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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society.
Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto?
Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday?
And you want to talk about a color-blind society?
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Oh god, can we have more rebranded white supremacists propaganda in this thread? That is totally what we need today, more bad faith debate about racist propaganda.
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United States43199 Posts
On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday?
But he said that not everyone who subscribed to a belief in the 14 words was a white supremacist because it's possible to want separate but equal ethnostates, don't you remember?
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On August 18 2017 02:31 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:25 Trainrunnef wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Because they know people on the right exist throughout the "conservative" spectrum, that are still looking to go back to the pre civil rights life, and for better or worse they tar everyone with the same feathers. The right needs to demonstrably show (not say) that they aren't racist before they stop being called racist, and I don't know that they ever did that. We don't need to show or prove anything.
Then why bother with any discussion about race or racism at all? you want to have your cake (have the left accept that there could be issues with the minority communities), and eat it too (not prove that your intentions are good). This is why people dont take some of your arguments seriously. 3
Nor should we try at this point. Regardless of what the Right does to appease the SJW Left, the narrative will never change. That much has been made abundantly clear over the years.
Like farva said. the right has done VERY little to even attempt to understand or further the position of minorities in the country. Most on the right merely tolerate their presence. The single greatest action that I can think of is Reagan granting amnesty. Maybe there are more local actions, but none come to mind off the top of my head.
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On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday?
did the blacks have their own land and their own sovereign government under apartheid?
theres plenty of ground on which to engage dauntless
here. i dont understand the need for everyone to put words in his mouth. the procrustean style of arguing where every "alt right" position is equated to nazis or apartheid is boring and pointless even if there are some actual nazis out there. why should dauntless bother making a long post in the future where he points out in bold underlining his differences from the white nationalists if you are just goig to shit the thread up with these kinds of comments?
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On August 18 2017 02:41 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:34 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 02:28 Mohdoo wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
[quote]
I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool."
I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens.
The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own).
If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility.
[I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.]
Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. So long as certain races are suffering from the consequences of segregation and the like, we have no reason to move on. Only once there are no longer any systematic, race-specific struggles, does it make sense to see the world as colorless. Do you think it should be a goal of society to undo the damage done by slavery and segregation? All I know is that Republicans and the Right are called racists whenever we dare point out that maybe black communities have some problems of their own making, even if we start offering some solutions to those problems. The reductive part is that you think you are some truth tellers for saying that. Do you know who knows that black communities have problems of their own making? Black communities. They didn't need your help. But if black people turn around and say “woah there, get your racist white people under control,” there is a resounding uproar from the Right. And then something about gang violence or some shit.
What racist white people are there to get under control? Those fools in Charlottesville? What do several thousand white supremacists have to do with the shitshow that is inner city Chicago or any of the other places where the black population is suffering in poverty? Clearly nothing. Blaming "racism" in perpetuity isn't a solution for anything -- and particularly not the demographic disaster that black people are experiencing.
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On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday? And you want to talk about a color-blind society?
How are you still confused about the definition of a 'color-blind society'? I will spell it out so it is explicit.
White people don't see race. Everyone else knows their place.
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On August 18 2017 02:55 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:41 Plansix wrote:On August 18 2017 02:34 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 02:28 Mohdoo wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Let's go back to your original statement:
[quote]
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked?
You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. So long as certain races are suffering from the consequences of segregation and the like, we have no reason to move on. Only once there are no longer any systematic, race-specific struggles, does it make sense to see the world as colorless. Do you think it should be a goal of society to undo the damage done by slavery and segregation? All I know is that Republicans and the Right are called racists whenever we dare point out that maybe black communities have some problems of their own making, even if we start offering some solutions to those problems. The reductive part is that you think you are some truth tellers for saying that. Do you know who knows that black communities have problems of their own making? Black communities. They didn't need your help. But if black people turn around and say “woah there, get your racist white people under control,” there is a resounding uproar from the Right. And then something about gang violence or some shit. What racist white people are there to get under control? Those fools in Charlottesville? What do several thousand white supremacists have to do with the shitshow that is inner city Chicago or any of the other places where the black population is suffering in poverty? Clearly nothing. Blaming "racism" in perpetuity isn't a solution for anything -- and particularly not the demographic disaster that black people are experiencing.
