HaroldWilson
1yr ago
when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?
I think some intellectual humility is probably in order here. Your own argument appears rather flimsy as well I'm afriad. As an addendum to my other comment on your main comment, my objection to the logic of your argument is this; the argument that factor Y is the main contributor to group X's underperformance does not imply that all groups facing some degree of factor Y should also underperform the average. True, we would expect other groups to feel negative effects of Y, but the presence of other factors may be such that, in spite of Y other groups nonetheless outperform the average, other factors from which group X does not benefit (in this case, as I wrote above, one potential 'other factor' being the selection for educated and driven migrants).
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Most people read into social subtext, so if you say, "blacks underperform for reasons other than discrimination" what most people hear is "blacks are bad, or somehow inferior.
Perhaps not for solely 'discrimination', but if one rejects that historical factors are the cause of racial disparities, what else are you left with? The OC offers as the only alternative 'culture', but that hardly helps; we can then only ask what causes the difference in culture? Hence, if you don't think there's a genetic difference we are left only with history and discrimination.
"believing black people should change" is problematic to many people.
I don't think people regard this as 'problematic' so much as pointless and unactionable. Where does a statement like that leave us in terms of actually making things better? As worthless a contribution as saying your solution to alcoholism is that people should drink less alcohol.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Equally-clearly, we see that outcomes of races do not correlate directly with discrimination.
This is just a causation/correlation problem. Just because discrimination has a significant negative effect on group outcomes, that does not imply historic discrimination will correlate directly with discrimination. In my view the two central factors determining group outcomes are historic discrimination/disadvantage and selection effects/the circumstances of arrival. These both work against African-Americans significantly, but for Asian-Americans the negative impact of discrimination is counter-acted by selection effects.
if selection effects explains all
I didn't say it explains all, just quite a lot and a very large part of why we see many more recent immigrants groups perform very well.
the reason for different group outcomes is that people are different, and groups contain different people,
Vague waffle. How are the people in these groups different and how is that affecting outcomes?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Go on then, link to your examples of 'this exact thing' happening.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
non-immigrants from Nigeria, and from Israel
By non-immigrants, do you mean Nigerians in Nigeria and Israelis in Israel? If so, then I'm not sure what the thrust of your point is. The different levels of prosperity of different countries are affected by various historical and geographical factors.
And again, does this assumption encode American original-colonist exceptionalism as an expected outcome, where we should assume that the best outcomes should belong to the stock of those that did the hardest initial work on arrival? Do you think there is any reversion-to-the-mean going on, and at what rate?
Again, not quite sure what you're getting at here. With regard to reversion to the mean, yes that definitely is happening to some extent but we should also recognise that these things are often very inter-generationally persistent. Indeed, this is the whole argument for programs to help certain groups with poor outcomes, that it is quite difficult to break the cycle of low education, low earnings and poor childhood circumstances for the next generation etc. without some external help.
My own default position is vague because it's complicated. My thoughts are that sets like black Americans and Jews are a huge, confounded mass of distinct lineages and cultural influences, and that what might be true about subsets of those groups could not be true about the whole. My default position is that while knowing someone's race gives you information about their likely group outcomes, every group contains diligent sinners and callow saints and that looking at the individual in front of you and tracing their specific life outcomes to their specific choices and reactions to the events of their own specific life is the only way to get a non-statistical answer.
If we want to look towards solution to the problems regarding the performance of different groups this appears a deeply unsatisfactory and pointless conclusion. Of course it's complicated, everything about society is complicated, but that does not preclude us from making general statements about the position of certain groups. Obviously the outcomes of each individual will depend on their specific circumstances, but the disparities between groups indicate broader forces are at play.
"But for X, these groups which have wildly divergent group outcomes would have near-identical ones.", then they'd better be able to show the general principle first that groups are not distinct in the absence of X, and second that X moves the needle for a high confidence interval of groups that I can think of in the expected direction."
I think the problem here is that you seem to be confusing 'X moves the needle' with 'groups affected by X must be below average in outcomes'. I think discrimination does and did affect the outcomes of Jewish and Asian-Americans, is just that it's moved the needle from over-achieving somewhat more to overachieving somewhat less.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Of course people flock to these paintings. We have eyes. No matter how often the art community screams and cries and stamps their feet and demands that we acknowledge that they are the masters of their field and we mere peons cannot possibly comprehend the mysteries they do, we have eyes. We appreciate beauty and we recognize ugliness when we see it. People go to art galleries to appreciate beautiful things. That's it. That's the answer to this accusation that all art-museum goers are secretly racist. They just want to look at beautiful things, and this painting is not a beautiful thing.
