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Edit: meant to post as reply, not top level.
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All I can think of is TechDirt's Content Moderation Learning Curve. The convergence of large social media platforms on similar content moderation rules is less due to shared ideological capture than a combination of legal, financial, and social pressures all pointing in a similar direction.
But these "social pressures", aren't they also a form of ideological capture among the institutions that exert said pressure on social media platforms? I don't have the data on me, but I've seen plenty of evidence that democratic voters form an absolute majority among key institutions (top university faculty, judiciary, media, big tech, federal govt employees etc).
Undoubtedly some of the social pressure on social media platforms come from institutions ideologically captured by Democrats, but hardly all of it.
Seems like it.
As of Jan 2021 the federal judiciary was actually majority appointed by Republicans although only slightly and this has probably reversed since. On the other hand, SCOTUS has been majority Republican appointed since, like, the 1960's
This obviously depends on the media entity. NYT or CNN? Sure. Fox News or OANN? Definitely not.
Probably
Are probably more split than you suppose, especially with respect to the Senate.
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Masnick's a two-faced prick on this particular topic among no shortage of others, and that post there could not be more of a strawman were the characters named Simplicio and Sagredo, but to engage with this far more seriously than it deserves:
The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract. But it's not like the SPLC is any less "shared ideological capture", and was heavily involved in moderation decisions at length, including far away from SPLC's supposed domain expertise.
When Masnick is discussing Twitter protecting people's first amendment rights he doesn't mean they didn't ban people (because banning people doesn't implicate their first amendment rights) he means they resisted subpoenas from the government demanding they de-anonymize it's critics, which does implicate their first amendment rights.
Yes, the point of the article is that very few of the people who talk about being a "free speech platform" have any idea that there's tons of stuff they are going to be legally obliged to moderate. The piece is not about responding to criticisms of Twitter, it's about the specific convergent evolution of social media moderation policies as the first paragraph makes clear:
It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.
What further elaboration is required? It turns out people don't like to spend time on a site where they are regularly called slurs! Advertisers think it damages their brand when their advertisements appear next to hate speech. Is this concept complicated? Masnick, in fact, has a whole article about Twitter and Hunter Biden's laptop.
I don't even know how to respond to the implication that legal or financial pressures are due to shared ideological capture. If your primary revenue stream is from people advertising on your platform then it's important for the survival of your business in a non-ideological way that they continue to do that. You are somewhat at the whim of what advertisers like and want. Similar advertisers only want to advertise on your platform because they believe they can reach users who will buy things. If users abandon your platform en masse that is also bad for your business, so you are somewhat beholden to the desires of users, whatever your ideology. Legal pressure even more so! I guess X could stop reporting CSAM or responding to DMCA takedowns, but the end result would definitely be the end of their business! How is ideological capture related at all? Sure some social pressure and its response may be due to shared ideological capture, I acknowledge as much in another comment.
What is the tort the ADL committed to constitute the "tortious" part of tortious interference? I am pretty sure they're his foe now because he goes around promoting open anti-semites like Keith Woods.
And this dichotomy is exactly what I'm criticizing. Masnick's entire shtick is to prevaricate between officially state-driven things that could be anywhere near the First Amendment whenever the censorship is something he opposes (see this) no matter how regulated speech is in that sphere otherwise, and then raising incredibly exacting standards for what counts as government action when it's something he doesn't care about (see for example this post conflating double-digit legal demands with the literally thousands of 'unofficial requests' from the government.).
The piece is literally titled 'Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve' and is tagged Elon Musk. And you're right, but it just makes him an asshole, and your post a non-sequitur to drop in.
Which is funny, because you'd think that people would be at least somewhat opposed to slurs that touched on them, and instead Twitter and Advertisers supposedly found tweeting "Learn To Code" at a handful of bargain-basement 'journalists' worse than having ads sandwiched between "KillAllMen" and photoshopped decapitations of a certain politician. And it was always like that.
Indeed, and he quickly papered over any potential problem by giving his friends at Twitter the most charitable possible explanations and possible facts, and then when those assumptions came false retreated time and time again, often in hilariously misleading ways. That link rests heavily on people not finding yet that any evidence of government pressure, and then despite all of the later releases his information since his comments never quite get around to revisiting the matter except to provide increasingly circumscribed reasons This Does Count.
The tort is tortious interference, sometimes called intentional interference with contractual relations. It's not an add-on to some other tort: it's trying to induce people to breach binding contracts with a specific person. The exact rule varies by state, but it can cover behavior that would not be tortious in itself (in some rare cases, not applicable here, even by negligence), typically requiring either malice or that the act be done without legal justification.
See the Third Restatement of Torts, which (while trying to scale down the tort from past version's array of privileges!) listed :
(emphasis added, note that many states still use far more expansive caselaw)
Now, that legal justification includes a wide First Amendment exception for interference that is truthful or at least opinion (possibly with some modulos for private information). And courts have been somewhat wishy-washy about "sole purpose of injuring the plaintiff". But this is not an open season for any statement to be immune: see SpamHaus v. DatabaseUSA. Musk alleges that they have separately made private claims to advertisers that are contradicted by widely available evidence. He could well be wrong or lying -- there's a reason I use "alleges" and "if true!"
((I don't think Musk will actually bring this case, or be successful if he does, and it's certainly not a multi-billion and maybe not even multi-million dollar tort. But that's more because it'd be worth pennies on the legal fee dollar even in the off chance he wins, and the standards for when a claim is an opinion of undisclosed facts or where it's just an opinion mumblemumble are an absolute mess. In addition to the obvious reputational risks.))
A bad like or reply this month can be strong evidence that Musk needs to lay off the cocaine, but it can't be the cause for a campaign to Twitter advertisers that's over a year old.
((In addition to the other inconsistency.))
I don't know how to tell you this but there's a difference between a government passing a law imposing criminal or civil penalties on someone and them clicking the equivalent of a Super Report button. The article specifically notes that Twitter did not comply with a majority of the government's unofficial requests. Twitter was (and is) free to ignore unofficial requests from the government. The doctors in the first article would not be free to disregard the government's prohibition on discussing certain topics with patients. The two things are different in very important ways.
Have you been on Twitter? Why would I think that? I'm sorry that advertisers and Twitter users don't share your ratings of what things are bad but their opinions are the ones that matter for Twitter's continued viability as a business.
I mean, yea. It's important that if you're going to allege the government pressured Twitter about the laptop story and that was the cause of their suppression people are going to want, like, evidence. So far none has been forthcoming. The best I've seen is some general warnings to Twitter about possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia.
I think the ADL's problem with Musk becomes much more obvious phrased as "He made frivolous threats they had committed torts against him."
That's not really my point; I can instead point to environments where Mere Polite Requests were obviously immediate jawboning, and were Masnick's twitter still open I could show more clear examples. But look at the articles and compare the dramatic differences in charity or even mere honesty in describing them -- most evidently the Super Report button instead ended up being weekly meetings or dedicated fast-response systems, but also the NRA-backed bill being described in far more maximalist terms than even the already-aggressive read by the newspaper he linked.
And Masnick is a two-faced prick, so while it claims that, instead it points to this comparison of official requests -- primarily legal demands like subpeonas and court orders, for mere double-digit (and often low double-digit) number removal requests. Aka, it tells us nothing about unofficial requests to take down accounts, which (again in contrast to Masnick's claims) ended up being thousands of accounts passed by spreadsheet and face-to-face meetings, not just a slightly more polished version of the Report Button you or I could use.
Masnick does not know the relative proportion of those unofficial requests that resulted in a removal. We don't have statistics, and given the heavy influence Baker had at the building they may not exist anymore. The selections Taibbi brought give 60%-85%, but Taibbi doesn't claim to have done a meaningful statistical analysis; he just provides a single e-mail that would break Twitter's transparency report for that time block. If Masnick had planted his flag on the possibility of consistent pushback, I'd not have highlighted that as severely or been as critical of him generally (although I wouldn't be surprised were his 'consistent' pushback to include one-offs that still resulted in account bans).
But he instead makes ludicrously strong claims with clearly wrong backing, and only ever one way.
I think you're vastly overestimating the popularity of guillotine twitter or of journalists, or of the relative proportion of the site's users or advertising targets those two groups or their sympathizers make up.
Well, no. Even before the Twitter Files, Yoel Fucking Roth declared that :
That is law enforcement specifically mentioning a hack-and-leak operation involving Hunter Biden in October of 2020, which is a good deal less general than "possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia".
((We've since learned that a 'totally private institution' funded in part by the State Department ran an exercise I'd call impressively prescient -- were it not for the FBI having already taken possession of Hunter Biden's laptop and corresponding documents months before the exercise was run.))
There's no clear "you must censor this or go to jail" e-mail, fair. There is 'just' all of this very precise concern about this particular topic, sent while the FBI and DHS were making claims about intransigent social media groups being allied with foreign governments, and while many politicians were talking up CDA230 modifications for those who didn't cooperate.
But Klobuchar wasn't sending the letter, so it's not really jawboning, it's just still a small coordinated groupthink with shared ideological capture.
Again, the ADL started calling Twitter's advertisers about Musk publicly (as in through newspapers) in November of last year, Musk claims that they did so privately the week he closed on the company and had called him saying they would do so if he did not continue certain parts of the Trust and Safety paradigm before that. Unless he or they have a time machine, the ADL's problem can not have started this week.
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The point is that they end up in the same vicinity not for generally accepted things as CSAM or copyright violation, but because infrastructure providers, advertisers, and governments impose ideological conformity. Not, in the case of advertisers, because their ads will be less effective or harmful without it, but because employees at the advertising companies are in favor of the censorship.
Citation that their ads will be equally effective? That there would be no difference in user base under various moderation schemes?
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For top-level posts we would like users to avoid just posting a link to a longer story. This is a place for discussion, and a top level post should start the discussion.
We have this rule for multiple reasons:
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The funny thing about anti-semitism is any serious cultural study of Jewish Culture/history would fall under anti-semitism atleast as espoused by the ADL.
In what way?
Of all the major religions they are the only one that doesn’t recruit members. It’s a chosen people. For a lot of history it does appear they’ve maintained a state within a state (less so for modern secular Jews today) and the ADL does declare things like “Jews having sympathies to Israel over America” as antisemitic.
They lists “Jews have too much power” - that makes discussing Jewish at one point being >20% of Ivy graduates, insane amount of Hollywood representation, Goldman Sachs, and overall Jewish grossly disproportionate representation at the top of a lot of fields difficult.
Feel like ADL publishes a list of antisemitism and a lot of the lists would have difficult bits to cover.
It’s because antisemitism atleast by the ADL doesn’t just mean don’t do genocide or hate us.
