The Assault on Empiricism
tabletmag.com
The Assault on Empiricism
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#2I don’t know, the article says people today are just ignoring “the data”, but you can make “the data” support almost any story you want.
You can (as this article does) point to crime statistics and say “see look, black people commit more crimes that’s why they are arrested by the police more”. Or you can say “look, the police are more likely to arrest black people even for minor offenses, which accounts for a difference in arrest statistics.” Same data, different story.
I also take issue with how some of the data in the article is presented. It claims with certainty that exactly 17 unarmed black men were killed by the police last year, but data on police shootings are notoriously unreliable. The article doesn’t even address this issue.
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#3I don’t know, the article says people today are just ignoring “the data”, but you can make “the data” support almost any story you want. You can (as this article does) point to crime statistics and say “see look, black people commit more crimes that’s why they are arrested by the police more”. Or you can say “look, the police are more likely to arrest black people even for minor offenses, which accounts for a differe…
Not the author, but even if 17 is undercounted, it seemed their argument was more about the perception that the number was closer to 1700; which is patently ridiculous. And the propensity for a single political team to believe that.
Or, just as ridiculously, something like 2/3's of republicans believe The Big Lie(tm). Granting that an American election could be stolen, we might put the odds closer to 1%, but there is a perception that it is closer to 99%.
I believe what the author is getting at is how far our perceptions our from actual facts on the ground reality. And further what is concerning that most people who are aware of this don't even seem to mind.
Personally, I'm not sure what else we would expect, apes gotta have faith in something after all.
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#4I mean given all this talk about "truth" this author might want to have a look, in a proper library, as to what Critical Race Theory entails. I'm sure much interesting empirical evidence can be found in the work of e.g. Crenshaw.
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#5I'm almost always wary of someone labelling discourse as left-right, especially a sociology professor.
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#6I'm almost always wary of someone labelling discourse as left-right, especially a sociology professor.
Is that because sociologists overwhelmingly lean left so emphasizing their political leanings highlights the biased nature of the field that's perpetuated by professionals like you who have a stake in the general public viewing the field as non-partisan?
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#7Considering he's been so much about getting number right, he got several things quite wrong himself. He says:
"Virtually all metrics measuring life expectancy, IQ, governmental corruption, poverty, racism, and women’s rights have been improving for decades—but no one seems to know it."
According to the US census bureau poverty rates in the US have pretty much remained the same over the last 50 years [1]. While life expectancy has gone up. It actually has increased much slower in the US than in comparable countries [2] and did decline/stagnate in the last 5-10 years (not counting 2020 where there was a significant drop). Also IQ is correct over the long run, it's been not so straight forward over the last 10 years. Income/wealth inequality ( he doesn't mention) should probably also be in that list and has been declining.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States...
[2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#8Considering he's been so much about getting number right, he got several things quite wrong himself. He says: "Virtually all metrics measuring life expectancy, IQ, governmental corruption, poverty, racism, and women’s rights have been improving for decades—but no one seems to know it." According to the US census bureau poverty rates in the US have pretty much remained the same over the last 50 years [1]. While life e…
That should have said income inequality has been increasing
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#9I'm almost always wary of someone labelling discourse as left-right, especially a sociology professor.
To explain my reasoning (the person responding to me seem to question my motives).
Categorizing things simply into "left/right" and saying "the left/right" does this or that... Grossly simplifies complex issues and paints a world in black and white that is really many shades of gray. I lived primarily in places with multiparty systems and while they can generally can be put on a rough spectrum from right to left, positions on particular issues can vary significantly from that.
Moreover, left and right are relative measures so when I read about some "far left" policy in the US, that often is considered a stance of the moderate right of centre parties here. Similarly some of the individual freedom stances of the "right" in the US have more overlap with parties on the left side of the spectrum here.
All that to say, that the world is more complicated than left and right and I expect a sociology professor to be aware of the nuance, instead of peddle to the politics.
Re: The Assault on Empiricism
#10I don’t know, the article says people today are just ignoring “the data”, but you can make “the data” support almost any story you want. You can (as this article does) point to crime statistics and say “see look, black people commit more crimes that’s why they are arrested by the police more”. Or you can say “look, the police are more likely to arrest black people even for minor offenses, which accounts for a differe…
The issue isn't whether this number is precisely correct, it's that there is simply no concerted effort by the activists to pursue it. Just like how advocates for the invasion of Iraq were perfectly happy to allow Americans in 2002 to dramatically inflate their own sense of danger from terrorism, activists have an "ends justify the means" mentality of not being concerned with data unless it supports their cause, independent of whether said data reflects truth.
The article links to the Washington Post's database, but a separate project that is run by activists who are relatively data literate is this one: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
I've dug through their dataset, and it's not bad. They tend to be a little too biased in the sense where they default to assuming unarmed or "allegedly armed", assuming that police reports of suspects having a weapon aren't trustworthy, which is understandable, but unscientific.
Also, no flag for "resisting arrest". An unspoken reality in these activist circles is that getting killed by police when NOT resisting arrest is a relatively rare event.
One of the stark things that stands out when looking through these databases is how the media's narrative bias has made non-Black victims of police shootings invisible. Felons with a violent history who are killed by police while resisting arrest get more media attention if their Black than do Latino victims of police shootings that were completely unjustified. The average HN reader looking at this comment can't name a single Latino person killed by police in the last 5 years. This is absurd and unjust, because there's no way that every Latino killed by cops is done so in a just manner, and without media pressure, the cops who killed them won't be brought to justice. Likewise for the single most horrific police killing I've seen (other than Floyd), Daniel Shaver. The cop who killed him got off with an early retirement and full pension.