My understand for how we measure systemic racism issues seems to typically be predicated on assumed outcomes. For example that if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this.
What I don’t understand is why that is assumed true. If we want to encourage many different cultures to live together wouldn’t it naturally make sense that different cultures would have different outcomes in job preferences? How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences?
My fear is if there are strong cultural differences that lead to disparate racial outcomes so organizations will always be able to point out that systemic issues exist even when they may be eradicated. I don’t know how we measure this.
> How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences?
By conducting studies where you study the effect of the race variable. This has been done many times over in multiple countries and the results have shown that colored people and racial minorities are discriminated against. But despite the vast amount of empirical data, people still refuse to believe that racial discrimination is a factor in the job market.
Well, your examples seem pretty cherry-picked and not necessarily generally empirical (ie. lots of embedded subjectivity).
Now your first link is more interesting and is usually the one that everyone pulls out as "absolute proof" that discrimination is live and well in modern hiring against Black people.
I wonder, though, how much of this is in the bias of the experimenters when they selected "Black sounding names" and how much is just unfamiliarity with an "unusual" (and by this I mean rare) name and how much is the knee-jerk reaction to a name (basically real prejudice).
For example the actual most common names for Black children in the US are – Jacob, Emma, Michael, Ava, William, Emily, etc. And I suspect they are not choosing those names on purpose.
On the other hand, my ex's sister named their son "Air Jordan" (for his first name) and their daughter Cinnamon for her first name. And I personally have great uncles with the real first names of "Snapbean" and "Squawk" (I am not joking).
None of these people are Black, but how do you imagine their resumes are accepted at large (or small) companies?
So I am wondering how much is prejudice against the person and how much is prejudice against the name?
I'm genuinely missing your point. It sou d like you're insinuating that the lack of a "normal" name is a good reason to disqualify someone from a job opportunity. That possibly implies that the resume screen uses someone's name as a discriminating factor and I don't think that it should be.
Why is it your choice to make? When you hire someone, you're hiring everything they bring to the table. You might be wrong in your interpretation, but it's what you've got. So perhaps you find names beyond the pale, but why not dress codes too? Names and many other characteristics involve human choices well beyond genetics.
You do realize that the orchestras used to hire blind, that is, the audition was done with the musician hidden behind a curtain and all other factors withheld, so that the only factor that was perceivable was the sound of the music from the musician, in an effort to remove bias. And New York Times in the last year or two had an editorial decrying this as unfair, because it didn't give the correct outcome of reducing underrepresentation. The DIE crowd does not want fairness and equality of opportunity; they want equality of outcome. They want diversity hires, not hires of the maximally strong candidates.
> The DIE crowd does not want fairness and equality of opportunity; they want equality of outcome
I always find it weird that people see this is a bad thing. Equality of outcome is equity. Extra time for people with learning disabilities is equity, ada regulations is equity, hearing aids, glasses, booster seats, handicaps in golf and chess, giving bus seats to the elderly are all equity. Equity is the thing we naturally strive for in basically all aspects of life. Provide aid when we can, receive aid when needed.
> They want diversity hires, not hires of the maximally strong candidates.
That's not what affirmative action is, it's recognizing both the systematic and individual disadvantages that someone experienced and, potentially, depending on what they are, realizing that they have more potential than meets the eye. It's like basing hiring decisions entirely on leetcode challenges and putting on your blinders on not realizing that the people who have the time to waste on leetcode is a skewed sample of the population.
Who is the more impressive student? Alice who had a stable suburban comfortable upbringing and went to prestigious private high school and got a 34 on her ACT, or Bob who grew up with a single father, went to a public high school in an high needs district, had to work a part time job after school and babysit his little brother every day before his dad got home and got a 29?
The above is an example of an individual disadvantage, now apply that same logic to systematic disadvantages.
> Who is the more impressive student? Alice who had a stable suburban comfortable upbringing and went to prestigious private high school and got a 34 on her ACT, or Bob who grew up with a single father, went to a public high school in an high needs district, had to work a part time job after school and babysit his little brother every day before his dad got home and got a 29?
The kid with the higher score is a more impressive student. But there might certainly be a justification for giving the kid who had a tougher road to get there a leg up.
But that’s different from what we’re doing, where we apply racist assumptions and treat certain minorities as if they’re all from single parent homes, regardless of whether that’s true for the individual.
