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On February 09 2022 12:22 NewSunshine wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 12:18 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 09 2022 12:06 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 11:29 NewSunshine wrote:
Gotta say I didn't necessarily expect the sequence of [talking about Trump's insurrection] > [arguing about CRT] > [talking about what it's like being black despite a black poster warning everyone there's some foot-in-mouth going on], but I can't say it entirely surprises me, either.
I feel like there're much better avenues of discussion this thread could be taking. Almost any of them, really. Well the sequence starting with talking about Trump's insurrection isn't that surprising since it's talked about on every page of this thread from the day it happened I thought it was primarily brought up again because of how the RNC recently trivialized it, no? Yup. The RNC tried to normalize a violent coup on democracy as "legitimate political discourse", and apparently they were onto something, because people are still carrying that torch here. And then it transitioned, about as elegantly as possible, to some folks trying to speak for black people. I should've made a fucking bingo card.
Not to rehash the argument but just for the record it's not true that the RNC called the attack legitimate discourse, nor is it true that anyone here is saying that.
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On February 09 2022 12:43 Doc.Rivers wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 12:22 NewSunshine wrote:On February 09 2022 12:18 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 09 2022 12:06 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 11:29 NewSunshine wrote:
Gotta say I didn't necessarily expect the sequence of [talking about Trump's insurrection] > [arguing about CRT] > [talking about what it's like being black despite a black poster warning everyone there's some foot-in-mouth going on], but I can't say it entirely surprises me, either.
I feel like there're much better avenues of discussion this thread could be taking. Almost any of them, really. Well the sequence starting with talking about Trump's insurrection isn't that surprising since it's talked about on every page of this thread from the day it happened I thought it was primarily brought up again because of how the RNC recently trivialized it, no? Yup. The RNC tried to normalize a violent coup on democracy as "legitimate political discourse", and apparently they were onto something, because people are still carrying that torch here. And then it transitioned, about as elegantly as possible, to some folks trying to speak for black people. I should've made a fucking bingo card. Not to rehash the argument but just for the record it's not true that the RNC called the attack legitimate discourse, nor is it true that anyone here is saying that.
It's all a political show anyway, which is what you'd expect to get when you have politicians investigating other politicians.
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On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 07 2022 14:59 gobbledydook wrote:
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines the effect of policies and systems on race, and how policies and systems with no explicit race discrimination can nevertheless favour the majority White race over other races.
There are a few points of contention right now, which are often conflated and result in meaningless arguments.
1) Is the academic CRT theory being taught in schools? Clearly the answer is no.
2) Are white people, overall, achieving better outcomes than black people in the current systems? Clearly the answer is yes.
3) Does the fact that white people achieve better outcomes than black people on average mean the system is unfair? This is something that can be debated. I am inclined to believe that it is indeed harder for black people to excel, given equal talent.
4) Are white people inherently privileged because of that? I find it difficult to argue that this is valid on an individual level and I find it insulting when someone gets told to 'check their white privilege' because they are white.
5) Should it be taught in schools that white people are privileged because of their race? Some school districts were trying to put elements of this concept in their curriculum. I think this is a clear no. I think this is also what most parents that are against CRT are really against, but for lack of a better term blame CRT. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the conclusion of CRT theory is that white people are privileged.
6) Should standards be lowered for 'non-privileged' races? This is the core concept behind affirmative action, particularly in college admissions and in race quotas. This can be debated, but I think it should be no, and the equity problem described in 3) should be solved by improving the resource allocation earlier in life so black children have the same opportunities as white children, instead of lowering the standards after the fact.
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3. If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable. Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom.
I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray.
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On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 07 2022 14:59 gobbledydook wrote:
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines the effect of policies and systems on race, and how policies and systems with no explicit race discrimination can nevertheless favour the majority White race over other races.
There are a few points of contention right now, which are often conflated and result in meaningless arguments.
1) Is the academic CRT theory being taught in schools? Clearly the answer is no.
2) Are white people, overall, achieving better outcomes than black people in the current systems? Clearly the answer is yes.
3) Does the fact that white people achieve better outcomes than black people on average mean the system is unfair? This is something that can be debated. I am inclined to believe that it is indeed harder for black people to excel, given equal talent.