Are you saying that you think if these blacks immigrated to Chicago in the same way all of our European immigrants did, we would have the same issue? Do you think that, without slavery and segregation, we would still be in the same place?
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On August 18 2017 02:51 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday? did the blacks have their own land and their own sovereign government under apartheid? theres plenty of ground on which to engage dauntless here. i dont understand the need for everyone to put words in his mouth. the procrustean style of arguing where every "alt right" position is equated to nazis or apartheid is boring and pointless even if there are some actual nazis out there. why should dauntless bother making a long post in the future where he points out in bold underlining his differences from the white nationalists if you are just goig to shit the thread up with these kinds of comments?
Shit should be responded to with shit. When the 14 points are being pushed in the thread and someone is advocating for “color blind society”, it earns these reductive responses. The only reason Xdaunt ever brought this up was because he felt I was being unfair for lumping the alt-right in with Nazis and the KKK. Even though the alt-right is the label adopted by those groups.
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On August 18 2017 02:51 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday? did the blacks have their own land and their own sovereign government under apartheid? theres plenty of ground on which to engage dauntless here. i dont understand the need for everyone to put words in his mouth. the procrustean style of arguing where every "alt right" position is equated to nazis or apartheid is boring and pointless even if there are some actual nazis out there. why should dauntless bother making a long post in the future where he points out in bold underlining his differences from the white nationalists if you are just goig to shit the thread up with these kinds of comments?
Well, he only really distanced himself from the really overt definition and why he didn't agree with the alt right is because the problem isn't skin color, it's culture. He wholeheartedly agreed with the diversity+proximity=war claptrash, and seems to adhere to some solution of "separate but equal" ethnostates.
There have been two groups advocating those solutions in the past. One was apartheid South Africa. The other was Jim Crow America.
If it looks like a racist and it quacks like a racist...
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United States43199 Posts
On August 18 2017 02:55 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:41 Plansix wrote:On August 18 2017 02:34 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 02:28 Mohdoo wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Let's go back to your original statement:
[quote]
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked?
You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. So long as certain races are suffering from the consequences of segregation and the like, we have no reason to move on. Only once there are no longer any systematic, race-specific struggles, does it make sense to see the world as colorless. Do you think it should be a goal of society to undo the damage done by slavery and segregation? All I know is that Republicans and the Right are called racists whenever we dare point out that maybe black communities have some problems of their own making, even if we start offering some solutions to those problems. The reductive part is that you think you are some truth tellers for saying that. Do you know who knows that black communities have problems of their own making? Black communities. They didn't need your help. But if black people turn around and say “woah there, get your racist white people under control,” there is a resounding uproar from the Right. And then something about gang violence or some shit. What racist white people are there to get under control? Those fools in Charlottesville? What do several thousand white supremacists have to do with the shitshow that is inner city Chicago or any of the other places where the black population is suffering in poverty? Clearly nothing. Blaming "racism" in perpetuity isn't a solution for anything -- and particularly not the demographic disaster that black people are experiencing.
The police? The voters that support racially disparate laws? The ones that view their own concerns as racially neutral but insist any discussion of black or Hispanic concerns are identity politics? The ones who think that racially motivated limitations on the franchise are acceptable?
Your argument is predicated on the belief that only people actively waving a Nazi flag at that time can be racist and therefore racism is not an issue.
