MixedNuts comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:
-celandine13
How about:
Someone who, following an honest best effort to evaluate the available evidence, concludes that some of the beliefs that nowadays fall under the standard definition of "racist" nevertheless may be true with probabilities significantly above zero.
Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people, and whose conclusion happens to reflect negatively on this person or group in some way. (Or, alternatively, someone who doesn't believe that making such inferences is grossly immoral as a matter of principle.)
Both (1) and (2) fall squarely under the common usage of the term "racist," and yet I don't see how they would fit into the above cited classification.
Of course, some people would presumably argue that all beliefs in category (1) are in fact conclusively proven to be false with p~1, so it can be only a matter of incorrect conclusions motivated by the above listed categories of racism. Presumably they would also claim that, as a well-established general principle, no correct inferences in category (2) are ever possible. But do you really believe this?
That (1) only makes sense if there is a “standard” definition of racist (and it's based on what people believe rather than/as well as what they do). The point of the celandine13 was indeed that there's no such thing.
The evidence someone's race constitutes about that person's qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here. And given that we're running on corrupted hardware, I suspect that someone who does try to “performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person” ends up subconsciously double-counting evidence and therefore end up with less accurate results than somebody who doesn't. (As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off... well, I've never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)
I have seen accusations for racism as responses to people pointing that out.
Also, according to the U.S. Supreme Court even if race is screened off, you're actions can still be racist or something.
In real life, you don't have the luxury of gathering forensic evidence on everyone you meet.
I'm not talking about forensic evidence. Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour. Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.
Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.
There's this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
...
I facepalmed. Really, Eric? Sorry, I don't think that a moral realist is perceptive enough to the nuances and ethical knots involved to be a judge on this issue. I don't know, he might be an excellent scientist, but it's extremely stupid to be so rash when you're attempting serious contrarianism.
Yep, let's all try to overcome bias really really hard; there's only one solution, one desirable state, there's a straight road ahead of us; Kingdom of Rationality, here we come!
(Yvain, thank you a million times for that sobering post!)
You know, there are countries where the intentional homicide rate is smaller than in John Derbyshire's country by nearly an order of magnitude.
That thing doesn't exist in all countries. Plus, I think the reason why you don't see that many two-digit-IQ people among (say) physics professors is not that they don't make it, it's that they don't even consider doing that, so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.
That's not the point. The point is that the black physics professor is less smart than the Jewish physics professor.
But the difference is smaller than for the median black person and the median Jewish person. (I said "even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it", not "all of it".)
The bell curve has both the mean and the deviation, you can have a 'race' with lower mean and larger standard deviation, and then you can e.g. filter by reliable accomplishment of some kind, such as solving some problem that smartest people in the world attempted and failed, you may end up with situation that the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation will have fewer people whom attain this, but those whom do, are on average smarter. Set bar even higher, and the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation has more people attaining it. Also, the Gaussian distribution can stop being good approximation very far away from the mean.
edit: and to reply to grand grand parents: I bet i can divide the world into category that includes you, and a category that does not include you, in such a way that the category including you has substantially higher crime rate, or is otherwise bad. Actually if you are from US, I have a pretty natural 'cultural' category where your murder rate is about 5..10x of normal for such average income. Other category is the 'racists', i.e. the people whom use skin colour as evidence. Those people also have substantially bad behaviour. You of course want to use skin colour as evidence, and don't want me to use your qualities as evidence. See if I care. If you want to use the skin colour as evidence, lumping together everyone that's black, I want to use 'use of skin colour as evidence', lumping you together with all the nasty racists.
What if verbal ability and quantitative ability are often decoupled?
I wasn't talking about "verbal ability" (which, to the extent that can be found out in ten minutes, correlates more with where someone grew up than with IQ), but about what they say, e.g. their reaction to finding out that I'm a physics student (though for this particular example there are lots of confounding factors), or what kinds of activities they enjoy.
