I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I’ve read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I’ve asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it’s not obvious to me that it’s impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn’t identical to the same total ill effect.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I’m very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like.
This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they’ve dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I’m aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.
Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.
Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I’m aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.
That’s a reasonable point—but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don’t have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
That’s probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan.
Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I’m not sure we’ve really hit that point that substantially.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like.
I’m not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don’t have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I’d consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help—but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don’t seem to have that, either. Humans just aren’t automatically strategic.
My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail—it felt like being on the receiving end of “I can’t explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I’m going to keep attacking until I feel better”.
This does not mean they were totally in the wrong—one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers—abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
This sounds like “I wouldn’t use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur.” Would you agree with that restatement?
Fair enough, yes. My use of the word obligation tends to revolve strictly around the personal, so I can see why you’d prefer this version if you use the word in the more typical sense. (Sorry about the confusion. I tend towards egoism, and have a tendency to redefine words to fit the philosophy.)
That would only work if the abuser would prefer not to be abusive. (One characteristic of many abusive relationships is that the abuser gets angry regardless of what the victim actually does—there really isn’t any way to avoid making them mad and “triggering” more abuse.)
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn’t that people’s system I has ‘racist’ aliefs, it’s that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
I’ve written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don’t matter—where they’re considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven’t really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that’s what I’d consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of ‘skin dyes’ for aesthetic purposes.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense—white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn’t just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you’d need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons—it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
I don’t understand what you mean by “matter.” People don’t care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn’t seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
That depends on what you mean by “strongly.” I would tentatively posit that even if race isn’t strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don’t know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I’ve recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled “racism” is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don’t really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that’s really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person’s race might tell you “I can get away with this”).
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
People are usually not “exactly correct” about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?
Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.
Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?
I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it’d be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier’s assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.
Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much “racist” as what we have today. (I don’t have a high confidence in this number, I just though it would be fair to write my opinion if I am asking about yours.) So cca 30% of the racism can be explained by people updating incorrectly, but that still leaves the remaining 70% to be explained otherwise. Therefore focusing on the incorrect updates misses the greater part of the whole story.
I think that affirmative action hurts both ways. And it also keeps the feeling of resentment alive, which again hurts people.
As a simple example, in my country most people in IT are male. So on one hand you have the “prejudice” that women in general are not good with computers, but on the other hand, if you meet a female programmer, you know that she specifically is good enough. She passed the filter.
I imagine that in an alternative reality where IT companies would be legally required to have 50% female programmers, the “prejudice” would expand, and it would say that women programmers are not good with computers. A female programmer would have to work harder to pass the filter. Even participating in a successful project would not be enough, because others would think that the males in her team did most of the work, and she was there mostly for political reasons. To prove herself, she would have to win some programming competition (and tell everyone about it). But those who can do it, they have no problem finding a programming job in our world, too.
Affirmative action would work best if you could legislate it and make everyone forget that it exists. Perhaps legislating it and making taboo of discussing it openly, is a step in this direction. Still, if the differences in abilities are real, people will notice the result, even if they are not informed about the causes.
In the alternative reality where IT companies are legally required to have 50% women programmers, and the law is successfully kept secret from everyone except the HR departments, programmers would still notice the differences in their colleagues’ skills. Although… this knowledge would exist only among the programmers, because only they see it firsthand. You could still convince the public that what the programmers see is not real, that it is merely their sexism.
So now I think that social enginnerings of this kind are successful only if people are prevented from discussing them openly. Even a lie told with good intentions makes the truth forever your enemy. Of course that makes it difficult to evaluate whether the policy really helps or not.
I’d have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties.
My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.
Who’s “focusing”? I would argue, if we take your numbers, that the incorrect 30% are disproportionately problematic compared to the remaining 70%, and that there are other, non-epistemic problems involved in racism. Eugine_Nier said that “the problem” is the 70%. That’s the disagreement that’s going on here. My claim is not that modern-day racism is on average a greater distortion of the facts than an inability to perceive race would be.