4) Are white people inherently privileged because of that? I find it difficult to argue that this is valid on an individual level and I find it insulting when someone gets told to 'check their white privilege' because they are white.
5) Should it be taught in schools that white people are privileged because of their race? Some school districts were trying to put elements of this concept in their curriculum. I think this is a clear no. I think this is also what most parents that are against CRT are really against, but for lack of a better term blame CRT. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the conclusion of CRT theory is that white people are privileged.
6) Should standards be lowered for 'non-privileged' races? This is the core concept behind affirmative action, particularly in college admissions and in race quotas. This can be debated, but I think it should be no, and the equity problem described in 3) should be solved by improving the resource allocation earlier in life so black children have the same opportunities as white children, instead of lowering the standards after the fact.
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3. If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable. Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray.
Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists.
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On February 09 2022 10:24 gobbledydook wrote:Show nested quote +On February 08 2022 21:07 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 20:51 gobbledydook wrote:On February 08 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 20:11 Belisarius wrote:On February 08 2022 19:03 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 07 2022 14:59 gobbledydook wrote:
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines the effect of policies and systems on race, and how policies and systems with no explicit race discrimination can nevertheless favour the majority White race over other races.
There are a few points of contention right now, which are often conflated and result in meaningless arguments.
1) Is the academic CRT theory being taught in schools? Clearly the answer is no.
2) Are white people, overall, achieving better outcomes than black people in the current systems? Clearly the answer is yes.
3) Does the fact that white people achieve better outcomes than black people on average mean the system is unfair? This is something that can be debated. I am inclined to believe that it is indeed harder for black people to excel, given equal talent.
4) Are white people inherently privileged because of that? I find it difficult to argue that this is valid on an individual level and I find it insulting when someone gets told to 'check their white privilege' because they are white.
5) Should it be taught in schools that white people are privileged because of their race? Some school districts were trying to put elements of this concept in their curriculum. I think this is a clear no. I think this is also what most parents that are against CRT are really against, but for lack of a better term blame CRT. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the conclusion of CRT theory is that white people are privileged.
6) Should standards be lowered for 'non-privileged' races? This is the core concept behind affirmative action, particularly in college admissions and in race quotas. This can be debated, but I think it should be no, and the equity problem described in 3) should be solved by improving the resource allocation earlier in life so black children have the same opportunities as white children, instead of lowering the standards after the fact.
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3. If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable. Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. I'd say it isn't unfair. I mean, if you put an NBA team against the University of Manchester Basketball team, well yes, it would be unfair. But, at the professional level, all athletes are incredibly gifted individuals, both in talent and in genes and there are typically selection rules in place (like the draft, etc.) to even out the teams. At that point, the main advantages aren't about size and strength but skill and how well they play as a team. But they need a certain level of size to even reach the point where they can play. The average height of an NBA player is 6'6. Every single player in the league is above-average height for the US. It's basically the dot game you invented. So, what's the difference? Given that physical attributes are always going to be necessary for success in sport at some threshold, what is a "fair" sport in your view? I'm not even talking about the race angle. Your analogy seems to suggest that every imaginable competitor has to have an equal chance to win in order for something to be fair, which is quite an out-there proposition. We were talking about education, not sports. I think sometimes simple analogies help to get the point across but obviously break down if you take it too far, as in this case. I think we all agree that every student, no matter where they live or how they look like should have a fair chance at 'winning' in the education system, correct? If a sport like basketball was used as the metric to gauge a student's success in the academic system, then yes, this would be deeply unfair. You will get no argument from me there. Edit: I guess, to answer your question fully: It's about stated outcomes. Professional sports are meant to entertain us with feats of prowess, whereas education is about making sure everyone has a fair chance in life. This has the obvious conclusion that in sports, we will select those athletes that deliver the highest amount of entertainment, regardless of socioeconomic status or ethnicity. The corresponding argument is that education is a way to increase productivity in society because people with more knowledge are more productive. Since some people naturally are better suited to learning knowledge, while others have other gifts, it would be most effective if those who were good learners received the best education. Standardized testing, college admissions criteria etc are all ways to try to do this, since we don't have infinite education resources. This may be where we differ in our basic worldview. I always thought that what was important in society was more along the lines of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' rather than maximising productivity. Surely the pursuit of happiness would be easier if the person was striving in a direction that they were naturally talented for. And that also, incidentally, drives productivity, because people generally enjoy and excel at things they are good at.
