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I'm not going to spend much effort in the comment section here because my activity will only empower the ideological dynamic at work. I refuse to engage in a losing strategy. Read Mencius Moldbug on why Conservatism always fails (this isn't a good place to start reading him, seek other recommendations then return to the linked piece) to see which losing strategy I mean. While I hold some right wing positions I'm not talking about mainstream Conservatism here but conservatism towards the LessWrong culture and ethos as I knew them. Even this comment is likely a mistake but I just can't keep quiet on this because of internal anguish.
It is not the opening material that bother me so bitterly, since I found that it had interesting examples of experience to share. Gathering and posting it also seemed a good idea to me in my optimism some weeks ago. The comment section however... I disagreed about it being too nitpicky, but now I wonder if I was wrong. I think some are plain avoiding attacking the fundamental assumptions, in a way similar to how I'm about to briefly do, in order to avoid the gender drama LW is infamous for. If so the game is already over.
The personal experiences shared basically give examples of "privilege" and "microaggressions". That is, relatively small but pervasive uncomfortable or inconvenient defaults and related status moves which one notices from time to time. People with low social awareness don't see when they occur to them, so hearing them described explicitly they go "wow this is horrible, how X group suffers". The voting shows systematic appreciation for a male posture of "protecting women". This posture does little good for women, much like like signalling how much you hate child molesters does the opposite of helping child abuse victims.*
For nearly anyone not living hermit's life experiences like these are common, but we are incredibly selective about which ones get our public attention. I say how much attention they get is based not on actual subjective suffering, but on the most viable political coalitions. And I find it obvious that nearly any kind of social standard will produce nearly exactly the same dynamics, just for people with different sets of traits, since these are features -- not bugs -- of how social apes work. Ah, but this kind of observation violates sacred norms that prevail in our society. Indeed, my entire post is probably already practically glowing red in the minds of some people reading it, causing a deep emotional disturbance.
I agree that what gets foregrounded matters, and that people can learn to foreground different things. Furthermore, I know by experience that the current feminist and anti-racist material I've read has cranked up my sensitivity, and not always in ways that I like.
One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don't seem to have a vision of what success would be like. (I've asked groups a couple of times, and no one did. One person even apologized for my getting the impression that she might have such a vision.)
However, it's not obvious to me that it's impossible to raise the level of comfort that people have with each other. The same dynamics isn't identical to the same total ill effect.
I'm hoping that the current high-friction approach will lead to the invention of better methods. I'm pretty sure that a major contributor to the current difficulties is that there is no reliable method of enabling people to become less prejudiced. I've wondered whether reshaping implicit association tests into video games would help.
I'm very grateful to LW for being a place where it seems safe to me to raise these concerns.
My idea of an anti-racial society is one in which skin colour and race don't matter - where they're considered about as relevant as (say) hair colour is today. I haven't really thought through the consequences of this in detail, but that's what I'd consider a victory condition for an anti-racial agenda.
Now that I think about it, though, it implies that an important step towards this result might be the production and commercialisation of 'skin dyes' for aesthetic purposes.
The problem there is that skin color is also fairly well correlated with groups of sub-cultures, so skin color not mattering at all might mean that the all the sub-cultures have dissolved. This might or might not be a loss in the utilitarian sense, but it would look like a huge loss to many of the people who are in those sub-cultures now.
I mean this in a fully general sense-- white represents a group of sub-cultures, and so does Christian.
I don't want to dissolve the richness of the subcultures (and I don't think that's possible, in any case). I want to dissolve the correlation.
Minor note: In that case, you wouldn't just need fast, safe, cheap, and easy skin dye, you'd need similar change to be available for at least faces and hair and possibly for skeletons-- it might be easier for people to just live as computer programs than to do this physically.
You mean like in some African countries where women apply skin-whitening products to look "prettier"? I'm not sure that's the best example of a step towards a world where skin color doesn't matter.
I'm thinking of products that (safely, and temporarily) allow anyone to make their skin bright purple. Or blue. Or orange. Or, yes, black or white. I'm thinking that when such products are widely known and used by a sufficiently large percentage of the population, then there will always be enough of a question (is he "really" black, or is that skin dye?) to cause most people to either re-think their assumptions, or at least to apply them a little more cautiously.
I don't understand what you mean by "matter." People don't care about hair color because hair color is not very predictive of other traits that people care about, but this doesn't seem to be true of race.
What traits, aside from skin colour and immunity or vulnerability to sunburn, are strongly correlated with race and cared about in more than an aesthetic sense?
Intelligence and criminality, to give the two most important examples.
I'd be interested to see a citation for the intelligence claim. I could believe a very weak correlation to genetics, but find a strong one unlikely.
There may be a strong correlation to intelligence via culture; which implies that some cultures are flawed, holding people back from achieving what they might in a better culture; implying in turn that flawed cultures should be improved/debugged.
Citation?
Again, I suspect - though I'm not certain - that what we have here is a cultural tendency pretending to be a racial tendency. If that is correct, then a member of the wrong race faces severe and unfair disadvantages even if he belongs to a less-criminality-inclined culture.
I never said anything about causation or genetics. I was just talking about correlation.
It sounds like you're using the word "correlation" to refer to different modes of causation, which is potentially confusing; "correlation" just refers to certain kinds of association.
