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anonymous

America's Epidemic of Enlightened Racism - 0 views

www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/...epidemic-of-enlightened-racism

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • the summary dismissal of the column – without substantive rebuttals to claims that are so racist as to seem to be beneath public discourse – means that he can play the role of victim of political correctness gone amok.
  • Derbyshire claims that his ideas are backed up by “methodological inquiries in the human sciences,” and includes links to sites that provide all the negative sociological data about black people you’d ever need to justify your fear of them, including the claim that “blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.”
  • So he can cast himself as someone who had the courage to tell it like it is – with all the sociological data backing him up – only to be punished for this by the reactionary hypocrites who control the public discourse.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Once again, he can tell himself, those quick to cry “racism” have prevented an honest conversation about race.
  • If Derbyshire were a lone crank, none of it would matter much. But he’s not.
  • they see them selves as advocates of a sort of enlightened racism that doesn’t shrink from calling a spade a spade but isn’t inherently unjust.
  • Enlightened racism is meant to escape accusations of being racist in the pejorative sense via two avenues: the first is the appeal to data I have just described. The second is a loophole to the effect that exceptions are to be made for individuals.
  • They could care less about skin color, they say; it really is the content of people’s characters that concerns them, and that content really does suffer more in blacks than whites.
  • Because they are so widespread and aim to restore the respectability of interracial contempt, these attempts at an enlightened racism deserve a rebuttal. Especially in light of the fact that those who hold such views often see themselves as the champions of reasons over sentiment, when in fact their views are deeply irrational.
  • First, a history of slavery, segregation, and (yes) racism, means that African American communities suffer from some social problems at higher rates than whites.
  • But that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of black people – statistically, and not just based on politically correct fuzzy thinking – are employed, not on welfare, have no criminal record, and so on and so forth.
  • So the kind of thinking that enlightened racists see as their way of staring a hard reality right in the face turns out to be just a silly rationalization using weak statistical differences.
  • In other words, one’s chances of being a victim of violent crime is already so low, that even accounting  for higher crime rates among African Americans, one’s chance of being a victim of violent crime by an African American remains very low.
  • The argument that Derbyshire and those like him make is that we are justified in treating an entire population as a threat – in essentially shunning them in the most degrading way – because one’s chances of being harmed by any given member of that population, while very low, is not quite as low as one’s chances of being harmed by the general population.
  • It’s an argument that starts out with sociological data and quickly collapses to reveal the obvious underlying motivation: unenlightened racism of the coarsest variety.
  • Second, there is the issue of character: because this, after all, is what really motivates these attempts at establishing an enlightened racism that gives individuals the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging the truth about general cultural differences.
  • I think it suffices to respond in the following way: people tend to mistake their discomfort with the cultural differences of a group with that group’s inferiority. (They also tend to conflate their political and economic advantages with psychological superiority).
  • If they respond with sociological data about education and birth rates and all the rest, we only have to respond that like crime rates, they’re exactly the sort of consequences one would expect from a history of oppression and even then fail to justify racist stereotypes.
  • The fact is, that where we pick a white person or black person at random, the same truths hold: they very likely have a high school diploma, and probably do not have a bachelor’s degree. They’re probably employed and not on welfare. They’ve probably never been to prison, and they almost certainly are not going to harm you. These are the broad statistical truths that simply do not vary enough between races to justify the usual stereotypes.
  • So here is the hard truth that advocates of enlightened racism need to face: their sociological data and ideas about black character, intelligence and morality are post-hoc rationalizations of their discomfort with average cultural differences between whites and blacks.
  • The fact that they have black friends and political heroes, or give individuals the benefit of the doubt as long as they are “well-socialized” and “intelligent” just means that they can suppress that discomfort if the cultural differences are themselves lessened to a tolerable degree.
  • And so they need to disabuse themselves of the idea that true, unenlightened racism is a term very narrowly defined: that it requires a personal hatred of individual black people based on their skin color despite evidence of redeeming personal qualities.
  • What they think of as redeeming personal qualities are just qualities that tend to make them less uncomfortable. But the hatred of black culture and post-hoc rationalizations of this hatred using sociological data are just what racism is.
  • This is not to say that mere discomfort with cultural difference is the same thing as racism (or xenophobia). Such discomfort is unavoidable: You’d have this sort of discomfort if you tried live in a foreign country for a while, and you’d be tempted by the same sorts of ideas about how stupid and mean people are for not doing things the way you’re used to.
  • strange customs become “stupid” because they reflect less of ourselves back to us than we’re used to.
  • That lack of reflection is felt not only as a distressing deprivation of social oxygen, but as an affront, a positive discourtesy.
  • The mature way to deal with such discomfort is to treat it as of a kind with social anxiety in general: people are strange, when you’re a stranger. Give it some time, and that changes. But it won’t change if you develop hefty rationalizations about the inferiority and dangerousness of others and treat these rationalizations as good reasons for cultural paranoia.
  • Americans seem to have difficulty engaging in the required reflective empathy, and imagining how they would feel if they knew that every time they walked into a public space a large number of a dominant racial majority looked at them with fear and loathing. They might, under such circumstances, have a bad day.
  • anonymous on 28 Mar 14
     