Certainly, in an ideal world, we would all be doing what we are talented at, not going to quibble with that.
However, we have tied high-paying jobs to people with more education. If you now allocate the finite resources in the education system on a 'who does best' basis, do you see how you may be shutting out people from top paying jobs that they might have been insanely talented at, but never got a chance because they couldn't afford a private tutor?
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On February 09 2022 17:48 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 10:24 gobbledydook wrote:On February 08 2022 21:07 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 20:51 gobbledydook wrote:On February 08 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 20:11 Belisarius wrote:On February 08 2022 19:03 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3.
If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable.
Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. I'd say it isn't unfair. I mean, if you put an NBA team against the University of Manchester Basketball team, well yes, it would be unfair. But, at the professional level, all athletes are incredibly gifted individuals, both in talent and in genes and there are typically selection rules in place (like the draft, etc.) to even out the teams. At that point, the main advantages aren't about size and strength but skill and how well they play as a team. But they need a certain level of size to even reach the point where they can play. The average height of an NBA player is 6'6. Every single player in the league is above-average height for the US. It's basically the dot game you invented. So, what's the difference? Given that physical attributes are always going to be necessary for success in sport at some threshold, what is a "fair" sport in your view? I'm not even talking about the race angle. Your analogy seems to suggest that every imaginable competitor has to have an equal chance to win in order for something to be fair, which is quite an out-there proposition. We were talking about education, not sports. I think sometimes simple analogies help to get the point across but obviously break down if you take it too far, as in this case. I think we all agree that every student, no matter where they live or how they look like should have a fair chance at 'winning' in the education system, correct? If a sport like basketball was used as the metric to gauge a student's success in the academic system, then yes, this would be deeply unfair. You will get no argument from me there. Edit: I guess, to answer your question fully: It's about stated outcomes. Professional sports are meant to entertain us with feats of prowess, whereas education is about making sure everyone has a fair chance in life. This has the obvious conclusion that in sports, we will select those athletes that deliver the highest amount of entertainment, regardless of socioeconomic status or ethnicity. The corresponding argument is that education is a way to increase productivity in society because people with more knowledge are more productive. Since some people naturally are better suited to learning knowledge, while others have other gifts, it would be most effective if those who were good learners received the best education. Standardized testing, college admissions criteria etc are all ways to try to do this, since we don't have infinite education resources. This may be where we differ in our basic worldview. I always thought that what was important in society was more along the lines of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' rather than maximising productivity. Surely the pursuit of happiness would be easier if the person was striving in a direction that they were naturally talented for. And that also, incidentally, drives productivity, because people generally enjoy and excel at things they are good at. Certainly, in an ideal world, we would all be doing what we are talented at, not going to quibble with that. However, we have tied high-paying jobs to people with more education. If you now allocate the finite resources in the education system on a 'who does best' basis, do you see how you may be shutting out people from top paying jobs that they might have been insanely talented at, but never got a chance because they couldn't afford a private tutor?
I'm not even sure I agree on the basic premise. I mean... most jobs don't really require much talent at all and people kinda roll into them through the random circumstances of life. However, if your parents had money and could afford education it's more likely you will "roll into" a job as mid-level programmer, whereas if that didn't happen, you will "roll into" stacking boxes at wallmart.
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On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 07 2022 14:59 gobbledydook wrote:
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines the effect of policies and systems on race, and how policies and systems with no explicit race discrimination can nevertheless favour the majority White race over other races.
There are a few points of contention right now, which are often conflated and result in meaningless arguments.
1) Is the academic CRT theory being taught in schools? Clearly the answer is no.
2) Are white people, overall, achieving better outcomes than black people in the current systems? Clearly the answer is yes.
3) Does the fact that white people achieve better outcomes than black people on average mean the system is unfair? This is something that can be debated. I am inclined to believe that it is indeed harder for black people to excel, given equal talent.
4) Are white people inherently privileged because of that? I find it difficult to argue that this is valid on an individual level and I find it insulting when someone gets told to 'check their white privilege' because they are white.