Hinduism? It doesn't strike me as a religion that actively seeks new members, though it is open to converts (just like Judaism). Of course, these converts may or may not always be treated as equal in practice. But that's another topic.
I think you get to my point later. Jews are to an a great extent an ethnic religion closed to outsiders with some of their own ethnostate institutions.
It does appear many orthodox still do keep boundaries between themselves and broader society and don’t fully integrate into the American melting part.
I don’t think it’s anti-Catholic to question whether a Catholic Potus first loyalty is to America or the Pope. (I believe a Catholic would have loyalty to the Popr first). But if you accuse a Jew of having sympathies to Israel First etc it’s declared antisemitic.
So if the Pope goes to war on America, you expect the Catholic POTUS to side with the Pope over USA, or at least give them remotely equal consideration?
Because here's the thing: if he doesn't, then I would not say he is loyal to the Pope first. If he does, then it's a big problem to have such a person as the POTUS, and it would be a problem if a person loyal to Israel to that extent was POTUS, and it's easy for me to see how Jews see it as an accusation and an unfair one at that. It's effectively calling them a potential traitor.
Well yes. That’s the vowels you take. Not sure it’s unfair. That’s the nature of religion.
I mean it can be a good thing. Catholic regions in Germany were the least supportive of Hitler. That’s the vows they take.
I don’t consider it anti-Catholic to recognize I answer to something above nation and we long took tbose accusations. It’s a big reason Catholics are preferred Supreme Court Justices because we aren’t malleable.
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Lol, but ultimately it seems to have gone fine. I doubt he’s going to ban Keith Woods but, at the same time, I think Ellison and co have probably convinced him to stop retweeting him.
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Here is the problem with advocating censorship of "bad" ideas: If it is permissible make rules about what ideas can be expressed, then someone has to make those rules. And who will that be, people with power, or people without power. Obviously the former.
Btw, I am referring to censorship of ideas, not obscenity, not child porn, and not any of the 1000 other things that those who favor censoring ideas they don't like want to conflate therewith.
I disagree with this argument (and all similar "how would you like it if it were the right wing censoring left wing ideas?" ones)
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that (idea) censorship, as a technique, is inherently bad - even if its being done on behalf of your in-group in order to suppress the out-group.
There are techniques that I would consider inherently evil, even if done against people I disagree with (torture, vigilante violence, etc)
But as suppression techniques go, censorship is rather underrated:
Yes, the people in power want to stay in power, and everyone wants to impose what they believe to be moral on reality.
If you genuinely believe that all criticism of Jews is unfounded in reality and that allowing such ideas to exist in the mainstream could lead to a 21st century Holocaust, then why shouldn't you stop these anti-Semites from trying to prosecute such a wantonly cruel agenda?
Sure, it would be bad for your cause if the tables were turned, and it were the enemy in power, censoring all of your own propaganda. And censoring them now will have the second order effect of making it more likely they censor you later on. But that's outweighed by the first order effect of actually censoring them.
No, the idea behind it is usually good. It's that is always ends up getting abused...
Just look at history (looking at you blasphemy laws), the pattern is the same each time.
Now, I'm not saying that we can't have any regulations on speech (ie fire in a crowded theater that is not in danger) but any rules need to be transparent and very carefully constructed.
I think you misunderstand me. I see blasphemy laws as the same in character to hate speech laws, and I'm saying both of them are a good thing.
I assume the terrible "pattern" you refer to is stuff like this. Obviously in contemporary Western society, even the most extreme anti-Semite isn't burned at the stake, or even executed.
But the principle - that you can be legally prosecuted by the state for being a dissident - remains the same (It's just that we don't even perform such gruesome acts on actual violent criminals), and I argue that unless you find the management of our current society intolerable (in which case you wouldn't be happy even with the freedom to proselytise your beliefs) this is a good thing.
I have no sympathy for the victims of such government persecutions given that, despite fully understanding the rules, they deliberately chose to disobey them for the purposes of a principled stand. I can't really empathise with such a person because I would never be in such a situation - if I were bound to the post, as an angry Protestant gave me one last chance to renounce my Catholicism, I would just say "I renounce my Catholicism" and walk away a free man, having suffered only a wound to my ego.
I agree with the need for transparency. But you seem to imply that lack of transparency is an issue with the current rules, which I disagree with.
The current rules change with time (About 20 years ago, the statement "a man cannot become a woman" was considered so obvious that no one would even say it, but now this would be considered transphobic) - however it's pretty easy to get a sense of what beliefs are socially appropriate to express.
In my experience, when I have made statements that have fallen outside of the Overton window amongst acquaintances it was made pretty clear to me (an awkward silence, someone explaining that I'm being "narrow-minded" or "ignorant", etc) and so I know to drop the issue and ensure to never bring the idea up again in polite company.
And historically, every famous story about someone being persecuted for their beliefs seems to include multiple opportunities to recant the offending belief, which they explicitly reject.
As for "carefully constructed", I disagree. I assume you mean the rules should be as meta as possible, and try and reflect general moral principles instead of just taking a stance on some specific contemporary controversy (i.e. "It is unfair to blame a group for the actions of an individual" is better than "you can't say Black people are violent because of their crime rate")
It can be tricky to figure out what your foundational moral principles are (I'm honestly not sure about my own) In practise this is just done by considering how you feel about various controversies/thought experiments and then trying to find the simplest possible consistent framework that explains all of these feelings. But you can easily get wider framework wrong, in ways you might not think of.
Consider my example about Black people again. A typical progressive would agree with the object level statement that you can't judge the entire group of Black people by the behaviour of a tiny unruly minority, and the meta level rule is a pretty reasonable attempt to create a general moral framework that would let us derive this conclusion.
But of course a typical progressive would also agree with the idea that "The police are racist towards black people". If you asked why, this would at least in part be because of events like the death of George Floyd, i.e. actions committed by a small subset of the group. This is of course a pretty common right wing talking point, and can be easily patched by amending the general principle to exclude groups you join voluntarily.
But had our progressive tried going the meta route, they would find themselves hoist by their own petard (Even the amended version runs into difficulties - do homosexuals lose their protected status now, as they can choose to just not indulge their preference? I have yet to see a general moral framework for progressivism that doesn't lead to undesired conclusions)
So instead, our censor (whatever their ideological persuasion), should focus on attacking specific object-level beliefs instead of running the risk of logicking themselves into a corner (and this has the bonus of being more transparent)
OK, hard disagree. I'll be honest, I stopped here. We have a completely different understanding of history.
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Censorship has been an obvious and pervasive aspect of American social technology since well before the founding, all the way back to the initial colonization. How did our long and rich history of censorship amount to abuse, and what were the concrete negative consequences of that abuse?
Orangecat clearly isn't talking about every form of censorship, the impression I got was they are talking about censorship to protect people's feelings or in some other impulsive fashion - the kind which simply wallpapers over an issue, usually to shut up agitators. I can't think of any time that has had a positive impact on society.
When did it have a notably negative impact on society, though?
...I've just finished one big debate on censorship, and I'm not really up for jumping into another one. I know the consensus is supposed to be that censorship is very bad, m'kay. I observe that large amount of censorship, through a variety of methods and with a variety of targets, appears to have been the norm throughout our nation's entire history, excepting perhaps two decades bookending the turn of the last century which were unusually permissive, and which were immediately followed by an acute decline in social conditions.
I know how this all is supposed to work. I am skeptical that it actually works that way. I note that a lot of the standard narrative about censorship conveniently ignores most of the censorship actually happening in the past or present, and gets pretty hand-wavey about nailing down cause and effect.
Covid would be my first example, but it's the first of thousands so I assume I am misunderstanding you. The way I see it, people who argue against censorship aren't arguing against censorship, which is an amorphous concept found in every sphere of life, and as you (and @orangecat) say, often with positive effects. They are trying to stop power grabbing. Someone proposing censorship is trying to assume power they didn't previously have, and anyone grabbing power should be suspect, because the unscrupulous outnumber the scrupulous a thousand to one.
Speech is a particularly important power because it is the basis of communication, allowing our hierarchies to exceed our physical limitations. So I immediately suspect anyone who tries to take it, and it completely blows my mind that anyone would willingly give it up, especially for a reason as minor as hurt feelings or to cover up a mistake. And since in my lifetime I haven't seen any negative consequences to telling censors to fuck off - ever - but can list multiple times I desperately wished everyone else had told the censors to fuck off, I don't see a problem with drawing a line in the sand at 'no censorship'.
I mean, you're right that permissiveness leads to worse social conditions, but if that's all that mattered Saudi Arabia would be a utopia. It's not, (unless you have a fetish for censorship, then it's pretty great) so we get back to the same problem as always - who gets to inflict their values on whom? We can only go forward from here - there's no getting back the Hayes code and CCA.
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As a non-exhaustive list:
The Sedition Act was near-instantly turned into a political tool, including of jailing dissenters and political opponents, including with charges related to writings predating the Act's enactment. In addition to not doing much good about the whole War With Napoleon thing, the statute legitimized a lot of internal revolutionary speech and literal rebellions, and badly damaged interstate comity; while not the sole cause of current red-hot judiciary problems, it's very much the first bite at the fruit.
Comstock personally used the law to charge sufferagettes in response to publishing an alleged affair by one of Comstock's . Leaving aside the object-level debates for his censorship itself being bad, the expansive and often quixotic efforts undermined much of his more conventional anti-fraud and anti-spam efforts, was an absolute mess when it came to actual STDs, and often publicized and promoted the very works he was opposing. (Also, from a social perspective, he also inspired a certain J. Edgar Hoover.)
McCarthyism blurred the lines between communist party Russian stooge, 'mere' philosophical sympathizer, and People Who Annoyed McCarthy well before the Army inquiries. In doing so, he both destroyed future anti-Soviet-espionage efforts and provided cover for tankie academics for decades.
Of course, the more morbid question is when did it have a negative impact on the censors; telling people that they'll win but burn down society invites a lot of Joker cosplay. The Adams administration didn't win reelection, but that was probably off the table before the Adams administration first won the presidency; Adams himself nor the Sedition Act's authors were prosecuted. Comstock made his keep off of those he fined and punished. McCarthy died abandoned, so there's that one I guess?
This was an excellent post, and a perfect example of what I was looking for: strong historical cases of actual censorship.
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Is it? Is it really?
Because we can actually have a look at a country that followed your proscription! Weimar Germany had very strong laws against hate speech, and they prosecuted and banned publication of Der Sturmer more oppressively and consistently than we ban The Daily Stormer in the modern day. Hitler was banned from speaking in public for several years, and many high ranking nazis went to prison for violating the criminal code in their public statements. Did this stop the rise of anti-semitism in pre-Nazi Germany? Because I think the actual outcome we observed was the opposite of what your theory here predicted.