> treat certain minorities as if they’re all from single parent homes
That’s not what you should have taken from that example at all, which is specifically why I used two white coded names. The point is that people grok individual disadvantages easily and giving them a leg up feels natural, and the same reasoning should be applied to systematic disadvantages.
> regardless of whether that’s true for the individual.
What you’re describing is looking at privilege through the lense of intersectionality, which nobody disagrees with.
Cough. Intersectionality assumes that people's problems are the problems of their identities, and that their identities are the ones visible to others. Black, short, etc.
Identity politics seems purpose-built by "allies" to explain why the allies don't actually listen to the people they're helping.
For instance, Thomas Sowell isn't treated as an individual who disagrees with BLM's policies instead he's declared to be a defective or traitorous black man who isn't part of the real black people group.
Intersectionality also reframes all minority politics in terms of a framework defined by white people according to white people’s political priorities. It creates a framework where you “center POC” voices—but only if they agree with white people. To further your example, Justice Clarence Thomas is treated as unrepresentative of Black people even when his views are typical of a southern Black man. About half the Black people in his home state of Georgia oppose abortion, and Black people nationwide have similar views on same-sex marriage as Republicans. When Justice Thomas votes to overturn racial preferences in college admissions, he’ll be attacked as a tool of white supremacy—even though most Black people also oppose using race as a factor in admissions and jobs.
By contrast, progressive POC are always presented as representative of their race even when they’re not. Ilhan Omar is held up as the face of Islam in America. But there’s way more Trump voting Muslims than ones who are as far left as Omar.
> That’s not what you should have taken from that example at all, which is specifically why I used two white coded names
What’s a “white coded name?” Most Black people have names similar to other Americans. E.g. here are the top names by ethnicity for babies in NYC in 2013: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/vs/baby-names-.... The top 3 Black baby names are Ethan, Jayden, and Aiden. Playgrounds in Park Slope are full of kids with those names.
Yes, but he’s applying the inverse here: asking me to assume that a non-Black coded name doesn’t refer to a Black person. That rests on the stereotype that most Black people have Black-coded names.
As someone who belongs to a Muslim family living in this country since the 1920s, I for once have to drop my jaw, side with rayiner and point out that you’re being the tendentious one (many such names like Jamal are in fact held by “whites” and non Blacks too)
If equity was our standard we wouldn't give eyeglasses to anyone because blind people can't see at all.
Instead we strive for equality, where everyone is able to use the best devices they or their insurance can provide regardless of others. I can get glasses to restore my vision to 25/20 even if yours never was 20/20.
> That's not what affirmative action is, it's recognizing both the systematic and individual disadvantages
Affirmative action doesn't treat people as individuals. It's specifically about using people's visible identities (whether or not they do!) to determine how they're treated. Under affirmative action a rich black man would get a job before a poor white man and it would be defended by its supporters as undoing systematic obstacles even if the recipient never encountered those obstacles themselves.
> people who have the time to waste on leetcode
Why do we hate people who teach themselves a skill? Why is it literally considered a negative these days?
> a skewed sample of the population
They're individuals, not population samples.
> Who is the more impressive student
If I was running a scholarship this would be the criteria because it would indicate who would get the most out of the resources. If I'm hiring them to fit a defined role I only care about their current skills, not where they started.
Yes, you are missing my point. I am not insinuating anything, I am stating directly that some people might be biased against unusual (to them) names. Names that are difficult to say, spell, etc. depending on the language, or just out-right stereotypical prejudice with a name (which is what these studies just assume). I am not saying that any of this is ok, people rarely get to pick their names. What I am saying is that it might not all be based on the color of people's skin.
Reducing racial bias to solely and precisely "skin color", and not the cultural biases that come with it is itself missing the point.
Begin biased against Black skin is a problem (and is the important bit in some instances). Being biased against "Black" names is also a problem, even if you can devise situations where the name is attached to a person who doesn't have Black skin. And both are racism, because they are directed at people based on the assumption that they are in a particular ethnic group, even if that assumption is wrong.
> Being biased against "Black" names is also a problem, even if you can devise situations where the name is attached to a person who doesn't have Black skin. And both are racism, because they are directed at people based on the assumption that they are in a particular ethnic group, even if that assumption is wrong.
You assume a racist motive in your scenario, but what if the bias is actually towards all unfamiliar names, only some of which are black names?