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On August 18 2017 02:51 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday? did the blacks have their own land and their own sovereign government under apartheid? theres plenty of ground on which to engage dauntless here. i dont understand the need for everyone to put words in his mouth. the procrustean style of arguing where every "alt right" position is equated to nazis or apartheid is boring and pointless even if there are some actual nazis out there. why should dauntless bother making a long post in the future where he points out in bold underlining his differences from the white nationalists if you are just goig to shit the thread up with these kinds of comments?
Well, since we're already Godwined...
If someone told you that Mein Kampf was their basis for personal worldly philosophy, but just the highlighted parts that aren't anti-Semitic or, you know, generally evil, how would you take that?
The argument is basically that you can take a racist and white supremacist manifesto, written by someone with an entirely racist and white supremacist world philosophy, and that you can cross out a few lines and make it okay.
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On August 18 2017 02:55 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:41 Plansix wrote:On August 18 2017 02:34 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 02:28 Mohdoo wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Let's go back to your original statement:
[quote]
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked?
You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. So long as certain races are suffering from the consequences of segregation and the like, we have no reason to move on. Only once there are no longer any systematic, race-specific struggles, does it make sense to see the world as colorless. Do you think it should be a goal of society to undo the damage done by slavery and segregation? All I know is that Republicans and the Right are called racists whenever we dare point out that maybe black communities have some problems of their own making, even if we start offering some solutions to those problems. The reductive part is that you think you are some truth tellers for saying that. Do you know who knows that black communities have problems of their own making? Black communities. They didn't need your help. But if black people turn around and say “woah there, get your racist white people under control,” there is a resounding uproar from the Right. And then something about gang violence or some shit. What racist white people are there to get under control? Those fools in Charlottesville? What do several thousand white supremacists have to do with the shitshow that is inner city Chicago or any of the other places where the black population is suffering in poverty? Clearly nothing. Blaming "racism" in perpetuity isn't a solution for anything -- and particularly not the demographic disaster that black people are experiencing.
North Carolina. Justify that state and its voter repression. Defunding of black communities and so on. Texas’s voter ID law that was just struck down. The ongoing racial segregation in New York through increased property values and lack of affordable housing in specific communities(aka, keep the poors out). The list is endless, but will never be good enough for you.
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On August 17 2017 21:40 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
This is a tough one. I actually think that Lee was actually a really good guy; I could be wrong, I've been raised in the south. I'm not trying to sound like an apologist either. It's tough. Stonewall I haven't read enough about and I'm probably biased towards because of my religious upbringing. Not joking, Bob Jones literally made a movie about Stonewall Jackson that I watched in school growing up link here. I remember liking it as a kid, but again I was a mostly indoctrinated kid.
I'd like to see some amount of memorialization to some of the actually "good people" from the south in that era. But it's really hard for it not to be turned into some promotion for slavery and racism. Plus, most of the modern statues/monuments to them really are and were symbols of oppression and racisim.
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It's worth mentioning that Northern city councils were generally far better at racist city planning than those the South. Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit are excellent examples of how the racist roots of a city's original planning scheme can affect infrastructural development for centuries to come.
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On August 18 2017 02:51 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday? did the blacks have their own land and their own sovereign government under apartheid? theres plenty of ground on which to engage dauntless here. i dont understand the need for everyone to put words in his mouth. the procrustean style of arguing where every "alt right" position is equated to nazis or apartheid is boring and pointless even if there are some actual nazis out there. why should dauntless bother making a long post in the future where he points out in bold underlining his differences from the white nationalists if you are just goig to shit the thread up with these kinds of comments?
I'll stop equating people to white supremacists when they stop defending their ideals.
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On August 18 2017 03:02 farvacola wrote:
It's worth mentioning that Northern city councils were generally far better at racist city planning than those the South. Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit are excellent examples of how the racist roots of a city's original planning scheme can affect infrastructural development for centuries to come.
Real estate is the oldest tool and most powerful tool to enforce the racial divide. Control where people live and you limit them in all sorts of ways.