5) Should it be taught in schools that white people are privileged because of their race? Some school districts were trying to put elements of this concept in their curriculum. I think this is a clear no. I think this is also what most parents that are against CRT are really against, but for lack of a better term blame CRT. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the conclusion of CRT theory is that white people are privileged.
6) Should standards be lowered for 'non-privileged' races? This is the core concept behind affirmative action, particularly in college admissions and in race quotas. This can be debated, but I think it should be no, and the equity problem described in 3) should be solved by improving the resource allocation earlier in life so black children have the same opportunities as white children, instead of lowering the standards after the fact.
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3. If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable. Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists.
Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu), and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen?
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On February 09 2022 18:27 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 17:48 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 10:24 gobbledydook wrote:On February 08 2022 21:07 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 20:51 gobbledydook wrote:On February 08 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 20:11 Belisarius wrote:On February 08 2022 19:03 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:
[quote]
Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair?
If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. I'd say it isn't unfair. I mean, if you put an NBA team against the University of Manchester Basketball team, well yes, it would be unfair. But, at the professional level, all athletes are incredibly gifted individuals, both in talent and in genes and there are typically selection rules in place (like the draft, etc.) to even out the teams. At that point, the main advantages aren't about size and strength but skill and how well they play as a team. But they need a certain level of size to even reach the point where they can play. The average height of an NBA player is 6'6. Every single player in the league is above-average height for the US. It's basically the dot game you invented. So, what's the difference? Given that physical attributes are always going to be necessary for success in sport at some threshold, what is a "fair" sport in your view? I'm not even talking about the race angle. Your analogy seems to suggest that every imaginable competitor has to have an equal chance to win in order for something to be fair, which is quite an out-there proposition. We were talking about education, not sports. I think sometimes simple analogies help to get the point across but obviously break down if you take it too far, as in this case. I think we all agree that every student, no matter where they live or how they look like should have a fair chance at 'winning' in the education system, correct? If a sport like basketball was used as the metric to gauge a student's success in the academic system, then yes, this would be deeply unfair. You will get no argument from me there. Edit: I guess, to answer your question fully: It's about stated outcomes. Professional sports are meant to entertain us with feats of prowess, whereas education is about making sure everyone has a fair chance in life. This has the obvious conclusion that in sports, we will select those athletes that deliver the highest amount of entertainment, regardless of socioeconomic status or ethnicity. The corresponding argument is that education is a way to increase productivity in society because people with more knowledge are more productive. Since some people naturally are better suited to learning knowledge, while others have other gifts, it would be most effective if those who were good learners received the best education. Standardized testing, college admissions criteria etc are all ways to try to do this, since we don't have infinite education resources. This may be where we differ in our basic worldview. I always thought that what was important in society was more along the lines of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' rather than maximising productivity. Surely the pursuit of happiness would be easier if the person was striving in a direction that they were naturally talented for. And that also, incidentally, drives productivity, because people generally enjoy and excel at things they are good at. Certainly, in an ideal world, we would all be doing what we are talented at, not going to quibble with that. However, we have tied high-paying jobs to people with more education. If you now allocate the finite resources in the education system on a 'who does best' basis, do you see how you may be shutting out people from top paying jobs that they might have been insanely talented at, but never got a chance because they couldn't afford a private tutor? I'm not even sure I agree on the basic premise. I mean... most jobs don't really require much talent at all and people kinda roll into them through the random circumstances of life. However, if your parents had money and could afford education it's more likely you will "roll into" a job as mid-level programmer, whereas if that didn't happen, you will "roll into" stacking boxes at wallmart.
Agreed with that. But most job adverts that I have seen that pay above minimum wage require a university degree even if the job itself does not need the additional qualification.
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On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 07 2022 14:59 gobbledydook wrote:
Critical Race Theory is a theory that examines the effect of policies and systems on race, and how policies and systems with no explicit race discrimination can nevertheless favour the majority White race over other races.
There are a few points of contention right now, which are often conflated and result in meaningless arguments.
1) Is the academic CRT theory being taught in schools? Clearly the answer is no.
2) Are white people, overall, achieving better outcomes than black people in the current systems? Clearly the answer is yes.