According to the wikipedia page:
So it seems they were only censored by the Nazis themselves? (I'm unsure whether you just didn't know this or they were also independently censored by the Weimar republic - I couldn't find anything suggesting the latter by a quick google search, but I'd welcome any evidence of this)
For an actual example of hostile censorship of the Nazis, we can note the party was banned following the Beer Hall Putsch.
Let's consider the national election results of the Nazi party (prior to Hitler becoming Fuhrer)
In 1928 they had about 10 seats, which is basically nothing, and then they rose to relevance in the 1930 election (alongside the Communists) with about 100 seats. This was due to the Great Depression in 1929 causing unemployment to increase.
On the other hand, the ban of the Nazi party happened before 1928, and so this censorship did not have the effect of somehow rallying the base. Rather the obvious thing happened - i.e. the ban just worked in suppressing them.
I never claimed that censorship is some kind of silver bullet that grants a regime total unqualified immunity from any kind of dissent. It's just a useful tool that increases the odds of a favourable outcome. But in the case of Weimar/Nazi Germany, there was too much ruin to be papered over by propaganda.
Also, if you really believe in what you're saying, I assume that means you are happy when a cause you care about is censored/suppressed? (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm honestly asking for a yes/no)
I was basing my claim off the following report - https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitism_September-October_1940.pdf The source doesn't seem like a nazi one so I'm not particularly bothered, but if you look up the history of Julius Streicher he was in a lot of trouble with the law in Weimar Germany. It isn't a surprise that the nazis also went after him later - wikipedia says that it was due to embarrassment at his vulgar, low-brow and attention grabbing style, which I find very plausible.
OK, and what happened next? Yeah, you had the immediate effect of lowering public support... but that doesn't actually do anything to my claim, which is that censorship ultimately has a self-defeating effect even if you get a bit of suppression at first. I feel pretty confident in saying that the Nazi party wasn't actually wiped out or defeated by being censored in Weimar Germany, and while I've heard of holocaust deniers I've never encountered any Nazi Germany deniers.
It is my contention that propaganda and suppression of speech like this will always fail and has only a short-term efficacy. For something like the Biden laptop story, where all that matters is suppressing coverage just before an election, censorship can work - but that's far more limited than what you're claiming, and even then the negative consequences are already starting to show up.
Absolutely not. Censorship like this is a waste of time and energy, causes problems in the short term and the long term and completely fails to address the root causes of whatever noxious belief you're trying to censor is - not to mention it lends credibility to the censored ("The powers that be fear this message so much they do not want you to hear it! I will bravely stand up for my convictions and suffer the slings and arrows of our powerful enemies due to my love for the people" etc). The spreading of ideas and philosophies, especially negative and anti-social ones, are essentially a warning light that something in society is failing. If you're the captain of a ship and a massive warning siren comes on telling you about incoming danger, you might want to temporarily shut off the siren so you can have a bit of time to think - but if you think turning off the siren is a substitute for dealing with the problems that it actually signifies, you're setting yourself up for ruin.
Thanks for the evidence.
Well yes, it didn't work in this particular case. But it does work in other cases (for a recent example, consider how Western public attitudes/treatment of homosexuals has shifted in the last 20 years)
Just because a technique has a < 100% success rate doesn't mean it's never effective. In this case, the reality of the situation was so bad that it overcame the propaganda and censorship.
How is this not a perfect example of my point? Hunter did what he did, and the Democrats couldn't fix it. So instead they suppressed it, and managed to win an election.
There was fallout later on, but that was just because there was an actual problem that had occurred. If they had just allowed the story to be disseminated freely, they would have been in even more trouble.
"All forms of medicine are an exercise in futility - the human body inevitably tends towards decay and death, any kind of pill/surgery is just a short-term delay tactic"
Yes, ideally you just address the actual problem. But what happens when one of the following is true:
The problem is beyond your ability to address (What exactly would you propose the Weimar republic have done differently? German currency was backed by US dollars, so when the US was ruined by the Depression, so were they. That's not some policy that the German government could just reverse)
The establishment's values and priorities misalign with the that of the majority. My understanding is that the people running the Weimar republic valued progressive ideals such as loosening sexual mores, women's rights, etc - and like the progressives of today, saw these things as intrinsically good - they were the end which justified the means. And the Nazi party saw these things as degenerate and unnatural.
So in either case, whether it because you can't solve the problem, or you don't even believe the "problem" is a problem - you do the next best thing, which is to discourage anyone causing any ruckus by thinking about the problem.
But you have to hear what the censored person is trying to say to pass any kind of judgement on their ideas in the first place.
???
Where's the censorship of gay rights activism? I do not understand what point you're making here.
First of all, I'd just like to point out that if the result of your strategy to defeat antisemitism is the actual literal holocaust, your strategy most likely has some big problems! Your comment about the reality of the situation also has me slightly confused - are you saying that the jews were actually so terrible that not even the power of censorship was enough to prevent anti-semitism? I really, really don't think this is a winning approach for your argument, but if you want to stand on this hill and proclaim that censorship is so effective that it can turn pervasive anti-semitism into a fascist dictatorship that tries to ethnically cleanse the semites I'm not going to stop you from advertising how correct my point is.
This doesn't mean you give people heroin to relieve the pain from a mild toothache. There are some things which we know do not work in medicine, and the fact that everyone ultimately dies one day is not a good reason to bust out the trepanning equipment.
I don't actually know how you conclusively defeat anti-semitism or stop it from being a problem - as far as I can tell, nobody in the entire history of the world has a good answer to this question, so I don't think my failure here should reflect negatively on my argument.
If an idea is at the point where it needs censoring then this process has already started. Again, I don't really think I have any point I can make that is stronger than "You think the strategy that took an anti-semitic society to the point where they committed genocide against the jews is a good idea".
I meant that anti-gay-rights activism has been censored in recent decades.
And I believe that this was a major factor in turning homosexuality from being seen as an unusual kink that should be tolerated based on "live and let live" ideals, to a legitimate, wholesome lifestyle which is deserving of widespread support and state-backing.
The homosexual advocates didn't come up with some devilishly clever new argument. Through the use of slogans ("love is love", "love is a human right", etc) and shaming, in the space of about a decade - we went from center-right politicians voting against homosexual marriage, to any opposition towards homosexuality pushed outside the Overton window (indeed - even a conservative can only protest the excesses of the movement like Drag Queen Story Hours, they have to make it clear that there's nothing inherently wrong with the lifestyle)
I'm claiming that the holocaust wasn't the result of censorship. Instead it was due to pre-existing anti-semetic attitudes and that Germany was going through a tough time (Treaty of Versailles, the Depression, etc)
There are lots of good examples where censorship has lead to otherwise unpopular agendas gaining power (just look at contemporary issues like BLM, trans rights, gay rights, etc) - which is why I claim it is an effective tool (there was just too much societal ruin prior to the holocaust)
Due to a higher IQ than Whites, Jews naturally tend towards being overrepresented in politics, and being wealthier than average, with the Weimar republic being a special case. Further, they are more liberal than Whites, which likely increased the extent of their impact on various forms of "degeneracy" brought about by the Weimar republic.
So if you have a problem with the Weimar republic, and are against sexual liberalism, then you would be drawn to anti-semitism (unless any criticism of Jews were made socially unacceptable and associated with schizophrenic losers)
However I believe that anti-semitism (whether based on genuine problems or not) played a very small role in the rise of Hitler. The biggest cause was obviously just the bad economic situation of Germany, which lead people to feel resentful and desperate, and seek out an extreme solution, blowing their grievances way out of proportion.
For the most part, certainly in contemporary Western society which is the context for most discussions about censorship, there isn't any such desperation. People might have problems with policy X, but if you just make it inconvenient to voice opposition to it, they'll eventually give you your way.
It's been pretty well accomplished in modern Western society. The only people/organisations which I can think of that are anti-semitic would be completely irrelevant fringe figures from White/Black Supremacist movements (indeed, even in the case of actual White supremacists, there seems to be disagreement on this issue - with Jared Taylor considering them as Whites)
And this has been accomplished by making criticism of Jews completely forbidden. Indeed, whilst they are far from alone in the long list of groups which you're not supposed to criticise, we go even further in the case of Jews - you can't even mention the fact that you're not allowed to criticise them (as that would be affirming the anti-semitic trope that Jews control popular culture)
Yes, the process has started - that doesn't mean it can't be stopped.
There is a massive gulf between some greentexts and forum posts by aryanpepe1488 on Storm Front, and an idea entering the public conscious to be discussed in polite conversation amongst normies.
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You do not understand me correctly. It is not the technique of suppression that I object to, but the suppression itself.
And, while I suppose it is true that censorship of dissidents is better than murdering them, it is also true that some techniques of murdering dissidents are better than others because of the lower risk of collateral damage, if we are discussing "what it the best method of silencing those with whom we disagree," I think perhaps we have taken our eye off the ball.
I expressed myself clumsily. That is exactly what I thought you meant. I was pointing out that suppression, in an of itself, isn't an inherently bad thing (I don't want dissidents murdered, but only because I don't want anyone killed or otherwise physically harmed unless there is no other option)
Obviously, since I don't see a regime silencing it's detractors as wrong, that question is extremely relevant to me (And my answer - as thoroughly as you can, so long as it's done non-violently and only to people who are being intentionally hostile to your interests)
I've never seen this quote before, but it nicely captures a lot of my thoughts on this issue.
What an eloquent and persuasive steel man of my position.
I wrongly inferred from your OP that you were making the "what if the tables were turned" argument.
The market place of ideas thing makes sense - even if you truly believe something, and have total authority, you could just be wrong about the thing, and so being able to critically examine your beliefs is clearly to your benefit.
However social media/the public square/etc aren't platforms for dispassionate rational debate. They are primarily a platform to spread propaganda and push an agenda based upon a belief system you've already decided upon.
I like to use The Motte precisely because of what Holmes is saying - so that my perception is as close to objective reality as possible. I use twitter to enjoy memes/rants that affirm my pre-existing world-view.
The current system of hate speech laws/cancel culture works gives the people holding the lever the best of both worlds. They can impose their will, which they believe will make the world a better place, and also can go to obscure corners of the internet to test out their thinking in private.
If that is what you think, I am afraid that we don’t have much to tallk about. But I can say that if you think that social media can't be a vastly better space for rational debate than The Motte, of all places*, then you are following the wrong people on Twitter.
As my father would say, if The Motte is not a platform to push an agenda based upon a belief system you've already decided upon, it will more than suffice until such a platform comes along.
