>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention.
Yeah I totally buy that.
>With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.
If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical?
I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It)
The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era.
(The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb )
Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously.
I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
> "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test.
This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work.
> I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s.
The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Jamal and Lakisha" applied to jobs 5000 times with a stack of carefully crafted fake resumes that were randomly assigned names that were either stereotypically white (e.g. Greg, Emily) or black (e.g. Jamal, Lakisha.) The same resumes with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks. Over 5000 job applications. What we were doing in the 90s/2000s was not working and the fact that many white people find the polite approach more comfortable is not a good reason to stick to it. This isn't a social problem-- we're talking about people's basic chance of success in life. This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy. Pushing through the discomfort to find what actually works is a worthwhile undertaking. If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.
The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment. Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense. You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob. As flawed and overly bandwagoned as it may be, "wokeness" is addressing real problems that oppress people in measurable ways every day. "Anti-Wokeness" is just another value signalling position to have that highlights political fault lines far older than any living American.
What makes you think talking more about race works any better or should be considered to be "social progress" rather than the opposite? Would that study have better results if done today? I'm not American, but I don't see why you are so sure today's America is not closer to the Jim Crow Era than 2005 was.
I'm a black person who grew up in Sweden in the 00s and early 10s, and I'm very glad race was never relevant or talked about outside of social science class. Almost everyone at my school was white, and I never felt like I was different because of my skin color. The first person who ever told me that my race or skin color was relevant to anything was an American. The worst thing about American culture (and what keeps me from moving to the US even though I could make much more money there) is that so many Americans are insisting on considering race (and other arbitrary categorizations like ethnicity, sex and gender) to be such a large part of what makes a person, overshadowing that person's unique attributes and identity.
You should read about the experiences of African Americans. Many cultural facets and political tensions held over from slavery are alive and well.
Financially, income inequality in Sweden is vastly lower than in the United States as it is, and in the United States much of the inequality falls on racial boundaries. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study found that local white household’s median net worth was $247,000 while for African American households it was $8. Yes, eight single dollars. The Black population in Boston has been well established for well over a century, and much of its white population came in waves of western European immigration in the early to mid 20th century.
Not talking about this problem hasn't solved it so far because systemic self-perpetuating inequality doesn't just go away if you ignore it.
I'm not objecting to talking about racism. I'm objecting to seeing race as a significant part of what makes a person. It's possible to do one without the other.
I don't see how it's useful to note that something didn't work when there is no evidence to suggest that the alternative works any better. I don't understand how talking more about race as a characteristic could possibly help to reduce racism or racial inequality. It seems to me much more likely to do the opposite.
That the social construct of race shouldn't contribute significantly to a person's identity is irrelevant. Vast troves of empirical evidence show how dramatically being born on one side or another of a racial boundary in the United States changes your life experience. See the study I cited in another comment "Are Greg and Emily more employable than Jamal and Lakisha." researchers sent 5000 job applications to jobs pairing a handful of fake, equally weighted resumes with stereotypically white or black sounding names. White sounding names got FIFTY PERCENT more callbacks... This is the United States where no job among already disadvantaged prime likely means no home, no food, no health care, no nothing. This isn't an affect people adopt as part of some fanciful cultural identity. Disrupting it isn't about pride or hurt feelings. It is a bin that our society forces people into and it will not go away by pretending it doesn't exist. Talking about it or not taking about it is the wrong dichotomy. It's directly addressing it VS not addressing it.
I'm not sure the 2005 study tells us much. Our question is which strategy works best for reducing discrimination. To answer that, we'd want to measure the level of discrimination over time to estimate the trend.
Imagine we found an identical study from 1995 that showed that white people received 100% more callbacks at that time, and a study from 1985 that found that white people received 200% more callbacks at that time. And then imagine that when subgroup analysis was done on the 2005 study, it was determined that most of the effect was from older hiring managers who were about to age out of the population. In this hypothetical, the study would strongly validate the strategy being used in the 90s and the 00s.
>This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy.
I didn't claim that. I just want interventions that don't backfire.