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On August 18 2017 03:02 farvacola wrote:
It's worth mentioning that Northern city councils were generally far better at racist city planning than those the South. Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit are excellent examples of how the racist roots of a city's original planning scheme can affect infrastructural development for centuries to come.
TBH, I'm pretty sure that most of the modern cities cited for desegregation are in the north. I think as far as I've been alive there have been major issues with segregation in Ill.; not just in Chicago. My grandma (who was a teacher for years) talked about it at various points when we would visit her.
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On August 18 2017 02:51 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:43 Gorsameth wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 13:48 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.
in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"
now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.
you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous? On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku
what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.
now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves). I brought up Bayes because a stereotype is an informal prior for a person. When there is pre-existing precise language developed for having this discussion, it improves the discussion to make use of it. I didn't bring it up because it's "cool." I never made the claim that race was a strong predictor of violence on trains. In fact, I even acknowledged it was very weak in my post ("the probability of being the victim of a crime is still low"). My point was merely to demonstrate that stereotypes have predictive power in character as well as Mahjong skill prediction. Even if skin color isn't the cause (and it certainly isn't), it has predictive power because it correlates with factors such as socioeconomic status, culture, etc., and that information often isn't known in real world situations. This is where the issue of racism gets tricky. Using the predictive utility of skin color isn't necessarily racist imo; attaching an irrationally strong prior (based on skin color because it's usually the first thing you see about someone) and not conditioning effectively on a person's actions is evidence of an actual racist. Of course, this is from a pure predictive utility perspective. In reality, most people have some sense of moral obligation and probably actively work to widen their prior (i.e. "reduce their bias" in common lingo). However, it's necessarily a trade-off in the sense that actively working to widen your prior for the exclusive purpose of fairness (what is promoted by "social progressives"), while noble, necessarily reduces predictive utility. Note that this doesn't mean that people don't often widen their priors from simply learning more (e.g. maybe spending more time around a certain race and realizing their prior was too narrow)--obviously, this is a best case outcome when it happens. The apparent current progressive "correct" prior is a totally flat (uninformative) prior, which I believe to be silly. To be clear, a flat prior would be to claim that a random Chinese and a random white person have an equal chance in a game of Mahjong. If you acknowledge that skin color on a train has any predictive power for crimes in the case where you lack any other information about the person (which is a fairly realistic assumption for strangers on a train... you might be able to see their facial expression, mannerisms, and clothing but that's really about it [and all of those are also correlated with race anyway]), then you're acknowledging that stereotypes about people's skin color have some predictive utility in terms of character (if you accept propensity to commit crime as an indicator of character, which is admittedly an argument of its own). If you recall, the original point was that the word "racist" has become diluted. My argument is that "racist" has been broadened to include "people who harbor stereotypes", which is a rather ridiculous definition as I argued above--as stereotypes are not necessarily "bad", and can increase utility. [I should also note that I argued that the term "racist" has been diluted because it is used by social progressives to defend socially progressive policies from people who agree that diversity is good, but disagree with the progressives on the merits of current socially progressive policy (e.g. probably Damore imo). But we're not discussing that argument here.] Also keep in mind that I'm only making arguments that demonstrate the existence of the "stereotype utility" phenomenon here. Stereotypes are employed hundreds (if not thousands) of times each day by everyone. It's literally impossible to argue what stereotypes are appropriate for each and every situation, so an argument of existence is going to have to make do if we're keeping this discussion general. Obviously, the magnitude of the "stereotype utility" is going to vary drastically from case to case, so making arguments about it in a general discussion makes little sense. In the train scenario, the "stereotype utility" is obviously small, as I've acknowledged in all my posts. In the Mahjong example, the "stereotype utility" is larger. Let's go back to your original statement:
If I'm sitting on a train car with 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, I can observe that I'm x times more likely to be the victim of a crime than if I were sitting among five random members of the general US population. Therefore, I feel more threatened on this train car.
