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Interesting rhetorical sparring point taking place in the U.S. election that relates to rationality here at LW.
In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton referenced bias when discussing the recent spate of police shootings of African Americans. Clinton said “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,” and went on to say “I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other," and “I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, ‘why am I feeling this way?’”
In the VP debate last night, again in the context of recent police shootings, Dem candidate Tim Kaine said, "People shouldn't be afraid to bring up issues of bias in law enforcement. And if you're afraid to have the discussion, you'll never solve it."
Clinton/Kaine have predictably drawn criticism from the Red Team for the comments (who try to paint the Blue Team as anti-police), but it seems to me the Dems have been more defensive than they need to be, given it seems obvious to me (from my time at LW) that humans are biased, and this bias would obviously be likely to play a role in high stress situations (like when guns are involved).
It will be interesting to me to see how this is adjudicated according to public opinion. Do people generally accept everyone has biases and of course this would affect police officers in high stress situations? Or do they view bias as a rare condition that only affects people without the proper virtue? Is this argument actually over different definitions of the word "bias"? Is it just a Red v. Blue argument that has little to do with facts?
I, for one, think Kaine and Clinton's comments were correct and made a very salient point. (But I'm biased against Trump.)
The problem is that the statistics don't show the claimed bias. Normalized on a per-police-encounter basis, white cops (or cops-in-general) don't appear to shoot black suspects more often than they shoot white suspects. However, police interact with black people more frequently, so the absolute proportion of black shooting victims is elevated.
The fact that the incidence of police encounters with blacks is elevated would be the actual social problem worth addressing, but the reasons for the elevated incidence of police-black encounters do not make a nice soundbite.
None of this is important of course because, as is usual for politics, the whole mess degenerates into cheerleading for your team and condemning the other team, and sensitive analysis of the actual evidence would be giving aid and comfort to the hated enemy.
Can you provide any sources for this?
Is the incidence of police encounters with blacks elevated?
What are the reasons?
For example, there were 4,636 murders committed by white people and 5,620 murders committed by black people in 2015 (source). On the per-capita basis this makes the by-white murder rate to be about 2.2 per 100,000 and the by-black murder rate to be about 16.2 per 100,000.
Why is this?
You asked why is "the incidence of police encounters with blacks elevated". This is a direct answer.
If you want to know the reasons for different crime rates, this is going to get long and complicated.
Can/will you TL;DR your view?
As with any complex phenomenon in a complex system, there is going to be a laundry list of contributing factors, none of which is the cause (in the sense that fixing just that cause will fix the entire problem). We can start with
The opinions about the relative weights of these factors are going to differ and in the current political climate I don't think a reasonable open discussion is possible.
What is the best source for this in your view?
Is it your view that past slavery in America still has a large impact on African Americans in the present day U.S.?
It seems obvious to me that it does, and that the effects are wide and deep, as slavery (and Jim Crow) is relatively recent history—We're only a handful of generations from a time where a race of people was enslaved and systemically kept from accumulating wealth and education.
Meh. Maybe. I'd like to believe I'm a reasonable guy. My views on these issues are largely ignorant and I'm open to learning.
The raw data is plentiful -- look at any standardized test scores (e.g. SAT) by race. For a full-blown argument in favor see e.g. this (I can't check the link at the moment, it might be that you need to go to the Wayback Machine to access it). For a more, um, mainstream discussion see Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Wikipedia has more links you could pursue.
My view is that history is important and that outcomes are path-dependent. Slavery and segregation are crucial parts of the history of American blacks.
Your social circles might have a strong reaction to you coming to anything other than the approved conclusions...
So have you actually learned anything from these discussions, in particular, are you willing to admit that the Hillary/Kane analysis of the "implicit biases" of police officers you cited in the OC is wrong?
What do you mean with that question? How do you compare the present state of the US with a counterfactual US where African Americans weren't in slavery?
I would also be interested in your view.
Source: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
What are the reasons? Well, beginning with the discovery of the North American continent 1492 ...