It's trivial to dig up citations for correlations between race & IQ. Distinguishing between the two causal models of racial genetic differences → IQ and racial genetic differences ↔ culture → IQ, which I think is what you're getting at, is a distinct and more vexed issue. Still, the first citation in that Wikipedia article is of a paper that clearly favours the first model over the second:
As it happens, I find this particular paper flawed in various ways, but it is a citation of the sort you're asking for.
Thank you, that was exactly the sort of citation I was asking for.
That depends on what you mean by "strongly." I would tentatively posit that even if race isn't strongly predictive in an absolute sense of other traits that people care about, it is relatively predictive compared to other traits that are easy to unambiguously learn about a person. For example, if I wanted to predict the performance of a high school student on standardized tests, I think race would be a better predictor than height or weight, and I don't know enough to confidently say whether it would a better predictor than income level.
I've recently begun to suspect that a possibly substantial amount of what gets labeled "racism" is just using race as weak Bayesian evidence in the spirit of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/ (edit: and then subsequently failing to distinguish between the probability of a statement being true having increased and the statement becoming true).
Hmmm. It seems to me that what is happening here is that race is reasonably correlated with culture, and culture is very strongly correlated with upbringing, and upbringing is very strongly correlated with academic performance. (Note that income level->culture is also a fairly strong correlation).
Race is also highly visible, and (often, but not always) easily discerned. Hence, a correlation (via culture) between race and academic performance would be very visible.
If the correlation between race and culture is thus dissolved, or at least dramatically reduced, then race will become far weaker evidence as to (say) academic performance, eventually dipping below random noise levels. Once the correlation between race and non-aesthetic traits that people care about is generally recognised as being below the level of random noise, then I would say that race will no longer matter.
(Culture, of course, will still matter. I don't really see any good way around that).
Why does it matter to you how strong the correlation between race and culture is? Isn't the real problem that people are mishandling Bayesian updates based on race? That could be solved by teaching people how to perform Bayesian updates more accurately. It wouldn't be a world in which "race doesn't matter," but it would be a world in which the extent to which race does matter is recognized and not exaggerated or ignored.
I can think of at least two other causal paths from race to academic performance. One is the attitudes a person's peer group is likely to hold towards academic performance (even if they don't make a point of affiliating with other people based on race, other people may make a point of affiliating with them based on race), and more generally how the people around a person treat them based on race. The other is genetics. (I imagine this is not a particularly popular thing to say but I recently realized that I do not have a solid statistical foundation for dismissing it.)
At this point I think the problem is that they are updating correctly.
I disagree. Many statistical effects of race are screened off by fairly easily obtained information, but people act as though this is not the case. Moreover, if you, say, beat someone for being black, that's really not tied to any sort of problem with your use of Bayesian updating.
Another possibility is that race affects how many people are treated in the educational system, and that affects how much effort they put into schoolwork.
My cousin is of mixed ethnicity (black father and white mother), and if half of what he says is true and not just teenaged exaggeration, a good chunk of his disciplinary record at school is probably (I'd assign over 70% assuming he's completely truthful) based on race, and nothing he does. He isn't as interested in academics as my sister or I were, but the only actual academic losses I've noticed were in his first quarter of mathematics in eighth grade (he wound up in the most advanced math class available, which he wasn't particularly thrilled about, and it was a new teacher and a new curriculum and the entire class was left in the dust for a few weeks).
Also, black people are usually not in such high academic standing as he is, and when I was his age, in the same school, I heard people talk about perceived racism from teachers toward the black minority that were in the honors/AP/etc classes.
All anecdotal hearsay, but it's strong enough evidence for me that I tend to agree with the idea that race correlates with intelligence and crime because the culture expects it to more than because of genetic reasons.
[edit] Oh, I'll also add that my evaluation of the likelyhood that my cousin is being completely honest in his accounts is only slightly above 50% at this point. He's way more honest than his younger brother (who is a pathological liar caught in a self-enforcing death-spiral (and they have different fathers--the younger one's father is white)), but is no stranger to trolling, and even when he's speaking truthfully his accounts might be muddled in bias. But a good number of them seem hard to interpret as anything but consistent unfair treatment in a context where what sticks out about him is race. He did not offer the explanation of racism, though; that was my conclusion after a dozen or so separate incidents.[/edit]
I'd say that this is another very strong possibility.
I don't care about the correlation between race and culture in and of itself. I want to remove or reduce (preferably remove) the percieved correlation between race and academic performance; and it seems to me that the best way to do this is to remove the correlation between race and culture (as the correlation from culture to academic performance does not look removable).
That is a good strategy, and quite possibly superior to my suggestion. The biggest trouble is that it requires a substantial majority of people to be willing to learn how to properly perform Bayesian updates, which I fear may make it less practical. (Not that my idea was necessarily all that practical to begin with).
Hmmm. This is a possible path; intuitively, I'd expect it to matter about as much as the neighbourhood one grows up in. That is, I would expect any non-cultural effects to be more or less random noise.
That is also possible. Intuitively (which is very poor evidence, I know) I would expect this to matter less than culture. I do know some very intelligent people of many races; so individual variance seems large enough to defeat any systemic genetic bias that may exist.
Experimental evidence of the effects of culture versus genetics could be discovered by studying people of one race raised in the culture of another race (e.g. by adoption).
I think a better strategy is to remove the actual correlation between race and academic performance, and possibly the one between race and criminality for that matter.
One place to start is to change the culture that leads to said problems.
Dr. Seuss wrote about this.