what a defect is.
But when it comes to traits that determine social status, people benefit from keeping lower status people—lower status. For instance, I wouldn’t want anyone shorter than me—that I don’t care about—becoming any taller; that puts me at a disadvantage.
That would be true if shorter people were a large subcommunity, or if short stature was correlated with other status-relevant traits. But when only the shortest 1-2% people are treated, and their new height isn’t above average, most people’s status shouldn’t be negatively affected enough to notice.
The people whose status would be affected are those who are significantly short, but not short enough to qualify for treatment (funded by society). This might depend on the exact shape of the height distribution curve...
his might depend on the exact shape of the height distribution curve...
Right. It could be that increasing the height of the bottom 1-2% by a notable difference will get them to be as tall as, say, 5% of men i.e. negatively affecting 5% of men, in exchange for helping 1-2%. It’s not clear whether the trade-off will be worth it.
Er… the lowest 1-2% is a subset of the lowest 5%. So they’d actually be helping 1-2% at the expense of 3-4%.
You’re also assuming that height is judged on a percentile basis—that being one of the shortest 1% is bad regardless of how different that is from the average height—and I’m not at all sure that’s accurate. It seems much more likely to me that height is judged relative to the judger’s height, so a 6“ difference is a 6” difference (with variations between how different people react to a 6″ difference, of course) regardless of whether there are many, few, or no shorter people in the population. This is purely theoretical (I’m not sure it stands up to being thought of in terms of how people are socialized to react to each other), but my point is really that there are several ways the height difference issue could actually work.
How do you determine when something becomes a defect i.e. treatable condition?
If it lowers your social status, and can be treated, it’s treatable condition.
I’m sure if blackness could be treated, it would be consider an illness.
Being offensively cynical is not identical to being wise. If traits which lowered social status were actually considered illnesses, changing them would be covered by insurance policies.
Few traits that determine social status are easy to manipulate. Those that are tend to get universally manipulated away, and nobody even thinks about them much.
For example for some reasons in this culture strong natural body smell decreases social status significantly. And because it’s so easy to manipulate, virtually everyone fixes this problem with regular showers, deodorants and such, to the point where it’s rare to find a person who doesn’t.
After all the easy ones get manipulated by everyone, the only determinants of social status that differentiate people are those that are difficult to manipulate—like being poor, or short, or ugly, or black. The situation only changes when technology makes manipulation easier, or signals change for any reason.
In case you don’t believe being black lowers your social status in this culture, even four year old black children know it.
You appear to have a single-scale, and thus completely inaccurate, concept of social status. I’d hesitate to label anything as “offensive,” because I don’t really believe in offense, but you appear to be seriously naive and misinformed if your comments here are intended even slightly seriously.
One of the strongest markers of social status is diction and pronunciation. It is not a perfect indicator, but one can often deduce someone’s social status from two minutes of conversation, simply by what words they use, the quality of their grammar, if they use expletives in casual conversation, if they have an accent, and other related indicators.
Diction is fairly easy to manipulate, particularly in childhood. People are nonetheless extremely resistant to changing their diction. Try correcting the grammar of anyone over six and see how it goes. Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups. If you speak like you went to Eton in the rural south, you are going have trouble fitting in with the local social order. If you speak like you’re from the rural South at Eton, you’re likely to have the same problem. Thus, there is clear evidence that there is a manipulable and powerful indicator of social status that does not get manipulated, principally because it is unlikely to improve social status within a selected peer group, and thus is seen as a part of a person’s identity.
This objection applies to your statement about race generally generally. An individual’s race does not affect their social status objectively or in a specific direction. Many non-whites derive higher status within their existing social circle due to their race. This is emphatically not confined to low-status individuals; I grudgingly use Clarence Thomas as a rather obvious demonstration of this fact—he would never have attained such an important and respectable position without being black.
The idea that an innate trait shared by millions of people that often forms a key part of their identities would be voluntarily altered were the opportunity provided suggests, first, that you do not know many black people, and, second, that you have an extremely oversimplified and naive view of race, culture, and social status.
Tangent: This can be played for laughs. I recall a scene in the TV show Weeds in which a black marijuana grower is asking a black friend for a favor in the latter’s business-y place of work. The friend’s white boss sticks his head in the room to ask for a report, and the friend’s accent subtly shifts when replying to the request. After the boss leaves, the grower snerks at his friend for talking white.
I appreciate the link, but this isn’t a matter of whether being black lowers social status—what I disputed is the original assertion that illness is defined by the effect on social status.