    From Nick Lalone in Buzz. "John Derbyshire has been fired from the National Review for an openly racist column on how white people should advise their children with respect to "blacks": for the most part, avoid them. Because on the whole, they are unintelligent, antisocial, hostile, and dangerous. Or as he puts it, avoid "concentrations of blacks" or places "swamped with blacks," and leave a place when "the number of blacks suddenly swells," and keep moving when "accosted by a strange black" in the street. The language is alarmingly dehumanizing: black people come in "swamps" and "concentrations" (and presumably also in hordes, swarms, and just plain gangs). And it's clearly meant to be a dismissal of the notion - much talked about recently in light of the Trayvon Martin shooting - that African Americans should be able to walk down the street without being shunned, much less attacked."
anonymous

Anti-Intellectualism in Boy Scout Badges - 1 views

noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com/...lectualism-in-boy-scout-badges

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • In other words, because women do well in school, it’s no longer manly to do so.   So masculinity becomes increasingly associated with anti-intellectualism, thus the “intellectual passivity” Denny describes.
  • And don’t make a mistake: anti-intellectualism is clearly a non-progressive ideal. Looking up the answer in the back of the book means “trust authority, listen to what your superiors say, don’t bother to look into it for yourself, just believe what we tell you.” It comes directly from the tradition that values, above all, children shutting up and being obedient to adults. Being told to research it yourself says “make up your own mind, learning things is your responsibility, don’t take anyone’s word for it, if your mother says she loves you check it out.” And it comes from the newer idea that children should try to become their own people.
  • The thing is: feminism made Girl Scouts question all the gendered bullshit. Instead of merit badges that told girls how to have a dinner party, feminism made it so that girls had merit badges that taught them about geology or astronomy, because dammit girls should be allowed to know things about space and rocks and not just proper table settings.
  • anonymous on 12 Mar 12
     
    Sociological Images has an interesting post on the gender differences between Boy Scot and Girl Scout manuals, one bit of which really sticks out to me.
anonymous

Somehow I Am Now Wishing I Had Read More Nietszche When I Was Younger... - Grasping Rea... - 0 views

delong.typepad.com/...tszche-when-i-was-younger.html

politics criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 15 Oct 10
     
    "Last week I spent some time with a group of people I don't usually spend much time talking to. They were not rich--by which I don't mean that they had overstretched themselves by buying a seven-figure principal residence but rather that they weren't rich: their household income was in the five or, for some of them, perhaps the very low six figures. And (which is unusual for Berkeley) they were not lefties, neither cultural nor sociological. They were deeply concerned with the future of our country. And they were desperate to figure out how to engage in effective political action--but had few illusions that the politicians they would vote for in November were their kind of people with their interests at heart." By Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality with Both Hands on October 13, 2010.
anonymous

