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Notes -
An Investigation into Privilege
In the most recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History, Gladwell invited 75 seniors from the University of Pennsylvania to participate in an experiment in which each student had to answer ten simple questions that were to investigate the nature of the privilege of the people in the room.
He then had his assistants use the answers to generate a numerical score for each student, which they wrote on large stickers that the students then affixed to their chests. The students were then invited to look around the room, examine each others’ numbers, then guess what the numbers meant. Gladwell hinted that his assistants spent only a few seconds for each student and didn’t use a computer, so it wasn’t the output of a complicated algorithm.
The students guessed a lot of things. One of the questions mentioned zip codes, was it about that? No. Public vs private schools? No. Race? No.
The answer was (last chance to avoid spoilers) the relative age of the students. Not only were there no students young enough to have skipped a grade, not a single student was born in 2001 or later (despite the fact that the potential birthdates for this cohort extended up to September 2001). It was a room of entirely (relatively) old seniors.
If you’ve read Gladwell’s book Outliers, this may ring a bell, as Gladwell dedicates a chapter to this phenomenon, but in that case focusing mostly on sports. The relative age effect occurs when relatively older members of a cohort (typically an annual age group) are disproportionately likely to be represented in the top levels of performance. This mainly occurs because a few months of age can matter a lot for size and maturity and younger ages, and then feedback loops exacerbate it.
Gladwell, however, had a suggestion for these students. There is an algorithm developed for competitive youth swimming that corrects for the fact that late-developers are disadvantaged by regular metrics. Would they have support a similar system if it were applied to adjusting test scores to birth dates?
Silence. Not a single student rose their hand in support. One student raised qualms with the possibility of the algorithm to be gamed. Another admitted they would oppose it solely out of self-interest.
Gladwell concluded that these Ivy League students have just made made aware of a totally arbitrary and unfair privilege they have been the beneficiaries of, but have no interest in fixing it.
What are the culture war connotations of this?
A snarky own-the-libs style reaction to this would go something like: “Look at all these Ivy Leaguers, most of whom will be undoubtedly be liberals, who will profess to caring about privilege and likely support affirmative action, but when it comes to a completely arbitrary and easily-correctable privilege they hold, they suddenly have no interest in abolishing it! Curious!”
A more thoughtful critique would note that progressive politics seems to be highly focused on very specific types of privilege (mostly race and gender, and occasionally class) to the almost complete exclusion of other types of privilege (such as relative age effects, but many others including heightism and lookism). A cynical explanation is that this is mostly to do with coalition politics (that there are e.g. gender and race-based advocacy groups in the Democratic coalition, but no “relative age” advocacy group exists, and heightism and lookism have a vague association with the very-much-outgroup incels). But a truly enlightened progressive would tackle unfair privilege wherever it emerged.
But I think there are lessons for the “anti-woke” too. That is, relative age effects are a proof-of-concept for significant arbitrary privilege being a real thing. A fair amount of anti-woke arguments claim that gender and racial disparities may disappear entirely when controlling for confounding variables (e.g. the gender wage gap or the racial policing gap). And perhaps in some cases this is true. Yet, while the motte of this argument is that “progressives can be misleading in their portrayal of group disparities”, I think there’s a bailey of “the world is pretty much meritocratic nowadays and any attempt to correct disparities is an unjust overreaction”. Yet in a world where something this seemingly insignificant can have such an outsized impact, it seems highly unlikely that other (perhaps harder to measure) disparities have all disappeared.
Personal notes
This episode resonated with me for another reason - I felt like I may represent the flip-side of those college students. I grew up as one of the youngest (and smallest) in my school cohort. Nonetheless, I was able and chose to skip a grade in math despite being explicitly warned that some students who did that in the past struggled in later years. A couple of years later, I struggled with my accelerated math course and dropped it the next year. I took math up again in university as a prerequisite but never really got the hang of it, which ultimately precluded me from taking up postgraduate study.
Probably in an alternative world where age-cutoffs put me in a lower grade, or I wasn’t accelerated in math, I would have done better academically. I guess I’m a “victim” in that respect. Still, if I were to objectively measure my privileges in all its domains, I would come out highly positive overall.
Which does make me think about the validity of worrying about privilege in the highest levels of achievement. Sure, they may be completely unfair and arbitrary reasons why people may fail to get into Ivies. But the people just on the cusp of getting into an Ivy can probably expect pretty good lives nonetheless. Perhaps the experiences of people at the median and below are more important when it comes to privilege, in which case some of these effect sizes seem likely to be smaller. B
Still, if I have kids, I’m not accelerating them in school.
Is this a novel lesson for many people? The first thing that comes to mind in terms of significant arbitrary privilege is "being born to wealthy parents." Probably many people would support some balancing against that privilege--trying to recruit students from low-income or first in family to go to college backgrounds is relatively non-controversial--but algorithmically adjusting test scores to correct for parental wealth strikes me as a fringe, though findable, preference.
Similarly, "not having significant developmental or learning disorders." Generally arbitrary, but algorithmically adjusting test scores in this case would defeat much of the sorting purpose of test scores to begin with.
Some people are luckier than others; initial inequality is inevitable. But luck exists across a tremendous number of dimensions; only some of those dimensions can be corrected-for socially; and many fewer of them should be.
I think we can make a distinction between "meritocratic" and "un-meritocratic" privilege-correction.
A learning disorder is unfair, but someone with a learning disorder may struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone without one.
Whereas the theory behind relative age adjustment is that there are some people who have the potential to become a doctor nonetheless don't because of arbitrary factors holding them back.
That's where a lot of the controversy over affirmative action comes from. Supporters often claim that it's about finding "diamonds in the rough" who have the potential to do just as well as someone with a privileged background, but their scores need to be adjusted to reflect their lack of privilege. Opponents claim that it will result in less capable graduates. Part of the reason why genetic claims of IQ differences are so controversial is that if true they make the "meritocratic privilege correction" argument much less persuasive
Learning disorders are pretty close to being a special case of an IQ differential. Someone with a lower IQ will struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone with a higher IQ, holding other attributes constant. (Lower IQ does not directly indicate a better bedside manner, or other benefits; that sort of "fairness/balancing/whatever" is for video games, not reality.)
Affirmative action has many problems, and "less capable graduates" barely makes the list. Even if you set aside the naked racial preferences and the reputation hit to successful minorities, you still have the mismatch between students and institutions, leading to much higher minority dropout rates from institutions above their level, when they could have been successful at institutions closer to their testing levels. Testing has a tight correlation with academic performance and graduation rates; when minorities end up thoroughly dominating the lowest quintile in class, it should come as no surprise that they also dominate the list of dropouts. (Of course, when you add in predatory student loans, and the worst case scenario is "loans + no degree," affirmative action starts to look like a perfect storm of how to screw over minorities most efficiently. I guess advocates of affirmative action can rest on their good intentions?)
"Adjusting" is never free; there is always a tradeoff. Even the mere knowledge that "adjusting" is happening generates second-order effects. Sometimes the specific policy is net-positive--the tradeoff was worth it. All too often, though, the effects are net-negative, as with affirmative action.
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