You’re right that most people will undergo procedures to eliminate undesirable traits and create or enhance desirable ones—your body odor example is apt—but that’s a lifestyle choice.
It seems there’s a misunderstanding here. I was talking about sufficient, not necessary conditions. There are obviously proper types of “illness” like cancer, flu, and such.
And on top of that, treatable things that lower social status, are very often added to the list. Can you think of many counterexamples?
To be quite frank, my chief objection was that expressions like “such-and-such is a disease” have been cover for prejudices in the past—for example, regarding homosexuality. But more to the point, race is seen as an intrinsic property of the person which cannot be eliminated even if the actual markers of race are eliminated (witness the one-sixteenth rules) - which would make it a genetic disorder which can only be managed, not eliminated. A “blackness” which is treatable is so different from the modern, Western sociological phenomenon we call “race” that it doesn’t make sense to talk about it.
So it’s a poor example that makes people uncomfortable, in sum.
You appear to have a single-scale, and thus completely inaccurate, concept of social status. I’d hesitate to label anything as “offensive,” because I don’t really believe in offense, but you appear to be seriously naive and misinformed if your comments here are intended even slightly seriously.
One of the strongest markers of social status is diction and pronunciation. It is not a perfect indicator, but one can often deduce someone’s social status from two minutes of conversation, simply by what words they use, the quality of their grammar, if they use expletives in casual conversation, if they have an accent, and other related indicators.
Diction is fairly easy to manipulate, particularly in childhood. People are nonetheless extremely resistant to changing their diction. Try correcting the grammar of anyone over six and see how it goes. Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups. If you speak like you went to Eton in the rural south, you are going have trouble fitting in with the local social order. If you speak like you’re from the rural South at Eton, you’re likely to have the same problem. Thus, there is clear evidence that there is a manipulable and powerful indicator of social status that does not get manipulated, principally because it is unlikely to improve social status within a selected peer group, and thus is seen as a part of a person’s identity.
This objection applies to your statement about race generally generally. An individual’s race does not affect their social status objectively or in a specific direction. Many non-whites derive higher status within their existing social circle due to their race. This is emphatically not confined to low-status individuals; I grudgingly use Clarence Thomas as a rather obvious demonstration of this fact—he would never have attained such an important and respectable position without being black.
The idea that an innate trait shared by millions of people that often forms a key part of their identities would be voluntarily altered were the opportunity provided suggests, first, that you do not know many black people, and, second, that you have an extremely oversimplified and naive view of race, culture, and social status.
I’d like to see that experiment replicated in South-Saharan Africa, where “albinos” (white people) are persecuted as witches and said to have magical powers.
Being albino is completely unrelated to being “White”. “White” and “Black” are not skin albedo designations, it’s purely coincidental that they sound like that.
I don’t know if “purely coincidental” is the right way to characterize that, but yeah, you can have an albino of any racial extraction.
Indeed.
Every time I look at those albino black people, I think how creepy! And realize again how race is wired into my mind.
I think you just expressed the key insight here. If it’s an illness, someone else pays for the treatment.
You don’t even need the social status argument. You can just say, “Being black lowers your life expectancy.”
On a similar note, men are all also terribly, terribly ill...
Usually when you sort people by social status, you will see effect on life expectancy. This seems to be true for height too.
It’s also been suggested to be a significant part of why overweight people have more health problems.
Does anyone remember a scene from the short-lived tv show Gideon’s Crossing? I never watched it, but they hyped one episode ad nauseum by showing this one very relevant clip, which remember as follows:
A black doctor is trying convince a deaf woman to let her daughter get cochlear implants to cure her deafness.
Mother: You’re saying that hearing people are better than deaf people.
Doctor: No, I’m saying it’s easier.
Mother: Would your life be easier if you were white?
I don’t think it’s just social status. I’m thinking of Ashley X as an example of this—her size and reproductive status don’t seem to have anything to do with her social standing.
Who? Is that a member here we’re all supposed to be aware of?
I’m assuming it’s this Ashley X, who I hadn’t heard of before a cursory Google search.
Yep, sorry, I’d assumed that’d made the news outside the disability activism arena. My bad.
It did, but outside the disability activism area is itself a very large space that different people will be familiar with different parts of. There is no common culture; it’s almost surprising the extent to which we (think we) can even talk to each other.
No it wouldn’t. You’re crazy if you really think this. Anyone who tried to classify blackness as an illness would immediately be called racist (accurately) and become a hated social pariah, like a neo-nazi.