The specter of racism is so great that people are expected to be free from every potential bias because it could be race-equity related somewhere.
"I'm not biased only against Black people, I'm actually biased against anything that is sufficiently non-white" (in this context, since we're talking about a study of conventionally WASP-y vs. black names) is not the slam dunk you think it is. And it's still racist.
> You assume a racist motive in your scenario
No, I don't assume any motive whatsoever. I'm talking only about actions.
I read the above as a way of saying that names may not necessarily be a good proxy for race specifically. Not as a comment on whether discrimination based on names is right or wrong.
You are of course entirely right that it shouldn’t matter in the decision process, unless the job at hand is “person named John”. But a point to raise is that this holds for positive discrimination as well, if the goal is to increase the number of X minority employees, then you cant optimize for that by selecting for X-sounding names if that’s a bad proxy.
I'm not sure it matters, in the sense that both feel like an example of "systemic" racism (as referred to above). It may not be the recruiter/interviewer's intention to be prejudiced, but it is the outcome of the system.
Well, I purposely pointed out the first link. Regarding the others, I think there are deeper historical, social, and religious issues that go beyond the racial problems in the US and I don't have any type of deeper insight on those.
People love to cite this study as an example of absolute proof of discrimination, but it isn't. There is an obvious rational non-racist explanation for the outcome in question, and it is affirmative action.
A black person, a white person, and an asian person with the exact same credentials mean extremely different things in terms of absolute rather than relative competence level, as a consequence of affirmative action policies. The filters they had to pass through are different, and therefore an Asian person who went to Harvard almost certainly is in the top 1% of the absolute test score distribution, whereas the same is not necessarily true for the others.
Since job performance is correlated with absolute capability, and not group-relative capability, discrimination on the basis of race is rational in a society that employs affirmative action policies at prior points in the credentialism pipeline. Correcting and controlling for this would only be possible by designing resumes that don't reference achievements that have group-relative thresholds.
That's a fair response, so I suppose I should add the asterisk: Conditional on a belief that test scores are correlated with ability level. However, this belief is rather common, and I wouldn't say that it is an intrinsically racist belief.
> There is an obvious rational non-racist explanation for the outcome in question
> A black person, a white person, and an asian person with the exact same credentials mean extremely different things in terms of absolute rather than relative competence level
I have. They do not refer to the capability of the groups, only their present level. It's entirely consistent with what I said that the current differences between the groups are a consequence of historical racism and inequity.
That doesn't change the fact that the absolute level of current ability implied by the same credential differs between groups, when the credential is conferred via affirmative action.
Take a moment to wonder at the implication of your observation. Why do you assume, if three people all went to the same university and had the same credentials, that one of those people is almost certainly at the top 1% of absolute test scores because of their race? Perhaps you may be experiencing subconscious biases without even realizing it?
Based on your other comment, you would claim "Affirmative Action" is why you think this. But it is important to realize that by making this assumption at all you are expressing biased judgements on these three humans entirely based upon their race.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Affirmative action policies mechanically have this consequence. Asians have the highest test scores (among the racial groupings commonly used for AA policies), and affirmative action policies effectively z-score test scores by racial group for the purpose of admittance. The effect I described is a mechanical consequence of these two facts, it doesn't require any further assumption.
Let me try again. You receive three resumes for a job application, for three humans of three different races. They have the exact same credentials. You immediately assume one of the three is the brightest of them, because your understanding of Affirmative Action Policies says this particular race has the highest likelihood of having higher overall test scores.
One of the other two could have had the highest possible score of all time, but you have written them off by making an assumption about them, based on race. You have made a judgement based on statistical inference, when you should have treated them all equally.
You may not intend it in any ill-meaning way, but it is important to realize that minor assumptions like this are pervasive, and they have far-reaching effects.
> You immediately assume one of the three is the brightest of them, because your understanding of Affirmative Action Policies says this particular race has the highest likelihood of having higher overall test scores.
I think it's important to distinguish between probabilities and possibilities. It is possible that any of them has the highest score. However, it is most likely that the Asian does.
Let me articulate this phenomenon in a more neutral example. Suppose you start an elite academy for the game Go. All of the best Go players in the world come from places like South Korea, China, etc, who have a long history of playing the game. However, you would like to increase the appeal of the game internationally, so you institute an affirmative action policy that says 50% of your students must come from non-asian countries.
