5 ms·

Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets

20 points by orhmeh09 3y ago

version_five 3y ago
[flagged]
- jrm4 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - uvnq 3y ago
    I wouldn't call it denial of the results but rather skepticism of the process
    - version_five 3y ago
      But then you wouldn't be able to use the italicized word denial to show your disdain for a different viewpoint.
    - WesternWind 3y ago
      If folks where actually skeptical of the paper, you would think they would provide some evidence to back up their thought process, based on experiences from academia, or a study of crowd movement in relation to race that shows contrary evidence to the paper itself, instead of saying they can imagine the possibility of bias. I mean I can picture an evil cabal of racists who purposefully show up in discussions like this to purposefully sow fear, uncertainty and doubt. Is that the level of HN discourse? The ability to imagine something isn't evidence of it's existence, nor is it healthy skepticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism
      - version_five 3y ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        happytoexplain 3y ago
        The point of the parent's example was to criticize the picturing of random technically possible but bad things about people you disagree with. They are specifically saying that it would be silly to make the exact claim that you are accusing them of making.
      - faeriechangling 3y ago
        So essentially, his assertion that academia is systemically bias, can only be proven through: >Experience in academia >Papers, which you can only get money to work on full time through academia Seems convenient. Looking at the paper itself it found evidence of both a gender bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against men) and a racial bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against blacks). It notably, did not censor any facts about this gender bias, and instead published them in full. In the discussion however, it discussed these two facts with overwhelming bias, treating the observed racial bias with the utmost seriousness while not discussing the observed gender bias at all. I think there's grounds to be sceptical of anything academia says on politically charged topics.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
    The problems grandparent describes are real. As a scientist, if you find "Black people good, white people bad" --> publication + promotion You find "White people good, black people bad" --> you lose your job Completely orthogonal to the morality of it, it creates something called publication bias (or the file drawer problem) in the social sciences. It's a huge issue.
    - Bran_son 3y ago
      To back up the parents claim: The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi... And of course, ignore Asians at all costs. Or if the study is about overrepresentation, invent a new, "Asian + white" category, and hide disaggregated numbers.
    - happytoexplain 3y ago
      >"Black people good, white people bad" --> publication + promotion >"White people good, black people bad" --> you lose your job It is totally believable that the bias problem you're referring to exists, but your description is provocative, dramatized, oversimplified, and carries a smug tone, and I wish it wasn't any of those things.
      - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
        You know, you're right. I think when you live it every day it gets exhausting.
  - zorked 3y ago
    "If I can abstractly construct an ulterior motive for the thing - despite having absolutely no evidence - that means the thing is false. Checkmate, science!"
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  I'm curious how they isolated the effect of race (but I can't read the paper, so, I dunno) among other signs. If they even did—the abstract doesn't make it clear to me that they're claiming race is the causal factor, but may just be observing that distance correlates with the race of the subjects (for whatever reason). [EDIT] cpitman's link elsewhere in the thread helped: they placed the person the avoidance of whom they were measuring, so they could at least partially control for affect and clothing and such.
- happytoexplain 3y ago
  It's easy to picture all sorts of specific bad things that might really be represented somewhere among a broader group we disagree with on some kind of ideological grounds, or, in your case, something they might do in the future! It's not useful, though, to describe these pictures every time a topic arises that just happens to be about that group (the group in this case being academics studying something that has to do with racism).
cpitman 3y ago
Looks like one of the authors has a working draft here: http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_sands_nyc.pdf http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_...
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, the study only looks for "black" and "not black", which seems pretty narrow, no?