3) Does the fact that white people achieve better outcomes than black people on average mean the system is unfair? This is something that can be debated. I am inclined to believe that it is indeed harder for black people to excel, given equal talent.
4) Are white people inherently privileged because of that? I find it difficult to argue that this is valid on an individual level and I find it insulting when someone gets told to 'check their white privilege' because they are white.
5) Should it be taught in schools that white people are privileged because of their race? Some school districts were trying to put elements of this concept in their curriculum. I think this is a clear no. I think this is also what most parents that are against CRT are really against, but for lack of a better term blame CRT. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the conclusion of CRT theory is that white people are privileged.
6) Should standards be lowered for 'non-privileged' races? This is the core concept behind affirmative action, particularly in college admissions and in race quotas. This can be debated, but I think it should be no, and the equity problem described in 3) should be solved by improving the resource allocation earlier in life so black children have the same opportunities as white children, instead of lowering the standards after the fact.
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3. If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable. Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen?
Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it.
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On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:On February 07 2022 17:44 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
I really like your post here and think it will generate good discussion. I only have time to add to point 3.
If a system delivers systematically worse results for a certain subset of people, it's objectively not fair. For instance, if you design a game where only kids abive a certain height can win (say touch a dot with your foot and another with a hand that is very far away) and then you give prizes to the winners, you'd say the game was unfair. I don't think this is debatable.
Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair? If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you?
Just leave it.
It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again.
The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion.
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On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:On February 07 2022 20:40 Belisarius wrote:
[quote]
Do you consider professional basketball to be unfair?
If not, what do you see as the substantive difference? I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion.
It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc.
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On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc.
We can look at these things but to draw decent conclusions from them we need to know if we are talking about causation or correlation. By noting that a certain group is over or underrepresented in a specific field or position you cannot conclude that this is necessarily due to discrimination.
Edit: Something like the wage gap is a different story. Here I agree that there should be no statistical difference if we are actually looking at the same nominal position at the same employer. It is hard to track that from an outside view when salaries are negotiated individually though because a lot of factors are relevant here. But this is something that needs to be addressed where it is existing.
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Norway28674 Posts
On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc.
Are all differences in outcomes necessarily the consequence of discrimination, though? I'm not at all arguing that difference in outcome stems from a difference in 'natural ability' (aside from stuff like 'men are physically stronger than women'), but can't there be legitimate differences in interests that aren't necessarily related to discrimination?
For example, if a certain high paying job requires working 100 hour weeks, it'd be conceivable to me that this type of job would appeal to a higher number of men than women, and that consequently, these jobs could have a higher % of men than women without any real discrimination happening? (Note that I don't at all idealize working 100 hour weeks, think that men on average work harder than women, or anything of the sort, if anything, it's the opposite. It is however my impression that men tend to find themselves more on the extremes than women do, and that there might be more men performing in the top 0.01% even if women are on average better.)
I mean that might also be a faulty premise, a bit too busy to delve into the data right now, but I'm basically just somewhat questioning the idea that every difference in outcome is a consequence of discrimination, even if I also acknowledge that there's a whole lot of past discrimination influencing current performance/resources/culture/connections (all which can influence current outcomes).
To me, this is part of a central debate regarding 'feminism/gender equality' (not so much racially, although I'm also inclined to think that there are cultural differences between averages of people of different ethnicities that can manifest in a similar way) - to what degree do we even want equality of outcome?
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On February 09 2022 21:07 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:
[quote]
Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education.
The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc. Are all differences in outcomes necessarily the consequence of discrimination, though? I'm not at all arguing that difference in outcome stems from a difference in 'natural ability' (aside from stuff like 'men are physically stronger than women'), but can't there be legitimate differences in interests that aren't necessarily related to discrimination? For example, if a certain high paying job requires working 100 hour weeks, it'd be conceivable to me that this type of job would appeal to a higher number of men than women, and that consequently, these jobs could have a higher % of men than women without any real discrimination happening? (Note that I don't at all idealize working 100 hour weeks, think that men on average work harder than women, or anything of the sort, if anything, it's the opposite. It is however my impression that men tend to find themselves more on the extremes than women do, and that there might be more men performing in the top 0.01% even if women are on average better.) I mean that might also be a faulty premise, a bit too busy to delve into the data right now, but I'm basically just somewhat questioning the idea that every difference in outcome is a consequence of discrimination, even if I also acknowledge that there's a whole lot of past discrimination influencing current performance/resources/culture/connections (all which can influence current outcomes). To me, this is part of a central debate regarding 'feminism/gender equality' (not so much racially, although I'm also inclined to think that there are cultural differences between averages of people of different ethnicities that can manifest in a similar way) - to what degree do we even want equality of outcome?