I'm not really sure this cuts it. There are plenty of black artists who have produced work that the average non-artist, non-expert such as myself look beautiful/impactful/impressive as those other paintings but few go to see them either. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't see Picasso or Monet or Van Gogh, but that the popularity of particular artists has as much do to with either a) arbitrary fashion and accidents of history or b) abstruse points of art history that 99% of gallery visitors know nothing about.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
we're supposed to take people at their word
The debate over self-ID is one of policy, not necessarily of 'fact'. That is to say, even though it is obviously possible to lie about gender identification/dysphoria, one could nonetheless argue that as a matter of policy self-ID is the best approach because there is no more acceptable alternative. Thus, one could perfectly consistently make exceptions to a self-ID policy, such as in sport (I mean, no-one advocates 'instant' sport self-ID) or in cases of an apparently bogus case of identification in the justice system, as the policy of self-ID in other areas was one adopted from a position of pragmatism, not because literally everyone who claims to be trans must be telling the truth.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
it will always be subject to the charge of being a medical disorder.
This is true, but I don't see why this a 'charge' rather than merely a fact that is not at odds with viewing medical transition as something often legitimate and necessary. After all, it may be, and in my view is, the case that transition is simply a/the treatment for, yes, the disorder of gender dysphoria.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
You're confusing policy with statements of fact here. Just because someone might argue that self-ID is the best policy response to the issue of the status of transgender people, this does not mean that someone is arguing that everyone who self-IDs as trans must be telling the truth. So I could credibly argue that, in general, self-ID is desirable but that there may be exceptions in which a more rigorous standard could appropriately be applied.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Self-ID is not a 'doctrine' but a policy. I very much doubt you can find any politician etc. of any prominence who argues that it is impossible to lie about gender ID. Obviously it is, the argument is that in some/most cases self-ID is the best choice even if there is a potential for lying, just as advocating for a more stringent system does not mean one believes that no genuine trans people will be erroneously denied a legal change.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
While I agree that the average filmgoer in earlier decades probably, on average, watched a better quality of film than today's filmgoer, the fault in my mind surely lies not with these imagined NPCs writing 'hollow' scripts - there have always been crap films on offer, there are today and there will be in the future - but the filmgoer himself. There are ample stimulating and interesting films released nowadays, as there always was, such that a person who watches an average number of films need never watch anything schlocky. Plus, I'm not entirely convinced that this is true to an enormous extent. Bond films regularly topped box office figures in the 60s and 70s, even the rubbish ones like Diamonds are Forever; I have nothing against the Bond films; indeed, I enjoy plenty of them myself, but they're hardly high art.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps.
Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism. Now, I actually think that black underperformance in very large part is explained by the legacy of slavery and subsequent structural racism, but, for instance, in the case of Asian-Americans, the selection effects of the American immigration system appear to account for their above-average performance in education etc.
Furthermore, 'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
But women were also told they were allowed to do particle physics and philosophy and drive garbage trucks and become plumbers, but for some reason women didn't choose to do those things as often as men did.
This is fairly obviously a gross oversimplification. For starters, especially in the kind of blue-collar communities from which most garbage men and plumbers will come, those kinds of jobs are surely still very male-coded. Certainly, fewer people are telling women they can't be plumbers etc. but, ironically, it's a very urban elite perspective to suggest that we've wholly eliminated gendered employment expectations, so all discrepancies must now be genetic/natural/whatever. A survey from a few years ago by City and Guilds suggested that, in the UK, around 17% of surveyed students were encouraged by their school to consider apprenticeships, compared to 33% of men. It's also important to remember that these things reinforce themselves without any individual engaging in career stereotyping - if every plumber who ever comes to your house or truck driver you see go past is a man, then one can see how girls might be dissuaded from such career choices.
And affirmative action for racial minorities doesn't seem to have actually solved anything; in many cases, things were made worse, as universities and businesses hired token minorities who failed to succeed because they were not equipped to succeed in the first place
This needs some sourcing; the onset of quota-based affirmative action in the 1970s saw an explosion in the number of black Americans graduating, not just enrolling, so clearly most of them were sufficiently well equipped to deal with the universities into which they began to enrol in larger numbers.
Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities,
Again, a baseless unsourced claim; there is evidence to suggest that more generous welfare provision does actually reduce crime;
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07418829800093741?needAccess=true
Look this pretty much goes for every claim you make. So many words and yet a total absence of any evidence to substantiate some fairly dramatic claims.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
as if Asia hasn't been subject to strife, warfare
This is a silly way of flattening all difference between the history of various countries. Of course, almost every country in the world has experienced strife and warfare, but that doesn't mean that for every country concatenation of various circumstances has led to different outcomes in each country.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Those things can be controlled for in statistics and the gap persists.