For example, how about removing the name from the resume?
With modern technology, it would be easy to conduct interviews remotely over screenshare with a voice changer.
80/20 rule, 20% of the discrimination probably causes 80% of the harm. As you imply, hiring discrimination is one of the most harmful types of discrimination. So anonymized interviews could put a serious dent in racial inequality. As the technology matured, we could hit firms which didn't anonymize interviewees with a punitive tax.
Would certainly be an interesting study, at least. Run it every few years to measure the trend in discrimination, as discussed previously.
>The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment.
If political tension is a complex phenomenon, isn't it possible that racial discrimination is also a complex phenomenon, which won't be solved effectively using the social equivalent of a sledgehammer?
>Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense.
Imagine a cop responded to criticism by saying: "Blaming crime fighting for the increasing resistance to crime fighting doesn't make sense." Would you find that persuasive?
It's possible to "solve" a problem in a way that superficially looks like progress, but actually makes the underlying issue worse. And if you can find a way to get paid money to do that, you'll never be out of a job. (Trump may not be good for America, but he's good for CBS. NY Times subscriptions exploded in the wake of Trump's election, IIRC.)
>You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob.
I do in fact blame fascism. Historically speaking, it seems fairly normal for right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism to arise at the same time in the same society. The left-wing extremism is strengthened by the right-wing extremism, and vice versa.
That's a pretty glib dismissal of a peer-reviewed and heavily cited study with a ton of data. Calling any of these interventions a social sledgehammer is laughably hyperbolic. How does any of what I said really on racism being simple? The name on the resume is obviously a symptom of a larger problem and only one of many ways someone's race shows up in any number of consequential situations far more difficult to spot, like in neural network derived decisions. No I don't blame crime fighting for the increased resistance to crime fighting because the actions taken by cops that people are actually mad about are crimes and opposing them is crime fighting. That you consider interrogating our culture to highlight racism to be political extremism says a lot. I'm all done here.
>That's a pretty glib dismissal of a peer-reviewed and heavily cited study with a ton of data.
I explained why regardless of study quality, the study can't support the point you want it to. You're not addressing my point, just making a vague appeal to authority.
>Calling any of these interventions a social sledgehammer is laughably hyperbolic.
What interventions are you referring to? You yourself referred to wokeness as "flawed and overly bandwagoned".
>How does any of what I said really on racism being simple?
You argued, without any supporting evidence, that it couldn't be the case that efforts to reduce racism could make it worse. If racism is complex then we shouldn't be surprised by counterintuitive results like that.
>The name on the resume is obviously a symptom of a larger problem and only one of many ways someone's race shows up in any number of consequential situations far more difficult to spot, like in neural network derived decisions.
I didn't claim that removing names from resumes was a complete solution, but it's suspicious that there seems to be so little interest in it, given that it could be very impactful.
Additionally, reducing hiring discrimination should have positive downstream effects: As Black people get better jobs, they move up in social class and that reduces stereotyping.
I think the fact that you aren't interested in an incremental solution should make you wonder if you're part of the flawed woke bandwagon you referred to. Remember, lots of incremental solutions can add up to a complete solution.
>No I don't blame crime fighting for the increased resistance to crime fighting because the actions taken by cops that people are actually mad about are crimes and opposing them is crime fighting.
By the same token, many people who claim to advance social progress may actually be advancing social regress.
>That you consider interrogating our culture to highlight racism to be political extremism says a lot.
I don't see how you've rebutted the study at all; you've argued that it would be possible to offset the racism in job applications by scrubbing names from resumes and using voice changers on interview calls (come on). But both of those interventions just mitigate the racism, they don't directly reduce it.
Mewanwhile, you've just cited a totally unrelated (and widely dunked-upon) NYT op-ed as evidence for your position, and then accused the person you're arguing with of bad faith. Physician, heal thyself.
You're correct, I haven't rebutted the study. Again, I explained that it doesn't make the point he wants it to make. See first 2 paragraphs here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214917
>using voice changers on interview calls (come on)
And if researchers can change the name on an applicant's resume to do a study, why can't HR departments do the same thing?