Let's say you have 100 slots to fill each year, and you operationalize your affirmative action policy as follows: You take all the asian applicants, rank them by ability, and take the top 50. You take all the non-asian applicants, rank them by ability and take the top 50.
It should be obvious that, in this example, the average absolute ability level of the two groups will be quite different. The incoming Asian group would crush the non-Asian group in competition. This isn't due to any innate racial capacity gap, but due to the historical and cultural relationship to the game of Go.
Now, you educate each group together for say, 4 years. That education process may homogenize ability a little bit - helping the lower performers improve more than the higher performers (though the opposite may also be true), but it's probably not sufficient to close the rather large incoming skill gap.
Now, if you were watching a match, and the only things you knew about the two competitors were that they both attended your elite academy, and one was from South Korea, and the other was from California, who would you bet on to win?
It's entirely possible that the Californian is better! It's just less likely, given no additional information. Critically, this isn't an argument against the affirmative action policy. The AA policy is doing just what it should do - helping to close the skill gap. But it does means that statistical reasoning about racism has to be sensitive to this confounding variable if it wants to make truly accurate inferences.
This is a good example, and I appreciate you trying to explain it further. But I think we are a bit like two ships passing in the night here. As I interpret it, you are trying to explain the effect of affirmative action on the likelihood that someone from a particular background is more likely to be skilled or not. I totally understand that this is an effect of AA, and that neither of us are arguing about the merits of AA.
However, the point that I am trying to make is that we, as a society, should be trying to ignore these obvious statistical likelihoods when we are choosing a candidate. Those statistical likelihoods have nothing to do with the candidate themselves. If we make these kinds of interpretations, we are no longer judging a candidate based on who they are, but rather who we think they might be. And who am I to make that judgement? I'm nobody special. That's all I'm trying to say, really.
EDIT Someone else in the thread brought up the idea of why there is AA for school, but not for the workplace as in my argument. It's kind of a different topic, but I think it's a good counterargument about the complexity of this. I don't really have a good answer, to be honest, but it will be on my mind for awhile now.
> However, the point that I am trying to make is that we, as a society, should be trying to ignore these obvious statistical likelihoods when we are choosing a candidate. Those statistical likelihoods have nothing to do with the candidate themselves. If we make these kinds of interpretations, we are no longer judging a candidate based on who they are, but rather who we think they might be. And who am I to make that judgement? I'm nobody special. That's all I'm trying to say, really.
Ah, ok I see. I didn't understand your point then. I think we at least kind of agree on that point. What I was trying to say is that, I don't think that it's accurate to characterize the resume study as proving racism or racial discrimination, given the bias induced by AA. At least, providing they are not going further than correcting for that bias.
I do agree with you that in an ideal world, people would try to avoid factoring that in. But, it is important to keep in mind I think that hiring decisions are often extremely consequential for the people that make them (in a way that university admissions are not), and as a consequence, asking the decision makers there to intentionally ignore pertinent information is almost always going to be a losing proposition.
I think, even if people are correcting a bit for this bias in the hiring pipeline, AA is still providing considerable value to historically disadvantaged candidates, by helping them get access to alumni networks, and presumably a higher quality education and hopefully that will be sufficient to close the remaining skill gaps over time.
> However, the point that I am trying to make is that we, as a society, should be trying to ignore these obvious statistical likelihoods when we are choosing a candidate.
The truth is one. If you lie to other people and demand they lie to you it affects your entire model of the world. If there are facts about the world that you would prefer not to acknowledge they are linked to other facts. Lying consistently requires enormous effort.
I think what GP said was logical. Imagine Harvard has 3 entrance criteria, and the criteria a student receives depends on the first letter of their first name:
* A name: must be in top 1% of test scores
* B name: must be in top 5% of test scores
* C name: must be in top 10% of test scores
The following 3 students are admitted:
* Allison (is in top 1%)
* Brian (is in top 4%)
* Caitlin (is in top 1%)
We can only safely assume that Allison is in the top 1% because her criteria certifies it. Even though Caitlin in actuality is in the top 1%, because her entrance criteria is more lax, we are not sure.
I think this is one downside of affirmative action, people are unsure if a person passes based on affirmative action or purely on merit. Now we consider the upsides and downsides of affirmative action, and decide whether it should be implemented.
Yes, I understand that affirmative action can have this consequence. I am not arguing for or against affirmative action. I am pointing out that it should not matter whether someone has an A, B, or C name when applications are being triaged. Because Allison, Brian and Caitlin all have the same credentials, they should be viewed as equally likely candidates.