Source?
The increasingly hysterical insistence that racism is baked into the very core of our society and thus our society must be deconstructed brick by brick is not some unheard of sentiment. Where have you been?
This is a relatively fringe position. Other things like quota-based affirmative action hardly 'tearing society apart'; America had quota-based affirmative action in universities for a good while before Bakke, and society remained notably intact.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely?
This is a silly hypothetical given that, absent the legacy of slavery, most African Americans would not be here at all. Nonetheless, we can observe immigrant groups from Africa whose circumstances of arrival more closely mirror that of Asian immigrants, and they tend to do pretty well. Recent Nigerian immigrants and their children out-earn the national average.
I don't really grasp the thrust of the rest of your comment. Obviously it's going to be very, very difficult to parse out the effect of every specific aspect of historic and structural racism, but so what?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I don't think believing that race/ethnicity/whatever should not be a site of collective feeling implies that you want an atomised society. Indeed, that's the whole point of civic nationalism.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Perhaps comparable to a British county?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
If companies prioritize race above things that otherwise lead to better quality works
What evidence is there that this is the case in this situation, what if they simply thought a black actor was the best fit for the part?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I don't think her race was ever an important part of the character. Adaptions aren't always, indeed very rarely are, intended to be 1:1 directly translating every that was described in the source material onto the screen. They aren't real characters; they don't have any 'actual' race.
Indeed, in the excellent TV adaption of Jeeves and Wooster with Fry and Laurie, actors of some characters change between seasons, and obviously look different, but it hardly matters. The Roderick Glossop we encounter initially looks completely different to the one in series 3 and 4, and neither of them are necessarily that close to the description given by P.G. Wodehouse, but I somehow doubt anyone would feel it reasonable to shout Roderick Glossop is bald at their TV screen.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
People often make these snarky comments such as 'what if a white actor played MLK' but it's blindingly obvious that these are not apposite comparisons. Race is obviously integral to Roots, whereas it has no relevance at all to the Little Mermaid. The appropriate comparison would be if you cast a white actor to play a part that was in previous iterations black, but with regard to which race was irrelevant.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Depending on the intentions of the filmmaker, I don't think 'fitting the role' always has to mean an attempted 1:1 representation of the physical description found in the source material. Sure, if the director/whatever wanted to cast a white actor with red hair etc. in order to faithfully fit the original description that's fine and a legitimate choice, but that doesn't mean every filmmaker has to operate that way. Film and TV adaptions deviate from the physical descriptions found in source material all the time, but there only seems to be major outrage when it's race that's changed.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I generics wasn’t heritable then we would see far more failed sons then we do now.
Why? Almost no-one disputes that outcomes are fairly heritable, many (including myself) would simply argue that it's mostly the advantages of a privileged upbringing that makes those outcomes heritable.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I think there's also, as usual, a case of diminishing returns here. If you're inactive, and you start exercising regularly and eating healthily, I don't doubt that's good for mental health (as well as physical health obviously). But once you pass the point of 'reasonably fit and healthy' I find it hard to believe gym-going is does anything more for you mentally than any other hobby.
The central problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the vastly different history of all these groups and the flattening the different circumstances of each by saying they were all discriminated against. Of course, you do address the point that each group are/were disadvantaged to a similar extent, but it isn't really that simple. Of course, Asian and Jewish Americans did/do face significant discrimination. However, for instance, in the case of Asian Americans the circumstances of their arrival have had the effect of counteracting disadvantage based on race faced on an institutional or inter-personal level. Asian Americans are almost all here as or as descendants of economic migrants, which selects for the most educated and grafting. Consider this; in the period immediately following 1965, Asian immigrants (excl. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) had an average 15.2 years of schooling, which makes plenty of sense - it was not your average Indian or Japanese that immigrated to America in the 1960s and 1970s, or even today, especially in the case of poorer countries. This far exceeded the average native level, which as late of 1980 was only 13.07. This represents an enormous advantage in terms of ensuring the kind of beneficial which, as you, Asian-Americans disproportionately enjoy. So of course Asian immigrants should do better than average.
The circumstances of the arrival of African-Americans are plainly vastly different. Hence why recent Nigerian immigrants and their children actually out-earn the American average. Looking at such a vast disparity between recent black immigrants and the descendants of slaves, what else can explain that gap except the circumstances of the arrival of the slaves and their subsequent treatment, first as slaves and then as free but disadvantaged citizens?
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