"Come on" is not a good faith counterargument.
>But both of those interventions just mitigate the racism, they don't directly reduce it.
I'm not sure that is true. Imagine someone had the experience of interviewing a Black developer using a voice changer, giving them a thumbs up, meeting them in person for the first time, and learning that they were Black -- counter to the stereotype they held. You don't think that experience could be a powerful demonstration of a person's racial bias which could cause them to rethink some stuff?
Past that, I don't see why the distinction between mitigating and reducing is so important. Racism is bad because it causes bad effects. (CF argument earlier in the thread: "If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.") If the easiest way to reduce the bad effects doesn't involve reducing racism, we should do it anyway. The point is to help people, not ideologically purify people.
>Mewanwhile, you've just cited a totally unrelated (and widely dunked-upon) NYT op-ed as evidence for your position
I cited it as evidence for the position that some extremists want to abolish the police. It's right there in the title of the op-ed. I don't see what dunking has to do with it.
Interviewing.io ran an experiment with voice changes, in part for the publicity value (that's not a criticism). Can you cite a tech company with more than 20 employees that uses voice changers in interviews?
There's a bunch of other problems with what you're saying here (for instance, the idea that you can correct for ethnicity with a voice changer), but they're not interesting compared to this question.
>Can you cite a tech company with more than 20 employees that uses voice changers in interviews?
No, I cannot. It seems that despite the big conversation about diversity in tech, people aren't very interested in practical solutions to reducing discrimination.
It comes down to the point I made about helping people vs ideological purification. Many people prefer the latter. This is the sort of left-wing extremism I referred to earlier.
To be honest, I think the main reason companies don't use voice changers is if they do, the ideological purifier types will go after them. Just in this thread you can see how upset you and DrewADesign got, after I suggested the idea.
>the idea that you can correct for ethnicity with a voice changer
If it can work for gender, why can't it work for race?
That’s not just a “voice changer”, and if you are going beyond pronunciation to alter grammar and vocabulary that is ethnically identifying, with even modern AI, you have a non-negligible chance of occasionally whiffing and radically altering semantics.
Also worth pointing out that this ethno-masking AI is a service that, so far as I know, does not currently exist. Which makes citing it a particularly weak response to the studies that show candidates with identifiably Black ethnicity do poorly compared to white-coded candidates with identical backgrounds.
There does seem to be a bit of conflating “this is an idea which might have potential and be worth investment in researching and developing” with “this is an alternative which actually exists, and if there was any concern people would just use it”.
The idea was suggested in response to someone who implied I favored "deliberately avoiding intervention". I mentioned the idea to clarify my position, and give an example of the sort of intervention I'd be in favor of.
If someone turns it into a product, they deserve mega kudos as far as I'm concerned.
Lets not forget that you changed the framing on this discussion, from (paraphrased) "there is evidence that race-based preferences are widespread in hiring, suggesting that we should take seriously the idea of race-specific privileges and disadvantages among candidates", to your preferred discussion of "is it possible to engineer a system that would prevent hiring managers from knowing the race of applicants".
Here's a user telling me I'm "desperate to assuage and protect racist beliefs" because (a) I said we should avoid methods that backfire, and (b) I suggested a practical idea for reduction of racial discrimination in hiring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34226817
The best way to put out a fire is to ensure that it doesn't start in the first place.
Racism stems from racist beliefs, and your approach to putting out spot fires ignores the raging wildfire that's spitting them out. Confronting the source of racist behavior, racist beliefs, is confronting the root cause of discrimination.
In the 90s and 00s, much of the anti-racism education consisted of the same things you'd cry "woke" about, but were instead called "politically correct". The education confronted racist beliefs, and engaged the how and why those beliefs were wrong, and gave students and intuition about why those beliefs were wrong when they encounter them in their lives.
CRT, for example, is nothing new. Anti-racism education in the 90s and 00s was direct implementations of the CRT school of thought that existed in the decades prior. At the time, the right-wing was losing their minds over how "PC" it was to say "African American", or to teach that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and not the fig leaf of "states' rights", or that they shouldn't say the n-word but black people can.