Making assumptions about them based on probabilities is exactly the problem here, and it is one that we can easily avoid.
This is obviously the golden standard we are trying to achieve, but how do we get there? It's theoretically impossible to treat everyone equally and apply affirmative action at the same time. I understand there is a difference between equality and equity, but I'm replying to the words you wrote.
Affirmative action may be the best solution we currently have to deal with systemic racism, but ultimately it's trying to fix prejudice with prejudice - and that is not a perfect solution. It also creates a lot of confusion because sometimes we say to treat people equally (as you say when trying to decide between hiring candidates), and other times we say we should help out the disenfranchised (such as when admitting students to schools). So where do we draw the line for when we want equality versus equity?
It is actually pretty simple (in this example anyway). If three candidates come to you with the same credentials, then do not assume one of them is the best candidate based on your interpretation of their background. You have to treat them all as equally likely candidates - interview all three. It is more work for you, but the effort is worth it, because it helps prevent the effect of possible biases.
Sure, I understand in that example what to do. But as a society, where do we draw the line? Why is it okay to apply affirmative action for selecting students but not okay when accepting employees (continuing the example from this thread)? Since we're trying to fix a systemic issue, we need a consistent response across society for it to be most effective.
My point is this is a complicated problem with no perfect solution, and people will correctly point out flaws with it both theoretically and (more relevant for this discussion) how we implement it.
This is a really good point, and I appreciate you bringing it up. What I am saying directly conflicts with affirmative action itself, so in effect I am arguing against it. I don't really have a good answer to that. Thanks for pointing it out, I guess I'll ponder that for awhile.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is actually only a means for potentially learning what is going on, and that it can also lead one into a state of confident confusion/misunderstanding.
Study results may only suggest something, which can often have the appearance of showing it.
IQ is a deeply questionable metric to start with (I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are", and as a child I obsessed over them and got very good at them by learning how to approach them, which means it very much isn't measuring something innate), tests are often (and in the case of the historic ones actually cited in the "evidence", all) culturally biased, and the supposed evidence for IQ differences is deeply flawed. (The famous example of "The Bell Curve" citing absurd things like tests in English referencing British culture being given to people who didn't even speak English properly and had never been to Britain as accurate IQ tests).
> It's clearly because of some more innate qualities measured by IQ.
This is an absurd statement, because even if the IQ differences exist, you are jumping to a conclusion here: that difference in IQ is innate, and not a result of racism or other external factors, with your only justification being:
> And the differences appear before school age, so it's hardly any opportunity for racism to cause it.
One of the biggest factors for childhood success is how much time your parents spend with you when you are young. If historic racism means your family is poorer, it likely means your parents can spend less time with you. Just one example of many of how this argument just doesn't hold water.
> I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are",
See, for example, Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. (2004). General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment and Job Performance, cited 1600+ times:
> The psychological construct of general mental ability (GMA), introduced by C. Spearman (1904) nearly 100 years ago, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest and attention in recent decades. This article presents the research evidence that GMA predicts both occupational level attained and performance within one’s chosen occupation and does so better than any other ability, trait, or disposition and better than job experience. The sizes of these relationships with GMA are also larger than most found in psychological research.
One main reason why you might not have seen this is that you didn't go out of your way to find it, and the mainstream publications systematically hide, distort, and often blatantly lie about the existing evidence.
I thought IQ was correlated quite well with the idea of "Spearman's G", and unless people actually use something else on a massive scale over decades I'm not sure how you can avoid using it as a metric.
The military still uses it because it is highly predictive. They also have a hard cutoff at the bottom which wasn’t always the case (see McNamara’s Folly for the history of when the army accepted literally retarded people - it didn’t end well). We also see a very strong correlation between eg IQ and occupation.
The U.S. marine corp promoted its first black 4 star general this year. I don’t think it’s the shining example of a race-blind institution, at least as far as leadership is concerned.
You are cherry picking data. The US military has historically been far more progressive than the country as a whole. It integrated in 1948 - long before the voting rights act or the end of Jim crow. We had a black chair of the joint chiefs long before we elected a black president. Rights and privileges were extended to gay members long before they existed elsewhere.
Only on HN would the prevailing thought be that leet-code interviews are stupid but IQ is a magical, unbiased metric of a person’s ability and potential.