There are at least two confounding factors for the crime statistics. One is that the justice system is pretty sloppy, and more so for black men. Another is that even if your crime statistics are accurate, it’s hard to identify a criminal’s exact motives. Was a beating part of a robbery? Was it a simple attack initiated by one side, or was it a quarrel that escalated?
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I’d assign over 70% assuming he’s completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn’t as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I’ve noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn’t particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it’s strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I’ll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He’s way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers—the younger one’s father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he’s speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is?
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race.
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I’d expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
That is a necessary prerequisite, yes. As long as such an actual correlation is in place, it will be observed and will result in a perceived correlation.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I’d be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
criminality
Citation?
Again, I suspect—though I’m not certain—that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
It sounds like you’re using the word “correlation” to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; “correlation” just refers to certain kinds of association.
It’s trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you’re getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
The hereditarian model of Black–White IQ differences proposed in Section 2 (50% genetic and 50% environmental), far from precluding environmental factors, requires they be found. Although evidence in Sections 3 to 11 provided strong support for the genetic component of the model, evidence from Section 12 was unable to identify the environmental component. On the basis of the present evidence, perhaps the genetic component must be given greater weight and the environmental component correspondingly reduced.
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you’re asking for.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look “prettier”? I’m not sure that’s the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn’t matter.
I’m thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I’m thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he “really” black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
Skin colour is a red herring. Race is was originally about rich people with empires and status justifying their success as inevitable and righteous, and still is about their descendants justifying living off the inheritance of empires (and off plundering the bounty of continents already in use by other people). Race-like oppressions can exist where there is no visible distinction (burakumin in Japan). “Where do your family come from?”. Colour blindness (dye or otherwise) without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
That’s one conclusion—but there’s a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.
In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven’t found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I’d be sorely tempted to use it.
That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.
Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don’t think it’s a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.
As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a “wierdtopia”. Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer suddenly transported to contemporary New York. Feminism is slowed by feminists dragging their feet. Anti-racism is slowed by anti-racists who shy away from how much wealth and resources and control of the future they’d have to give back.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
And as for weirdtopia, in some ways we’re already there. It took me three or four years to stop thinking that having gay marriage as a serious political issue wasn’t something out of 1950s satirical science fiction. I was never opposed to it, just surprised that it ever got on the agenda.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
Uh.
This might be an outside context problem.
I see people talk about that plenty—I’ve been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They’re usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.
Also, we may be talking about somewhat different things—do the groups you mention talk about it as a goal, or do they ever talk about having succeeded, even for moderate periods of time?
The groups in question had it as just a basic matter of operating policy. It was often a balancing act, and it wasn’t without hiccups, but it worked pretty well. Example: A support group at which I facilitated for a while; the going approach was “safer space”: they knew they couldn’t ensure it was safe, full stop, for everybody in all situations—safety in this context being construed as “a buncha different people from a bunch of different backgrounds with varying experiences of oppression need to use this space, and they won’t always speak each other’s language about that, and we want to minimize the sense that this place is a hostile environment.”
It usually ran pretty smoothly. I can only recall one person who really ran afoul of it, and they did blatantly insult about half the group in the space of a couple minutes on their first visit, and escalated badly in response to people saying something about it.
I can think of some reasons why what you saw was different from what I saw, and it’s pretty much that you had a self-chosen group which was meeting in person and had work the members wanted to get done.
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane’s “Door into...” series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn’t a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.
Let me put it this way—I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn’t even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) “biologically compatible as-is” or “biologically compatible with medical help” (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn’t assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn’t correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.
I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I’ve read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don’t seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I’ve asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it’s not obvious to me that it’s impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn’t identical to the same total ill effect.
I’m hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I’m pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I’ve wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I’m very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they’ve dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I’m aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.
I’ve got some sympathy for people who don’t want to shut down organizations merely because they’ve succeeded.
Stable organizations are hard to create, and people apt to have a lot of valuable social relationships in them.
Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.
Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I’m aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.
That’s a reasonable point—but are there lessons to be learned from organizations that continued to be disproportionally powerful even after their problem was solved?
I’m thinking of groups like the Sierra Club. My impression is the group is less powerful than it once was—and the problem is more solved than it was.
Global warming might suggest otherwise. As to political power- if one is judging by amount of discussion in political discourse, in many ways, the environmental movement has substantially lost power in the last 40 years, at least in the US. It used to have broad, bipartisan support, whereas now it is primarily an issue only supported on the contemporary left. But yes, the general situation in many respects is much better (we don’t have rivers catching on fire obviously.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that environmentalism is a broad label; the facets that used to have bipartisan support still do, generally, but new issues have arisen under the label that are supported by a much smaller group.
That’s probably true to some extent, but not universally. For example, in the early 1970s, having fuel efficient cars was a bipartisan issue, whereas now attempts to minimize gasoline consumption are more decidedly on the left.
Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, fuel efficiency itself is a broad issue. You could, if you were charitable, see the parties a representing a search for absolute improvements in all areas, vs searching for the current most efficient improvements; such that when technology improved so that improving fuel efficiency was cheaper & safer then it would again be bi-partisan.
Most likely, neither is that rational about the matter, but there is an inkling of truth to it.
Diminishing marginal returns may have something to do with it. Fuel efficiency for passenger cars has increased by about a third, and larger increases have occurred in vans and small trucks.Relevant graph. But, compared to the maximum efficiency for their types, efficiency is still extremely low. And efficiency for large trucks is essentially unchanged. So I’m not sure we’ve really hit that point that substantially.
Yes, fuel efficiency can be increased at the expanse of something else, e.g., cost, safety, etc.
I’m not sure whether this is particular to those groups. I would expect that most Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, human rights activists, transhumanists, LW-style rationalists, or for that matter anyone who wants to change society in a certain direction, don’t have a clear vision of what success would be like, either.
Nor do I know whether I’d consider that an issue. To some extent, not having such a vision is perfectly reasonable, since there are lots of opposing forces shaping society in entirely different directions, and it can be more useful to just focus on what you can do now instead of dreaming up utopias. Of course, a concrete vision could help—but people could also be helped if they had a clear vision of where they want to be (with their personal lives) in ten years, and most people don’t seem to have that, either. Humans just aren’t automatically strategic.
My reason for being concerned about the lack of a positive vision is related to my experience reading RaceFail—it felt like being on the receiving end of “I can’t explain what I want you to do, I just want to stop hurting, and I’m going to keep attacking until I feel better”.
This does not mean they were totally in the wrong—one of the things I realized fairly early is that there are two kinds of people who could plausibly say “you figure out how not to piss me off”—abusers and people who are trying to deal with a clueless abuser.
I submit that the latter who react that way are still abusers—abuse in self-defense is still abuse.
Are you saying that abuse victims have an obligation to coach their abusers in how not to be abusive?
I would say… yes, actually, insofar as they want that abuse to end while changing nothing else about the dynamic.
This sounds like “I wouldn’t use the word obligation, but I would make the prediction that if abuse victims coach their abusers in how not to be abusive, they would make the abuse less likely to occur.” Would you agree with that restatement?
Fair enough, yes. My use of the word obligation tends to revolve strictly around the personal, so I can see why you’d prefer this version if you use the word in the more typical sense. (Sorry about the confusion. I tend towards egoism, and have a tendency to redefine words to fit the philosophy.)
That would only work if the abuser would prefer not to be abusive. (One characteristic of many abusive relationships is that the abuser gets angry regardless of what the victim actually does—there really isn’t any way to avoid making them mad and “triggering” more abuse.)
Consider the number of people on this forum looking for ways to overcome personality defects, and repeatedly failing.
Not to say that abused people owe it to their abusers; they may or may not owe it to themselves, however. The number of abused people who go out of one abusive relationship directly into another suggests they need coaching/counseling just as much, and perhaps examining where they are is a good place to start in getting to where they need to be.