It's a fair question. I don't think you're going to achieve perfectly 'equal' representation in all fields -- there are always inherent imbalances in the system. What I think we should be striving for is equality of outcomes in aggregate -- this actually happens to a large degree in professional sports. Some have over-representation, i.e. NBA or winter sports, but in aggregate, 78% of all professional athletes are white (according to this www.zippia.com, not sure how reliable that is to be fair), which compares to about 76% of the US population being white. You could then look at wage gaps and so on, and I'm sure you'll find differences, but in terms of representation, it's probably as good as that's going to get.
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On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:On February 08 2022 13:54 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
I'm interested in a response for this as well. Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education. The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc.
But does America discriminate against black people or does America discriminate against poor people which includes an overrepresentation of those people? If you're a poor white person you're going to be going to a school that has less resources. If you're a rich black person you're going to be going to a school that has more resources. School funding in based on property taxes in most places in America. With just your zip code people can get a pretty good guess at where you'll end up.
We know that there is overrepresentation of black people in the poor category because of racist policies like red lining, but how does that change? School resources moving from local or county levels to state or federal would be a start, but you're going to have a hard time convincing the well off to give up their advantage to help the less fortunate. There is still a wave of charter school privatization going on as well which is even more concerning.
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On February 09 2022 23:37 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:
[quote]
Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education.
The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc. But does America discriminate against black people or does America discriminate against poor people which includes an overrepresentation of those people? If you're a poor white person you're going to be going to a school that has less resources. If you're a rich black person you're going to be going to a school that has more resources. School funding in based on property taxes in most places in America. With just your zip code people can get a pretty good guess at where you'll end up. We know that there is overrepresentation of black people in the poor category because of racist policies like red lining, but how does that change? School resources moving from local or county levels to state or federal would be a start, but you're going to have a hard time convincing the well off to give up their advantage to help the less fortunate. There is still a wave of charter school privatization going on as well which is even more concerning.
You're describing 'conservatism' in a nutshell.
The system is set up so the wealthy have a much higher chance of coming out on top with additional barriers for under-represented groups. Basically, it's both to your first question.
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Northern Ireland25458 Posts
On February 09 2022 21:07 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:On February 08 2022 14:42 Starlightsun wrote:
[quote]
Do most people view education as a zero sum, competitive event? I seem to see a lot of analogies to competitive sports. Maybe I am being too naive, but I thought the goal of education is to have an informed, humane and productive citizenry more than it is to weed out the weak from the strong. Later on, when people are specializing into challenging fields then a sports analogy is more appropriate, but it seems unfitting for general education.
The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field. Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc. Are all differences in outcomes necessarily the consequence of discrimination, though? I'm not at all arguing that difference in outcome stems from a difference in 'natural ability' (aside from stuff like 'men are physically stronger than women'), but can't there be legitimate differences in interests that aren't necessarily related to discrimination? For example, if a certain high paying job requires working 100 hour weeks, it'd be conceivable to me that this type of job would appeal to a higher number of men than women, and that consequently, these jobs could have a higher % of men than women without any real discrimination happening? (Note that I don't at all idealize working 100 hour weeks, think that men on average work harder than women, or anything of the sort, if anything, it's the opposite. It is however my impression that men tend to find themselves more on the extremes than women do, and that there might be more men performing in the top 0.01% even if women are on average better.) I mean that might also be a faulty premise, a bit too busy to delve into the data right now, but I'm basically just somewhat questioning the idea that every difference in outcome is a consequence of discrimination, even if I also acknowledge that there's a whole lot of past discrimination influencing current performance/resources/culture/connections (all which can influence current outcomes). To me, this is part of a central debate regarding 'feminism/gender equality' (not so much racially, although I'm also inclined to think that there are cultural differences between averages of people of different ethnicities that can manifest in a similar way) - to what degree do we even want equality of outcome?
