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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33047 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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What's not compelling about the standard narrative of familiarity and education overcoming irrational, subconscious bias? (Though I apologize for wasting space if you were specifically trying to poll people who don't buy this narrative, just felt weird that no comments except the very bottom two seem to touch on it.) People have a very strong subconscious bias against the weird and unusual. People of a different race went from very obviously looking like nothing you've ever seen before to common familiarities in the street and on TV. Furthermore, education levels increased, giving more people the ability to overcome incorrect biases in their thinking. Once everyone realized that other races were 99.99% the same kind of humans, acceptance immediately followed.

I would even add another layer to this. In the past, following this same-race bias wasn't very costly. Excluding the one or two different-race/ethnicity/culture people you ever see from your group doesn't really matter. People used to be basically replaceable as far as skills and ability to contribute---one farmer or pre-modern or soldier isn't going to be dramatically different from any other. However, for whatever reason, this has completely changed in the modern day and some people have special skills that let them contribute an absurdly disproportionate amount. By the 20th century, excluding, for example, someone like von Neumann or Einstein because they're Jewish makes your civilization lose out and be destroyed.

The difference is even worse now---in all the most important fields that make a civilization powerful, the top performers contribute just so much more than the average performer. You really cannot exclude the 100x programmers/scientists/entrepreneurs because of their race---they are just too rare and too important. Non-acceptance of different races is just untenably for a society and any costs of cultural inhomogeneity pale in comparison. Literally, judge people by the content of their character (i.e. skills and abilities) instead of the color of their skin or be outcompeted and die.

Of course prevailing views always lag practical pressures by a bit, but it really should not be surprising that attitudes changed so much.

That’s an argument for not discriminating against groups that have a reasonable chance of producing 100x people. As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.

As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.

I don't think this is at all true. It requires a much weaker claim than blank-slatism: simply that non-whites are capable of being these 100x contributers. As long as the relative fraction isn't so extreme that like 80-90% of top-level talent is white even though whites are a much smaller percentage of the world population, then there are still serious costs for excluding non-whites. I've never seen HBD claims this strong---probably because they're patently ridiculous if you look at, for example, what the US IMO team looks like, the demographics of difficult STEM classes at elite universities or workers at tech companies, etc.

Of course, as asked by @aardvark3, this isn't the group that you guys are usually interested in discussing, though I note that the original post was only about the acceptance of any non-whites at all. Even in this case, saying something like there are almost no prominent black scientists is just false---this is the the strength of claim you would have to show for the argument not to apply. (Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century---you can plausibly argue that he's literally the only example, so trivially no ethnic group except his own reaches that bar.) Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group---I think even the strongest HBD positions accept this. Therefore and at the very least, the right specially selected subset of any racial group will always be very beneficial to accept.

Can you name ten black scientists whose discoveries are used with some frequency? Say roughly at the level of David Blackwell or higher.

This is not a gotcha. I’m open to learning something.

I found this an interesting exercise, so here's who I was able to come up with:

  1. Norbert Rillieux, inventor of the multiple effect-evaporator used in industrial sugar production.

  2. Percy Julian, pioneer of chemical synthesis of steroids and hormonal drugs.

  3. John Hodge, who determined the mechanism of the Maillard reaction in cooking.

  4. John Dabiri, developer of advanced wind turbines and some weird jellyfish-inspired soft robots

  5. George Carruthers, inventor of the ultraviolet camera deployed on the Moon by Apollo 16

  6. Arlie Petters, developer of the mathematical theory of gravitational lensing

  7. Alexander Anim-Mensah, whose contributions to membrane engineering are quite opaque to me, but seem to be quite significant in the areas of water filtration and improvement of washing machines

  8. Mark Dean, who holds an impressive number of patents in computer hardware and processor design

  9. Charles Drew, who achievements in blood plasma storage enabled the development of the first large-scale blood banks during WWII

  10. Kristala Prather, one of the major figures in the infant field of synthetic biology

I tried to limit this list as much as I could to the harder sciences and to leave out anyone whose contributions or lack thereof are at the center of a major controversy, which narrowed it down considerably. You are free to point out that this list includes mostly highly selected African immigrants or people with so little black ancestry that no one but an American would label them as such.

Thanks! This is a much better answer.

I don't think I can satisfy the exact requirements you want. David Blackwell did his work while the foundations of his field were being developed so it gets outsized use. There isn't really something as important as statistics where the foundational work was done late enough that the generation born after say civil rights could contribute. I think it's uncontroversial that there wasn't a level playing field before?

My list is also somewhat focused on younger people since it's a bit easier for me to judge their credentials and I'm more likely to have heard of them.

With that said, here's a list of prominent black scientists and mathematicians I can name off the top of my head. I think all of them are pretty respected within their field:

This isn't quite 10, some quick further research finds:

Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum matches the level of impact you're looking for, but sort of in a right-time-right-place technicality way. Also, Robert Ellis seems to match the older-figure pioneer pattern of David Blackwell.

You can judge for yourself how compelling this list is. It works better as support for the level-of-talent argument instead of the level-of-societal-contribution one, though the second is very hard for me to judge and sort of random.

I’d discount Fryer (economics is not really a science in my book) and maybe McWhorter. For the others, I will need to spend some time on mathsci.net and arxiv to be sure. Let’s take a few days’ pause on the discussion if you don’t mind.

Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century

You literally introduced "someone like von Neumann or Einstein" into the conversation.

Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group

No. Esitimates for Ashkenazi Jews: average IQ = 110 and SD=15. African Americans IQ = 85 and SD =15. And that's not even taking pygmies or Australian Aborigines, who have even lower IQs.

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