I agree that providing support for abuser self-improvement is likely to reduce the frequency of abuse—and thus a very worthwhile policy.
Why should abuse victims be responsible for providing the support themselves? For example, if anger management course are effective, is there reason to think they are more effective if taught by an abuse victim?
Further, expecting good results from a victim attempting to educate his own abuser seems particularly unlikely to work—because of all the other social dynamics and history at play. Even if your father was the best therapist in the country, would you feel comfortable doing talk therapy with him?
(Alternatively, mandatory counseling for both abusers and abuse victims. As odd as it seems, I think this would be harder to push on a societal level, however.)
For the abused, the practical limit is not personal willingness, but financing and social stigma.
Depends on whether you intend the anger management course to teach the student or the instructor.
If the only lesson that is learned is by the abused, and the lesson is that “This won’t work,” that’s worth learning, too. A lot of abused people think they can fix things. I don’t think merely switching to another fix-me-up relationship is a solution, and that seems to be the standard procedure for abused people.
I just don’t see much, if any, commonality in the curriculum between the abusers’ classes and the victims’ classes. What little there might be seems unlikely to be sufficient to justify creating a common classroom, given the potential downsides.
I think people complaining about things like implicit association tests are missing the fundamental problem. The problem isn’t that people’s system I has ‘racist’ aliefs, it’s that those aliefs do in fact correspond to reality.
Why do you believe that people’s prejudices are generally accurate?
Look at the statistics for race and IQ (or any other measure of intelligence), or race and crime rate.
They show that East Asian are smarter in average than White Americans, and I’m not sure that many people alieve that.
Any such statistic would also reflect any bias in the law-enforcement system. How do we know how many white people commit crimes but don’t get caught?
I do; am I mistaken to do so?
Asian-Americans also have lower crime rates than White Americans. Are you saying this is likely due to “bias in the law-enforcement system”?
Probably not; but IMO the criterion of mistakenness for aliefs (unlike for beliefs) is not being instrumentally useful (rather than not being epistemically accurate). If I’m trying to attract women, alieving that I’m unattractive would be a mistaken alief (though the linked article doesn’t use the word “alief”).
I’ve written before about how aliefs about races can be problematic even when epistemically accurate. (My own aliefs about these things happen to be wrong even epistemically, so I need to be extra careful to compensate for them when I notice them.)
Having good aliefs about criminality, for example, is instrumentally useful.
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don’t matter—where they’re considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven’t really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that’s what I’d consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of ‘skin dyes’ for aesthetic purposes.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense—white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
I don’t want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don’t think that’s possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn’t just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you’d need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons—it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
I don’t understand what you mean by “matter.” People don’t care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn’t seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
That depends on what you mean by “strongly.” I would tentatively posit that even if race isn’t strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don’t know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I’ve recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled “racism” is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don’t really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn’t the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn’t be a world in which “race doesn’t matter,” but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person’s peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don’t make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that’s really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Or would be if people weren’t actively rigging said information such that this is not the case. And that’s before getting into tail-effects.
Which really doesn’t happen these days. (It’s certainly much rarer than someone being beaten up for being white.)
Some such information is degraded, yes, but not all, and not to uselessness. And yes, people are beaten in the first world in this day and age for being black or for being white, and I find it difficult to blame either of those on the use or misuse of Bayesian updating (except to the extent that observing a person’s race might tell you “I can get away with this”).
I do not accept your contention that people just happen to be exactly the correct degree of racist.
People are usually not “exactly correct” about anything, so statements like this are almost automatically true. But is this your true rejection?
Imagine that tomorrow some magic will turn all people into exactly the correct degree of racists. That means for example that if a person with a given skin color has (according to the external view) probability X to have some trait, they will expect that trait with probability exactly X, not more, not less.
Would such society be more similar to what we have now, or to a perfectly equal society?
I’d bet on closer to a perfectly equal society, but it’s rather hard to do the experiment.