If you're able to drive the conversation like that, you can get information about IQ, and that information may have a larger impact than race. But to "screen off" evidence means making that evidence conditionally independent- once you knew their level of interest in physics, race would give you no information about their IQ. That isn't the case.
Imagine that all races have Gaussian IQ distributions with the same standard deviation, but different means, and consider just the population of people whose IQs are above 132 ('geniuses' for this comment). In such a model, the mean IQ of black geniuses will be smaller than the mean IQ of white geniuses which will be smaller than the mean IQ of Jewish geniuses- so even knowing a lower bound for IQ won't screen off the evidence provided by race!
Huh, sure, if the likelihood is a reversed Heaviside step. If the likelihood is itself a Gaussian, then the posterior is a Gaussian whose mean is the weighed average of that of the prior and that of the likelihood, weighed by the inverse squared standard deviations. So even if the st.dev. of the likelihood was half that of the prior for each race, the difference in posterior means would shrink by five times.
Right- there's lots of information out there that will narrow your IQ estimate of someone else more than their race will, like that they're a professional physicist or member of MENSA, but evidence only becomes worthless when it's independent of the quantity you're interested in given the other things you know.
Minor note, this appears to actually not be the case. Most studies have no correlation between race and penis size. See for example here. The only group that there may be some substantial difference is that Chinese babies may have smaller genitalia after birth but this doesn't appear to hold over to a significant difference by the time the children have reached puberty. Relevant study.
Huh, according to this map the average Congolese penis is nearly twice as long as the average South Korean penis. (ISTR that stretched flaccid length doesn't perfectly correlate with erect length.)
Oddly salient for such a trivial result. Should a study qualify for an Ig Nobel if you can use it to settle bar bets?
Where would someone like Steve Sailer fit in this classification?
Indeed as strange as it might sound (but not to those who know what he usually blogs about) Steve Sailer seems to genuinely like black people more than average and I wouldn't be surprised at all if a test showed he wasn't biased against them or was less biased than the average white American.
He also dosen't seem like racist2 from the vast majority of his writing, painting him as racist3 is plain absurd.
What evidence leads to this conclusion?
He published his IAT results and he's proposed policies that play to the strengths of blacks.
Historically, proposing policies that are set to help the specific strengths of a minority group are not generally indicative of actually positive feelings about those groups.
The IAT is the best measure of 'genuinely like X people' we have now, though that's not saying much. (I believe the only place he published it is VDare, which is currently down.)
What are the competing hypotheses and competing observations, here?
...for a particular value of genuine. (See this, BTW.)
It seems to me the natural interpretation for "genuine" is "unconscious," and if that post is relevant, it seems that it argues for more relative importance for the IAT over stated positions and opinions.
So if a minority takes the Implicitly Association Test and finds out their biased against the dominant "race" in their area, are they a Racist1, or not?
I would also really question the validity of the Implicit Association Test. It says "Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for White People compared to Black People.", which given that blacks have been severely under-represented my social sub-culture for the last 27 years(Punk/Goth), the school I graduated from (Art School), and my professional environments (IT) for the last 20 years is probably not inaccurate.
However, it also says "Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for Herman Cain compared to Barack Obama." Which is nonsense. I have a STRONG preference for Herman Cain over Barack Obama.
Looks like we need more "racism"s :D A common definition of racism that reflects the intuitions you bring up is "racism is prejudice plus power," (e.g., here) which isn't very useful from a decision-making point of view but which is very useful when looking at this racism as a functional thing experienced by the some group.
This is missing Racist4:
Someone whose preferences result in disparate impact.
...and also useful for those among us who don't identify as "liberal-minded."
You left out one common definition.
Also I don't see why calling Obama the "Food Stamp President" or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a "Racist2" unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that "race" provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn't update very well upon learning these things. For example, "X is a college graduate, and is black" doesn't tell you all that much more than "X is a college graduate"; it's probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.