It's literally the same example as Mahjong, but now it's politically sensitive. No, it's not fair to the African Americans on the train. And I would be irrational to assume I'll likely be the victim of a crime on that train, since base crime rates are very low. But I'm still logically and mathematically justified in feeling more threatened on that train car than I would with 5 other random US citizens.
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked? You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. Didn't we just yesterday have you defend a definition of the 'alt-right' that contained a strait copy from the Nazi manifesto? Weren't you advocating for apartheid just yesterday? did the blacks have their own land and their own sovereign government under apartheid?theres plenty of ground on which to engage dauntless here. i dont understand the need for everyone to put words in his mouth. the procrustean style of arguing where every "alt right" position is equated to nazis or apartheid is boring and pointless even if there are some actual nazis out there. why should dauntless bother making a long post in the future where he points out in bold underlining his differences from the white nationalists if you are just goig to shit the thread up with these kinds of comments?
I wasn't actually sure when I read the bolded section. But they did; that's what the Bantustans were designed for, semi-autonomous racially homogeneous zones that black individuals were deported to en masse with their South African citizenship canceled. Surprisingly, canceling people's citizenship and deporting them away from all the infrastructure and supply lines did not actually result in "separate but equal."
On August 18 2017 03:02 geript wrote:This is a tough one. I actually think that Lee was actually a really good guy; I could be wrong, I've been raised in the south. I'm not trying to sound like an apologist either. It's tough. Stonewall I haven't read enough about and I'm probably biased towards because of my religious upbringing. Not joking, Bob Jones literally made a movie about Stonewall Jackson that I watched in school growing up link here. I remember liking it as a kid, but again I was a mostly indoctrinated kid. I'd like to see some amount of memorialization to some of the actually "good people" from the south in that era. But it's really hard for it not to be turned into some promotion for slavery and racism. Plus, most of the modern statues/monuments to them really are and were symbols of oppression and racisim.
From what I understand of Lee he himself was against the enshrinement of the Confederacy in monuments/etc.and didn't want to be buried in his war uniform or anything, so it's a shame he's caught in the crossfire here.
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On August 18 2017 02:55 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2017 02:41 Plansix wrote:On August 18 2017 02:34 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 02:28 Mohdoo wrote:On August 18 2017 02:17 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:56 IgnE wrote:On August 18 2017 01:52 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2017 01:47 IgnE wrote:On August 17 2017 23:39 mozoku wrote:On August 17 2017 14:29 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Let's go back to your original statement:
[quote]
This is an absurdity meant to prove I don't know what. You've reduced the 5 African Americans from the South Side of Chicago to a relatively limited set of variables based entirely on race and an arbitrarily selected geographic region. Are these individuals 90 years old? Maybe they are returning from south side bingo night. Oh, you assumed you were talking about Young Black Males. Are they wearing ties and carrying The New World Translation of the Holy Bible? Are they in their mid 40s and tired, carrying bags of groceries home? Do you think a 40 something restaurant manager carrying groceries and a gaggle of older women with grey hairs still presents a greater risk than "5 other random US citizens?" What's the crime rate for 50 year old black person of either gender compared to 18-25 white unemployed white male? How do you identify an unemployed person? What color is your skin? If you are white are you more or less likely to be killed by a black man per capita or a white man per capita? Are you an old woman or are you a man in a police uniform? How many members of the public do you think know any accurate statistics on any of the questions I asked?