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    > When subsetting to non-Black pedestrians, who make up 93% of our sample, our results do not meaningfully change. Huh. Not... quite what I think most people would expect to find in the paper, from the headline and abstract. Am I reading that right? Black pedestrians behaved similarly to non-black pedestrians, as far as staying farther from a young black man standing on the sidewalk, than from a young white man doing the same? Or have I misunderstood?
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      Look at figure S21, "results don't meaningfully change" can be a result of an effect not existing, or a result of the authors failing to have sampled enough black people for results to meaningfully change. While sample size is low, it sure looks to me like the black population stayed closer to the black confederates than the rest of the population.
      - yamtaddle 3y ago
        Ah, yeah, wondered if that being a smaller sample size might be the cause. If the effects are actually significant, seems worth re-running with different pedestrian demographics. Could be interesting. [EDIT] Interesting, I mean, because there are a lot of dynamics that might be sussed out by this. Might find that e.g. being different from most other pedestrians enhances this effect even for pedestrians of the same race as the confederate, or any number of other quirky effects (or the opposite, or none of that! Who knows?). Or that under certain circumstances, the effect vanishes. Lots to play with, here. They call out a bunch of other studies in the paper, but it'd be cool to see the same study run several times in very-different locations.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bitcurious 3y ago
According to Wikipedia, Staten Island has the lowest percentage of black residents, at 9.7%. NYC overall is 26.6% black. You’d have to be either pretty deliberate or pretty careless to work with a sample population of only 7% black folks.
sublinear 3y ago
Ghastly. How can this possibly be published by Nature? Flawed from the start since reliably detecting "race" is more complicated than just physical appearance, yet the data is based on surveillance cameras. Also, culture may be just as if not more significant. Maybe New York just has a lot of assholes and low individualism. Also, how can a mere correlated difference of reaction be considered "racist"?
- zorked 3y ago
  What does a pedestrian use to judge the racial group of another person if not appearence?
  - sublinear 3y ago
    Appearance is not race and this is supposed to be a scientific paper.
    - yamtaddle 3y ago
      What if you're measuring reactions to appearance?
      - sublinear 3y ago
        The paper's title says "racial avoidance" and the paper itself claims to be about race. EDIT: unable to reply to your reply since it seems we have reached the maximum depth of this thread, but have you considered that judging race by appearance is... racist (and unreliable)?
        yamtaddle 3y ago
        If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome... I very much doubt they failed in that way. If that's not your concern, then I've lost track of what your complaint is. [EDIT] Reply to your edit: Yes, that's... the point? [EDIT AGAIN] Wait, are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? If so, I'd regard that objection as specious. That's not racist. Having-to-do-with-race isn't what racism is. It could be inaccurate (or not!) but it's not racist. In any event, it seems they didn't actually measure a difference in reaction of pedestrians based on their own race (!) so it may not be relevant anyway.
joshuaheard 3y ago
I wonder if they used the traffic camera data to record the number of violent incidents to see if there was any correlation between the number of violent incidents and the amount of avoidance for each racial category.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
FrankyZunim 3y ago
[flagged]
NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
This is a really stupid paper. Their effect sizes are tiny (a 3-4" deviation??). I don't care how accurately you estimated it. Also, they don't talk about the things that are obviously driving this. It's not race per se, it's things that correlate with race. If you live in an environment where all black and non-black people have the same distributions of behavior, you won't learn to treat people differently on the basis of being black vs. non-black. It's the fact that black Americans are ~7-10x as violent[0] as non-black Americans that is driving the behavior the paper observes. Obviously. The fact that they don't touch this obvious driver makes them, in my view, cowardly, bad scientists out for a cheap thrill. 0: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... 7.5x raw numbers, closer to 10x when accounting for the fact that clearance rates are lower among black offenders (i.e., black Americans get away with murder more often).
PKop 3y ago
Isn't the behavior just rational pattern recognition? What is the problem exactly?
- FrankyZunim 3y ago
  [dead]
golemiprague 3y ago
[dead]
tingletech 3y ago
This looks like the pre print http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_sands_nyc.pdf http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

