Category Archives: culture

Intervening for racial equality

Posted on by

Glenn Loury says,

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.

Can we trust the social science of trust?

Posted on by

Kevin Vallier writes,

Strikingly, the U.S. is the only established democracy to see a major decline in social trust. In other nations the trend was in the opposite direction. From 1998 to 2014, social trust increased in Sweden from 56.5% to 67%, in Australia from 40% to 54%, and in Germany from 32% to 42%. Meanwhile, the U.S. is becoming more like Brazil, where trust is around 5%. What makes America unique?

. . .Growing up under polarized political institutions may lead young people to generalize from partisan distrust to social distrust. Americans are sorting themselves into social silos, seldom interacting with unlike-minded others, leading to less moderation and more radicalization. This may be due in part to social media, though recent research on the effect of social media has reached mixed conclusions on this question. But the effect is clear: In 2017, around 70% of Democrats said that Donald Trump voters couldn’t be trusted, and around 70% of Republicans said the same of Hillary Clinton voters.

I am skeptical of the quantitative, survey-based approach to this issue. Centrist political parties and establishment politicians have taken a big hit in many countries, not just in the U.S. It seems to me that we live in a Martin Gurri world, not a world in which America is the exception.

I am not sure that political dislike carries over into social distrust so much. If the best surgeon you can find supports the other party, how many people would pick a different surgeon?

Joseph Henrich watch

Posted on by

Ş. Pelin Akyol and Naci H. Mocan write,

We leverage a Turkish education reform which went into effect in 1997. For political reasons, the reform was implemented very quickly and rather unexpectedly, and it increased the mandatory years of education from 5 to 8 years.

. . .In many societies around the world, the practice of consanguineous marriage is part of the fabric of culture. Nevertheless, our results reveal that the propensity to approve this practice and the propensity to be actually in a consanguineous marriage are malleable and that these tendencies are influenced by women’s educational attainment.

Elite over-production

Posted on by

Malcolm Kyeyune writes,

for some time now, the West has been using a massive expansion of higher education to create a new class of functionaries—”knowledge-workers” and would-be managers—in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb. Yet, it is only just now that we are seeing, with clear eyes, that this class of people (which, again, nobody denies the existence of) might begin acting as a class.

Peter Turchin coined the phrase “elite over-production” to describe the volatile situation in which there are too many people with elite class markers relative to high-status positions in society. We “solve” this problem in the United States by putting these surplus elites into college administration and other meaningless non-profit positions. Otherwise, even more of them would end up as baristas, where they would at least be contributing positively to society.

One very uncharitable way to describe the result is that these surplus elites have some unfulfilled desires for power and status. They take these out on the rest of us in fits of woke rage.

Kyeyune puts the uncharitable interpretation this way:

The point of this “totalitarianism” is not to force everyone to think correct thoughts at the risk of getting fired; it is to get them fired. Full stop. Like the medieval guilds of old Europe, surplus managers are threatened by the existence of a mass of people willing to do any job within their ambit that cannot be comfortably accommodated without inviting the pauperization of their entire profession.

I recommend the whole essay.

Don’t hire TIVs

Posted on by

Rahav Gabay and others write,

The present research investigates this Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships. People who have a higher tendency for interpersonal victimhood feel victimized more often, more intensely, and for longer durations in interpersonal relations than do those who have a lower such tendency. Based on research on victimhood in interpersonal and intergroup relations, we present a conceptualization of TIV, introduce a valid and reliable measure, and examine its cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences.

. . .anxious attachment is associated with a combination of being unable to regulate hurt feelings, and being very sensitive to others’ responses, and with an ambivalent perception of others that involves anticipating rejection or abandonment, while depending on others as a source of self-esteem and self-worth (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016). Thus, anxious attachment should be positively associated with TIV.

This is a study that is dubious yet appealing. It is appealing because it reduces the cry-bullies of the Woke movement to a personality type. It is dubious because it reduces a political orientation to a personality type. It is dubious because these sorts of psychological studies are not reliable.

But if you could test for this sort of personality, I would recommend not hiring anyone like this, regardless of their political orientation.