I'm not sure that what you have in mind here is screening, at least in the causal diagrams sense. If I'm not mistaken, learning that someone is a college graduate screens off race for the purpose of predicting the causal effects of college graduation, but it doesn't screen off race for the purpose of predicting causes of college graduation (such as intelligence) and their effects. You're right, though, that even in the latter case learning that someone is a college graduate decreases the size of the update from learning their race. (At least given realistic assumptions. If 99% of cyan people have IQ 80 and 1% have IQ 140, and 99% of magenta people have IQ 79 and 1% have IQ 240, learning that someone is a college graduate suddenly makes it much more informative to learn their race. But that's not the world we live in; it's just to illustrate the statistics.)
Which are generally much harder to observe.
Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.
I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one's performance. (Though I've heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)
Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people. For instance, "black people are inherently stupid and lazy" becomes "black people don't have to meet the same standards for education". The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don't like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)
A quick google search isn't giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who're admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in "AA" type policies is that they often will put someone in a slightly higher level school (say Berkeley rather than Davis) than they really should be in and which because of their background they are unprepared for. Not necessarily intellectually--they could be very bright, but in terms of things like study skills and the like.
There is sufficient data to suggest this should be looked at more thoroughly. In general it is better for someone to graduate from a "lesser" school than to drop out of a better one.
Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who'll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone's time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate? (Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don't hear "my father also went here" the same way as "I got in partly because of my race", then there's a different factor at work here.)
In the extreme case where being above a given level of competence deterministically causes graduation, you're correct and AA makes no difference; the likelihood (but not necessarily the prior or posterior probability) of different competence levels for a college graduate is independent of race. In the extreme case where graduation is completely random, you're wrong and AA affects the evidence provided by graduation in the same way as it affects the evidence provided by admission. Reality is likely to be somewhere in between (I'm not saying it's in the middle).
It depends on the actual distribution of legacy and AA graduates.
I'd say that the point of admissions is less to weed out people who'll succeed from people who'll waste the school's time than to weed out people who'll reflect poorly on the status of the school. Colleges raise their status by taking better students, so their interests are served not by taking students down to the lower limit of those who can meet academic requirements, but by being as selective as they can afford to be. Schools will even lie about the test scores of students they actually accept, among other things, to be seen as more selective.
I think it's more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.
I'm honestly confused. You don't see why calling Obama a "Food Stamp President" is different from criticizing his economic policy?
I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton - even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama's economic policies.
Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.
You haven't answered my question:
Given the way that public welfare codes for both "lazy" and "black" in the United States, do you think that "Food Stamp President" has the same implications as some other critique of Obama's economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama's race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?
"public welfare codes for both "lazy" and "black" in the United States"
Taking your word on that, what "other critique of Obama's economic policies" are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?
A political opponent of Obama might say:
or
or
edit: or
(end edit)
without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama's race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama's economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.
Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as "public welfare codes for..." I don't see how that one wouldn't have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in "Obamacare."
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I'll agree that there's no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.
Here is another example of my point that one can claim any criticism of Obama is racist if one is sufficiently motivated.
The term "welfare president" has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.
Well, yes by finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
Yes, that's certainly true.
I'm really curious now, though. What's your opinion about the intended connotations of the phrase "food stamp President"? Do you think it's intended primarily as a way of describing Obama's economic policies? His commitment to preventing hunger? His fondness for individual welfare programs? Something else?
Or, if you think the intention varies depending on the user, what connotations do you think Gingrich intended to evoke with it?
Or, if you're unwilling to speculate as to Gingrich's motives, what connotations do you think it evokes in a typical resident of, say, Utah or North Dakota?
That seems improbable. To pick the first example I Googled off of the Atlantic webside: Chart of the Day: Obama's Epic Failure on Judicial Nominees contains some substantive criticism of Obama - can you show me where it contains "code words" of this kind?
It's not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.
I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here:
EN: By finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
RZ: What about this criticism?
EN: By declaring "epic", "confirmation mess", and "death blow" to be racist "code words", you can make that criticism racist.