20 points by orhmeh09 3y ago

version_five 3y ago

[flagged]

jrm4 3y ago
[flagged]
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
  [flagged]
- uvnq 3y ago
  I wouldn't call it denial of the results but rather skepticism of the process
  - version_five 3y ago
    But then you wouldn't be able to use the italicized word denial to show your disdain for a different viewpoint.
  - WesternWind 3y ago
    If folks where actually skeptical of the paper, you would think they would provide some evidence to back up their thought process, based on experiences from academia, or a study of crowd movement in relation to race that shows contrary evidence to the paper itself, instead of saying they can imagine the possibility of bias. I mean I can picture an evil cabal of racists who purposefully show up in discussions like this to purposefully sow fear, uncertainty and doubt. Is that the level of HN discourse? The ability to imagine something isn't evidence of it's existence, nor is it healthy skepticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism
    - version_five 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - happytoexplain 3y ago
        The point of the parent's example was to criticize the picturing of random technically possible but bad things about people you disagree with. They are specifically saying that it would be silly to make the exact claim that you are accusing them of making.
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      So essentially, his assertion that academia is systemically bias, can only be proven through: >Experience in academia >Papers, which you can only get money to work on full time through academia Seems convenient. Looking at the paper itself it found evidence of both a gender bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against men) and a racial bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against blacks). It notably, did not censor any facts about this gender bias, and instead published them in full. In the discussion however, it discussed these two facts with overwhelming bias, treating the observed racial bias with the utmost seriousness while not discussing the observed gender bias at all. I think there's grounds to be sceptical of anything academia says on politically charged topics.
- NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
  The problems grandparent describes are real. As a scientist, if you find "Black people good, white people bad" --> publication + promotion You find "White people good, black people bad" --> you lose your job Completely orthogonal to the morality of it, it creates something called publication bias (or the file drawer problem) in the social sciences. It's a huge issue.
  - Bran_son 3y ago
    To back up the parents claim: The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi... And of course, ignore Asians at all costs. Or if the study is about overrepresentation, invent a new, "Asian + white" category, and hide disaggregated numbers.
  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    >"Black people good, white people bad" --> publication + promotion >"White people good, black people bad" --> you lose your job It is totally believable that the bias problem you're referring to exists, but your description is provocative, dramatized, oversimplified, and carries a smug tone, and I wish it wasn't any of those things.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
      You know, you're right. I think when you live it every day it gets exhausting.
- zorked 3y ago
  "If I can abstractly construct an ulterior motive for the thing - despite having absolutely no evidence - that means the thing is false. Checkmate, science!"
yamtaddle 3y ago
I'm curious how they isolated the effect of race (but I can't read the paper, so, I dunno) among other signs. If they even did—the abstract doesn't make it clear to me that they're claiming race is the causal factor, but may just be observing that distance correlates with the race of the subjects (for whatever reason). [EDIT] cpitman's link elsewhere in the thread helped: they placed the person the avoidance of whom they were measuring, so they could at least partially control for affect and clothing and such.
happytoexplain 3y ago
It's easy to picture all sorts of specific bad things that might really be represented somewhere among a broader group we disagree with on some kind of ideological grounds, or, in your case, something they might do in the future! It's not useful, though, to describe these pictures every time a topic arises that just happens to be about that group (the group in this case being academics studying something that has to do with racism).

cpitman 3y ago

Looks like one of the authors has a working draft here: http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_sands_nyc.pdf http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_...

