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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32804 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I started writing a post for the culture war thread, and it got longer than I thought it would so I ended up just posting it as its own thread. I know some people don't always see those threads, so I thought I'd post a link here. I'm open to discussing it in either location:

https://www.themotte.org/post/604/the-case-for-ignoring-race

The Case for Ignoring Race

There are two arguments I want to push forward. The first is about ignoring race in your personal life. Ignoring your own race, and ignoring the race of others around you. And the second argument is to ignore race in the policy space. Ignoring race in college admissions, immigration, crime, etc. I also don't want to make the case that only white people should ignore race. I think it is generally beneficial for everyone to ignore race, but I'm guessing that most of the racial identitarians (people who place great importance on racial identity) that are here on themotte are white racial identitarians.

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Summary

Race is clearly a thing that exists. Genetic differences exist across races. The simplest proof is in people's skin pigmentation. However, genetics doesn't have to dictate anyone's destiny. Genetics can be barriers to unlimited possibilities, but your final place within a large set of possibilities is up to you.

And because race and genetics do not fully dictate who a person is, those characteristics do not provide good information about an individual that isn't obtainable in a myriad of other more reliable ways.

There are many variations on a joke about a race blind man refusing to cross the street as a black youth is walking towards him, he then gets mugged by the black youth. In more recent times the joke is often subverted to turn the race expectations on their head. Anyways, it is a good example for my purposes. Let us break the situation down:

Context - Walking down a dark street at night in a bad section of town. Age - young, teen to late twenties. A time when humans are often physically at their peak, and a time when males are more prone to violence. Gender - male, as mentioned above more prone to violence and physicality. Clothes - You are often left to paint the picture for yourself in the joke. But imagine a dark hoody and well worn jeans. Demeanor - fixated at you, arrogant walk, one hand holding something in their hoody pocket. At this point, without race ever being a factor, you can make an informed decision that interacting with this person is a bad idea. If you can't tell their race, and then are suddenly able to see it at the last moment, no result should change the informed decision you already made.

I won't make the very strong claim that Race is never a useful deciding factor...

It doesn't take very many changes, nor does it take rare or unusual changes to make race highly salient. Let's take it outside of the dark street in a bad section of town; should I be more concerned by a black guy than a white guy that fits this description on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? I think so. Let's remove the demeanor and neighborhood, but hold all else constant - would you feel more threatened by a young black man than a young Asian man in a hoodie? Let's keep everything the same, but flip the gender - are black women more threatening than women of Hmong descent? Let's change almost everything and update to a guy in his 40s approaching me in a grocery store parking lot - surely you'd think race is at least somewhat informative on how this interaction is likely to go?

Basically, I think you stacked the deck to be as substantially bad of a situation as possible and followed up with, "well, a white guy that fits all of the worst characteristics you can think of is bad too". Sure. Fair. I would definitely avoid a threatening looking Chinese guy with a weapon in a neighborhood known for Triad gang activity. I'm also a lot less likely to encounter that than the various black permutations, to the point where 6.6% my state is black and they account for 67% of my state's murders. On the grocery store example above, where I'm unlikely to be targeted for violence, I can guess with a high degree of certainty that the black guy is going to be asking me for money.

Now, perhaps morally I should elect to hear that guy out either way, maybe he really does just need $10 for a can of gas, but it surely informs my decision-making process.

This is basically a fog of war type argument of using bayesian logic. If you have limited information then race can be extremely important. But as you add more information race becomes less important.

The problem with stereotyping is when you can’t update your priors to new information to properly find outliers like Stephon Curry.

Race of course can be quite important for public policy. You will get group level effects if you say choose between taking a million immigrants from an African Country versus a million Cuban refugees or a million Han Chinese fleeing communists. But if instead you IQ test then it wouldn’t matter.

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