I must address myself to the underlying fundamental developmental deficits that impede the ability of African Americans to compete. If, instead of doing so, I use preferential selection criteria to cover for the consequences of the historical failure to develop African American performance fully, then I will have fake equality. I will have headcount equality. I will have my-ass-is-covered-if-I’m-the-institution equality. But I won’t have real equality.
I recommend the entire interview.
Meanwhile, Lilah Burke reports,
In 2013, the University of Texas at Austin’s computer science department began using a machine-learning system called GRADE to help make decisions about who gets into its Ph.D. program — and who doesn’t. This year, the department abandoned it.
Before the announcement, which the department released in the form of a tweet reply, few had even heard of the program. Now, its critics — concerned about diversity, equity and fairness in admissions — say it should never have been used in the first place.
The article does not describe GRADE well enough for me to say whether or not it was a good system. For me, the key question is how well it predicts student performance in computer science.
I draw the analogy with credit scoring. If a credit scoring system correctly separates borrowers who are likely to repay loans from borrowers who are likely to default, and its predictions for black applicants are accurate, then it is not racially discriminatory, regardless of whether the proportion of good scores among blacks is the same as that among whites or not.
David Arnold and co-authors find that
Estimates from New York City show that a sophisticated machine learning algorithm discriminates against Black defendants, even though defendant race and ethnicity are not included in the training data. The algorithm recommends releasing white defendants before trial at an 8 percentage point (11 percent) higher rate than Black defendants with identical potential for pretrial misconduct, with this unwarranted disparity explaining 77 percent of the observed racial disparity in algorithmic recommendations. We find a similar level of algorithmic discrimination with regression-based recommendations, using a model inspired by a widely used pretrial risk assessment tool.
That does seem like a bad algorithm. On the face of it, the authors believe that they have a better model for predicting pretrial misconduct than that used by the city’s algorithm. The city should be using the authors’ model, not the algorithm that they actually chose.
I take Loury as saying that intervening for racial equality late in life, at the stage where you are filling positions in the work place or on a college campus, is wrong, especially if you are lowering standards in order to do so. Instead, you have to do the harder work of improving the human capital of the black population much earlier in their lives.
It seems to me that Loury’s warning about the harms of affirmative action is being swamped these days by a tsunami of racialist ideology. Consider the way that a major Jewish movement seeks to switch religions.
In order to work toward racial equality through anti-racism, we must become aware of the many facets of racial inequality created by racism in the world around us and learn how to choose to intervene. Join us as we explore:
– How race impacts our own and each others’ experiences of the world
– The choice as bystander to intervene or overlook racist behavior
– How to be an anti-racist upstander
There is more of this dreck at the link.
I foresee considerable damage coming from this. Institutions and professions where I want to see rigor and a culture of excellence are being degraded. Yascha Mounk, who doesn’t think of himself as a right-wing crank, recently wrote Why I’m Losing Trust in the Institutions.
Finally, this seems like as good a post as any to link to an essay from last June by John McWhorter on the statistical evidence concerning police killings.
There seems to be two problems repeatedly coming up in this blog and everywhere else for that matter. First, African Americans are underperforming. Second bigotry is ever present in the US and it’s directed at blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews and LGBT. So as is often the case the problem is easy to identify, but the solution seems very difficult to find. Yet, if we find a solution it will take decades to implement. There is no quick fix for either issue.
Clearly, providing better education, job opportunities, healthcare and social services will aid any minority group. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that alone solves the African American underperformance and so I can’t come up with the solution on my own.
The second problem, especially under the present wokeism movement seems to be a fundamental human flaw and it therefore may be unsolvable. What flawed creatures we are.
Any any event, we should stop spending 95% of our time discussing the problems and instead start a Manhattan Project style problem solving effort to tackle resolving once and for all these two dilemmas. It’s solution time.
“It’s solution time.”
Do you wanna kick off the festivities with some possible solutions?
