6 ms·

As much as I love HackerNews, questions like this are simply offensive, unacceptable and ridiculous.

drakonandor 10y ago
The data is pretty clear, if we're afraid to discuss it, the problem will never get solved. Albeit it might be more acceptable to discuss it from a monetary perspective, e.g. "Why are urban poor crime rates so high"
- ebfe 10y ago
  Acceptable, sure, but I don't see how introducing a proxy would make our research more effective. It could very well be the case that race is itself a factor for anti-social behavior.
ebfe 10y ago
Can you help me understand how my question is ridiculous?
- reader5000 10y ago
  Don't you get it? He's so morally superior to you that he doesn't even have to engage the argument.
tzs 10y ago
I'm reminded of an article I read in a magazine or newspaper a long time ago. Briefly, a school district gave IQ tests to all of the children in a particular grade. There was a bimodal distribution, with the black children scoring significantly lower than the white children. Most officials in the district concluded that the test must be culturally biased or flawed in some other way, and were going to ignore the results. One teacher, though, decided to operate under the assumptions that (1) the test was not flawed and so was showing a real difference between the children, and (2) there was no inherent racial difference in the students, and so started looking for other explanations for the lower performance of the black kids. He found that all the black children lived in older housing, built in the in the early '70s or earlier. All the white children lived in newer housing, built after 1980. He knew that we had stopped using lead paint in housing in 1978, and wondered if the black kids could be suffering from lead poisoning. They and their houses were tested, and sure enough, the black kids were living in high lead environments. One of the effects of lead poising is a reduction in cognitive abilities. The houses were cleaned of lead, and the children treated, and within a couple of years the gap on IQ tests went away. If that teacher thought like you did he would have just dismissed the question of whether or not the black kids' performance was due to a real cognitive difference as offensive, unacceptable and ridiculous, and those kids would have went through much or all of the rest of their childhood and teen years suffering from cognitive impairment and the accompanying limitations on their futures.
- tptacek 10y ago
  The question was offensive. The teacher asked and very carefully answered a question about demography, using IQ tests not as an assessment of racial superiority but as an epidemiological indicator. Here, the the question is "maybe black people are just problem passengers". It's a pipe bomb thrown into the conversation, not an attempt to get closer to the truth.
  - tzs 10y ago
    I can see how it could be read that way. I gave a lot of weight to the words "disproportionately likely" in his phrasing ("might be disproportionately likely to cause problems"), and assumed he was suggesting things like the correlations between race and crime or between race and tipping (both things that might be of interest to a taxi driver). The race and crime correlation comes about because poor people are more likely then middle class or wealthy people to commit the kind of crimes that a taxi driver would worry about, and wealth distribution is not independent of race in the United States, with black people disproportionately represented among the poor. I have no idea where the race and tipping correlation comes from. It's well known in waiter circles, with both white and black servers complaining about poor tips from black people. There was an interesting literature review and discussion of this topic published by the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration: http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=articles http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... These and similar correlations raise some interesting questions. Humans naturally generalize from experience and make predictions based on correlations. Since race is visible it gets involved in those correlations. Other factors, like economic status, that are probably closer to the actual cause of whatever behavior one is observing and generalizing from are not directly visible so we don't use them as much in our generalizations. So one question that comes to mind is can we make those lower level factors more visible? What if an Uber driver got essentially a background check on their potential passenger, giving income level, education level, arrest record, and so on? Would drivers be less likely to generalize based on race if they could instead generalize on those other factors? Then if a driver had 300 white passengers and 100 black passengers in a month and 5 whites and 10 blacks caused problems, instead of generalizing that blacks are problem passengers the driver might notice that all 15 of the problem passengers were involved in gang activity and the generalization becomes "don't pick up people involved in gang activity". I realize that giving the aforementioned information to drivers would be a big loss of privacy for passengers. Maybe there is an inherent conflict between privacy and reducing race-based generalizations, much like the conflict between privacy and security. I bet a good writer could make an interesting science fiction story around that idea and its implications.