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...lead-crime-link-gasoline

shared by anonymous on 06 Jan 13 - Cached
  • More generally, we all have a deep stake in affirming the power of deliberate human action. When Reyes once presented her results to a conference of police chiefs, it was, unsurprisingly, a tough sell. "They want to think that what they do on a daily basis matters," she says. "And it does." But it may not matter as much as they think.  
  • Another reason that lead doesn't get the attention it deserves is that too many people think the problem was solved years ago. They don't realize how much lead is still hanging around, and they don't understand just how much it costs us.
  • So in round numbers that's about $20 billion per year for two decades. But the benefits would be huge.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • By Mielke and Zahran's estimates, if we adopted the soil standard of a country like Norway (roughly 100 ppm or less), it would bring about $30 billion in annual returns from the cognitive benefits alone (higher IQs, and the resulting higher lifetime earnings).
  • Estimates here are even more difficult, but Mark Kleiman suggests that a 10 percent drop in crime—a goal that seems reasonable if we get serious about cleaning up the last of our lead problem—could produce benefits as high as $150 billion per year.
  • There's a flip side to this too. At the same time that we should reassess the low level of attention we pay to the remaining hazards from lead, we should probably also reassess the high level of attention we're giving to other policies. Chief among these is the prison-building boom that started in the mid-'70s.
  • There's always an excuse not to spend more money on a policy as tedious-sounding as lead abatement—budgets are tight, and research on a problem as complex as crime will never be definitive—but the association between lead and crime has, in recent years, become pretty overwhelming. If you gave me the choice, right now, of spending $20 billion less on prisons and cops and spending $20 billion more on getting rid of lead, I'd take the deal in a heartbeat. Not only would solving our lead problem do more than any prison to reduce our crime problem, it would produce smarter, better-adjusted kids in the bargain. There's nothing partisan about this, nothing that should appeal more to one group than another. It's just common sense. Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.
  • anonymous on 06 Jan 13
     
    "Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied promising methods of controlling crime, suggests that because criminologists are basically sociologists, they look for sociological explanations, not medical ones. My own sense is that interest groups probably play a crucial role: Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the '60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue. And while lead abatement could be big business for contractors and builders, for some reason their trade groups have never taken it seriously."
anonymous

You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You | Code and Culture - 0 views