Full disclosure: I’m quite happy with the status quo since it seems like the cheapest and most effective solution. People complain about injustice blah blah blah and then we send them welfare checks and free healthcare as recompense for those alleged injustices. Equilibrium established and it works.
The status quo may be the best we can hope for, but if that’s true then it knocks down my faith in humanity and Americans more specifically several notches.
That’s what wisdom feels like.
I’m very sorry.
Would you have more faith in humanity if we implemented a bunch of radical and likely harmful programs to try and fix the unfixable (black genetics).
I have the solution, dissolve the country because it’s impossible to govern 330 million people. More countries will give people more choices and governments will improve because they’d have to compete for citizens.
And what about China? How do you persuade others that the Chinese government is not good for the post-Cultural Revolution generations? Please don’t tell me you don’t share their beliefs and values because I don’t share them.
There are two relevant questions. The easy one: Will the Chinese government expand its territory and population? My answer is they won’t do it because they know how costly would be to transform and control non-Chinese colonies (their preferred strategy is to control the international organizations).
The hard one: Will the U.S. and other countries go through a sort of Mao’s CR? I think the barbarians are coming and have already won some battles, in particular in the U.S. (yes, with the complicity of rotten and corrupt democrats and idiots like Romney). My main concern is that in the U.S. there are too many people ready to take any bribe they are offered in exchange for at least tolerating the barbarians –you can see how weak loyalty is in the Ivy League and other big private organizations.
You talk about competition a la Tiebout, but both the theoretical and the historical analyses of nation-states and empires are far from conclusive. The analysis of Mafia competition for territory is at least good entertainment.
You are wrong. “The problem” is not easy to identify because it has several dimensions and there is no agreement on which are the relevant ones. The easy way out is to presume that some individual behavior Y (say, bigotry) is wrong and bad and the cause of a social problem X (say, inequality) and therefore X is the problem. Even if you look at a society in which most people are poor (they are barely surviving despite spending most of their time working hard), you will find a few that are relatively rich (either they barely survive but don’t work hard 16 hours per day or they are clearly better than just surviving because they work hard 16 hours). Even in that society, no two people are alike, and we should find the relevant dimensions that differentiate them before entertaining solutions. The ones advancing solutions based on “Y is the cause of X” are not seeking the elimination of X, they are relying on the excuse of Y-people oppressing others to grab power.
Have you ever worked in Africa, Asia, Latin America with salvation armies of virtue-signaling people? I bet you haven’t done it. Today some new armies have learned from Mao that the solution is to change the new generations via Cultural Revolution. Will they succeed outside China?
Had I been alive in the 1940s and asked to provide a solution to developing a nuclear bomb, I would’ve had no solution. Nevertheless, had I been present in Los Alamos to witness the testing of the first atomic bombs it would have been easy for me to determine that problem-solving was underway. Thus, one does not have to have a solution to notice that we have moved away from discussing the problem to solving the problem.
Again wrong. I refer to human problems, now you refer to material problems.
The Tony Timpa case, here in the DFW area of Texas, doesn’t bother me that much. He was high on cocaine and off of his antipsychotic meds. After watching the body worn camera videos, the officers’ reaction to this doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to me, but they do come across as callous.
The other North Texas cases that do bother me a lot are the Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson cases. But, the criminal justice system seems more than capable of dealing with them. The officer involved the the killing of Jean has already been convicted of first degree murder and the officer involved in the killing of Jefferson has been charged with murder while we await the trial.
Bottom line: we don’t have a justice perfect system, but it does seem to work effectively in the clear cut cases.
“Instead, you have to do the harder work of improving the human capital of the black population much earlier in their lives.”
This is just as toxic a sentiment, maybe more so. It’s an excuse to start teaching and implementing critical race theory in K-12. The earlier the better, right. Many elementary schools are already implementing BLM propaganda. What could go wrong with indoctrinating people even earlier than university.