It’s certainly my (a) true rejection of “the problem is that [people] are updating correctly”. What did you expect I was rejecting?
I dunno what that society would be more similar to. I expect it’d be a fair distance from either, and that there would remain significant problems apart from inequality of social status, economic status, etc. Eugine_Nier’s assertion was that it would be identical (read: very similar) to what we have now. I disagreed.
I confess, I was sacrificing some precision for snark. I meant “the problem is that [people] are updating correctly, to the extant they are”.
Just for the record, my estimate is that it would be cca 70% as much “racist” as what we have today. (I don’t have a high confidence in this number, I just though it would be fair to write my opinion if I am asking about yours.) So cca 30% of the racism can be explained by people updating incorrectly, but that still leaves the remaining 70% to be explained otherwise. Therefore focusing on the incorrect updates misses the greater part of the whole story.
Really? I’d estimate more like 120%.
Edit: especially consider affirmative action and the desperate impact doctrine.
I think that affirmative action hurts both ways. And it also keeps the feeling of resentment alive, which again hurts people.
As a simple example, in my country most people in IT are male. So on one hand you have the “prejudice” that women in general are not good with computers, but on the other hand, if you meet a female programmer, you know that she specifically is good enough. She passed the filter.
I imagine that in an alternative reality where IT companies would be legally required to have 50% female programmers, the “prejudice” would expand, and it would say that women programmers are not good with computers. A female programmer would have to work harder to pass the filter. Even participating in a successful project would not be enough, because others would think that the males in her team did most of the work, and she was there mostly for political reasons. To prove herself, she would have to win some programming competition (and tell everyone about it). But those who can do it, they have no problem finding a programming job in our world, too.
Affirmative action would work best if you could legislate it and make everyone forget that it exists. Perhaps legislating it and making taboo of discussing it openly, is a step in this direction. Still, if the differences in abilities are real, people will notice the result, even if they are not informed about the causes.
In the alternative reality where IT companies are legally required to have 50% women programmers, and the law is successfully kept secret from everyone except the HR departments, programmers would still notice the differences in their colleagues’ skills. Although… this knowledge would exist only among the programmers, because only they see it firsthand. You could still convince the public that what the programmers see is not real, that it is merely their sexism.
So now I think that social enginnerings of this kind are successful only if people are prevented from discussing them openly. Even a lie told with good intentions makes the truth forever your enemy. Of course that makes it difficult to evaluate whether the policy really helps or not.
I’d have expected affirmative action to have substantial ill effects, but no one seems to be saying that the quality of American goods has dropped noticeably since the late sixties.
My tentative explanation is that hiring and promotion are much more random than people want to think.
Well two points:
1) There is a huge confounding factor, namely technological progress.
2) In general, labor intensive goods aren’t even produced in America anymore.
Who’s “focusing”? I would argue, if we take your numbers, that the incorrect 30% are disproportionately problematic compared to the remaining 70%, and that there are other, non-epistemic problems involved in racism. Eugine_Nier said that “the problem” is the 70%. That’s the disagreement that’s going on here. My claim is not that modern-day racism is on average a greater distortion of the facts than an inability to perceive race would be.
Taboo “perfectly equal society”.
Evidence? Also, are you including assault by the police in your comparison?
Look at crime statistics.
Sure, it doesn’t change its truth.
There are at least two confounding factors for the crime statistics. One is that the justice system is pretty sloppy, and more so for black men. Another is that even if your crime statistics are accurate, it’s hard to identify a criminal’s exact motives. Was a beating part of a robbery? Was it a simple attack initiated by one side, or was it a quarrel that escalated?
I don’t think this is a valuable response to being asked for evidence.
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I’d assign over 70% assuming he’s completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn’t as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I’ve noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn’t particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it’s strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I’ll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He’s way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers—the younger one’s father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he’s speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
I’d say that this is another very strong possibility.
I don’t care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I’d expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
That is a necessary prerequisite, yes. As long as such an actual correlation is in place, it will be observed and will result in a perceived correlation.
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I’d be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
Citation?