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I don't see why that's a problem, though I can certainly see why it would seem problematic to people with certain assumptions.
And what assumption would that be?
That your side will ever be out of power.
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I don’t know why these people find it tough. It just isn’t. Don’t censor. But someone said something I consider naughty? Who the fuck cares.
There are plenty of people who aren’t interested in a place that tolerates anti-semitism. Somebody on /r/TheMotte or /r/slatestarcodex once made the interesting point that maximizing speech is completely different from refusing to censor anything — at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.
Also advertisers – advertisers care.
That idea is itself a central and noxious example of what it describes.
"I use the [speech act] leverage at my disposal to make you censor my enemies."
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To be clear: they care about not being attacked by establishment NGO's, not about "being associated" with something objectionable in the eyes of the consumer.
I’ve heard this claimed before but admit to knowing nothing about it. What is the evidence for it?
Examples of companies losing business due to reaction from consumers are few and far between. Bud Light is probably the only one in recent memory, and they didn't really change course all that much as a result of it. Also advertisers were constantly being associated with offensive content on Twitter, Youtube, etc. It's not until the establishment media do a "it's bad to advertise on $platform" report that they actually bother to pull out.
All in all, there's very little evidence they care about being associated with something offensive, and a much simpler explanation is that it's the media coverage that bothers them.
In part, probably because the only people who saw those ads were “bad people” anyhow so there was no taint to their brand. But then the media blew their spot up.
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Might be true, but trying to carefully micro-manage which views need to be pruned to what extend in order to give room to which other views, and deciding which views bring how much value, and having an apparatus in place to enforce all of that...well, it might work on small internet forums where small teams of savvy mods who know their userbase well and actually care to maximize viewpoint diversity (though still - by what metric?), but I don't think it scales at all without devolving into conformity enforcement machinery.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record that goes "AI will fix it", that sounds like a job for AI.
I suspect a model finetuned on the moderation decisions of The Motte will beat the brakes off the typical internet or reddit mod.
I think you underestimate how many humans want censorship. To me reddit is a boring sterile place in most areas where any political sub becomes parroting of the same agreed ideas. But humans seem to want that because we converge on it repeatedly.
Even here if someone parrots a few ideas like more communists leaning they probably get enough disagreement that they end up just deciding to go to the place where everyone will call them geniuses.
AI might be able to maximize for users by never showing that posts they don’t like. Effectively letting everyone live in their self-reinforcing bubble. But it does seem many on the left don’t like the idea of supposedly something they think is a Nazi being on the same platform whose thoughts they never see.
I think people are confused about what they want. They don't understand that in order to get lively, creative, intellectually stimulating conversation, they have to be willing to tolerate people with beliefs that are far different from their own.
The modern progressive movement has sold the idea that you can have all the vitality, ingenuity, and fun that we've always had without the dissidents and the ghouls and the witches. Hell, they push the line that without those bad people, there will be even more of the good stuff!
Unfortunately this message is, likely unintentionally, a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Who's they? How big exactly do you reckon the audience for these things is?
'They' are the 'average person' that @sliders1234 is referencing above. The standard, everyday, stereotypical person or I guess 'NPC' (although I find that term demeaning). People who for whatever reason don't have the ability or time or inclination to think deeply about their beliefs and struggle towards improving them. Who tend to latch onto mainstream messages and not question them too deeply.
In terms of the audience for these things, well, I'd say everyone? If you ask a person on the street if they prefer interesting conversation over boring conversation, what do you think they'd say?
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In this particular case they could be both the establishment and the normie audiences.
It's ginormous. Why else were they (the establishment) raiding all the lively, creative, intellectually stimulating cultures for popculture entertainment?
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Completely true. I’m not saying Twitter is trying to (or even can) cultivate a garden if ideological diversity, which was (roughly) the goal of /r/slatestarcodex
Twitter is probably more interested in maximizing users (which, as you say, isn’t the same as diverse viewpoints), but a similar principle still holds: if you want to maximize the number of people using your services, a policy of allowing entry to all often isn’t optimal (as users here often point out for public transportation).
What AI? The commercial versions which are being carefully monitored, pruned, and edited to make sure no No-No Words or Thoughts get through the sieve?
Finetuning is the process by which such goody-two-shoes AI can be coaxed into almost anything you like. You could remove the guardrails, turn it into a member of the gestapo, or in this case, teach it the tenets of Motte moderation.
Of course, this is for open source models like Llama where we can tinker with their brains, not GPT-4, which is locked down and if you get naughty, OpenAI will spank you.
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I think you replied to the wrong comment
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That’s a fig leaf for a forum like Twitter to block views that are abhorrent to the people who run Twitter. Oh — this post criticizing Soros prosecutors is just anti-semitism so we are banning it.
Well, Soros choose to give a lot of money to elect prosecutors who seem to only like prosecuting people who defend themselves. He should be criticized regardless of whether it may or may not be a dog whistle.
That’s what it always devolves to so the only way to really run a program at scale that isn’t going to devolve into censorship of ideas I dislike is the free speech paradigm.
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That was the old attitude of those fighting censorship. Aw, you don't like sex/naughty words/other things, you prude? Well then just don't read or look at that stuff. Anyone has the right to say anything they want.
Of course, that couldn't last long in the pure state, because (1) okay so are you saying it's really okay to spew lies about people and call for their murder? and (2) some of the people who were fighting censorship were only doing it because it was their views or wishes that were being censored; when they got the right to say/write what they wanted, they soon moved on to "no, you can't say/write that because it's hate speech or violence". In other words, they were not committed to fighting censorship, they wanted the power and authority to censor what they didn't like.
EDIT: My natural instincts are pro-censorship. There are things I think are harmful or stupid or wrong and should not be publicised. I've had to consciously make myself more 'tolerant' on this, and then when I finally get to the point of "okay, I may not agree with it, I may not like it, but they have the right to say it", then the liberal side goes for "now we have the upper hand, censorship is okay!"
I’m fine with libel laws and the incitement standards. They are robust narrowly defined set of rules (I would overturn NYT v Sullivan).
And yes, there is a problem that some people only like free speech when it’s their speech that is being censored. I am honestly okay with allowing progressives, commies, Nazis, or even the Amish to have free speech rights.
Honestly I don’t think you are being intellectually honest saying your fine with those people having free speech.
If the commies were in position to actually win and their numbers just went from 20 to 30% and you knew in 5 years they would succeed taking over every institution and you would suddenly being living in Mao China then you would not say you support free speech for them.
Let’s say you are Musks. You own twitter. You can hit a red button let’s call it the deplatform button. If you hit it the commies lose momentum and disappear. If you don’t hit it then you live in communists china in 5 years.
I would not believe you if you told me you won’t hit the red button. You are fine with them having free speech provided they are small and not in charge of real power. But that changes quickly if their free speech leads to winning the ideology battle.
The point of free speech is
Speech = win battle of ideology = win power = enforce their ideology on you
"Imagine you are richest man in Russia who (among other things) owns largest network of newspaper kiosks in St. Petersburg in April 1917. Would you stop selling Pravda if it is the only way to stop the dastardly commies?"
This is hypothetical scenario unconnected to real life.
1/Nowhere in history communists won due to "free speech" , nowhere communists won by convincing majority on free marketplace of ideas that communism is the best thing since sliced bread. Countries where communists prevailed were countries that practiced heavy censorship (at the time), it did not helped.
Closest example is possibly Czechoslovakia after WW2, but it was heavily managed "democracy" with only four political parties(and their newspapers) alloved and all criticism of Soviet Union treated as fascist treason.
2/ In situation where communists are in such ascendancy and ready to take power, they now have their political party, trade unions, organizations of all kind (including well armed militias) and their own newspapers, radio, TV stations and, in modern conditions, their equivalent of Twitter.
Does Elon have any comprehensible "ideology"? He is against long list of things (that changes every week), but what exactly is he for? What he wants the world look like?
I think his core is what I’ve heard to as Victorian ideology. Striving to still do great things. I think he probably has a great deal of HBD realism probably even magnified by his experience in S Africa and it now being a failing state.
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Maybe you are right. Communist China sucks. But at the same time, I know the allure of wanting to ban disfavored speech is to turn everything I don’t like into commies. Don’t stare into the void.
In the last few years I think I’ve just lost faith that the better argument will win and society will be better off. And historically a lot of bad things seemed to have happened.
I grew up in America being mostly good but it seems like path directionality sometimes matter.
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Censorship is merely a tool that can be used to further a goal. If you only want to ban commies, and not go any further, then just do exactly that and no more.
It's not some kind of addictive substance or dark magic that will warp your mind into something unrecognisable. It's a simple, non-violent press of a button - the victims will be frustrated and angry, but unharmed physically.
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I'm more a fan of the Solomon-type "cut the baby in half" approach (as in, only those that would otherwise allow their world view to be censored for common-good reasons will never be censored; those that would do that will be judged by their own standard and silenced), which is the only way you will ever preserve a free-speech paradigm in a socioeconomic environment otherwise unfavorable to it.
Censorship cannot co-exist with a mutually assured heckler's veto or among equals; it arises when the former stops being a natural consequence of economic prosperity and, for the latter, when the (later to be oppressed) group on the downswing fails to guard that balance of power sufficiently jealously.
I understand the position. My concern with the paradox of tolerance paradigm is that it is an easy cudgel to stifle dissidents.
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What does a heckler’s veto have to do with economic prosperity?
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Can you expand a bit on what exactly this means? It's a bit confusing to me.
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The Amish are run like a society-wide cancel mob.
I don't think that's true. They use shunning as punishment, but as far as I know the mob element is absent; the punishments are deliberated by the leaders of the communities, right?
It is somewhat of a matter of definition, but I'd say that it's close enough. You can disobey the leader, but then you'd get shunned too. I admit I have no idea how common this is compared to the leader actually using force against people who refuse to participate in the shunning.
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I wish it was that simple. I really do.
I've been a moderator on /r/slatestarcodex and then /r/themotte. I also semi-moderate a few different real life non-profit thingies.
I'm also an anarcho-capitalist by philosophy, and a libertarian via practicality.
At the end of the day, censorship is a consumer demand, not a platform demand. After all, if you are a platform the easiest move is not to censor anything. But there are many things that will absolutely turn off users. Maybe those users suck, and they shouldn't be so picky. But I can guarantee that you, as a user, want at least one, and more likely all three of these things censored on the platforms you use:
Spam is really the trickiest though. One man's trash is another man's treasure. And one man's spam is another man's news. It is subjectivity all the way down on "spam". Because spam is ultimately just content you don't want, sent by people that want you to have the content.