codeandculture.wordpress.com/...youbrokepeerreview

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • no more anonymous co-authors making your paper worse with a bunch of non sequiturs or footnotes with hedging disclaimers.
  • The thing is though that optimistic as I am about the new journal, I don’t think it will replace the incumbent journals overnight and so we still need to fix review at the incumbent journals.
  • So fixing peer review doesn’t begin with you, the author, yelling at your computer “FFS reviewer #10, maybe that’s how you would have done it, but it’s not your paper”
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • Nor, realistically, can fixing peer review happen from the editors telling you to go ahead and ignore comments 2, 5, and 6 of reviewer #6.
  • First, it would be an absurd amount of work
  • Second, from the editor’s perspective the chief practical problem is recruiting reviewers
  • they don’t want to alienate the reviewers by telling them that half their advice sucks in their cover letter
  • Rather, fixing peer review has to begin with you, the reviewer, telling yourself “maybe I would have done it another way myself, but it’s not my paper.”
  • You need to adopt a mentality of “is it good how the author did it” rather than “how could this paper be made better” (read: how would I have done it). That is the whole of being a good reviewer, the rest is commentary. That said, here’s the commentary.
  • Do not brainstorm
  • Responding to a research question by brainstorming possibly relevant citations or methods
  • First, many brainstormed ideas are bad.
  • When I give you advice as a peer reviewer there is a strong presumption that you take the advice even if it’s mediocre
  • Second, many brainstormed ideas are confusing.
  • When I give you advice in my office you can ask follow-up questions
  • When I give advice as a peer reviewer it’s up to you to hope that you read the entrails in a way that correctly augurs the will of the peer reviewers.
  • Being specific has the ancillary benefit that it’s costly to the reviewer which should help you maintain the discipline to thin the mindfart herd stampeding into the authors’ revisions.
  • Third, ideas are more valuable at the beginning of a project than at the end of it.
  • When I give you advice about your new project you can use it to shape the way the project develops organically. When I give it to you as a reviewer you can only graft it on after the fact.
  • it is essential to keep in mind that no matter how highly you think of your own expertise and opinions, you remember that the author doesn’t want to hear it.
  • time is money. It usually takes me an amount of time that is at least the equivalent of a course release to turn-around an R&R and at most schools a course release in turn is worth about $10,000 to $30,000 if you’re lucky enough to raise the grants to buy them.
  • Distinguish demands versus suggestions versus synapses that happened to fire as you were reading the paper
  • A lot of review comments ultimately boil down to some variation on “this reminds me of this citation” or “this research agenda could go in this direction.” OK, great. Now ask yourself, is it a problem that this paper does not yet do these things or are these just possibilities you want to share with the author?
  • As a related issue, demonstrate some rhetorical humility.
  • There’s wrong and then there’s difference of opinion
  • On quite a few methodological and theoretical issues there is a reasonable range of opinion. Don’t force the author to weigh in on your side.
  • For instance, consider Petev ASR 2013. The article relies heavily on McPherson et al ASR 2006, which is an extremely controversial article (see here, here, and here).
  • One reaction to this would be to say the McPherson et al paper is refuted and ought not be cited. However Petev summarizes the controversy in footnote 10 and then in footnote 17 explains why his own data is a semi-independent (same dataset, different variables) corroboration of McPherson et al.
  • These footnotes acknowledge a nontrivial debate about one of the article’s literature antecedents and then situates the paper within the debate.
  • Theoretical debates are rarely an issue of decisive refutation or strictly cumulative knowledge but rather at any given time there’s a reasonable range of opinions and you shouldn’t demand that the author go with your view but at most that they explore its implications if they were to.
  • There are cases where you fall on one side of a theoretical or methodological gulf and the author on another to the extent that you feel that you can’t really be fair.
  • you as the reviewer have to decide if you’re going to engage in what philosophers of science call “the demarcation problem” and sociologists of science call “boundary work” or you’re going to recuse yourself from the review.
  • Don’t try to turn the author’s theory section into a lit review.
  • The theory section is not about demonstrating basic competence or reciting a creedal confession and so it does not need to discuss every book or article ever published on the subject or even just the things important enough to appear on your graduate syllabus or field exam reading list.
  • If the submission reminds you of a citation that’s relevant to the author’s subject matter, think about whether it would materially affect the argument.
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "I'm as excited as anybody about Sociological Science as it promises a clean break from the "developmental" model of peer review by moving towards an entirely evaluative model. That is, no more anonymous co-authors making your paper worse with a bunch of non sequiturs or footnotes with hedging disclaimers. (The journal will feature frequent comment and replies, which makes debate about the paper a public dialog rather than a secret hostage negotiation). The thing is though that optimistic as I am about the new journal, I don't think it will replace the incumbent journals overnight and so we still need to fix review at the incumbent journals."
anonymous

Cul-de-sacs are killing America - 3 views

theweek.com/...ul-de-sacs-are-killing-america

shared by anonymous on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The crux of his argument isn't new: Cul-de-sacs discourage mobility and increase our dependence on cars to get around. Not surprisingly, the health of Americans who have chosen to live outside of city centers is slowly eroding. These maze-like neighborhoods "engineer their travel behavior," which studies have shown can have tangible effects in several areas of their lives
  • Consider Atlanta. The average working adult in Atlanta's suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That's 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people's environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city. Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta's downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day. [Slate]
  • suburban group-think has largely deviated from the practical grid layout featured in older, bigger cities
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Organizing neighborhoods in a lattice shape isn't just less confusing; it also encourages different kinds of mobility. Grids encourage walking. Perpendicular intersections make life easier for bike commuters. Streets that don't twist and turn make public transportation like buses and rail more viable commuting options, thus diminishing our over-reliance on cars.
  • Most of the oldest cities in America — not to mention the oldest capitals in Europe, or in the Roman Empire, for that matter — were laid out in neat, densely interconnected grids that enabled people to get around before cars came along... These communities had what Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, calls "location efficiency," a rough analogue to the idea of energy efficiency that captures the extent to which your job, your grocery store, and your favorite pub are all convenient to you. Around the turn of the century, U.S. cities of all sizes built thousands of miles of railway for streetcars that made the urban grid even more efficient. "It happened everywhere, it happened brilliantly," Bernstein says, "and we threw it away." [The Atlantic Cities]
  • Indeed, deviating from the tightly woven grid pattern creates all kinds of impractical weirdness. The planners behind the labyrinthine suburbs sprouting up in Las Vegas are quickly running out of names for their streets, as Willy Staley pointed out at The Awl. Incidentally, the street names therein have already reached their comically absurd end, like Big Bird Court or Tupac Lane.
  • It isn't exactly a secret, either, that urban flight has all sorts of psychological and sociological drawbacks, engendering seclusion, a lack of diversity and shared ideas, and a "disassociation from the reality of contact with other people," as The New York Times put it in 1999.
  • "The way we organize most cities actually encourages individuals to make choices that make everyone's life harder," Frank told Montgomery. "The system fails because it promises rewards for irrational behavior."
  • anonymous on 12 Dec 13
     