"Woke" is the new "PC", and the CRT that gets derided as "woke" is the same CRT that was derided as "PC" in the past, and it is the same CRT that influenced anti-racism education during your halcyon days of the 90s and 00s. That same anti-racism education addressed those very same racist beliefs you're desperate to assuage and protect.
Dancing around the problem and pretending racism and racist beliefs don't exist, because pointing that out makes some people uncomfortable, is something we've tried for decades, and it doesn't work, as MLK has pointed out:
> First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
Right-wing resistance to the results of liberal democracy is as old as time, and not anything new that suddenly appeared in 2015 like you seem to beleive. All of the rhetoric you hear now is the same rhetoric espoused by the right in the decades prior. The right has spent decades getting triggered over direct action and society acknowledging racism, and "woke" is just what they're calling it instead of "PC".
These beliefs existed before 2015, but they were mostly only expressed in "good company" between like-minded individuals, because blatant racism became a social faux pas. They were allowed to fester and go unaddressed because addressing them made people uncomfortable. But then Trump comes in and welcomes the far right renaissance that was happening around the world, a world-wide renaissance that had nothing to do with the NY Times posting articles that upset you, to the US. Trump showed them that no, they don't have to speak about those beliefs in hushed tones, you can wear bigotry on your sleeve and millions of people will celebrate it. Since you seem to take their rhetoric seriously, you can find plenty of far right leaders and ideologues saying just that, that Trump is "their guy" and that he opened the door to mainstream their far right ideas and rhetoric.
I object to "anti-racist" advocacy which has been shown to be actively counterproductive. It's not a firefighting method if it makes the fire worse.
I don't claim we should never confront racism. I claim we should do it in an evidence-based way.
I went through the public education system in the 90s and 00s, in California's Bay Area of all places, and the discussion around race was very different than the discussion today. The idea that we should treat people the same regardless of race has switched from being a liberal position to being a conservative position. It seems to me that whatever was being done in the 90s and 00s "worked" in a way that what we're doing today does not. Probably because what we're doing today is very different, and is the product of an ideological conversation on social media rather than a conversation informed by data or reasoned discussion.
>But then Trump comes in and welcomes the far right renaissance that was happening around the world, a world-wide renaissance that had nothing to do with the NY Times posting articles that upset you, to the US.
Generally speaking the rest of the world takes their cultural cues from the US much more than the US takes their cultural cues from the rest of the world. Hollywood movies are viewed globally. The entire world follows news from the United States closely. Much of the rest of the world uses American social media websites. Etc.
It's a common observation that the current rise of wokism started in the US and then spread elsewhere in the world, which fits the general pattern. So the overall hypothesis that NY Times left-wing extremism is the root cause of the current worldwide far-right renaissance is pretty plausible to me. As you said -- treat the root cause.
>Since you seem to take their rhetoric seriously, you can find plenty of far right leaders and ideologues saying just that, that Trump is "their guy" and that he opened the door to mainstream their far right ideas and rhetoric.
You were just confronted with evidence, and invented an AI ethnic voice masker on the spot to dismiss it. Your evidence, meanwhile, is an NYT op-ed about police abolition. I don't necessarily endorse anything this person wrote (I didn't read it that carefully), but in this thread you've been deploying a number of really weak arguments.
I don't think you've been reading my comments very carefully either -- it seems like you are generally missing the structure of my reasoning, and reinterpreting it as a sort of collage of bits of pieces of what I'm saying. (I'm going to stop responding to you in this thread, because I have a feeling neither of us is getting much out of this discussion -- but if you're interested in understanding my position better, I encourage you to read what I've already written more carefully. Please don't attribute positions to me that I don't hold, and keep in mind that I'm a human who makes mistakes.)
Yeah I totally buy that.
>With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.
If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical?
I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It)
The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era.
Trump's popularity exploded around July 2015: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2...
But e.g. the number of NY Times articles on "whiteness" were on an exploding trend by 2014: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
(The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb )
Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously.
I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."