We’ve already tried every single intervention in the book. We just went through two plus decades of educational reform proposals centered on closing the gap that failed spectacularly and were wildly unpopular.
We can’t improve black underperformance because it is genetic. All interventions have proven ineffective or counter productive at scale.
Glenn just wants to shove his problem out of elite circles and into the rest of society so he doesn’t have feel bad that someone might think he is an AA slot, as if that won’t just magnify the problem in the end. He’s on the record saying he doesn’t want racial genetics discussed, so all he’s doing is hawking an idea that already failed over the last few decades.
We’ve got people letting vaccines expire on shelfs because it might close racial gaps by increasing deaths but hoping white people die disproportionately. That’s where “blame society and demand radical change up and down the line to fix disparities” gets you.
Setting aside 10% make work sinecures for incompetent blacks is a vastly more efficient compared to reshaping all of society to pursue some impossible utopian vision. Unfortunately, the DIE industry has to grow or die, so it won’t take such a steady state deal.
Instead, you have to do the harder work of improving the human capital of the black population much earlier in their lives.
We’ve been trying that since 1965. It’s called Head Start. The effects fade out after a few years, and it hasn’t made any substantial progress in achieving racial equality.
The algorithm problem is more nuanced than you give it credit for. For example, you can gain predictive power in court by using zip code in a model because people from “bad” areas have higher rates of recidivism. But conditional on my crime, it doesn’t strike me as fair to give me a harsher punishment based on where I choose to / can afford to live. This is often couched in racial terms because it treats black people more harshly on average, but the same applies to white people living in high-crime areas and black people living in low-crime areas. If we take the maximize model accuracy objective too far, we can get some really bad outcomes. For example, I would guess that a perfect model would treat politician’s children more leniently, but I wouldn’t want to live in that world.
You can make utilitarian arguments as well. To take one example, Loury often cites that 70% of black children do not have a father in the household as a possible reason for poor outcomes. But sending black fathers to jail at a higher rate for the same crime, which is the outcome if you use zip code in the model, is certainly not going to push that statistic in the right direction. So even from a utilitarian perspective, it’s not obvious that maximizing short term recidivism probability is the right objective function.
The goal of the algorithm is to reduce crime. Would increasing crime in poor neighborhoods help black outcomes?
Look, if you’ve got an idea of how to get people on the left half of the bell curve to get and stay married I’m all ears. But anything I could think of would touch so many progressive third rails that it’s dead on arrival.
The goal of the algorithm is to predict crime. The goal of policy makers if multifaceted and reducing crime is one aspect. Perhaps that is your sole goal. But then I’d ask you – if the algorithm found politicians’ children were at lower risk of recidivism, would you give more lenient sentences? If not, it sounds like you have other goals as well.
‘Would increasing crime in poor neighborhoods help black outcomes?” Of course not. But there are multiple effects of court sentences. The fact that you can point to one which goes in a specific direction says nothing about the entire picture. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that jailing blacks at higher rates for the same crime would lead to worse black outcomes overall.
Is the sole goal of prison time to minimize recidivism?
It makes common sense that taking people likely to commit crimes off the street leads to better outcomes. The burden of proof should be on you to prove that there is some kind of triple bank shot effect where releasing likely criminals is good for black outcomes. And no I don’t buy the “huge reserve of nonviolent drug offenders” schtick because it’s just not true when you look at the math. Black people are in jail because they committed violent crimes, often multiple crimes, and are a danger to their communities.
Every generation or so you say that blacks are being jailed too much, get soft on crime, and we have a crime wave. This attitude just caused a huge crime spike in 2015 and now again in 2020. After so much failure, isn’t it “implausible” to think more of the same would be good.
