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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Culturalists confuse cause and effect, arguing that lack of social mobility among black youth is a product of their culture rather than the other way around.

I recognize this pattern. This is what happens when both sides of an argument perceive at least part of a feedback loop, but neither side perceives the feedback loop itself.

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Then both sides yell at each other, both playing the racism card on the other which ensures that their positions entrench because they can't afford to listen to those racists over there, governments left without any effective guidance pick whichever allows them to politic better with no regard for whether it actually work, which inevitably ends up further feeding the feedback loop instead of shutting it down due to the second-order impacts their ineffective interventions have due to the fact they don't consider that they are working in a domain with a feedback loop instead of simple forces that don't interact, and it all just gets worse.

I wish more disciplines other than physics and mechanical engineers would be introduced to the idea that feedback loops are the norm and things that can be modelled with "simple first-order forces" are the exception. This misconception does so very, very much damage to us.

The social sciences in the US don't really understand time (yes, it's crazy but true). They see social dynamics as happening between forces instantaneously, with all the nuance of whether something happens first or last completely washed out of their regression.

Oh -- sociologists aren't necessarily as smart as physicists and mechanical engineers, ...

This was one thing I was starting to really dislike about the article - as if they hadn't quite plugged the output into the input. It's rather a chicken and egg - it was obviously started by many years of oppression, but now both the culture and the lack of social mobility are cause and effect - it's a big cycle, that needs to be tackled on both fronts not individually - black culture is a huge rebellion against the norms perpetrated by the square America, the same America that has locked them out of it, and in doing so making the only dignified reaction to reject it. Of course a disillusioned youth is going to ignore an education that is perceived as teaching culturally irrelevant principles and skills.

An (sort of) example from here in the UK is that in a local comprehensive school, teachers were getting a lot of flak for having less great English results than the local Catholic Grammar school. This completely ignored the fact that the vast majority of the intake at the comprehensive were people who did not speak English at home/spoke it as a second language, whereas of course the grammar school had their pick of the white, middle class students who'd passed the entrance exam. This of course is one in a multitude of reasons why school league tables are awful, but that's a tangent for another time.

You might be interested in reading this blog post which made adjustments to education statistics for that exact thing: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Another interesting read. Not sure where they were going with the anti-liberal tangent, but ignoring that, it's quite a clever look at things. I would say that it needs to be a bit more in-depth than simply discounting 1st/2nd generation immigrants, but as I said, interesting nonetheless.

This debate makes me think of two engineers arguing whether the most important thing in a car are the spark plugs or the fuel injection system. Every time something goes wrong -- it doesn't start, it hits a tree, the brakes fail -- they go back to yelling "spark plugs!", "fuel injection!"

Call me cynical, but if we wait for academic social science to fix society, we are screwed...

Don't look down on the social sciences too much, there was a time when great battles were fought between the people who believed in Darwinian evolution and those who believed in Mendelian genetics.

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