Again, I suspect—though I’m not certain—that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.
It sounds like you’re using the word “correlation” to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; “correlation” just refers to certain kinds of association.
It’s trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you’re getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you’re asking for.
Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look “prettier”? I’m not sure that’s the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn’t matter.
I’m thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I’m thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he “really” black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
Dr. Seuss wrote about this.
Skin colour is a red herring. Race is was originally about rich people with empires and status justifying their success as inevitable and righteous, and still is about their descendants justifying living off the inheritance of empires (and off plundering the bounty of continents already in use by other people). Race-like oppressions can exist where there is no visible distinction (burakumin in Japan). “Where do your family come from?”. Colour blindness (dye or otherwise) without putting inequalities to rights just hides the issue from sight.
That’s one conclusion—but there’s a whole debate about how best to move forward that your conclusion just ducked. Making descendents pay for the mistakes of the ancestors vs. wiping the slate clean of all cultural baggage.
In practice, the distinction matters less because we haven’t found any successful (or even partially successful) technique that wipes out all cultural baggage. But if I found a pill that could restart all cultural baggage for everyone but prevented all reparations, I’d be sorely tempted to use it.
That viewpoint, in itself, is at least partially cultural.
Yes, there are other means of oppression; people can be oppressed for having the wrong sort of noses, or living on the wrong side of the river, or coming from the wrong family. These I see as seperate, though related problems; resolving the issue of race will do nothing directly about the other problems (and may even throw them into sharper relief), but I don’t think it’s a good idea to refuse to solve one problem just because others might still exist.
As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a “wierdtopia”. Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer suddenly transported to contemporary New York. Feminism is slowed by feminists dragging their feet. Anti-racism is slowed by anti-racists who shy away from how much wealth and resources and control of the future they’d have to give back.
I was thinking of something smaller—I don’t see people talking about a social group or organization which was both diverse and safe (or perhaps even just reliably safe for non-privileged people), even if it was just for a short but extraordinary period.
And as for weirdtopia, in some ways we’re already there. It took me three or four years to stop thinking that having gay marriage as a serious political issue wasn’t something out of 1950s satirical science fiction. I was never opposed to it, just surprised that it ever got on the agenda.
Uh.
This might be an outside context problem.
I see people talk about that plenty—I’ve been within groups and organizations that tried, in varying ways and with varying success, to realize that idea. They’re usually support groups or nonprofit organizations that provide services to marginalized populations, and the idea of broadly-safe space as a core goal is built right in.
It could well be an outside view problem.
Also, we may be talking about somewhat different things—do the groups you mention talk about it as a goal, or do they ever talk about having succeeded, even for moderate periods of time?
Hey, sorry it took a while to reply.
The groups in question had it as just a basic matter of operating policy. It was often a balancing act, and it wasn’t without hiccups, but it worked pretty well. Example: A support group at which I facilitated for a while; the going approach was “safer space”: they knew they couldn’t ensure it was safe, full stop, for everybody in all situations—safety in this context being construed as “a buncha different people from a bunch of different backgrounds with varying experiences of oppression need to use this space, and they won’t always speak each other’s language about that, and we want to minimize the sense that this place is a hostile environment.”
It usually ran pretty smoothly. I can only recall one person who really ran afoul of it, and they did blatantly insult about half the group in the space of a couple minutes on their first visit, and escalated badly in response to people saying something about it.
No problem with the delay.
I can think of some reasons why what you saw was different from what I saw, and it’s pretty much that you had a self-chosen group which was meeting in person and had work the members wanted to get done.
Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane’s “Door into...” series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn’t a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.
Let me put it this way—I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn’t even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) “biologically compatible as-is” or “biologically compatible with medical help” (such as stem cell gametes, in-vitro organ-printed wombs, etc) that latter encompassing both homogamete and infertile pairs, that does mark gender identity but doesn’t assume there are only two nor does it correlate them with gametes, and in which clothing style, or femme versus butch, doesn’t correlate either with either gametes or gender identity.