What I find by far to be the most sensible proposal would be user-chosen blocklists/filters. People should be able to pick and choose what they want to see, so the no-gore and no 7000-yo-lolis crowd can give their eyes a break.
In terms of spam, let multiple filters, some community run, exist, so that people can pick their poison. I suspect a middling AI like Llama can do this on the cheap, for "good enough" results.
Outright CP is well, illegal, so I don't suppose platforms that exist on the open web have much choice in removing it.
That's a good start, but use any but the very most clearly-defined labels and you start getting into fights over what should or should not be labelled. I for one would prefer not to see normal pornography on my feed; must I specify each action and bit of anatomy I consider pornographic, or hope the arbiters of the label share my views on the matter? If they do, they present an enormous target to anyone who wants to stir up trouble. Labels could be crowdsourced, and I think a good solution in that area is possible, but would require quite a lot more innovation than the centralized tyranny we currently enjoy.
In general, given the world's recent pattern of institutional capture by people who hate me, I'd prefer my filters to be more concrete and more resistant to change. The current tactic of flagging questionable material and reducing its reach is certainly imperfect, but it at least mostly sidesteps the debate and the power games.
I generally agree, but the issue is a bit more complex than just allowing more customizable filters.
Sure, this would be easy - just provide a clear, concise and accurate definition of pornography and the filter will be produced in short order. Good luck!
That's pretty much my point--I can't tell if you're trying to agree or disagree with me.
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You would presumably subscribe to a blacklist source who shares your notion of what counts as pornography.
Many years back this problem came up in an Actual Adversarial Environment. The Freenet distributed anonymous network, though various cryptographic contrivances, supports the semi-persistent storage and retrieval of files associated with a key. Furthermore, there is a mechanism publish updated versions of a file, which can be discovered by someone in possession of the old key. This was first intended to be used to publish blogs and the like, but at some point in Freenet's history (way before my time) someone figured out how to build something like Usenet on top of it (but without binaries because there's no point when you can just upload a file and include the key in your message).
The first such usenet-alike was called Frost. From what I've read about the motivation for the second one, Frost was quickly filled with people discussing and sharing CP, and almost as quickly, by enormous volumes of automated spam created by people who didn't like CP. More importantly than filling up the UI, the automated spam made Frost effectively unusable, taking message latency and reliability from, "something like metro area snail mail in 19th century London", to "something like sending a letter to Jamestown from 17th century London".
The replacement was FMS (Freenet Message System, iirc). In order to combat the spam problem, it used some kind of web-of-trust thing where you could mark messages as spam/ham, and also mark other nodes as honest sources of spam/ham labels and labels about other nodes. Or maybe the trust was automatic based on agreement with your own labels or something. I don't recall exactly. In any case, messages that were too spammy would not be propagated, protecting the network from overload.
FMS's WoT censorship system was just a single axis spam probability, because this was 2011 and everyone involved was a cipherpunk free speech partisan solving a technical problem. Anyone who didn't want to see pedos talking about pedoshit was offered the simple expedient of not subscribing to alt.erotica.redacted. But I don't think there's anything inherent to the web-of-crowdsoruced-moderators idea that says you can't have a whole smorgasbord of labels.
Trust webs do sound like a good way to crowdsource the whole thing.
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It may be the most sensible if you are sufficiently (classical) liberal, but there are many topics for which most people are no less bothered (or even more bothered, in the "I can handle this/don't get off on this, but what if this gets seen by someone more gullible/degenerate than me?" way) by the prospect of a consenting third party receiving the content as they are by being exposed to it themselves. Pick your poison: CP, loli, gore, racism, porn, pro-homosexual or -transgender content, "misinformation"/worldview reinforcement for the outgroup...
It's like the old "Is there someone you forgot to ask?" meme.
Well, sure, in a vacuum most people gravitate towards censoring speech they don't like. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. We shouldn't structure society around people's natural destructive impulses; we should structure society around what allows humans to flourish. And we've known for centuries that that is a free and open exchange of ideas. Not because there are no ideas which are genuinely harmful! But because humans and human organizations are too fickle, ignorant, and self-interested to be trusted as arbiters of which ideas meet that standard.
To be clear, I agree with your stated position here - it's just that I have grown cynical about the willingness of people, even those who are vocal free speech maximalists, to stick to the principle when faced with speech they find particularly disgusting or threatening to their tribe. Would you be okay with removing obstacles to consenting parties sharing all entries in my list above?
Me personally? Yes, for all the things you listed. But is that really all that surprising? We're on The Motte. The only one you listed that people here would really find controversial is CP, and while I (of course) agree that creating real CP should be illegal, sharing virtual/generated CP harms nobody and should be allowed. (This is basically the situation we're already in with hentai, which is full of hand-drawn underage porn.)
But if you want issues that do challenge my stance, I'd suggest revenge porn, doxxing or the Right To Be Forgotten. So, you're right that my "free speech maximalism" only goes so far; there's always something in this complex world that doesn't have an easy answer.
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And then there is the "right side of history" crowd, where even the mildest disagreement is met with "you are literally genociding me!" and calls for "this should not be allowed" action by social media, mainstream media, schools, governments, libraries (I get a kick out of the 'banned books' weeks in libraries because dang sure something not on the approved thought list is going to be banned by the cat's eye glasses wearing ladies), advertising, billboards, placards, and you just walking down the street thinking your own thoughts in your own head.
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Similarly, one can decrease rape by declaring it consensual.
[not a reply to you] Not sure why OP deleted their post, I thought it was good.
Idk about good but it certainly was eye-opening. Did you catch the username? I was confused about how cocaine comes from scorpions and wanted to follow up via PM.
Good one! The username was jfnyqinr292m
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You'd need a mod, it was a random string of characters like jfnyrgi or something. Not memorable.
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Well now I wish I had gotten to read it!
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Right, the segue into late-stage capitalism vs. hallucinogens was confusing though.
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Could you summarize?
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Hmm. Should posters be allowed to delete top level posts like this? It isn't great behavior.
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Well, really why bother? Maybe the CIA could or couldn't get rid of Maduro, but it seems to be of very little advantage to the United States. They don't need their oil, they're not in a relevant location, there are much bigger and more serious threats, and whatever comes after Maduro could be worse. Either way, the CIA gets the blame, so why not go home early on Fridays?
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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.
Personal life - always, Personal life as consumer - always as long as it is not in your face too much - aka it is ok to avoid purple owned businesses, it's not ok to explicitly demand to be serviced by the only green employee there. Professional - you can go like Cristal brand to tell that you are amused that this rap guys are buying so much Champaigne, they get offended, and you know that your real customers - can freely drink without being associated with the likes of Jay Z or 50 Cent
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I take the utilitarian position, however I feel like lots of people who think they are taking the utilitarian position nevertheless produce wildly different real-world conclusions about what types of discrimination are or aren't justified.
It's a hugely complex issue once you start considering things like the just world fallacy and how people will take any 'approved' discrimination as justification to dehumanize entire populations, or the way discrimination creates self-fulfilling prophecies, or etc.
I almost feel like this is one of those cases where people can't actually think usefully about the truth of the matter, and the utilitarian optimal thing is to pretend that you 100% believe and insist on the liberal version, while secretly using the utilitarian version on practice, because a society that believes in the liberal version will come closer to the utilitarian-optimal outcome than one that tries to explicitly do utilitarian math.
I'm not sure that's stable though, because it may inevitably slippery slope its way into progressivism. That is, this optimal state depends on universal but not-common knowledge: the utilitarian version has to actually be a secret. Because if you are publicly insisting on ignoring group memberships and everyone knows that person A is discriminating against group X in a not-secret way, then the public persona is forced to denounce them as a X-ist in order to maintain consistency. But if everyone using the utilitarian version in practice, then it's hard to keep that a secret from everyone else (who is doing the same thing). And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.
Maybe it works if you restrict the secret utilitarian version to only cases where there's absolutely no conceivable way of being discovered.
Right, I think that's the world we're actually in, and that it's probably worth the trade-off.
Rationalists should get better about hiding it, no one's ever caught me so far.
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This thread is reminding me of doing high school debate and arguing about racial profiling.
"The good news is you won the debate. The bad news is you will never gain entry to a selective college nor a prestiguous employer. I hope this was worth it to you, young Mr. Sailer".
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I believe you are strawmanning my position. It would be absolutely fine to always prefer non-brown-haired candidates, other things being equal. They might still win by virtue of other characteristics.
This kind of strawmanning seems necessary to me in order to demonize basic Bayesian reasoning. Otherwise everyone would see this as eminently rational behavior.
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I am not a big fan of proxies when it comes to important matters. We should aim to get as close to the underlying variable as possible.
Got a black and white potential candidate for a job as a physics researcher? In my world whoever scores higher in the IQ test gets it.
Not hiring child molesters at a pre school is less about competence or safety and more about optics. Lets say you had a device that could read minds and is attached to ones wrist to deliver a deadly electrical shock before one is to sexually abuse a child. I would bet most parents would still rather this guy not be near his children with the device on even if it means his life depends on doing an excellent job.
Will we ever reach the perfect set of proxies? No. But if they are used the way Bayes intended, I am fine with them. In practice they are used as hard and dumb cutoffs.
Oh you have 5 years of experience Instead of the 5.1 we are asking for? Too bad.
The problem with this view, which is at the heart of the modern rational world, is that the energy expended to figure things out in totality isn't always worth expending.
Your brain doesn't need to understand the shape of the environment on the atomic level to manipulate it, you've developped the concept of objects, which are a useful, wrong, simplification of it.
Newtonian physics are falsified, yet we use them daily in engineering.
The truth is that ALL criterions are proxies. The true nature of the world is unknowable and all decisions are made using models based on experience.
And quality models are energy efficient for their uses.
This actually gets at how I personally define “IQ”, which is the physical level at of detail at which a being understands reality. In this sense, there is a theoretical — and arguably practical — upper bound on intelligence, where a being understands all of reality across all time — that is, the position of every atom in the universe across every temporal dimension.
I have no doubt in the near future we will have AIs which achieve a significant portion of this — the ability to perceive and manipulate reality at the atomic level across a substantial — say, galaxy sized — slice of the universe. In practice these would be indistinguishable from magic to someone alive today. You could just say “get me a beer” to the AI, it would instantly assemble atoms into a glass (ice cold with frost on it) filled with atoms assembled as freshly brewed beer.
Looks like you're mixing in so much perception, memory, reach and ability to manipulate into "intelligence" that your personal definition of "IQ" is going to massively differ from the colloquial.
This is like the gripe I have with the Yud-esque AI doomers who claim intelligence is when if more, then can do magic.