    "A big house with a yard is a shining emblem of the American Dream. And cul-de-sacs, the culmination of winding roads that slice suburbia into space-maximizing lots, are just one mechanism suburban planners use to entice homeowners into buying property. They create space, make us feel safe, and allow for conveniences like large driveways."
anonymous

For Goodness' Sake - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...deWaal-t.html

humanity sociology altruism layscience

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • “The Price of Altruism” is about far more than Price himself. It covers the entire 150-year history of scientists’ researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?
  • Haldane was one of the architects of the now familiar “gene’s-eye view” of evolution. Looked at from the gene’s perspective, altruism seems a little less perplexing. When an organism sacrifices its life to save a relative, it helps perpetuate the genes they share.
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    "[The book] is about far more than Price himself. It covers the entire 150-year history of scientists' researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?" By Frans de Waal at The New York Times Book Review on July 1, 2010.
anonymous

How facts backfire - 0 views

www.boston.com/...how_facts_backfire

humanity sociology layscience science

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    "It's one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789" But is this true? By Joe Keohane at The Boston Globe on July 11, 2010.
anonymous

American Psycho - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ook-club-american-psycho-ellis

sociology

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    "Week three: Bret Easton Ellis on the misreading of American Psycho" By Bret Easton Ellis at The Guardian on July 10, 2010.
anonymous

What Futurists Actually Do - 0 views

www.good.is/...what-futurists-actually-do

longnow technology futurists

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • This is a shame, because during the second half of the 20th century and continuing through the past decade, professional thinking about the future has grown from a niche field dominated by military strategists and predictioneers into a diverse global practice.
  • The Institute for the Future’s work is heavily influenced by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. By looking at the convergence of social and technological forces that shape our communities, we help individuals and organizations make better, more informed decisions about the future. 
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    "...during the second half of the 20th century and continuing through the past decade, professional thinking about the future has grown from a niche field dominated by military strategists and predictioneers into a diverse global practice." By Mathias Crawford at GOOD Blog on July 13, 2010.
anonymous

The Power Law in a Free Society - 0 views

sophistpundit.blogspot.com/...power-law-in-free-society.html

power longnow

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • If an individual's success in getting their practice adopted more widely increases the probability of getting another practice of theirs widely adopted "by even a fractional amount", this will result in a power law distribution in which a tiny minority of individuals account for the vast majority of the practices that end up gaining wider adoption.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 10
       
      It seems that there is an iterative process at work. Your credibility effectively broadens other peoples' attention on *other* areas. Makes me think about how fame might be some sociologic-a-mal manifestation. And junk.
  • I began thinking of Hayek's engine of cultural evolution in a binary manner
  • but the reality is much richer than this.  This interaction occurs at every conceivable scale.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • it makes sense that people would keep an eye on them just in case they come up with something worthwhile again.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 10
       
      See above annotation.
  • The larger the scale, the more compressed the power law. But there is a power law at every scale--it is simply more dramatic at a larger scale than it is at a smaller one.
  • could go from being in the woods one day to being front and center the next
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 10
       
      An exciting prospect. It certainly sparks we techie-peoples' interest a lot. :)
  • Their freedom makes it more likely that they will generate some good practices if for no other reason than that they will generate more practices total.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 10
       
      This is the salient point, it would seem.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Adam Gurri at Sophistpundit on April 29, 2010.
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