You think being racist sometimes yields utility, and you'd really appreciate it if everyone would stop calling people racist who are racist only sometimes, especially when they were right about it. One of the issues I'm having with what you keep doing is that you never actually attempt to outline what "racism" is. I'm assuming you're of the opinion that the Mahjong scenario is not racist, but the train scenario is. But what is the difference between the train scenario and the Mahjong scenario? If you don't want the term "racist" to be diluted, you need a commonly understood definition for "racism" and only use the term when it meets that definition. Instead, we have a status quo where racism is functionally defined as a "you know it when you see it" thing, which, of course, is a total mess in practice. Earlier in this discussion, I was accused of having a racist analysis for having allegedly incorrect facts (I disagreed, but that's irrelevant)--when I think it was clear to all sides that there was no intent to be racist. In that case, "you know it when you see it" led to "alleged factual inaccuracy = racist." Now in this discussion, you're asserting (see bold) that using a stereotype as a prior is racist (i.e. having stereotypes = racist). Even though, using a stereotype in the Mahjong scenario was not racist. If this happens in a discussion literally about the dilution of the word "racist" (where you'd expect people to be particularly careful), how can you assert that people are more careful in conversations where they have political motives to slander their opponents as a racist and no incentive to be careful about how they use the term? I'd ask you to offer some real-life examples but I know that you are so far deep in abstraction land that you've lost touch with how stereotypes operate in reality, where one datapoint (skin color) swamps all the other uncountable sensory datapoints that we receive during basic, short interactions with people. People aren't actuaries with sets of data in their interactions. You're muddling definitions again. If a stereotype is a prior, then it only swamps all other sensory datapoints when the prior is extremely strong. I've already said that having an irrationally strong prior based on skin color and not conditioning on new data effectively is arguably what defines a racist. You're going back to the classic Frequentist point that "priors are sometimes misapplied, therefore they shouldn't be used." Which I disagree with. If priors are sometimes misapplied, the solution is to be aware, disciplined, and critical of your priors (i.e. be informed and challenge your beliefs). It isn't to stick your head in the sand and apply a flat prior to everything (i.e. assigning equal probability of winning to both players in the Mahjong scenario). or the solution is to use non-racist priors. if you come up to me in tattered clothes without shoes and without having showered for several days there are several priors there, none of them race-based, that condition my response. as ive said repeatedly, how you decide which information to condition your prior is always unjustifiable and faith-based. choosing to use race to condition your prior is racist. i expect you'll say something like "ideally you include all the data," at which point i say, get real, thats not how stereotypes work, the whole premise here was that it's an efficiency shortcut, and then you waffle around a bit with more abstractions while accusing me of conflating definitions etc. luckily i am not a proponent of thought crime so in your mahjong scenario its not a big deal to keep your thoughts on the likelihood of who is a better mahjong player to yourself. but if you went up and said, "hey i bet you could beat this white person here at mahjong," you'd be doing something racist. likewise if you got on the train in chicago and treated a bunch of black people going about their business like potential criminals you'd be doing something racist (and irrational). Yeah? And how many of those are left in the wake of the ever-expanding definition of racism? quite a lot. reality is pretty complex. sorry you cant use "black man" as the determinative prior anymore. Horseshit. The whole problem here is that our SJW friends cry racism/sexism/whatever every time there is anything resembling a disparate impact. They won't allow a color blind society. So long as certain races are suffering from the consequences of segregation and the like, we have no reason to move on. Only once there are no longer any systematic, race-specific struggles, does it make sense to see the world as colorless. Do you think it should be a goal of society to undo the damage done by slavery and segregation? All I know is that Republicans and the Right are called racists whenever we dare point out that maybe black communities have some problems of their own making, even if we start offering some solutions to those problems. The reductive part is that you think you are some truth tellers for saying that. Do you know who knows that black communities have problems of their own making? Black communities. They didn't need your help. But if black people turn around and say “woah there, get your racist white people under control,” there is a resounding uproar from the Right. And then something about gang violence or some shit. What racist white people are there to get under control? Those fools in Charlottesville? What do several thousand white supremacists have to do with the shitshow that is inner city Chicago or any of the other places where the black population is suffering in poverty? Clearly nothing. Blaming "racism" in perpetuity isn't a solution for anything -- and particularly not the demographic disaster that black people are experiencing.
You. You are the racist white person who society needs to keep in check.
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