Anyone who espoused that view openly, sure. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, in ways that weren’t considered socially unacceptable. Looking ‘more’ black is already fairly widely ‘treated’ on an individual level by cosmetics and hair treatments, from what I’ve read, and that doesn’t get much outcry. I’ve also read that ‘more black-looking’ black people have trouble finding mates, even among the black community. If that’s accurate (and I have no idea, honestly) it could also be counted as another form of ‘treatment’, in a long term sense, by way of natural(?) selection.
Push to get rid of their low status traits usually comes from low status people, or parents who don’t want their children to stay low status (or people who sell them the treatment).
People already use some highly harmful substances to make their skin paler. Paler skin requires doesn’t give even a tiny fraction of benefits of being really “white”, and side effects are far greater than what I proposed. By extrapolation if there was a magic pill you could take to make yourself permanently Caucasian without any significant side effects, plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly. Of course we are unlikely to see this being tested, as such procedure seems unlikely to occur.
Here’s data on how being “White” as opposed to “Black” drastically increases your mate selection opportunities. There’s earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you’re “Black”. It’s naive to think that people would stay “Black” voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.
Except the reasoning on the OkCupid blog is completely worthless because of this little note:
In other words, they fucking control for physical attractiveness. If men found e.g. Black women more physically attractive en masse, their charts wouldn’t reflect that. What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.
Perhaps either falsification in beauty rankings (‘that black chick isn’t too hot, but for a black chick she’s pretty good, so I will give her a high rating even though I’d likely ignore her’), or the exact opposite (“she’s hot, but I’d rather an equally hot white chick”); oh the irony...
...Wow, that’s another great catch. I really should’ve thought of that one myself. Kudos.
OkCupid, are you here? Are you listening? =)
People don’t just look at pictures when they decide if they’re attracted to someone, and correction was only for picture attractiveness.
Why in the world does this make it worthless? They’ve discovered an effect above and beyond any possible aesthetic trends in the assorted races; if they hadn’t included that control, the data could be written off with “well, maybe white men are just all so ridiculously attractive, of course people write them back”.
If you want to predict someone’s actual response rate, the model is fine—you can get an accurate prediction by plugging in that person’s information into the model, provided they’re in the attractiveness stratum of the data pool used to fit the model. But for OkCupid’s claimed causal inference, we’re interested in counterfactual inquiries like, “What sort of response rate would black woman X get if she were white?” But we can’t twiddle just the race variable in the model to get the answer: if X were white, her attractiveness rating would be different too, and she might end up in a different stratum than the one addressed by the model. Since there are no results for that counterfactual stratum, the model cannot address the counterfactual, i.e., it can’t be used to make causal claims.
ETA: Andrew Gelman calls this the fallacy of controlling for an intermediate outcome.
Thanks for the link, that description applies to OkCupid’s analysis perfectly.
The problem is that if you’re trying to detect racism, the variables you’re controlling for had better be independent of racism, which in this case they obviously aren’t. Actual racism could go either way and still be consistent with their findings. At the very least I’d like to see the data before and after applying the control; this would give us more information, but probably wouldn’t let the OkCupid team make sweeping generalizations about me like “White guys are shitty” (actual quote).
Attractiveness is wildly subjective. If people find the features of minority races to be less attractive than the features of white people, that just is a type of racism. Any possible objective standard of physical attractiveness (candidates include symmetry, youth, koinophilia relative to the world population, health) would have only the weakest possible correlation with race.
Nearby in this thread, gwern gave an example of how an attractiveness rating can be influenced by factors other than actual subjective attractiveness to the rater… and how those factors can be related to, yes, race. If after reading his comment you’ll still think you know an unambiguous way to interpret the post-control data that OkCupid published, I’d really like to hear it. To me the whole situation looks more like a trainwreck.
They also ignore massive selection effects. Most significant, and obvious, is the fact that most OKCupid users are white. If I were a black or Asian person interested only in other people of my race, it would be much wiser for me to find a site dedicated to finding people of my race, which exist. If I’m white and I only want to date white people, there are so many that I’ll be just fine.
They were measuring person-attractiveness, not picture-attractiveness.
Reply rates depend on what person’s profile says, how they act in messaging etc. A black person with similar picture-attractiveness and height will be much less overall attractive than a white person.
Feel free to ask them for uncorrected data, or picture-attractiveness by race, the effect might very well turn out to be even stronger.