The data is pretty clear, if we're afraid to discuss it, the problem will never get solved. Albeit it might be more acceptable to discuss it from a monetary perspective, e.g. "Why are urban poor crime rates so high"

ebfe 10y ago
Acceptable, sure, but I don't see how introducing a proxy would make our research more effective. It could very well be the case that race is itself a factor for anti-social behavior.

ebfe 10y ago

Can you help me understand how my question is ridiculous?

reader5000 10y ago
Don't you get it? He's so morally superior to you that he doesn't even have to engage the argument.

tzs 10y ago

I'm reminded of an article I read in a magazine or newspaper a long time ago. Briefly, a school district gave IQ tests to all of the children in a particular grade. There was a bimodal distribution, with the black children scoring significantly lower than the white children. Most officials in the district concluded that the test must be culturally biased or flawed in some other way, and were going to ignore the results. One teacher, though, decided to operate under the assumptions that (1) the test was not flawed and so was showing a real difference between the children, and (2) there was no inherent racial difference in the students, and so started looking for other explanations for the lower performance of the black kids. He found that all the black children lived in older housing, built in the in the early '70s or earlier. All the white children lived in newer housing, built after 1980. He knew that we had stopped using lead paint in housing in 1978, and wondered if the black kids could be suffering from lead poisoning. They and their houses were tested, and sure enough, the black kids were living in high lead environments. One of the effects of lead poising is a reduction in cognitive abilities. The houses were cleaned of lead, and the children treated, and within a couple of years the gap on IQ tests went away. If that teacher thought like you did he would have just dismissed the question of whether or not the black kids' performance was due to a real cognitive difference as offensive, unacceptable and ridiculous, and those kids would have went through much or all of the rest of their childhood and teen years suffering from cognitive impairment and the accompanying limitations on their futures.

tptacek 10y ago
The question was offensive. The teacher asked and very carefully answered a question about demography, using IQ tests not as an assessment of racial superiority but as an epidemiological indicator. Here, the the question is "maybe black people are just problem passengers". It's a pipe bomb thrown into the conversation, not an attempt to get closer to the truth.
- tzs 10y ago
  I can see how it could be read that way. I gave a lot of weight to the words "disproportionately likely" in his phrasing ("might be disproportionately likely to cause problems"), and assumed he was suggesting things like the correlations between race and crime or between race and tipping (both things that might be of interest to a taxi driver). The race and crime correlation comes about because poor people are more likely then middle class or wealthy people to commit the kind of crimes that a taxi driver would worry about, and wealth distribution is not independent of race in the United States, with black people disproportionately represented among the poor. I have no idea where the race and tipping correlation comes from. It's well known in waiter circles, with both white and black servers complaining about poor tips from black people. There was an interesting literature review and discussion of this topic published by the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration: http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=articles http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... These and similar correlations raise some interesting questions. Humans naturally generalize from experience and make predictions based on correlations. Since race is visible it gets involved in those correlations. Other factors, like economic status, that are probably closer to the actual cause of whatever behavior one is observing and generalizing from are not directly visible so we don't use them as much in our generalizations. So one question that comes to mind is can we make those lower level factors more visible? What if an Uber driver got essentially a background check on their potential passenger, giving income level, education level, arrest record, and so on? Would drivers be less likely to generalize based on race if they could instead generalize on those other factors? Then if a driver had 300 white passengers and 100 black passengers in a month and 5 whites and 10 blacks caused problems, instead of generalizing that blacks are problem passengers the driver might notice that all 15 of the problem passengers were involved in gang activity and the generalization becomes "don't pick up people involved in gang activity". I realize that giving the aforementioned information to drivers would be a big loss of privacy for passengers. Maybe there is an inherent conflict between privacy and reducing race-based generalizations, much like the conflict between privacy and security. I bet a good writer could make an interesting science fiction story around that idea and its implications.