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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent cautionary tale against lazily attributing politically inconvenient data to testing bias (which remains fashionable). It may seem like an easy way out, but it also offers an excuse to simply ignore the problem, which perpetuates it.

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It isn't necessarily just laziness. The first step to fixing the problem means accepting the results, which in this case meant accepting a certain racial group of (silently lead-poisoned) kids had measurably lower intelligence. I don't think I need to explain why that is a minefield.

Right but ironically, the fact that it is a minefield is likely what drove this teacher to make that discovery. Imagine if it was just a random scattering of students living in such apartments (but same number of people). It may have never been discovered in that case.

Everybody accepts that. The only difference is the hypotheses that some people have for explaining that difference. Those who accept a genetic hypothesis are unlikely to look for the real cause.

Blaming testing bias is a great way to gain support from disadvantaged minorities without having to actually do any meaningful work. Conveniently, it allows allows the elite to exclude the educated bourgeoisie from their elite institutions, instead replacing them with underqualified candidates who pose no real threat to the power hierarchy.

I guess. But seems to me that if you are going to claim testing bias, then you have some work to do in creating an unbiased test.

No. The plan is to eliminate testing altogether.

https://edsource.org/2021/university-of-california-sticks-wi...

definite "maybe" on that.. the statement "it allows" is made with certainty, yet at most, that is only part of one possible scenario.. among many

Now instead of lazily explaining differences with "there must be some testing bias, black kids are just as smart as white kids", we're lazily explaining differences with "it must be systemic oppression, black kids are more oppressed than white kids".

Couldn't you argue the disproportionate number of black people being stuck in lead-filled houses is still an example of some sort of oppression? It's not like black people who were shopping for their houses said "Gee, I'd sure like my kids to have lead poisoning."

I think the critical difference is that a gut reno to eliminate the actual source of low IQ is significantly more feasible than swiftly eradicating most of the other issues that contribute to oppression. Identifying low-hanging fruit is a good quick win, so long as it doesn't weaken broader efforts.

Sure, I'm all for quick wins; get lead outta houses, I'm all on board, but we also shouldn't forget the circumstances that caused black people to disproportionately be in lead-filled houses (presumably mostly economic).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that lead poisoning is a symptom of a bigger issue. It's perfectly fine (and encouraged) to treat the symptoms, but I feel like the comment was replying to was acting like we shouldn't attribute things like this to systemic oppression.

I think everybody agrees that we should get rid of unnecessary environmental sources of lead as rapidly as we can. But it's not all that cheap[1], and there's probably a correlation between not owning the place you leave (i.e., not being entitled to massive renovations) and being a member of an oppressed group.

Even as a financially secure white tenant, I have found my landlords to be extremely hesitant to initiate any testing that might legally obligate them to renovate (or at least cover/shield) sources of lead. And in most municipalities, your landlord is only obligated to follow up on lead concerns if they have personal knowledge of lead paint usage on the property; they're not obligated to go through the property's history and refute the possibility of lead.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_abatement_in_the_United_S...

Living in lead-rich environments is an example of systemic oppression, iiuc. There is a lot of nuance lost in any generality but in this case I do not believe it is a misattribution as much as it is an incomplete descriptor

I think this is an illustrative example of how abstract ideas like "systemic oppression" can compete with their original concrete meanings for attention. I see it a lot in business, too - buzzwords that become detrimental anti-concepts after acquiring an existence separate from what they referred to.

The problem with using lead-rich environment as an example of systemic oppression, and the reason why activists are taking very little about lead these days, is that unlike “systemic oppression”, lead exposure is something very concrete, and it can be tested and studied. We did a lot of studies, in fact, on this particular issue, and the results are pretty clear: differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here. It turns out that in many places, exposure to lead is either overall minimal, or there is no big difference in exposure to it across races, but the gap is just as big as everywhere else. This is inconvenient for the lead blaming narrative, and so the narrative is abandoned in favor of more magical, less well specified theories, that cannot be studied as easily.

Or perhaps "systemic oppression" is being used to refer to all the little things that add up in aggregate.

Perhaps lead levels contribute only a small amount. But then also, micro-aggressions have a tiny affect. Testing bias might also be very small. Maybe less income also leads to being less likely to get glasses when you need them. Perhaps food deserts in minority communities leads to poor nutrition and poorer outcomes, but only a negligible amount. Then there are poorer, urban neighborhoods that might be loud at night causing children to not get quite enough sleep.

And sure, you could blame a lot of this just on poverty in general, but then of course, you have to acknowledge our racist history that lead to so much less wealth in minority families.

It goes on and on and pretty soon you have death by a thousand cuts and a phenomenon that is far too complex to explain in anything less than an entire encyclopedia so you sum it up with "systemic racism".

> differences in lead exposure explain very little fraction of the outcome gap here

Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution. In practice, those are the differences that everyone will ask about. Why are so many X's (relative to Y's) living in socially marginalized settings, resorting to crime, ending up in the justice system? Why are there so very few X's in very high-skill, high-effort occupations like computer programming and other hard-STEM fields? The X's and Y's will vary by time and place, of course. And societal oppression of various sorts is always playing a role in these dynamics, if only as an amplifying feedback. But either way, these are questions about uncommon, tail outcomes not average or median ones!

> Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution.

That's true, but the gap is already huge at the median. As a rough approximation, the distribution of outcomes has same variance, but mean is shifted left by 1 sigma.

Where is that research? http://ippsr.msu.edu/research/inequality-lead-exposure-and-b... says the opposite.

The proper way of phrasing this argument is that the systemic oppression was mediated by lead exposure. Meaning that if you intervene to mitigate the latter, you've managed to deal with a significant chunk of the former.

It would be if politicians opted not to fix the problem because of who lived there. But doesn’t oppression generally require action/choice by some party? Or are we inferring that a choice simply “must” have been made not to help?

Does systemic oppression not include economic relegation or societal indifference to being raised in lead-contaminated homes?

Wealth or lack therof is one of the primary components of systemic oppression...

Completely agree with you. I’m just continually surprised that some (many?) can so blithely disregard wealth and its concomitants when analyzing oppression in a capitalistic system.

they objectively are? I think it's lazier to think nothing can be done about it

"Of defects did the spirit of those Saviours consist; but into every defect had they put their illusion, their stop-gap, which they called God."

Or focus all resources on the wrong problem and ensure everyone is trying to optimize the wrong thing, thereby actually exacerbating the very problems that we as a society need to address. Sometimes the wrong solution is much worse than doing nothing.

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