How renumeration dovetails with what legitimate divergence in interests does exist, or what difference in interest relates to other societal roles and expectations could be where it’s at. Although whether one considers that active discrimination or something more subtle at a systemic level, or indeed how to actually identify exactly where and why differences in interests occur, well that’s rather tricky.
I think as a society we ask the wrong questions, so we tend to get the wrong answers.
The progressive answer to disparities invariably involves cramming more women into the upper echelons of traditionally male-dominated fields, where the power lies, rather than evaluating if it’s desirable that that’s where the power does lie.
In a crude sense do we improve more as a collective society with more females in boardrooms, or more jobs, including those traditionally female dominated being given both the prestige and crucially kind of money they merit?
I’m unsure, I’m sure there’s some wider aspirational trickle down across the board with the former, equally I have no great faith that a more female Wall Street or City of London would make a repeat of 2008 any less likely.
The (probably brief) reframing of the ‘unskilled worker’ or other unappreciated skilled labour into ‘essential workers’ kind of laid bare how interconnected things are and how crucial some cogs are after all.
@Zero apologies on my part if my posting on such topics is crude, I only intend to speak in generalities and trends rather than personal experience and hope I didn’t step over that particular line.
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Northern Ireland25458 Posts
On February 09 2022 12:43 Doc.Rivers wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 12:22 NewSunshine wrote:On February 09 2022 12:18 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 09 2022 12:06 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 11:29 NewSunshine wrote:
Gotta say I didn't necessarily expect the sequence of [talking about Trump's insurrection] > [arguing about CRT] > [talking about what it's like being black despite a black poster warning everyone there's some foot-in-mouth going on], but I can't say it entirely surprises me, either.
I feel like there're much better avenues of discussion this thread could be taking. Almost any of them, really. Well the sequence starting with talking about Trump's insurrection isn't that surprising since it's talked about on every page of this thread from the day it happened I thought it was primarily brought up again because of how the RNC recently trivialized it, no? Yup. The RNC tried to normalize a violent coup on democracy as "legitimate political discourse", and apparently they were onto something, because people are still carrying that torch here. And then it transitioned, about as elegantly as possible, to some folks trying to speak for black people. I should've made a fucking bingo card. Not to rehash the argument but just for the record it's not true that the RNC called the attack legitimate discourse, nor is it true that anyone here is saying that.
Did they directly say that? Well no.
Actions do tend to speak a bit louder than words so censuring their own legislators for wanting a thorough investigation etc doesn’t really speak to that stated stance.
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On February 10 2022 03:36 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2022 21:07 Liquid`Drone wrote:On February 09 2022 20:26 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 20:16 justanothertownie wrote:On February 09 2022 19:10 JimmiC wrote:On February 09 2022 19:05 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 18:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On February 09 2022 16:36 BlackJack wrote:On February 09 2022 13:04 Starlightsun wrote:On February 09 2022 07:52 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
The point of the analogy is not to say that education should be set up in a manner similar to professional sports. The point is to demonstrate the flaw in the argument that if there is an inequity in the outcome for different subsets of people then there must be inherent unfairness in the system itself. So if you use that argument then you should be prepared to explain the paradox of black people being overrepresented in the NBA when we can safely assume that black people are not holding white people down from participating. The argument that those elite athletes are just the most gifted by talent and genes might receive a permanban if it was offered to explain the overrepresentation of whites in any field.
