This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The obvious answer that comes to mind is that they're terrified of being called racist, and they have a few mental fig leaves that allow them to deny being racist - being colourblind, treating people as individuals, etc. To further torture the metaphor, HBD doesn't just remove the fig leaf covering the penis of racism, it gives it viagra and supercharges it. "Oh, yeah, black and brown populations are just genetically stupider and more criminal" - this is not the kind of belief you can hold and still pretend you are judging people by "their character, not the color of their skin."
I think that you have got that backwards. If the police are scrupulous about treating crime and punishment as strictly individual, there will be no racism apparent as the cases are investigated and prosecuted one by one. But compile national statistics and racial differences jump out at you. If you believe in individual justice and judging people by their character, not the color of the their skin, you just have to shrug and say "races really are different."
The trouble starts if you insist that the national statistics need to be race balanced. To make the national statistics come out race balanced requires fiddling the individual cases, convicting innocent white men, acquitting guilty black men, and doing the racist thing of telling an individual "we aren't going to judge your case on the actual facts, but on skin color, because we've a quota to fill."
More options
Context Copy link
Of course it is. The same way you can judge a marathon runner by their time and not the color of their skin, but damned if the top ones aren't black every time.
I think "hold explicitly" is a better way of phrasing it. People act in ways that suggest they actually believe in HBD all the time (even and especially on the left), but few of them will actively state that when asked.
You can hold it explicitly and still judge people -- individually -- by "their character, not the color of their skin."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you watch 500 marathons and every time the winner is black, then when marathon #501 comes around and you’re getting ready to place your bets, you would be a complete moron to approach those bets with the attitude, “I have no opinion about which race the winner will be from. It could be the white guy this time, we have no way to know beforehand!” When surveying the slate of runners, you are completely justified in looking at the white guys and saying, “Bad bet, safe to ignore.”
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes. If the only information given to me about two competing candidates is that one guy’s name is Connor Przyewski, and the other guy’s name is Anquon Washington, I have to use outside information - like my observations of patterns - to supplement the explicit info I was provided. This means that I have to judge the candidates based on the information I have, which, if skin color has a demonstrated correlation with observable disparate outcomes, would include skin color as a useful proxy for important information.
In reality, you would have more information than just the applicants' names. This being a white-collar job, there would presumably be detailed resumes. You can judge the candidates based on that. Either the Black candidates' resumes would be weaker, or their resumes would be of a similar quality to Whites, but they would be underrepresented relative to the population.
Likewise with racial profiling in policing. A police officer usually has much more information than just race. In a true Bayesian inference calculation, race would end up mattering very little. Instructing police officers to racially profile would probably just cause them to give too much weight to race and ignore other relevant information. Note that even race-neutral policing results in Blacks being disproportionately arrested etc., because they commit crime at a higher rate than Whites.
My understanding of HBD, in general, is that the takeaway should be that a non-racially-discriminatory system will produce unequal outcomes, not that racial discrimination is justified. That is, the current system is non-discriminatory and disparate outcomes are because of HBD, not that the current system is discriminatory and that's fine because of HBD.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think there's a magic bullet solution, but this is why I think legally mandated moronicism - so that everyone is equally a complete moron in this respect - accompanied with increased legibility into individual competence is the right approach. There should never be a case where someone's name or race is the only information given to you as a recruiter/hirer, and it should be punishable if you make some meaningful consequential decision in the case that somehow that were the only information given to you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link