What are you talking about? It has statistical predictive ability when used on groups of people. Of course it can be very inaccurate for an individual but the reality of being able to make testable predictions makes it pretty hard to throw out, except for ideologically motivated people who don't like what it reveals.
Really? HN in 1822 would be filled with educated people seriously defending phrenology. 1922 HN would be falling over itself to defend eugenics. Apparently 2022 HN hasn't come very far from 1922.
No one falls for pseudoscientific groupthink like communities of affluent, well-educated people.
Please cite it. Every time someone claims this, they come back citing something laughably easy to disprove like The Bell Curve, which claims this, and is just an absolute mess of obvious nonsense:
Using deeply culturally and/or language biased IQ tests.
Using IQ tests that essentially just test the quality of education they received.
Sampling unrepresentative populations.
Using studies from an Apartheid state as an example of "a state without systemic racism".
Using tests that aren't IQ tests and the author explicitly say isn't equivalent and "converting" them with arbitrary systems.
Literally just making up data.
Cherry picking the worst data from studies which the original study explicitly calls out as less likely to be accurate.
Every correlation vs causation mistake you can possibly make.
Just discounting every environmental factor except parental socioeconomic status.
Assuming environmental factors are a result of genetic factors (which is literally just assuming their conclusion).
Regularly citing a literally white-supremacist funded source as unbiased.
I don’t care to get in some debate at all, but first you’d have to offer up a very precise question and not some general smear campaign. If it’s some of the sentences you’re arguing with upthread, I might agree with you.
Innate was too strong a word. I meant to say that it was pre-existing. Any discrimination in a job application is not the discrimination that causes low IQ, if any. That occurs in early childhood.
Uh, can't it? Stuff like lead exposure is higher in disfavored groups, and lead exposure is very bad for IQ. All sorts of environmental pollution is bad for child development, developing brains are pretty susceptible to this stuff, and guess which people end up having to live in more polluted areas?
That’s completely hypothetical and easily refutable by rural/urban breakdown, county-level breakdowns, outperformance by poor Asians, historical LA smog, etcetera.
no, subcounty level breakdowns actually support the thesis that higher pollution is at least correlated with lower educational attainment. Don't post misinformation. "historical LA smog" isn't a statement that refutes anything. The international consensus is that pollution is bad for educational attainment as well as other iq-like metrics, this is true in India, China, Brazil, and the UK, as well as impacts of prenatal exposure being bad in NYC and internationally.
Even if we accept that (and I gave plenty of reasons above why IQ is deeply, deeply, flawed as a metric, and the link to race—both at all and in terms of amount—is deeply questionable, and just because there is some difference in early childhood doesn't mean all of what you claim is, so plenty of it could be later racism), you are still just arbitrarily saying that accounts for the disparity, when there is evidence that isn't the case, because tests have been done with matching candidates, or presenting the same applications with different photos, etc...
> and as a child I obsessed over them and got very good at them by learning how to approach them
Then you weren't doing proper IQ tests. They must be administered by suitably qualified professionals and not made available for practice. You were cheating. Of course you're going to get good at a game by breaking the rules.
In the United States coming from a position of "maybe there is or isn't an effect from racism" is simply naive. A quick glance at history will show you that many differences in both outcomes AND culture have deep-seated intentionally racist historical sources (in different ways for different races).
How do you fight intentional racism, with a healthy dose of residual lasting generational effects from past racism, with passivity?
It's like creating a game with rules, but having no penalty for breaking them for the first half of the game, and then saying it's just the fault of the loser if someone cheats to beat them.
Or saying "I can't tell for sure if it's below freezing, my thermometer has an error bar of +/- ten degrees" and ignoring a bunch of freezing water around you.
Perhaps by not telling the alleged perpetrators they are taking advantage of "power structures" provided by racism. If the US is ~60% white, then simply by the numbers there are more disenfranchised white people than any other race. Are these people also taking advantage of said "power structures"?
If the movement to fight this spectre of "institutional" racism would focus less on applying their rules to everyone, and more on applying their rules to actual perpetrators, it would garner more support from the people it needs. To use your analogy if you're sitting in your neighbors pool and he says it's not freezing, but there's freezing water, perhaps don't blame all of his neighbors.