The organized opposition to affirmative action mostly comes from groups which are overrepresented in selective schools and other elite institutions, particularly Jews and Asians. However, there doesn’t seem to be much if any evidence that they actually have worse educations or life outcomes because they end up at slightly less selective schools. On the other hand, as Glenn Loury understands, there is a lot of evidence that the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action are actually harmed, as persuasively argued by Stuart Taylor & Richard Sander in Mismatch. A lot of people in admissions offices have to be aware of this, but of course it would be professional suicide to admit it.
If getting into Harvard isn’t important to ones life outcomes, why do people try so hard to get in? I mean I’ve seen some pretty brutal stuff in Asian cram schools. Are they all idiots?
I dunno, I get that some smart Asian math whizz can probably earn a good six figure salary graduating from state U, and maybe that means median income isn’t all that different. Yet somehow they seem to think is really important to something in their lives and make huge efforts based on that belief. Maybe they are seeing some value there you aren’t measuring.
I think part of it is that Asian countries have much more rigid pipelines where good test scores -> admission to good colleges -> good job prospects. The relationship is much weaker in America, but Asian immigrants encourage their children to play the game as it’s played in Asia.
Agree that there are far more pathways in U.S. One of my kid’s Asian friends, despite a terrific record, couldn’t get in any Ivy league schools. She went to UVA, did very well, & went on to Yale Law, probably the most selective law school in the country. I know lots of similar examples.
Does Yale Law not have affirmative action?
I mean all you’ve proved is that if you don’t make it past the filter in undergrad, maybe you can make it up in grad.
Bottom line is Yale Law graduated a lot of Supreme Court justices and State U law not so much.
What’s a good job prospect?
I have no doubt that all these Asian grinders can achieve UMC grinder jobs if they choose, regardless of admission to Harvard. But if they get into Harvard, other possibilities become more likely.
I don’t know what you are worried about. President-Elect Biden has promised to “root out” systemic racism from day one of his administration. The Biden-Sanders Unity agenda states:
“We need a comprehensive agenda for communities of color with ambition that matches the scale of the challenge and with recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities. We need proactive anti-discrimination detection and enforcement. On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.”
And Biden’s campaign platform promised to give tons of money away to people with the right colors: https://joebiden.com/racial-economic-equity/
Problem solved!
Those whom Biden will exclude from the largesse and who are to be leveled down might wish to acquaint themselves with possible protections under international law (the USA courts exercising judicial review are unchecked and unbalanced so that any assertions of protections under USA law or the USA constitution are meaningless.)
First, be aware that the 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines the crime of apartheid as:
“The following inhumane acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:
* Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person
* By murder of members of a racial group or groups;
* By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
* By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;
*
* Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;
* Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;
* Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;
* Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;
* Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.”
Which pretty much covers all of Build Back Better. Second, Article 2 of the 1943 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide includes in its definition of “genocide” the following:
“
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;”
This of course raises the question “is ‘anti-racism’ genocide?” We need a national dialogue on this important topic. And we must be prepared to invoke this law as the divisive hate preached by the new administration snowballs into ever greater violence and killing.
As for CDC’s initial “social justice” guidance & then reverting on “public outcry”: are the CDC folks better intelligent/Machiavellian than they are being given credit for? They are public servants and so the initial “social justice” reco was a “performative act” to signal virtue – knowing pretty well that there will be a public outcry and hence switch to a model which gave the least mortality? I mean, they are expected to CYA and they did so brilliantly.
Sorry if this has been already noticed/commented and I am the nth such comment.
What did they revert to?
People 75+ (but not 65-74) are now behind 20 million healthcare workers and jumbled in with 30+ million frontline workers. People 65-74 are behind all of them and jumbled up with over a hundred million other people in phase 1c. My 72 year old father with like a dozen comorbities is looking at months before getting a vaccine.
They can’t even get the doses out. Cuomo just fined a clinic a million dollars and threatened criminal charges because they gave a dose to a 68 year old diabetic that runs food pantries rather than let it expire.
Why the hell are you people taking a victory lap here? This was and still is murder.