Can facts be racist? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Can facts be racist? (2013)

blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk

17 pointsutopcell21 comments

What a silly, poorly thought out article. Top comment from 2013 already explains why

> The content of a true fact is irrelevant to the motivation behind someone focusing on that true fact to the exclusion of others. You seem to confuse a true fact being ‘racist’ with the potential racial bias behind a motivation to share it.

Facts aren't racist, your intent and your construction of the "fact" can be.

Example: Black men make up the largest group of prisoners in the US.

If you are discussing criminal justice reform it's probably not racist to bring it up, if you are discussing the superiority of the white race it is.

Context is key and for the life of me I can't understand why everyone seems to be pretending it isn't these days.

Social media and online forums feed on hyperbole and outrage. It's a tragedy newsmedia started reporting on it.

The problem is not what is being reported, but how opinions are selected and presented.

The post is about a scientist, Richard Dawkins, tweeting that the world's Muslims earned less Nobel prizes than Trinity College Cambridge. While the fact itself may be true, what is the point of broadcasting it to your Twitter followers? It isn't relevant to any academic discourse, and the way Dawkins cherrypicked and amplified it puts Muslims in a bad light ("they don't contribute to society"). That in itself is discriminatory.

You read a lot into that.

Neil Tyson said something similar a while back.

Twitter isn’t generally the place for academic discourse. Saying something you don’t like doesn’t have to be followed up with research every single time.

Contributing to society and winning Nobel prizes aren’t even close. That would imply only a few dozen people in all history have contributed to society.

Dawkins' and Tyson's remarks show their bigotry, and frankly, ignorance. Not only are they zealous and condescending, but it's honestly embarrassing for them when they step out of their field to talk about religion, especially Islam. Their arguments are laughable and shows that they lack the most basic knowledge to back their incorrect claims, and they expose their severe ignorance.

On a side note, I want to see Tyson's response when asked how many Black people have won the Nobel prize.[1]

[1] Courtesy of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRnYNig9jU

Dawkins is a journalist, and a bigoted one at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ya_9-06MIQ

I agree with the gist of it. Facts aren't racist, but their application certainly can be. They can be presented without context, or in such a way to push a negative narrative. Unfortunately it's much easier to make a bad argument this way than it is to deconstruct it.

I wouldn't expect Dawkins to come out and say "99.99% of religious people have never committed a violent crime"

> 99.99% of religious people have never committed a violent crime

At least in the US, the rate of "violent crime" (murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and "gang violence") is 383 per 100,000, or ~0.38% (2017). The numerator isn't people, so this isn't exactly right, but the order of magnitude is larger than 0.01%. Most Americans are religious, and there's no reason to believe religious people commit crimes at different rates from atheists. (In fact, criminals in prison are more religious than non-prisoners[0].)

Something like 99.62% of religious people have not committed a violent crime this year. Lifetime figure ("never") would be lower.

All that said, Dawkins is a miserable asshole.

[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-prisoners-less-like....

No. Abuse of facts can definitely be racist. But facts are simply facts. E.g. if someone claimed that police are sexist and pointed out that 90% of police killings are against men, and another responded that this matches the rate at which men commit violent crime that's a perfectly reasonable use of facts. Pointing to the fact that men commit crime at higher rates and saying they cannot be trusted in public society and that civil rights should be curbed is an abuse of facts.

We can, and should, criticize the abuse of facts. But we should be sure we are criticizing the abuse not trying to deny the fact itself. I think many who do the latter are well-intentioned, but ultimately it's trying to deny reality.

The other way to look at it is that he presented a correlation, but (knowing his opinions on these matters) tried to imply a causation.

The answer is yes.

The article wants to conclude that facts are racist by considering a company racist. Lacks of logic.

I would turn the rhetorical question into a real one though.

These days “facts” are politicized to further political agenda and push a narrative.

Inconvenient “facts” are hidden and censored from platforms.

News people don’t tell the news and truth tellers don’t tell the truth.

When unsubstantiated and without evidence, they aren't facts.

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