I'm not trying to say that there hasn't been a history of racism nor even that it isn't prevalent today. I just want to understand how we accurately measure the actual effects of it so that we can understand how much effort to put into solving it or measuring if it is getting better over time. And some of the most used measures I find as evidence seem to be about the distribution of races in various jobs which on its own doesn't necessarily seem like a reliable metric to me.
Others pointed out some studies which showed potential biases in hiring and that seems like a great potential proxy to understand the current level of racism in hiring.
This seems to be the largest potential issue then with my understanding of requiring research a-priori to match an assumed outcome or ideal. I wonder if an academic wanted to rigorously attempt to isolate between these, would they be allowed to publish the results were found that systemic issues were not significant. It seems potentially dangerous if we stifle publications of studies that find minimal impact of racism because it could have the impact of only highlighting the cases of racism, but not the net impact.
The only issue with this is we can and have isolated clear mechanisms in which certain races are treated differently as compared to others (for example, names on resumes and interview rates, property assessments given a white looking household vs black looking household, pain management in hospitals for women of various races during childbirth, etc), and do I think it is fair to say that the expectation would be if the system were truly unbiased that the proportion of people of different races in various roles would be about similar.
Obviously there are a lot of mechanisms that might change that equal expectation, but it still seems reasonable to me that for most jobs the default expectations should be around equal.
> In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds.
So your focus is on what "camp" someone falls into, not whether their arguments have merit or their statements are factual?
No wonder you think there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia. As long as your "side" controls the narrative, you'll nod your head and clap like a trained seal no matter what lies and "misinformation" they spread.
The talk page, and Quillette article, are proof that Wiki entries needs to contain the discredited sources too, and the properly sourced criticisms of them of course, rather than simply deleting them.
Wiki rules are tools to build better content, not absolutes we must die on. If 90% of readers of an entry find it lacking or untrustworthy because it doesn't mention well-known studies or even fields of endeavor then it's not a useful article.
> despite what a number of skull-measuring right-wingers would like you to believe
Do you believe that acceptance of the theory that genes impact IQ is split along communist/non-communist lines? That communists are less likely than average to believe this? These broad statements and the identities around them are the partisanship behind much of the politically-motivated editing going on in Wiki now.
Quillette articles are rarely proof of more than the ability of deranged conservatives to get nonsense published.
>Do you believe that acceptance of the theory that genes impact IQ is split along communist/non-communist lines?
Maybe. I think the idea that genes impact IQ and that IQ actually usefully measures anything - certainly anything that could be described as 'intelligence' - is probably split that way.
The Quillette article was cited as tautological proof of how "those people" feel about the wiki entry. They don't find it convincing and are explaining the citations they feel it lacks...
The point of Wiki is to educate and that means reaching the uneducated who are going to have those nasty uninformed opinions. Even if I agreed with your assessments of the people involved I'd want to improve them, not crap on them for where they are. If Wiki is only for those who already believe the right things, why even have Wiki?
> split along communist/non-communist lines?
Why would a support for a scientific concept be split across groups by economic philosophy? Is there anything inherently capitalist or communist about these ideas or are these ideas conflated with identities?
> [IQ being] anything that could be described as 'intelligence'
That it's related at all, or that it's a perfect match? Because of course we'll always have subjective views of the definition of intelligence and no one test will satisfy everyone.
> the idea that genes impact IQ and that IQ actually usefully measures anything
Unlike intelligence, IQ is definable, stable, and correlates highly to job performance. (Of course, because the tests resemble many work-skill tasks...)
Why would IQ be the only trait that isn't genetic at all?
I have no desire to see any given racial group maligned, even with "correct" data, but I feel the discussion about genetic traits is limited for fear of this, and that this censoring falls exactly along the lines of the USA's post-slavery racial lines. To me this suggests that this is a you (the USA) problem, not an us (the rest of the anglo-sphere) problem, and that it should be treated with racial sensitivity training and honesty, not with demonization and censorship and quashing research.
There is a robust empirical difference that's seen between races. That quote is about the notion that this difference is inherent. Rather, most scientists think it's largely environmental. They wouldn't have to attribute the difference to environmental factors if there were no actual difference.
So the OP is correct in saying that even if you remove discrimination there would still be differences, because the environmental factors that caused those differences remain.
>There is a robust empirical difference that's seen between races.
There's not an objective/standardized way to even measure intelligence, so you'll forgive me if I treat the claim that there's an empirical difference in intelligence between races with a mountain of skepticism.