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The issue with not using proxies is that really a lot of measures are nearly impossible to get any other way. I can’t give an intelligence test to potential hires — it’s illegal. So I have to use college graduation as a proxy. I can’t really ask whether you’re going to commit a crime, — the criminal isn’t going to admit it — but someone rocking up with face tattoos wearing a hoodie is a decent proxy for criminality.
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Everything. Next question please.
To elaborate, whenever the expected utility from discrimination exceeds the costs. If there's a genetic test that correlated with a 0.05% increase in risk for colon cancer, no sensible insurance company would order it, nor should a sane employer hinge their employment decisions upon it, because that would just be a pain in the ass. There's no magic threshold where Bayesian reasoning and statistics becomes applicable, just that there's a time and a place where it's worth the effort over the default course of action.
For many properties relevant to us, it's just blindingly obvious, such as if a person is male or female for the purposes of how concerned you should be when seeing them jogging towards you in a deserted alley.
I would be perfectly OK with this, because even slightly rational employers wouldn't fire someone on that basis, and a world where that happens is one that looks nothing like ours. Should they end up fired, then they'll likely end up hired by someone else for 99.99% of their previous wages.
For example, I'm against employers being unable to discriminate on the basis of disability, despite having my own mental health issues, such as ADHD. I'm still functional, if it was so bad that I, say, forgot what medicines I'd prescribed my patient or wandered off in the midst of work, then I would have no expectations of further employment. I wouldn't want that person as an employee, colleague or even my own physician, yet that counts as a protected characteristic.
That's for when we're actually post-scarcity, at least in terms of deserving subsistence if not a job, and we're not there yet.
I'm not sure I agree with this: there are lots of tests like BRCA1 that reveal something like 40% of women with the gene will develop breast cancer. Large employers often self-insure for employee health insurance (often with a known insurer providing the infrastructure and managing benefits), so health care costs actually come directly out of their bottom line. I can imagine that the math works out pretty easily that if, say, Starbucks knew of a positive test for the gene or a family history of certain diseases, it would actually be an actuarial loss to hire certain candidates and provide health insurance.
The US prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of genetic information, and I'm not sure I disagree with the idea that we should do so.
That's not a vanishingly small likelihood is it? It makes perfect sense for insurers to cover it.
As for me, I'm fine with it, I consider attempts to shield important information away with a sceptical eye, leaving aside issues of poor incentives like the police breaking the law to acquire evidence which ought to be inadmissible and such. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and rare is the time when more information is bad for you.
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Is this how it works?
I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.
I guess if they told the health insurance company they were genetically screening employees they could ask for a lower rate, but I sort of wouldn't expect the health insurance companies to go along with it, when they can refer to it being bad optics in order to not give a discount.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something.
If you doubt it, you could literally just hit your favorite search engine up for an explanation of self-insuring companies.
No, the whole point of health insurance is to pool risk. Companies offer it as a perk, now, but the typical American association between employment and insurance is exceedingly contingent. Insurance companies collect premiums to finance the pool, as well as to finance the administration of the pool and also to distribute profits to shareholders and do all the other things companies do. Large insurance companies have larger pools, distributing risk more widely and collecting more money to the pool. If you're a large enough corporation, however, collecting the premiums yourself (and perhaps paying a small administrative fee to an insurance company) may save you and/or your employees a lot of money, for example if your employees tend to be some combination of young, healthy, unmarried, and/or childless.
Strictly speaking, you can self-insure as an individual, too. If you forgo insurance and simply put your "premiums" into a high yield savings account every month, then over the course of your lifetime you should on average actually come out ahead of people who buy insurance, since the whole point of insurance companies employing armies of actuaries is to be sure that they don't go bankrupt--that is, to insure that more money is coming into the pool, than going out of it. So if you believe the mathematicians, you should self-insure! Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky; since insurance companies also have enormous negotiating power, even when self-insuring accurately duplicates the risk pool it doesn't duplicate stuff like "in network" discounts, negotiated rates, "maximum out-of-pocket," and other such perks. To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.
You have an inverse of Pascal's Wager going on as an individual. If MegaCorp runs its health insurance in house it at least in theory turns a profit from 99 mostly healthy employees paying for the 1 unlucky guy that gets into a terrible car accident or gets cancer. If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.
Right, that's why I said:
For that matter, self-insurance sometimes goes very badly even for whole corporations--though, as with insurance companies, the larger they get the less this is likely to be a problem. Small and mid-size firms do self-insure sometimes, and sometimes this goes badly for them. Two or three million-dollar medical events in a single year would be terribly bad luck for a company of, say, 500 employees, but it's well within the realm of the possible. This is why a company that self-insures should typically also have some kind of stop-loss policy backing up its self-insurance pool (and indeed many insurance companies themselves have stop-loss coverage). This is a fascinating area of the law that unfortunately falls outside my expertise, but I find it fascinating even so. Insurance and, essentially, meta-insurance form the basis of all sorts of interesting economic gambits. But some of the greatest profits of all have been won by persuading whole nations that participation in such gambits is wise, or even obligatory.
Which is to say: while I acknowledge that the equilibrium I live in requires that I bet, pragmatically, against the actuaries who think they'll take more of my money than they'll have to give back, I remain suspicious that insurance is in fact a deeply parasitic economic entity, of a kind that should probably be much more regulated than it is (even though I am, in almost all cases, reflexively anti-regulation).
Maybe I'm just being autistic here, but I was thinking that most of these self-insuring fools actually make it out OK or even come out ahead, a few break even, and some get hauled to the cleaners and back.
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I think I’d have a high threshold for most common contexts, though as the task at hand got more critical to the mission of the company, the health and safety of the clients or employees, or the safety of the product, my threshold goes down by quite a lot.
I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.
When it comes to something more mission critical, for example a programmer for my software company, the threshold goes down rather quickly. I lose money when I have to waste 1000 man-hours because someone bungled the code, and delays might well cost me millions in salary or lost sales. This hurts everyone working for the company.
The most obvious case would be in dangerous roles, or roles where a mistake can cause injury or death to other people or themselves. A doctor who is too stupid to understand what he’s doing, or has ADHD badly enough that he’s likely to miss critical details is a danger to his patients. An engineer who is unable or distractible enough to not do accurate calculations is a danger to anyone who uses his designs. Even in some forms of factory work, missing a detail or failing to check for people around before servicing or starting equipment can cause serious injury.
So it’s sort of a sliding scale for me. The more critical the role and the more a mess up will harm employees, clients, or the company itself the more I’m at least OK with using any means necessary to get the best possible person for the role.
Sure, I’d add not a thief, friendly, and capable of prioritization. But you do actually get a value add from a better employee- particularly ability to train as a mgr/assistant mgr, which places like that are always short of.
Agreed in the abstract although I think in a lot of those industries you’ll find more issues with turnover than competence, anyone with a reasonable work ethic, a normal IQ and basic skills will probably do well at low level management anyway. The issue with too much competence in that kind of job is that they’re usually temporarily working that field whilst perusing higher skills to get a better job. Brandon Sanderson talks about working the night desk at a hotel before becoming a writer. He was and still is fairly competent and you could train him to be a good manager. Except for the rather obvious problem that he has no intention of staying in the hotel after he gets published. Or you might get a smart kid to work the desk while going to college and find that they leave after graduation. And again sure for a time you get someone good, but once he graduates he’s going on to his professional field leaving you to get someone else to fill the gap.
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Here is where I sigh heavily and type out a reply more in sorrow than in anger.
I've worked a lot in those kinds of "all you need is a warm body" jobs. And then bosses wonder why the fuck their customers are annoyed and leaving shitty reviews.
Because even for "what the hell do I care who I hire, all I want is a trained monkey to take names and rattle off the prepared script" roles, you do actually need a teeny bit more than "can stand upright unassisted and speak English".
The other day at work I had to engage with the customer service hotline of the bank where we do business, and it soon became apparent that they'd outsourced from the natives here to someplace else. Presumably because it would be cheaper and "what the hell do we care who we hire for these minimal roles".
And it was not a happy experience, lemme tell you. Not the fault of the people on the other end of the line, who were doing their best but had plainly just been dumped with "yeah this is the script" and no support, but the attitude of the higher-ups responsible for the decisions on outsourcing, customer service, shaving off expenses for wages, etc.
It took three phone calls to get a minor issue sorted out, that ordinarily would have taken just one.
And that is why the saying "pay peanuts and get monkeys" came into being. If your attitude to public-facing/customer-facing jobs is "this isn't important, it's just something any minimally competent person can do", then that is what you will get: minimal competence. Which is not enough. If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!
And how do you get people willing to go the extra step? For a start, don't display that you think this is a step above not being employable at all, that you don't give a shit about the job or the people who do it, and that you consider it so minimal, you have no respect for the people doing it.
The amount you would have to pay more for the good for marginally better service is not worth hiring marginally more competent warm bodies.
The best receptionist in the world would be a really flirty Victorias Secret model with massive tits and 150 IQ who also volunteers at the animal shelter and the retirement home and has a warm smile. But she's not going to bring in enough marginal dollars to Dunder Mifflin Paper company to justify the salary on net.
You are leaving Economics completely out of the picture.
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Whenever I encounter shitty public service, I usually joke after the fact "interest rates are too low".
I dont mean this literally of course, but it is a real problem that improved sorting of people into roles plus some percentage of the distribution of IQ and conscientiousness being too low for meaningful contribution to society, means some experiences in life are just going to be terrible. I often wonder how much of my own childhood experience with generally decent schoolteachers versus my children's teachers who are basically morons is my own changing perception, vs. the fact that smart women have better options now.
I've had similar thoughts about my own elementary school teachers vs my childrens. Smart women do have more options now. Classrooms are different now, the expectations of the experience are different. I think this encourages the moronic.
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Datapoint of one(or some small number, whatever), but I remember my teachers as mostly moronic, sometimes motivated to teach and sometimes more concerned with making the kid fit into a box optimized for being easy to work with, and generally being quite lazy. So possibly changing perceptions.
Yeah, I easily can count the number of teachers I didn't think were stupid on one hand.
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The issue is often that their competitors are not any better in this regard. Or, even when they are, any advantage from customer service is absolutely swamped by other considerations.
I travel a lot and have had a range of experiences with hotel front desks, but I can't say any of them would ever trump even a small difference in price or location. I think the only exceptions I could imagine would be those bordering on the actually criminal.
Especially in the era of travel aggregators, a lot of folks are looking at just the price tag and maybe a map.
Yeah, that's the problem. Because that approach does lead to the "not my job, not my problem" attitude with staff, where a small amount of extra effort could avoid something becoming a major problem later on, but eh why should I care, the boss doesn't, I'm just gonna do my hours and not a finger's worth of extra effort.