Nice catch!
There are certainly some blacks who value lighter skin and straighter hair, but saying that they really want to become white makes as much sense as saying that a white woman who gets a tan really wants to become black. Two other major problems:
This does not follow. It would depend on what subgroup took it and which did not. I also think you seriously need to go talk to some actual black people before you make this claim.
You assume that, holding all else constant, but changing people’s skin color, all these things would go away. This actually sounds like cartoonish, 18th-century-style racism to me. I would love to see some theoretical description of the problems faced by blacks such that merely changing their skin color/facial features would solve most or all of these problems—I rather believe they’re caused by complex social, cultural, and economic factors that are ultimately independent of race. You could carve out a subsection of whites with similar characteristics, if you picked the right selection criteria.
Allow me to suggest “rednecks” as a candidate.
Using cosmetics to lighten skin is NOT the same as trying to “heal blackness”. White people often darken their skin with chemicals (sunless tanning). This is NOT because they don’t want to be white, or because they are trying to “heal whiteness”. This is just a cosmetic change. In the United States at least, blackness is a boolean data type. You either are black or not. Being 25% black=Black all the way. Lightening skin is not about decreasing blackness.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
I’m glad you’re mentioning it, I didn’t as I thought it was far too clear the opposite way.
So, in spite of very high cost (estimated $45k-$105k) of cochlear implants, very low quality of sound (described by some as human language sounding like “a croaking dalek with laryngitis”), requirement of surgery with possibility of complications, unpredictability of results, very short battery life (1-3 days), requirement of bulky external equipment (this problem is getting gradually solved) etc., popularity of cochlear implants exploded from 49k users worldwide in 2002 to 150k users in 2008.
I’d be willing to bet any money in prediction markets at imminent death of the “deaf culture” in a few generations (or for practical reasons some proxy like popularity of cochlear implants, percentage of deaf children in developing country learning sign languages etc.)
Some people from the “deaf culture” are protesting because they built their identity on this back when it was not treatable (so “not an illness”). Now as it’s treatable it’s considered an illness by the society, most importantly by parents of deaf children, and people who recently lost hearing. That’s exactly the shift I predicted.
Really?
Then again...
Not to spam it everywhere, but here’s an exchange that summarizes the parallels between the two cases.
Note that this happened with, for instance, Italian immigrants to the US. There was a huge industry in teaching immigrants to look/act/talk more like Americans. This probably resulted from anti-Italian discrimination, especially during WWII.
Functionally? As far as I can tell, it’s when the majority of people (or, people with power over the people in question) decide they prefer people without that trait.
But when it comes to traits that determine social status, people benefit from keeping lower status people—lower status. For instance, I wouldn’t want anyone shorter than me—that I don’t care about—becoming any taller; that puts me at a disadvantage.
I think a better way to determine a treatable defect: When the majority of people feel sorry for you because of the traits you have and therefore feel compelled to treat those traits. [I believe you’re saying the same thing, but I added the sympathy part]. This raises the issue of what traits should reach this threshold of sympathy. As we know, a human emotion is not the best marker for doing the utilitarian thing to do. There must be a different, more objective metric that determines what a defect is.
That would be true if shorter people were a large subcommunity, or if short stature was correlated with other status-relevant traits. But when only the shortest 1-2% people are treated, and their new height isn’t above average, most people’s status shouldn’t be negatively affected enough to notice.
The people whose status would be affected are those who are significantly short, but not short enough to qualify for treatment (funded by society). This might depend on the exact shape of the height distribution curve...
Right. It could be that increasing the height of the bottom 1-2% by a notable difference will get them to be as tall as, say, 5% of men i.e. negatively affecting 5% of men, in exchange for helping 1-2%. It’s not clear whether the trade-off will be worth it.
Er… the lowest 1-2% is a subset of the lowest 5%. So they’d actually be helping 1-2% at the expense of 3-4%.
You’re also assuming that height is judged on a percentile basis—that being one of the shortest 1% is bad regardless of how different that is from the average height—and I’m not at all sure that’s accurate. It seems much more likely to me that height is judged relative to the judger’s height, so a 6“ difference is a 6” difference (with variations between how different people react to a 6″ difference, of course) regardless of whether there are many, few, or no shorter people in the population. This is purely theoretical (I’m not sure it stands up to being thought of in terms of how people are socialized to react to each other), but my point is really that there are several ways the height difference issue could actually work.
I said “5% of men” not “the bottom 5% of men.”