Workaccount2 3y ago
As far as I can tell, the study only looks for "black" and "not black", which seems pretty narrow, no?
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  > When subsetting to non-Black pedestrians, who make up 93% of our sample, our results do not meaningfully change. Huh. Not... quite what I think most people would expect to find in the paper, from the headline and abstract. Am I reading that right? Black pedestrians behaved similarly to non-black pedestrians, as far as staying farther from a young black man standing on the sidewalk, than from a young white man doing the same? Or have I misunderstood?
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Look at figure S21, "results don't meaningfully change" can be a result of an effect not existing, or a result of the authors failing to have sampled enough black people for results to meaningfully change. While sample size is low, it sure looks to me like the black population stayed closer to the black confederates than the rest of the population.
    - yamtaddle 3y ago
      Ah, yeah, wondered if that being a smaller sample size might be the cause. If the effects are actually significant, seems worth re-running with different pedestrian demographics. Could be interesting. [EDIT] Interesting, I mean, because there are a lot of dynamics that might be sussed out by this. Might find that e.g. being different from most other pedestrians enhances this effect even for pedestrians of the same race as the confederate, or any number of other quirky effects (or the opposite, or none of that! Who knows?). Or that under certain circumstances, the effect vanishes. Lots to play with, here. They call out a bunch of other studies in the paper, but it'd be cool to see the same study run several times in very-different locations.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bitcurious 3y ago

According to Wikipedia, Staten Island has the lowest percentage of black residents, at 9.7%. NYC overall is 26.6% black. You’d have to be either pretty deliberate or pretty careless to work with a sample population of only 7% black folks.

sublinear 3y ago

Ghastly. How can this possibly be published by Nature? Flawed from the start since reliably detecting "race" is more complicated than just physical appearance, yet the data is based on surveillance cameras. Also, culture may be just as if not more significant. Maybe New York just has a lot of assholes and low individualism. Also, how can a mere correlated difference of reaction be considered "racist"?

zorked 3y ago
What does a pedestrian use to judge the racial group of another person if not appearence?
- sublinear 3y ago
  Appearance is not race and this is supposed to be a scientific paper.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    What if you're measuring reactions to appearance?
    - sublinear 3y ago
      The paper's title says "racial avoidance" and the paper itself claims to be about race. EDIT: unable to reply to your reply since it seems we have reached the maximum depth of this thread, but have you considered that judging race by appearance is... racist (and unreliable)?
      - yamtaddle 3y ago
        If your concern is that the researchers failed at picking confederates whose race, judged by appearance, would be interpreted the way the researchers expected it to be, close enough to 100% of the time to not have affected the outcome... I very much doubt they failed in that way. If that's not your concern, then I've lost track of what your complaint is. [EDIT] Reply to your edit: Yes, that's... the point? [EDIT AGAIN] Wait, are you saying that it's racist for the researchers to categorize pedestrians' races based on appearance? If so, I'd regard that objection as specious. That's not racist. Having-to-do-with-race isn't what racism is. It could be inaccurate (or not!) but it's not racist. In any event, it seems they didn't actually measure a difference in reaction of pedestrians based on their own race (!) so it may not be relevant anyway.

joshuaheard 3y ago

I wonder if they used the traffic camera data to record the number of violent incidents to see if there was any correlation between the number of violent incidents and the amount of avoidance for each racial category.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

FrankyZunim 3y ago

[flagged]

NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago

This is a really stupid paper. Their effect sizes are tiny (a 3-4" deviation??). I don't care how accurately you estimated it. Also, they don't talk about the things that are obviously driving this. It's not race per se, it's things that correlate with race. If you live in an environment where all black and non-black people have the same distributions of behavior, you won't learn to treat people differently on the basis of being black vs. non-black. It's the fact that black Americans are ~7-10x as violent[0] as non-black Americans that is driving the behavior the paper observes. Obviously. The fact that they don't touch this obvious driver makes them, in my view, cowardly, bad scientists out for a cheap thrill. 0: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... 7.5x raw numbers, closer to 10x when accounting for the fact that clearance rates are lower among black offenders (i.e., black Americans get away with murder more often).

PKop 3y ago

Isn't the behavior just rational pattern recognition? What is the problem exactly?

FrankyZunim 3y ago
[dead]

golemiprague 3y ago

[dead]

tingletech 3y ago

This looks like the pre print http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_sands_nyc.pdf http://www.brycejdietrich.com/files/working_papers/dietrich_...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]