And so customers go "they're all equally shitty, which one is cheapest?" and for cost-cutting, employers go the "it's a minimal job for minimal staff" and the outcomes are what we've all experienced: hanging on the phone trying to get the options from the automated menu instead of talking to a real person; if you do get a real person, they're working off a script in an overseas call centre and can't help you even if they wanted to; they don't want to, because everyone knows call-centre work is shitty and this is only something they're doing until they can get something better; help lines aren't helpful, and the degradation in quality continues so long as people will put up with it because it's not worth shifting from service provider A to service provider B since they all use the same kind of cost-cutting measures.
But automation and AI will make it all better, so even the minimal people will be out of jobs to be replaced by the Helpful Friendly ChatBot! Except I don't expect AI to be exempt from the "it's a minimal job, cut expenses as much as possible, this may be crappy but it's good enough" attitude, either.
I've seen the jokes about the American DMV and I don't know what they are like in reality, but that's all part of the "minimal job for minimal people" attitude and how it corrodes any sense of wanting to do something to help people. I've had low-level public-facing public service jobs where it would have been easy to go "not my job, not my problem" and leave people hanging, versus putting in a bit more effort to try and help them solve their problem and tell them what to do and how to navigate the bureaucracy, even though that wasn't formally part of the job.
But if that is not wanted, and indeed punished, by "I don't care who I hire so long as they can turn up sober and speak English" attitudes to 'it's a job any minimally competent person can do and doesn't need good workers because if they're any good they're going to leave for something higher up and better paid' positions, then bored, indifferent and even actively aggressive clerks who shut the window just as your position in the queue moves up to it are what you're going to get. "Oh, I could have stayed open five more minutes beyond my official closing time and taken that form, but now you're going to have to wait another two hours in line? Not my job, not my problem".
Hmm I'm starting to think we've gone over this before...
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But they were doing so before this. Most of the jobs I’m thinking of have been in a race to the bottom for decades. People want low prices and labor has a fairly high cost so most service roles are bare bones, purposely dumbed down so anyone off the street can do it, and quite often understafffed from even their own plans. People don’t actually care in most instances. They want cheap, and probably don’t even notice the service end unless it particularly bad. So there’s never really been a reason to worry about quality in low level workers. And as I said above, at the wages most of these jobs can afford to pay, you really don’t get to keep qualified people that long. That young go getter who’s really bright and helpful will probably be doing something else pretty quickly because the pay sucks and he’s got options. If you paid enough to keep him, the room rates go up and you have more empty rooms. The same would go for low level retail. If you paid enough to attract talent you’d have to raise your prices, and people generally don’t really put up with that when there are other cheaper options.
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And every once in a while, someone does better customer service, word gets around, and people start actually going over to the better firm. Which then finds they can't scale the better customer service, returns to the crappy norm, and we're back where we started.
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One counterargument to meritocracy is that majority or minority populations don't like it when they're outperformed and seek redistribution or expropriation. From a naively utilitarian point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of meritocracy to achieve a bit more stability, or to find an equilibria somewhere you can get a good amount of both.
See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.
Personally, I think this is a bad idea that leads to long-run instability. Opening up and strengthening divisions in the population of the country is a bad idea. If you have meritocracy, then you will have groups of winners and angry losers. If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers, a recipe for toxic politics. Better a nation-state without such dividing points. Or, if you can't have a nation-state then at least try to avoid huge divisions in ability between populations, if you have to import people then aim for similar levels of skill to the general population.
When the state determines winners and losers among groups, the incentive to compete for state control matches the state's ability to differentiate group outcomes.
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I feel like this accounting of winners vs losers in meritocracy is obscuring the fact that there is no 'natural' distributional outcome of meritocracy.
Meritocracy 'naturally' produces an ordinal relationship between people on whatever axis it measures, which does naturally create 'winners' and 'losers' (and those in between).
But one meritocratic system might end with the winners have 10% more resources than the losers, and another meritocratic system might end with the winners having 1,000,000X more resources than the losers. This having nothing to do with how much better the winners are than the losers, just with contingent factors about how the system itself functions.
The meritocratic ordering itself says nothing about which of those two distributional outcomes is 'correct' or 'natural' or 'right,' meritocracy measures something different from that and has nothing to say on the matter.
Which of those systems we should choose to live in, and which distributional outcomes we should want our meritocracy produces, is purely an arbitrary and political question.
If the losers demand that they get more than the winners, then that is trying to overturn meritocracy and take what is not theirs.
If the losers think that winners should get 10x as much as losers, and the winners think that winners should get 1000x as much as losers, then that's just a standard conflict of material interests between two different groups of citizens.
That's just politics.
(also, insert the standard affirmative action rant about 'recruit the kid who runs fast but has terrible form')
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Malays get this so that they don’t riot against the Chinese minority who dominate the country’s economy, as they already have before. For the Chinese, bumiputra is a price they are willing to pay for the preservation of their economic power (and its associated privilege, as it’s not as if they’re less clannish than the Malays are), a fig leaf that minimizes racial hostility. The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely, and while that would be bad for the Malays, it would also be bad for the Chinese affected.
As I've heard it told, the founding story of independent Singapore involved the parliament of Malaysia voting unanimously (absent members from Singapore) in 1965 to expel Singapore from its state involuntarily. This seems related to the fact that the island was, unlike the mainland, a majority ethnic Chinese. The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.
Malaysia isn’t that badly off- it’s certainly better off than Indonesia. Difference in government(and Lee Kwan Yew really was a once in a generation genius at government) and geography can explain the difference, probably better than HBD.
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I do think we've discussed this topic to death, as has 'the discourse' generally. And ethics depends on context. Consequentialist or not, so long as your values look more like "economic productivity" or "more happy people" or "national greatness" than "racism bad", it makes sense to think about the ethics of discrimination based on how they impact those. And while in the far past, 'statistical discrimination' probably could cause significant harm, I think today it causes essentially no harm.
In most cases of potential discrimination with political relevance, modern science, technology, and political organization would allow a competent corporation or state to directly measure each individual's traits or capacities, bypassing the ethical dilemma. Intelligence / job skills? IQ tests. Criminality? Properly enforce even minor laws, and have a public database of offenses employers can consult. Various right-wingers lament the low IQ of immigrants, but no need to statistically discriminate here, just give potential applicants IQ tests. Not politically viable, but so are immigration restrictions on all colored people. This alone makes 'statistical discrimination' a mostly moot issue in practice, IMO, and any marginal statistical discrimination has no systemic impact as a result. This is the point at which critics of pervasive racism or sexism fall back to 'structural racism that disadvantages poor/nonwhite/nonmale people even by objective standards', although they never draw the conclusion that they should pay less attention to explicit discrimination.
The terms I'll use are statistical discrimination - most centrally, making a decision with goals unrelated to race/sex/the group in question, but using the group as a proxy for the goal - versus taste-based discrimination, making a decision that's not really rationally justified on any goal other than 'exclude group'. Which category you place something into depends on your values - a white nationalist probably thinks a white-only company is a rational choice to maximize productivity, and a committed anti-racist would in their heart consider any discrimination taste-based because black people aren't any less capable than white people. But there's a big difference between giving black people .3 percentage points higher interest rates than white people or not hiring a hispanic house-cleaner because the last one stole from you, and not hiring any female doctors in the entire medical system because you incorrectly think they're much less capable than men. Even if it was applied universally, statistical discrimination in modern life is just not that impactful. Even if the cars of black people are stopped 3x as much as those of white people, the cumulative harm this does to black non-criminals is just low, the rate of police physically harming innocent and cooperative people is low. If there was a latent supply of skilled black programmers somewhere, Big Tech would love to tap it no matter the average black IQ (alas, immigration laws). And to whatever extent statistical discrimination, by assumption justified excluding second-order effects, harms black people who are on the good end of the distribution in question (IQ, criminality), that harm is (by assumption) compensated for in aggregate by the higher skill, lower criminality, or whatever of the worker that replaced them. If it was absolutely morally necessary to alleviate this, itd still be better to do so so via e.g. taxes and transfers, a pareto improvement, than by banning statistical discrimination. And again, this should be moot because one can just measure individuals.
I don't think your voluntary vs involuntary group membership distinction is important. Being born with a low IQ is exactly as involuntary as being born with median IQ into a group with a high rate of having low IQ, but it's perfectly reasonable to give lower-paying jobs to people with lower IQ, so in low information environments (that aren't modern environments), I don't think giving lower-paying jobs to group members is different.
Then there's taste-based discrimination. Those committing it incorrectly (by assumption) believe it's statistical discrimination, and given how pervasive that mistake is it's worth considering. I think nobody can deny that this can be terrible in economic and moral senses. Take untouchables, a recurrent cultural phenomena, whether in india, europe, or elsewhere. These groups are prohibited, for absurd reasons, from engaging in most productive occupations and many social relations. (Although I'm curious if anyone has a defense of untouchable classes, the only study I found put dalit IQ at 5 points less than brahmin, which is low, but I don't think that estimate means much) It's a waste of surplus, and terrible for those affected. The categorical exclusion from many occupations of women and individuals of various races in the recent past seem similarly misguided, as confirmed by the low remaining wage gaps. But when people condemn taste-based discrimination today, the moral weight they put fits untouchables more than it does us. Most people in America are apolitical, centrist or progressive, and believe either in race-blind merit or explicit affirmative action, and hiring practices reflect this. And while nobody hiring women obviously depresses female wages, if even half of firms openly treat women equally, they'll suck up all the women and reduce the wage gap, adjusted for hours worked and skill, to a minimum. While taste-based discrimination is still dumb, and thus bad in the same way that firing someone for having brown hair is bad, in areas like hiring, interpersonal relationships, and criminal justice, it's not a significant moral issue in the US, in the same way that religious persecution was a massive issue 300 years ago but isn't anymore.
So to go into your example:
I think this is a misleading example - there are many people currently teaching who have demographic attributes that make them, statistically, more than 10% likely to be pedophiles than other groups of teachers. E.g. men vs women. But even taking it literally, I don't think it's an issue, because it's limited to the small percentage of occupations that involve childcare, so people with that strain can just get other jobs. It's equal in impact to the many other idiosyncratic and irrational preferences employers have.
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In general, I would have the state seek policies of colorblindness (even outside of the context of literal skin color). I can acknowledge that this may not always be the most efficient choice economically, but it seems desirable because it's a system I could accept being on the other end of. At the same time, I think we can and should guarantee a certain minimum of quality of outcome: even if you're at the bottom end of the system we should be able to make systems that give dignity, the basics (shelter, food, and such), and ideally purpose.
