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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.
Hang on a minute - though I think I'm careening off a cliff here - it seems as if age-norming could lead to really weird outcomes if done over large-enough gaps. Could students arbitrarily young be given enough of a norming boost that they can pass a class by "doing well enough for their age," if standards are to be made relative instead of absolute? Could a baby obtain a college degree by dint of being, once you account for his age, at the top of his class?
Obviously it could never get that far, and I share this post mainly because it was an amusing mental image to me, but I do hope that there's some useful illustration in this reductio-ad-absurdum of the idea that absolute standards are often what we really care about. Relative standards are useful for putting people in order, and if you're ideologically opposed to there being such an order as it's inequitable or inegalitarian, then I don't think norming by age or gender or race is going to be enough - you're going to need to norm by everything, that is, abandon the tests.
I'm confused by this comment, because it seems to be missing the point. You would still have orderings after age-norming, or after changing the structure of activities and institutions to avoid this phenomenon. They would just not be correlated to what time of year you're born in. To take the reductio-ad-absurdum to the other end, would you directly compare a 3 year old and a 10 year old, and expect to get a meaningful prediction of which of them is more likely to be a professional athlete based on their relative athletic performance now? Of course not. But we do exactly that on a smaller scale when we put 3 year olds and 4 year olds on the same team.
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