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>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

>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 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/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html 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/the-nytimes-is-woke.html 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 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."

DrewADesign 4y ago
> "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.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  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.

DrewADesign 4y ago

> "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.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
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.