RZ: But "epic", "confirmation mess", and "death blow" aren't racist code words!
EN: Right. Neither is "food stamps".
Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo "code word" -- for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between "food stamps" and black people than between "epic" and black people, but would not find stronger associations between "food stamps" and white people than between "epic" and white people.
I think "nigh-unfalsifiable" is unfair in general when it comes to the use of code words, but I'm not familiar with the facts of the particular case under discussion.
I agree in the general case.
In fact, I fully expect that (for example) an IAT would find stronger associations between "food stamps" and black people than between "epic" and black people, but would not find stronger associations between "food stamps" and white people than between "epic" and white people, and if I did not find that result I would have to seriously rethink my belief that "food stamps" is a dog-whistle in the particular case under discussion; it's not unfalsifiable at all.
But I can't figure out any way to falsify the claim that "by finding enough 'code words' you can make any criticism of Obama racist," nor even the implied related claim that it's equally easy to do so for all texts. Especially in the context of this discussion, where the experimental test isn't actually available. All Eugene_Nier has to do is claim that arbitrarily selected words in the article you cite are equally racially charged, and claim -- perhaps even sincerely -- to detect no difference between the connotations of different words.
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they've been accused of. It's not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim--I hope you're familiar with Lee Atwater's very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
No, they just declare each individual instance 'racist' no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as 'racist' being the most prominent example.
That's the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like "race traitor" is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine's phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)
(N.B. that if this definition wasn't question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)
Possibly, I couldn't quite figure out Mixed Nuts' definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.
Well they aren't. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:
Surely one of the definitions of "racist" should contain something about thinking that some races are better than others. Or is that covered under "neo-Nazi"?
Depends on what you mean by "better". There's a difference between taking the data on race and IQ seriously, and wanting to commit genocide.
(blink)
Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of "better" and wanting to commit genocide?
That's the question I was implicitly asking Oscar.
Most obvious plausible available meaning for 'better' that fits: "Most satisfies my average utilitarian values".
(Yes, most brands of simple utilitarianism reduce to psychopathy - but since people still advocate them we can consider the meaning at least 'available'.)
Fair enough.
Sure, I just thought it was weird that the definitions given barely even mentioned race.
I'm pretty sure that's covered under Racist1. Note the word "negative".
Though it's odd that Racist1 specifically refers to "minorities". The entire suite seems to miss folks that favor a "minority" race.
Not really it is perfectly possible to be explicitly aware of one's racial preferences and not really be bothered by having such preferences, at least no more than one is bothered by liking salty food or green parks, yet not be a Nazi or prone to violence.
Indeed I think a good argument can be made not only that large number of such people lived in the 19th and 20th century, but that we probably have millions of them living today in say a place like Japan.
And that they are mostly pretty decent and ok people.
Edit: Sorry! I didn't see the later comments already covering this. :)
Negative subconscious attitudes aren't the same thing as (though they might cause or be caused by) conscious opinions that such-and-such people are inferior in some way.
Ah yes - it's extra-weird that someone isn't allowed in that framework to have conscious racist opinions but not be a jerk about it.
If one has conscious racist opinions, or is conscious that one has unconscious racist opinions (has taken the IAT but doesn't explicitly believe negative things about blacks) but doesn't act on them, it's probably because one doesn't endorse them. I'd class such a person as a Racist1.
I don't think not being an "insensitive jerk" is the same as not acting on one's opinions.
For example, if I think that people who can't do math shouldn't be programmers, and I make sure to screen applicants for math skills, that's acting on my opinions. If I make fun of people with poor math skills for not being able to get high-paying programmer jobs, that's being an insensitive jerk.
That's true. I was taking "racist opinions" to mean "incorrect race-related beliefs that favor one group over another". If people who couldn't do math were just as good at programming as people who could, and you still screened applicants for math skills, that would be a jerk move. If your race- or gender- or whatever-group-related beliefs are true, and you act on them rationally (e.g. not discriminating with a hard filter when there's only a small difference), then you aren't being any kind of racist by my definition.