The nightmare transparent society

Posted on by

Over twenty years ago, David Brin wrote The Transparent Society, which offered a vision of how we could learn to live with surveillance technology. I would describe his vision as having two components:

1. Symmetry or mutuality, leading to deterrence. Government would have the ability to spy on us, but government itself would be transparent. Because we could see what government is doing, we could deter government from abusing power.

2. Forbearance. In the restaurant, I could hear everyone’s conversation, but I don’t listen.

It seems to me that right now we have the opposite. The big tech firms see everything about us, but we know very little about how they work.

And people are fighting for attention, rather than for privacy.

Irrational commitments

Posted on by

Bobby Jindal and Alex Castellanos write,

We don’t make the big decisions in our lives with a calculator: whom we love, whom we marry, the children we bring into the world, the groups to which we are loyal, the causes for which we fight and die. We make those commitments not only with our heads, but also with our hearts.

People live not just with rational beliefs but also with irrational commitments. When Bohr says to interpret the Uncertainty Principle as implying that the location of an electron is probabilistic, he is stating a rational belief. When Einstein replies “God does not play dice!” he is stating an irrational commitment.

Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up makes a case for respecting, or at least not dismissing, irrational commitments. As an example, he uses the belief in free will. But the Enlightenment, which raised the status of Reason and lowered the status of dogma, has apparently given us a better way to approach issues in science, business, and politics. The philosophical project of many epistemologists in the British empiricist tradition seems to involve making an irrational commitment to get rid of irrational commitments.

Rhymes of history

Posted on by

Paul Matzko’s The Radio Right describes a short-lived period in the history of radio. From about 1957 to the end of the 1960s, a set of now-forgotten political/religious AM radio broadcasters attained a listening audience that approached 20 million, at a time when our population was about half of what it is today. I recommend listening to the Matzko interview with Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus.

Some ways in which this rhymes with the present:

1. This grass-roots right was much, much bigger than the intellectual right. National Review had less than 20 thousand subscribers around 1960. Then, as now, conservative intellectuals were leaders without a following.

2. The grass-roots right was strongly attached to conspiracy stories. Back then both Communism and racial integration were part of a conspiracy. Of course, the right has no monopoly on conspiracy-mongering–look at the left’s theory that Trump-Russia collusion defeated Hillary in 2016. I think that the grass-roots right will never let go of the theory that the Democrats stole the election for Biden. I predict that four years from now at least two-thirds of Republican voters will believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. Assuming Mr. Trump is not the nominee in 2024, my prediction is that the actual nominee will be unable to completely distance himself or herself from the stolen-election narrative.

3. The left treats censorship of the right as perfectly legitimate. Matzko’s main story is how President Kennedy undertook to use the IRS and the FCC to shut down the Radio Right, and by the end of the 1960s this effort had succeeded. I think it will be harder to stamp out the grass-roots right today, but the effort is surely being made. And of course, when someone is trying to shut you down, this serves to increase your openness to conspiracy theories, as Ross Douthat points out. (Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I had written most of this post before Sunday, when Tyler linked to the Douthat piece.)

Common humanity or common enemy?

Posted on by

Jonathan Haidt has drawn this distinction. Eric Vieth transcribed part of a podcast in which Haidt spoke with Joe Rogan.

You can either do what we call common enemy identity politics, where you say life is a battle between good groups and evil groups. Let’s divide people by race, you know, straight versus everyone else. Men versus all the other genders and white versus everybody else. So you look at the straight white men. They’re the problem. All the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man. That’s one of the core ideas of “intersectionality.” What we say in the book is that this leads to eternal conflict.

Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. We don’t say to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand justice. That’s fine, But you do it by first emphasizing common humanity. That’s what Martin Luther King did. That’s what Pauli Murray did. That’s what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray . . . she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s . . . She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He’s relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He’s using the language of American. Of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common and then people’s hearts are open. We’re within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it’s the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the Grievance Studies departments, especially, that I think is an alarming trend.

Unfortunately, I think that people like Haidt or Bret Weinstein or Coleman Hughes or Glenn Loury or James Lindsay are confined to an intellectual ghetto, aka the IDW. Only a few of us on the right know that they exist. We also know about Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. But people on the left know only about the latter.

When I go to YouTube, it recommends mostly my side, but some of the other side. I suspect that when people on the left go to YouTube, they never see recommendations from the ghetto.