The OP said IQ. That's a specific measure that may or may not be related to intelligence. It does have strong correlations with academic and life success though.
Look at the actual research that supposedly leads to the rejection of that idea. There doesn't seem to be any, except for a bunch of unsupported speculation. A notorious example is the Minessota Transracial Adoption Study or something along those lines. They actually found what was clearly an inherent difference according to their experiment's design, then after they got this uncomfortable result, they found another variable they'd forgotten to control for and attributed it to that, without any further evidence. The science in this field is full of fraud because it's dominated by leftists who will be punished by their peers for publishing politically incorrect findings.
Personally I'd be more concerned that people don't know that IQ tests are not a measure of intelligence, and that anyone who's claiming that differences in IQ across racial lines are evidence of racial intelligence differences is attempting to launder some racist bullshit.
Except IQ differences between races are themselves heavily influenced by societal/ historical discrimination. And discrimination still occurs in employment practices for jobs where high IQ is not a significant predictor of capability.
FWIW I don't doubt that racially-aligned genetic factors that influence appearance almost certainly affect other factors, including general cognitive ability, however we're so far off the point that it's likely to be the dominant explanation for why those from particular racial backgrounds rarely gravitate toward and ultimately succeed in particular careers that I see no benefit in focusing on it.
I do however worry that many "affirmative action" policies may be well-intentioned but severely flawed and ultimately self-defeating - if I were a disabled older black female I wouldn't want to have to deal with the suspicion (in my own mind, as well in those of others) that I landed a particular role because of my race/sex/age/disabilities rather than in spite of them (or better still, because we finally lived in world where such attributes were simply considered irrelevant). There are surely better methods that can be used to help overcome undeniable levels of systemic favouritism towards those with particular attributes. I say that as a white, able-bodied male under 50 - personally I suspect most of the reason I've found it easy to succeed in the software industry is due to my upbringing and in particular my Dad, also a white able-bodied male who was even more successful in the IT industry even before he was 40. Virtually everyone technical or managerial in his in own companies fit the same profile - the sales department had some white female able-bodied employees under 50, and later on there were probably one or two Asian employees though I can't recall seeing any. The same industry today is undeniably more inclusive/representative of society as a whole, though we're still a long way from it. I don't think "affirmative action" has really been a big driving force, and I've certainly never worked anywhere that specifically had a policy of actively preferring candidates of a particular sex/race/age/etc. that traditionally has been underrepresented. But I would still like to see more of an effort made to encourage such candidates to apply and to ensure that there's nothing in the job-posting/interview/ selection process that might contribute towards that continued underrepresentation.
Because the different outcomes of those groups is popularly used as a reason that there must be racism causing it which leads to division, hate, and further racist government actions as people imagine that that racism must be very serious to cause such serious effects. But it might actually not be very significant if the cause is something else. And such efforts won't even help the people who are suffering from poverty either. It would be OK if this was a niche opinion but it's incredibly widespread and actually has real world consequences.
The ideas within a comment that is stated in a sarcastic form on the other hand, still possess the same value as they would have if stated in a different form. A sarcastic form may render the value invisible from certain frames of reference, but it is still there.
It's not unreasonable to think that cultural preferences might influence job roles in academia, but in a country with a strong and poorly addressed history of racism, the assumption should be that it results from discrimination. Cultural factor should only be considered if there is strong evidence for them, otherwise they would be used as a rhetorical justification for maintaining discriminatory systems.
Or you could just not assume any specific cause and actually study the problem, otherwise you leave such policies open to perfectly justified attacks, to say nothing of the fact that you're potentially persecuting a whole class of innocent people.
> in a country with a strong and poorly addressed history of racism
Is there a diverse country that doesn't have a strong history of racism?
Is US worse than India, with it's caste system?
Is US worse than China, with it's Uyghur genocide?
Is US worse than Russia with it's Slavs-only rental ads?
Mind you, those are not the examples of past discriminations.
Is it possible that the reason you know more about discrimination in the US is not because US had more of it, but because you are better educated about US?
What I don’t understand is why that is assumed true. If we want to encourage many different cultures to live together wouldn’t it naturally make sense that different cultures would have different outcomes in job preferences? How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences?
My fear is if there are strong cultural differences that lead to disparate racial outcomes so organizations will always be able to point out that systemic issues exist even when they may be eradicated. I don’t know how we measure this.