ETA: did anyone downvote for a reason other than LocustBeamGun's?
(ETA: I didn't downvote, but) I wouldn't call gender differences in math "small" - the genders have similar average skills but their variances are VERY different. As in, Emmy Noether versus ~everyone else.
And if there is a great difference between groups it would be more rational to apply strong filters (except for example people who are bad at math, conveniently, aren't likely to become programmers). Perhaps the downvoter(s) thought you only presented the anti-discrimination side of the issue.
I think in most cases the average is more important in deciding how much to discriminate. But I deleted the relevant phrase because I'm not sure about that specific case and my argument holds about the same amount of water without it as with it.
EDIT:
Huh, I was intending to say that it's acceptable to discriminate on real existing differences, to the extent that those differences exist. Not sure how to fix my comment to make that less ambiguous, so just saying it straight out here.
Not to mention a bad business decision.
That too, thanks for pointing it out.
Indeed. For some reason I'm not sure of, I instinctively dislike Chinese people, but I don't endorse this dislike and try to acting upon it as little as possible (except when seeking romantic partners -- I think I do get to decide what criteria to use for that).
Can you expand on the difference you see between acting on your (non-endorsed) preferences in romantic partners, and acting on those preferences in, for example, friends?
As for this specific case, I don't happen to have any Chinese friend at the moment, so I can't.
More generally, see some of the comments on this Robin Hanson post: not many of them seem to agree with him.
I don't understand how not having any Chinese friends at the moment precludes you from expanding on the differences between acting on your dislike of Chinese people when seeking romantic partners and acting on it in other areas of your life, such as maintaining friendships.
Yes, the commenters on that post mostly don't agree with him.
That said, I would summarize most of the exchange as:
"Why are we OK with A, but we have a problem with B?"
"Because A is OK and B is wrong!"
Which isn't quite as illuminating as I might have liked.
Since I'm not maintaining any friendships with Chinese people, I can't see what it would even mean for me to act on my dislike of Chinese people in maintaining friendships. As for ‘other areas of my life’, this means that if I attempt to interact with a Chinese-looking beggar the same way I'd behave I'd interact with an European-looking beggar, to read a paper by an author with a Chinese-sounding name the same way I'd read one by an author with (say) a Polish-sounding name, and so on. (I suspect I might have misunderstood your question, though.)
What about a "Racist4", someone who assign different moral values to people of different races all other things being equal?
Based on a couple interviews I've seen with unabashed Racist3s, I think that they would tend to fulfill that criterion.
Edit: Requesting clarification for downvote?
Depends if the differences in assigned moral values are large enough they can easily approach Nazi pretty quickly. As a thought experiment consider how many dolphins would you kill to save a single person?
That would be a paleo-nazi. Not many of them around, anymore, and those that are don't get away with much.
Why make up a new word? Paleoconservatives and smarter white nationalists (think Jared Taylor ) seem to often fit the bill.
Apart from race, isn't this a problem with English or language in general? We use the same words for varying degrees of a certain notion, and people cherry pick the definitions that they want to cogitate for response. If I call someone a conservative, is it a compliment or an insult? That depends on both of our perceptions of the word conservative as well as our outlook on ourselves as political beings; however, beyond that, I could mean to say that the person is fiscally conservative, but as the current conservative candidates are showing conservatism to be far-right extremism, the person may think, "Hey! I'm not one of those guys."
I think if someone wants to argue with you, you'd be hard-pressed to speak eloquently enough to provide an impenetrable phrase that does not open itself to a spectrum of interpretation.
Sure. "Conservative" isn't a fixed political position. Quite often, it's a claim about one's political position: that it stands for some historical good or tradition. A "conservative" in Russia might look back to the good old days of Stalin whereas a "conservative" in the U.S. would not appreciate the comparison. It's also a flag color; your "fiscal conservative" may merely not want to wave a flag of the same color as Rick Santorum's.