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It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few o

It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first "paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point: > Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, black people are much more likely to have been arrested for it. The lesson goes much further than the weed-boom, of course. So many people look at the current legal landscape and say "opportunities are equal for equal candidates", with seemingly no ability to observe for the compounded effects of all the preceding inequality. @ edit: My comments seem to have been flagged so hard that I can't post replies. I guess this place isn't much more sophisticated than BuzzFeed when it comes to race issues. As for that piece you keep posting, ikeboy, I don't think it's nearly as relevant or convincing as you think it is. From the choice headline quote from the research SSX cites: > is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled The entire controversy here arises due to the racially-biased source of the prior record. I have a very low opinion of SSX's weasel-word-weaving to pander to his narrow audience, to be honest. > Summary: Blacks appear to be arrested for drug use at a rate four times that of whites. Adjusting for known confounds reduces their rate to twice that of whites. However, other theorized confounders could mean that the real relative risk is anywhere between two and parity. Never trust the media to give you any number more complicated than today’s date. Blacks "appear to be", huh? With a couple of sketchy assumptions, suddenly we're "between two and parity", which then gets reproduced by you in this debate as "misleading and basically parity". Anyway, > There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

jgh 11y ago
The comments section here isnt much better than that Edit: To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their race. The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.
ikeboy 11y ago
The problem is that that stat is heavily misleading. See section C of http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
ikeboy 11y ago
Reply to the edit: The study he references is trying to figure out whether there's bias in "pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults". To determine that, you need to control for anything that should matter to such determinations. Of course prior record matters to sentencing etc. Whether prior record is itself biased has nothing to do with investigating bias in sentencing etc, and is properly controlled for. What assumptions are "sketchy"? "about equally likely to have broken the law" is misleading, when blacks break the law more often. Equally likely in the last year, not the same number of times. If they'd said "blacks are more likely to break the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, but they get arrested at a rate that's between the same or double that of other races, depending on whether you trust their self-reports on whether they've taken drugs, which they're known to lie on at twice the rate of white people", I'd have no problem. I haven't asserted that it's parity, just that claiming otherwise hasn't been supported. If someone has a good counter-argument to SSC's applying black drug honesty rates to their supposed discrimination by police, I'll be happy to consider it. But just making a blanket statement like buzzfeed is misleading. >> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail. That does nothing to justify buzzfeed. Sentence length doesn't change whether someone has a criminal record, which is buzzfeed's mechanism for "racism in drug industry".

jgh 11y ago

The comments section here isnt much better than that Edit: To follow up your edit, I find the attitudes toward race and gender on HN particularly troubling. Whenever there is an article that discusses legitimate race/gender issues it tends to be downvoted/flagged and drop like a rock off the front page. The comments are often calling into question the credibility of the person making the complaint about racism, and even blaming them / their race. The reason that I find the attitudes here so troubling is because there are a number of influential people here. Many are entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs. If these attitudes are a reflection of the racial attitudes in the tech industry then woe unto us. We are doomed. We fancy ourselves sophisticated, rational, and benevolent leaders of the future world economy but we are too arrogant to look inward at our own flaws.

ikeboy 11y ago

The problem is that that stat is heavily misleading. See section C of http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

ikeboy 11y ago

Reply to the edit: The study he references is trying to figure out whether there's bias in "pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults". To determine that, you need to control for anything that should matter to such determinations. Of course prior record matters to sentencing etc. Whether prior record is itself biased has nothing to do with investigating bias in sentencing etc, and is properly controlled for. What assumptions are "sketchy"? "about equally likely to have broken the law" is misleading, when blacks break the law more often. Equally likely in the last year, not the same number of times. If they'd said "blacks are more likely to break the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, but they get arrested at a rate that's between the same or double that of other races, depending on whether you trust their self-reports on whether they've taken drugs, which they're known to lie on at twice the rate of white people", I'd have no problem. I haven't asserted that it's parity, just that claiming otherwise hasn't been supported. If someone has a good counter-argument to SSC's applying black drug honesty rates to their supposed discrimination by police, I'll be happy to consider it. But just making a blanket statement like buzzfeed is misleading. >> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail. That does nothing to justify buzzfeed. Sentence length doesn't change whether someone has a criminal record, which is buzzfeed's mechanism for "racism in drug industry".