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‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#561

Post by lliamander »

ineedasername wrote: post #450
rayiner wrote: post #4

I like the More in Common Project. But it overlooks the disproportionate representation of the extremists in our institutions. This happened at my alma matter earlier this year: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator... . They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 It’s not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people a…

That school appears to be abandoning the exam in favor of GPA. I certainly don't know their own data on the utility of the test vs. GPA in predicting student success, but I do know that data with respect to college admissions: HS GPA is consistently as good or slightly better than standardized test scores. Even if the balance is tilted the other way for this particular magnet school, it's quite inflammatory to claim…

GPA seems much more likely to be entangled with various aspects of privilege than SAT.

For instance, I attended a HS where GPA was graded on a 4.0 scale, even for advanced placement and college credit classes. The consequence is that you had a bunch of "Valedictorians" with perfect GPAs that attended spitwad classes.

Other schools I've seen grade on a 5.0 (or even a 6.0 I believe) system, to differentiate.

I would also suspect that GPA is more easily influenced by parental involvement than SAT (or just a plain IQ test).

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#562

Post by charlesu »

rayiner wrote: post #460
charlesu wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized tests could also be considered a way for picking the right kind of person: namely, people who know that standardized tests are something to prepare for. I’ve tutored students at both elite and underperforming high schools. Students at elite schools, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, are highly aware of the importance of standardized tests. Some of the underperforming high schools don’t even adm…

> The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. My high school was 70% Asian. Projections are that getting rid of the entrance exam will drop it to about 30% Asian. (Ironically, the group that will benefit the most from the lottery is white people.) The elite schools a…

> Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc.

I would argue that understanding the importance of the SAT is a form of cultural competency.

> Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.

We shouldn't limit the number of Asians at top universities or companies. But we shouldn't be content with a system that perpetuates a status quo built on our country's original sin. We have to do something proactively. Maybe it's reparations. Maybe it's universal pre-kindergarten or means-tested baby bonds. But it's something instead of nothing.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#563

Post by lliamander »

jkingsbery wrote: post #209
barry-cotter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first describes a quasi-religious ritual in which all participants ritually affirm that they are unworthy sinners, racists. Those who believe get the satisfaction of publicly proclaiming their sin, signaling their superiority over the outsiders. Those who don’t believe have their faces rubbed in the fact that other people have the power to make them lie in public about who they are and what they believe. It shows…

The comparison to religious rituals is interesting. As someone who is Catholic, this looks to me sort of like an attempt at a group confession, but at least in the Catholic tradition we perform examinations of conscience [1] and go to confession [2] and we are told to come to terms with what we actually did wrong. You don't get away with some vague acknowledgement of being a sinner. As the Catechism says, "Through su…

It's arguably a Protestant heresy (specifically a variant of the Social Gospel) which removes God, Jesus, and the forgiveness of sins.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#564

Post by srtjstjsj »

blm202021 wrote: post #414
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the…

I'm going to retort, specifically in the context of a very important issue in the US currently: the BLM movement. Contrary to popular thought, the "liberal" media utterly failed minorities. The abuse of minorities in the US spans generations and has consistently been relegated to the margins of mainstream news. It has been typical in the US -- for decades -- for the NY Times to grant a single death in Israel front pa…

My parent is not telling the truth.

NYT has a "brown" person and an African-American on the current board of directors:

https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Rogers_Jr.

Editorial Board has an African-American (Brent Staples: Education, Criminal Justice, Economics) with 30year tenure .

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/opinion/editorialbo...

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#565

Post by srtjstjsj »

Veen wrote: post #528
wnissen wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget the boards, the LA Times has one (1) black reporter out of 90 covering local news. LA is 8% black. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/874530954/rancor-erupts-in-la...

I will not "Forget the boards". blm202021 made a factual claim to back up their argument. I want to know whether that claim is true.

It's false.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24903200

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#566

Post by shadowgovt »

JamesBarney wrote: post #531
shadowgovt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue a non-diverse team will hit is getting blind-sided by lack of perspective on emerging phenomena. Given that aspect, I don't find it surprising that the benefits from a diverse team could exceed the benefits between the difference in average and good leadership. Both an average and a good leader will drown the same army if they lead them into a swamp because they've never seen a swamp before.