But I can also accept that there are times when deviating from this policy is expedient or even required: if there's a dangerous fugitive at large known to be tall, I wouldn't necessarily demand stopping and checking short people equally.
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I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.
It's only reprehensible because we have better alternatives, right? Say (tortured hypothetical) it's the year 1500, and you're picking crewmembers for your voyage in a week. You need a bunch, so all you have to evaluate them is a three minute chat, and they're not particularly educated so there's not much shared knowledge to go on. It's your experience from past voyages that jewish crewmembers are the best and africans are the worst, and this is still informative even after adjusting for your first impression. (Also, a bad crewmember might mean 'your ship sinks'). I think making the race-based judgement here is fine. The only other alternative is picking randomly to an extent. And if you have a moral issue with some people being deprived because they're paid less - how is 'not being chosen because you're black' morally worse than 'not being chosen because you're low iq'? Both are unchosen.
This, of course, isn't really true in the modern day. You can just give someone an IQ test or an interview problem or something.
Even in this scenario given a three minute chat and just observing behavior I think you could swamp race with other observations. But yes, if you're going to construct a scenario that amounts to "You need to select people knowing only the average stats of their group" (racial or otherwise - this same analysis applies to things like hair color of any other arbitrary grouping) then it would just follow that you should select the group with the highest expected competence.
I agree with the following implications and further think this implies some obligation of those who are more capable to help those who are less. Not on a group based level but just the mesh of all humanity.
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Is it even possible to not pre-judge though? I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?
And if you are acting on behalf of someone else, hiring for a job in someone elses company or choosing a school district for your kids, is it moral to not make the best informed choice possible?
I've never had any trouble with it myself. For the most part people you're interacting with have been sorted such that I think assumptions wouldn't be interpersonally useful. I work with excellent black engineers. It's a lot like how I can recognize for various reason women tend not to enter engineering fields and yet I easily recognize one of the most talented engineers on my team is a woman.
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You don't need HBD for that. You just need to know the facts; HBD gives a reason for them, but even if HBD is false and there is some other reason for them, the same inferences may be drawn.
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Except I'm not just coyly avoiding references to HBD but secretly referring to that alone, I'm deliberately including a broader range of groups like using someone's membership in the KKK to know you don't want to be friends with them, or using someone's presence on a sex offender registry to avoid hiring for daycare positions. This is also a form of using someone's group membership to pre judge them. Of course there are differences, I'm not trying to argue "these are the same therefore in order to be consistent you have to support or oppose both". My point is more "there are tons of differences between these things, which ones are the actually relevant distinctions and why?"
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This is such a general problem that a even book would be insufficient to wholly deal with it.
Some other examples: Instead of directly determining a person under eighteen's ability to consent by whom they wish to governed, all are deemed incapable of it because of an involuntary characteristic (age). That this discrimination takes places has is probably related to the fact that the alternative, individual assesment of voters understanding of elections, has been determined to be outside the overton window. While the other alternative, barring no-one on the grounds of age, is infissable as infants are incapable to even use a pen to mark the ballot, let alone understand the meaning of this action.
During ww2 all Japanese-Americans were deemed a threat and interned, while Koreans Americans weren't affected and also showed no sympathy for their co-Asians. Meanwhile Soviet Union in 1937 declared Korean-Soviets were more loyal to Japan than SU, and deported them to mostly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In Japan, Koreans distinguished themselves as brutal, particularly as guards of PoWs. Was it moral for FDR to allow Koreans to roam free, while Stalin deemed them a threat, and Japan viewed them as an asset? Or perhaps all internment and ethnic cleansing schemes schemes unjustified by their very nature?
When the person under eighteen is paying all the bills for this house and keeping it up and running and solving their own problems, then the person under eighteen can get a say in who runs the place, otherwise I'm your mom and this is my house, my rules.
(Sorry, couldn't resist).
There are limits. I think a child does have a right to e.g. being fed, and if the current parent isn't satisfying this then society probably should step in.
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Taking that argument seriously leads to some pretty dark places when it comes to voting restrictions.
Only if you think anything but the most novel moral fads is "dark".
Universal franchise has been panned as a stupid idea for as long as Republics have existed, and under the name of "democracy" specifically denounced by all but the most depraved and bloody products of the Enlightenment.
In fact the only reason most people ever got the franchise was to justify feeding them into the meat grinders of the bloodiest wars to ever happen and taxing them at rates that would be deemed confiscatory by most of history. So I think this ancient skepticism was on point.
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What dark places? That the franchise should be restricted to net taxpayers? It’s actually pretty trivial to figure that out without having to resort to ethnic or other discrimination.
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My position would be somewhere along the lines of: "If there is no way to evaluate the factor being considered directly, then discrimination based on proxies is acceptable. Voluntary proxies (like dress) are preferable to innate proxies (like race)."
Say redheads have an unusually high chance to spontaneously combust, and I don't want to hire them in my explosives factory. If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious. If I can't, then yeah, sorry redheads.
Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most, effectively all proxies (race, education, class, wealth etc) are unacceptable nowadays, though they were fine before.
This is an example of the base rate fallacy. The only way priors could cease to matter is if you had perfectly accurate information, which is obviously unrealistic. To borrow an example from Neven Sesardić:
My point isn't disagreeing with that at all. In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine. Additionally, considering multiple proxies simultaneously is fine as well. A white person dressed trashy is less likely to be a criminal than a black person dressed trashy, yes, and so you can definitely factor in both the race and dress proxies simultaneously. If we ever had a perfect legal system that always caught every criminal (or even say, 99.99%), then the use of those proxies would immediately become pointless, as you could instead just check whether they've been convicted.
But for the qualities that are most important in official contexts we have plenty of measurements we can take instead. Between IQ, Big-5, a simple psych questionnaire, and a skills test, a bureaucrat/hiring-manager can know nearly all you'd need to know to make a decision about any given individual. It doesn't matter what the base-rate IQ of blacks is if Jerome sitting in front of you tested at 130. It doesn't matter that whites from Germany are known to be hardworking if Matteo tested at 10th percentile conscientiousness. With the accuracy we're capable of attaining in our postmodern era, the generalities frequently worsen predictions rather than improving them.
The problem we have now isn't that we overuse measurements, but that we ignore them because we don't like the conclusions and so weigh the scales to get outcomes that are deemed more acceptable. This is effectively using generalities backwards, which is definitely worse than using them forwards, but still worse than just looking at individuals and getting some stats.
Perfect legal system with catches people for past crimes, but not future ones? Then proxies still remain useful.
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Except there is no such thing as 100% accurate measurement. People cheat, people bribe their way up, people luck out. Any measurement you use will have a certain margin of error. Within that margin prior probabilities reign supreme. Put simply, most Africans with an IQ of 130 are less intelligent than Europeans with the same score. Because the percentage of the latter with scores ≥ 130 is much higher (2.28% vs. 0.13% for African-Americans, one of the smartest African populations), you are simply more likely to encounter a genuine one vs. a cheat or a one-off compared to the former. You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up. Ditto for men and women etc. This is the only way to do justice to truth and fairness. This applies even more so to immigration policy — because intelligence is not 100% heritable, the genotypic intelligence of high-IQ individuals from low-IQ populations (resp. their descendants) is always going to be lower than the already adjusted scores.
Yet if most people caught you correcting scores in this way they’d be fuming with righteous indignation. This is the result of ideological indoctrination that does not aim for truth or fairness and declares Bayesian reasoning (or more precisely, certain priors) taboo. The idea of ‘not judging people by the color of their skin’ is simply a fallacy, part of deceitful activist propaganda.
I've no education in statistics, but isn't this double counting? The average score for Africans is calculated including the high-achievers and low-achievers. If Africans score an average of say 85, and you then apply a penalty to the high achievers, by doing so you move the average down below 85, in which case a stronger penalty must be applied to future tests and so on, right?. You would improve the average accuracy of any individual test, but you'd skew the whole. I guess it's probably resolvable by keeping nominal and adjusted scores separate.
But really, how much of a concern is the precise accuracy here anyway? An IQ test takes what, an hour? Make people take one every year, or every time they apply for a job, or whatever. If the collective accuracy of 10+ IQ tests isn't good enough for society, then God knows how we've made it this long.
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Of these, only IQ, and people are often reluctant to be measured. If someone gets a high score on IQ test, they almost certainly have high IQ. If someone gets a high score on personality test, this also could mean they are high IQ liar and decided their intelligence to get result wanted by test presenter.
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I will charitably assume that you understand discrimination here quite broadly, and mainly as things on the quantitative side, like multidimensional demographic profiling in mortgage approvals, rather than a recipe for an explicit caste society. Most arguments against this line of thought are invalid (rejecting the premise) or non-consequentialist and «principled» to the point of absurdity (statistically reliable proxies in uncertainty are bad! Uncertain gut feelings/laughably gameable metrics are good!).
I think the main problem with the utilitarian approach is simply that the society we have cannot be trusted with the full power of Reverend Bayes. That's okay, in my view: it'll recalibrate under the pressure of truth and retain its good sides while reducing bad ones. But, as it stands, Nick Land said it best:
As it stands, so it goes.
Does this suggest that if such an obnoxious rational person does have the statistical sophistication to draw such distinctions and make decisions in secret, then it's okay? That is, stereotypes are bad in general if widespread because normies will abuse them, but the actual rational analysis is fine if used in an isolated and secret way that normies don't find out about?
What defines "obnoxious" here? Is rationalism itself defined as obnoxious because it cares about pedantic details that normies don't? Or is it merely the social obliviousness of nerdy rationalists who oversimplify everything and miss the forest for the trees, such that a more sophisticated rational intelligence that understands and compensates for normies would not be obnoxious?
obnoxious race realist, colorized, 2019
I think this racist is better than the last, but the next racist will be the really good one. That will be our lucky racist. He will grant us three wishes.
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There's another problem as well. Finding out specific information about someone is not free.
It may be that if a group has a 20% greater chance of committing a robbery in the future, it's cheaper to just exclude all of the group than to specifically examine each one. This is especially so when the undesirable trait is something like "will do X in the future"--it's pretty hard to measure that before it happens.
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Thanks for pointing this out. Land here articulates very well something I've been trying to understand for quite a while.
A more simplified way to put it in my view, would be to say that statistical analysis and the scientific method more generally are best used as limited tools. Unfortunately these tools were so mind-bogglingly, world-shatteringly powerful our ancestors couldn't help but violently wrench the entirety of human society to serve the tools, and make them more effective. Now we can't even use the tools properly, because the masses of society don't understand that these methods aren't the exact same thing as divine messengers serving up Truth from the heavens.
And so the wheel turns. At least soon we'll have artificial intelligence to turn the wheel for us.
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