This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?
I want to consider a broad range of groups including both involuntary/innate characteristics such as race, gender, and IQ, as well as more voluntary categories such as religion, political ideology, or even something like being in the fandom for a certain TV show, expressing a preference for a certain type of food, or having bad personal grooming. This is a variable that your answer might depend upon.
Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y. Let's leave the causation as another variable here: maybe membership in X increases the probability of Y occurring, maybe Y increases the probability of joining X (in the case of voluntary membership), maybe some cofactor causes both. This may be important, as it determines whether discouraging people from being in group X (if voluntary) will actually decrease the prevalence of Y or whether it will just move some Ys into the "not X" category.
Another variable I'll leave general is how easy it is to determine Y directly. Maybe it's simple: if you're interacting with someone in person you can probably quickly tell they're a jerk without needing to know their membership in Super Jerk Club. Or maybe it's hard, like you're considering job applications and you only know a couple reported facts, which include X but not Y and you have no way to learn Y directly without hiring them first.
When is it okay to discriminate against people in group X? The far right position is probably "always" while the far left would be "never", but I suspect most people would fall somewhere in the middle. Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability. And few people would say that it's not okay to discriminate against hiring convicted child rapists as elementary school teachers on the basis that they're a higher risk than the average person. (if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position).
So for the most part our variables are:
-Group membership voluntariness
-Feature Y's severity and relevance to the situation
-The situation itself (befriending, hiring, electing to office)
-Ease of determining feature Y without using X as a proxy
-Causality of X to Y
Personally, I'm somewhere between the classically liberal "it's okay to discriminate against voluntary group membership but not involuntary group membership" and the utilitarian "it's okay to discriminate iff the total net benefit of the sorting mechanism is higher than the total cost of the discrimination against group members, taking into account that such discrimination may be widespread", despite the latter being computationally intractable in practice and requiring a bunch of heuristics that allow bias into the mix. I don't think I'm satisfied with the classically liberal position alone because if there were some sufficiently strong counterexample, such as someone with a genetic strain that made them 100x more likely to be a pedophile, I think I'd be okay with refusing child care positions to all such people even if they had never shown any other risk factors. But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely I don't think it would be fair to do this, because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination. Also the utilitarian position allows for stricter scrutiny applied for more serious things like job applications (which have a huge cost if systematically discriminating against X) versus personal friendships (if people refuse to befriend X because they don't like Y, those people can more easily go make different friends or befriend each other, so the systemic cost is lower)
But I'd love to hear more thoughts and perspectives, especially with reasoning for why different cases are and are not justified under your philosophical/moral framework.
I feel like the unexamined assumption in both this post and many of the replies is "WTF does it even mean to be <quote>accurate<\quote> in this context?"
And even if some autist were to attempt to codify it, the Engineer's Hymn strikes me as the only appropriate response.
In short, If your goal is to come up with some sort of systematic means of judging group membership so you don't have to put the effort into judging individual merit, you're inevitably going to get a garbage result because garbage in is garbage out.
Even shorter, you're asking the wrong questions.
Edit:formatting
I think I defined it fairly unambiguously:
It's "accurate" in that the literal proportion of people with trait Y in the general population and the group, in real life are p and q respectively, with p < q, and we also believe this to be true. As opposed to an inaccurate stereotype representing a false belief. In-so-far as Y actively impacts merit, then membership in X does provide a real signal correlated with merit.
Obviously actually measuring merit directly is superior to imperfect correlations, but if you are, for instance, hiring someone for a job, imperfect correlations are the only thing you have up until you actually hire someone and watch them perform the job. Literally everything you judge on is going to be an imperfect correlation of some form, so it's just a question of which ones you use and how much weight you put on each.
The thing is that you haven't explained why that should matter.
Why are you trying to avoid measuring merit? Is it Laziness? or is it lack of ability/bandwidth?
In many cases it's where merit is difficult to measure up front. If you are looking at job applications, you can't literally perceive merit until you've already hired someone, and thus excluded the other candidates. If you're trying to avoid rapists, you can't perceive merit until they've literally attempted or succeeded at raping someone. If you're looking for romantic partners, a 1 minute analysis based on group membership is 120 times cheaper than going on a 2 hour date, and thus potentially worthwhile if the amount of information you can extract from it is 1% as much.
The optimal Bayesian thing to from a purely selfishly rational perspective seems to be using immediately identifiable group membership as a first screening pass (establishing the prior) and then update with more direct merit measures as/if they become available.
...And yet I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be. To use the hiring example just last week I was in the position of vetting a bunch of potential new hires. Our organization uses the abbreviated (30 question) Wonderlic in conjunction with an internally generated field-specific aptitude/skill test. I feel like between the test scores and simply talking to each candidate individually for 15 - 20 minutes we were able to get a pretty good sense of each one's "vibe" and sort the ones we wanted to call back, from the ones we don't.
While I will grant that this method may not be practical for the sort of "all we need is a warm body" job that @FarNearEverywhere refers to I can't help but wonder how much of that is a product of the attitude that "all we need is a warm body". I recognize that I am fortunate to have a dozen applicants for 3 open slots. I can afford to be picky. At the same time there is price to be paid for not being picky. I'd rather be in the field myself with my guys collecting overtime because we're shorthanded than hire some shit-wit who's going to make a mess of things and potentially get someone killed.
Okay but you don't seem to be arguing against categorizing people, you're mostly just suggesting that accurate categories are superior to inaccurate categories. I'm not especially familiar with Wonderlic, but some quick Googling suggests it's an employment-specific intelligence test. Which means it's is not literally measuring merit at a job, it's categorizing people based on questions that it thinks are a proxy for job skill (unless the job literally consists of answering Wonderlic questions). People don't go around politically identifying with in discrete groups based on their intelligence, but screening out unintelligent people is still a form of grouping people up and discriminating based on something that isn't directly merit, but is strongly correlated with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because measuring merit means hiring them for the job and seeing how well they do. By the time you've done this, if it turns out they have no merit, you've paid a big cost. The worst case is if "merit" doesn't just mean "will do the job well" but also includes things like "won't embezzle funds". It's hard to measure whether someone's going to embezzle funds other than by either using proxies, or waiting until they actually embezzle the funds and taking the hit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link