A blue collar factory worker, a harvard grad management consultant, and a business researcher who are all white males try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation. A black woman, a white man, and Asian woman who all graduated from Harvard and worked for McKinsey try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation. I wouldn't be surprised if the more diverse group came up with a better sol…

No disagreement here, but if we're talking non-contrived examples, actual facial recognition cameras for video conferencing have gotten all the way to sold on store shelves with an inability to recognize black faces.

I think it's fair to assume that had there been at least one black individual in the development pipeline, the company that made that camera would have avoided an embarrassing mistake.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#567

Post by shadowgovt »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #536
shadowgovt wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that change the normal interaction dynamic?

I generally try to avoid racist people, because they'll treat me and many of my friends poorly. That's what "racism" meant in the culture I was brought up in - a racist person was by definition one who treated certain races poorly. Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me…

So it's a matter of definition, not behavior. Because the point of unconscious bias training is to help people see the ways in which they are racist even if they don't think of themselves as racist.

In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#568

Post by darawk »

shadowgovt wrote: post #469
maxwindiff wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benefitting from structural privileges is very different from being a racist though.

In computer security, we often talk about the lack of distinction between malice and ignorance---if the security system is bad, it doesn't matter if the attacker is intent on causing harm or merely innocently curious and hack-sawing away through your computer security for fun. The outcome is the same. I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.

"Ism" is a suffix that implies a philosophy. An ism is a suite of beliefs. Anything that is unconscious is, by definition, not an ism. Racism refers to people with a philosophy of racial hierarchy, or ideas about race that evoke or imply such a philosophy.

For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#569

Post by lliamander »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #115
ericmay wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that sense we're all 'racist' to some degree and its important to acknowledge that so as to overcome it. No. I reject this. No matter how many times you or others tell me that I’m racist and can’t help it, and if I just pray... I mean take enough sanctioned training courses it’ll go away I will not partake. Period. Nobody is racist until proven otherwise, or racist until they’ve taken enough unconscious bias tra…

>No. I reject this. No matter how many times you or others tell me that I’m racist and can’t help it, and if I just pray... I mean take enough sanctioned training courses it’ll go away I will not partake. Period. Nobody is racist until proven otherwise, or racist until they’ve taken enough unconscious bias training courses. That’s something you and others are making up to deal with your own insecurities and racism. B…

Political activists regularly equivocate between "racism as unconscious bias", "racism as benefiting from systemic forces", and "racism a overt discrimination" at will, going to whatever definition is expedient to achieving their tactical aims. It's not a truth-seeking process, it's psychological manipulation. A growing minority of people are recognizing those tactics for what they are and rightly rejecting them.

And for the record, unconscious bias training has not been shown to have any correlation with actual discriminatory behavior, and the the researchers who developed the test reject how it is being used in these training sessions.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#570

Post by shadowgovt »

Reelin wrote: post #527
shadowgovt wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning" The entire point of the courses I've seen is to bring people awareness of unconscious bias and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of error to awareness of the potential for such error. And unconscious bias doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior.

Disclaimer: I realize the below could be interpreted in an inflammatory manner. I DON'T MEAN IT THAT WAY. I just find it absolutely unbelievable that someone could honestly claim not to see the clear religious parallels here. The entire point of the [bible camp] I've seen is to bring people awareness of [unconscious sinning] and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of [sin] to awareness of the potent…

The parallel is obvious and I fail to see your point.

Original sin is a concept couched in Christian mythology. Unconscious bias is a concept derived from statistical study and observation. The similarity is that unconscious bias, like original sin, appears to be innate to the human existence---a byproduct of the way we think about the world, the thousands of quick decisions we make subconsciously to go about our days. The parallel doesn't make it untrue.

The entire point of some exhibits in science museums I've seen is to bring people awareness of optical illusions and help them transition from not knowing that the human eye has some fascinating corner case failure modes to awareness of the existence of those failure modes. And the eye being imperfect doesn't make it "worthless," it's a pretty ordinary side effect of evolution in the context where those failure modes are rare to observe.

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