Now I've posted here long enough to know that people are going to immediately misconstrue what I just said by saying things like "BlackJack thinks discrimination doesn't exist against black people because they have success in the NBA." To reiterate, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs. People that struggle with the logic of this might have their head explode when they take it one step further and consider the logic of the following: Just because the NBA is 80% Black also doesn't allow you to conclude that black people don't face discrimination in this field. In fact, it could still be the case that the NBA discriminates against blacks and it would be 90-95% black if they didn't. Kaboom. I mean yeah, not every unequal outcome means inherent unfairness. But surely you agree that that can and does happen in some situations. When trying to determine if early education is one of those situations, I think it just confuses things to compare it to something as different as professional basketball. I disagree with "you can't work backwards from the results to draw conclusions about the inputs" as an absolute, although yes it can lead people astray. Right. It's evidence that discrimination may exist. It's not proof that discrimination exists. Surely if people report that discrimination happens in the workplace (miriads of links, but here's a recent one www.hsph.harvard.edu, and people from under-represented groups earn less and are less represented in top paying positions (i.e. unequal outcomes), we can conclude that discrimination does indeed happen? Of course discrimination still happens. We just had like 10 pages worth of discussion based on President Biden's decision to discriminate against any potential Supreme Court nominee if they didn't have the required skin color and gender for his selection. I think it's safe to say we're quite far from from MLK's dream of not judging people by the color of their skin when even the President is doing it. It is amazing that you read that discussion, participated and came back with this conclusion inspite of everything that was said quoted and so on. We live in scary times that you still are so certain that because he picked a Black woman and stated it, that he MUST have eliminated all other people from consideration and a Black women could not possibly, or even a few, been the best choice for the newest appointment to the SJC. Is it safe to assume since you had no issues with Trump declaring his second appointment would be a woman that you are blindly partisan or is it the Blackness that offends you? Just leave it. It will be the same discussion when you come at it in this way. Again. The degree of discrimination happening right now is something that is very hard to quantify in my opinion. It's only difficult to quantify in the sense that discrimination is not being done as openly as in the past. It is, however, measurable in the resulting outcomes. We can look at representation in high paying positions, we can look at wage gap between people nominally at the same level, etc. Are all differences in outcomes necessarily the consequence of discrimination, though? I'm not at all arguing that difference in outcome stems from a difference in 'natural ability' (aside from stuff like 'men are physically stronger than women'), but can't there be legitimate differences in interests that aren't necessarily related to discrimination? For example, if a certain high paying job requires working 100 hour weeks, it'd be conceivable to me that this type of job would appeal to a higher number of men than women, and that consequently, these jobs could have a higher % of men than women without any real discrimination happening? (Note that I don't at all idealize working 100 hour weeks, think that men on average work harder than women, or anything of the sort, if anything, it's the opposite. It is however my impression that men tend to find themselves more on the extremes than women do, and that there might be more men performing in the top 0.01% even if women are on average better.) I mean that might also be a faulty premise, a bit too busy to delve into the data right now, but I'm basically just somewhat questioning the idea that every difference in outcome is a consequence of discrimination, even if I also acknowledge that there's a whole lot of past discrimination influencing current performance/resources/culture/connections (all which can influence current outcomes). To me, this is part of a central debate regarding 'feminism/gender equality' (not so much racially, although I'm also inclined to think that there are cultural differences between averages of people of different ethnicities that can manifest in a similar way) - to what degree do we even want equality of outcome? How renumeration dovetails with what legitimate divergence in interests does exist, or what difference in interest relates to other societal roles and expectations could be where it’s at. Although whether one considers that active discrimination or something more subtle at a systemic level, or indeed how to actually identify exactly where and why differences in interests occur, well that’s rather tricky. I think as a society we ask the wrong questions, so we tend to get the wrong answers. The progressive answer to disparities invariably involves cramming more women into the upper echelons of traditionally male-dominated fields, where the power lies, rather than evaluating if it’s desirable that that’s where the power does lie.
In a crude sense do we improve more as a collective society with more females in boardrooms, or more jobs, including those traditionally female dominated being given both the prestige and crucially kind of money they merit?
I’m unsure, I’m sure there’s some wider aspirational trickle down across the board with the former, equally I have no great faith that a more female Wall Street or City of London would make a repeat of 2008 any less likely. The (probably brief) reframing of the ‘unskilled worker’ or other unappreciated skilled labour into ‘essential workers’ kind of laid bare how interconnected things are and how crucial some cogs are after all. @Zero apologies on my part if my posting on such topics is crude, I only intend to speak in generalities and trends rather than personal experience and hope I didn’t step over that particular line.
The framework of racial capitalism addresses this kind of stuff. It recognizes racism as inextricable from capitalism and the absurdity of aspiring for diversity among oppressors. When combined with the feminism from folks like the Combahee River Collective we're able to get a much clearer picture of the problems and explanations people are ostensibly seeking.
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EPT
