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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

This is a general question for the whole "social justice" movement.

If you're concerned about the wellbeing of black people, and you justify your concern with statistics pointing out that they're disproportionately poor, why not, instead of instituting preferential treatment for black people (which, btw, is racist), you support preferential treatment for poor people instead? That way, you are more efficient (e.g. your resources aren't wasted on Obama's daughters, who are certainly sufficiently privileged already), while also helping people who weren't captured by your superficial assessment ("black <==> poor").

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The basic hypotheses for the pro-affirmative action crowd are:

1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at.

And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with challenges more common in white populations than challenges common in black populations.

So the idea is, if you change the support systems and measures of success to be more universal, the differences will go away.

And then the metric for whether administrative bodies have succeeded in this is “equal outcomes”. What you call “racism”.

But the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based make rational sense. There’s no logical flaw. There’s no conclusive evidence for these hypothesis either, but they are logically plausible.

The opposite perspective is the same: rational, yet lacking any basis in evidence. That is the perspective that black people, through biology, socialization, and/or culture, are actually “worse at stuff”. And the support systems and performance metrics are fair.

There’s no way to prove something is “fair” or “not fair” in the face of “unequal outcomes”. It just comes down to what you want to believe. There’s no rational basis to come to one conclusion or the other.

I choose to believe that all of the big categories of people are pretty similarly “good at things” but I can acknowledge that belief is a leap of faith. The truth is unknowable.

Sorry, but I take offense at this "it is all a matter of opinion and all opinions are equally valid" BS.

1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so.

2) You are ignoring the obvious fact that blacks do NOT get anything like equal treatment. They start with terrible schools, in neighborhoods that are aggressively targeted by police, and grow up with realistic expectations of going to jail that are amply born out by lived experiences. It takes willful blindness and stupidity to ignore that there are excellent reasons why we should expect poor black performance.

Given that the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based require willful blindness and stupidity to believe, there really is a giant logical flaw. It is most emphatically NOT plausible to say that we should expect equal performance from children whose fathers are in jail, whose schools are atrocious, whose neighborhood is dangerous, and who rightly believe that they are being unfairly targeted by police. Both how common these factors are and how important they are to actual outcomes is borne out by extensive research.

The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability. Read https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th... if you want a more complete accounting of that fact.

But you do not need to have an opinion on that question to identify many factors that are helping ensure that black kids don't get a fair shake at life. And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.

I doubt the funding for black and white students really differs that much. You can find many articles claiming this but a lot of this seems to depend how you count and who is counting. The washington post or NYT will run an article claiming huge gaps, while the heritage foundation says it is broadly equal (https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...). Some of the best funded schools in the whole country are black schools. America is littered with failed projects to better minority performance by increasing school expenditures (here is one: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-most-costly-educati...). The tendency of blacks to go to prison doesn't really seem to have to do with the things you mentioned, at least not solely. For example, young blacks whose parents are in the top 1% of earners, who certainly do not grow up in bad neighbourhoods with terrible schools or targeting by police, seem to commit crime at rates similar to whites from families earning <40,000$/year (raj chetty). And none of this explains how policies that help Nigerians get into Harvard make sense as a means of helping poor American blacks.

In California they certainly do. Schools are mostly funded locally. As a result, there are very large funding gaps. And it isn't just liberal media saying it, https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failin... says the same. I can't speak to other states.

That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very good at it.(That would be a rant for another day - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a flavor.)

And about crime, the issue of targeting by police is not necessarily the neighborhood, but the person. When police see someone "who doesn't look like they belong", that person gets targeted. As a result black people in affluent neighborhoods get stopped a lot more than white people in the same neighborhoods. So even if black and white kids are doing bad things in similar amounts, the blacks are going to get arrested for it at a far higher rate.

This is not just a random conspiracy theory. See https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-ra... for an example of research on racial disparities of how policing is done in Los Angeles. Many other cities have similar problems.

That the problem is not just limited to one bad police department is shown by a simple statistics. In surveys, blacks and whites do illegal drugs at similar rates. But blacks are arrested and charged for that at several times the rate that whites are. And so the arrest and jail statistics make it look like blacks are doing far more drugs than whites. But our best evidence is arrest records are a very severely racially biased sample of what is actually happening.

That said, I'm mostly in agreement with you on affirmative action. But there is one data point that shows a flaw in your argument. It is easy to argue that policies that helped a half-Kenyan kid get into Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for law school won't help American blacks very much. But Barack Obama went on to become the first black US President. And the symbolism of that seems to be very important for inspiring US blacks in general. So even though it doesn't seem to me like it should matter, in practice it seems to have.

Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though.

I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding.

I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).

We agree on problems in how education was done.

Sitting at my son's IEP meetings with a roomful of expensive professionals who documented all of the ineffective things that they were doing was eye-opening. I pulled him from public school and put him in a private school that specialized in children with lack of executive function (primarily ADHD and autistic). For a cost of about half the per student average in the school he was in (where he had cost far more than average) he got real help. He went from there to a college prep school that is far more academically rigorous than public schools, at similar per capita cost.

He is doing far better than public schools could have done, in a much more cost effective way.

On minority schools, a big part of the problem isn't funding. For many good reasons, schools in bad districts see very high turnover. As a result their teachers tend to be inexperienced. Plus there is the whole disrupted classroom issue, which is much worse in a tough neighborhood.

And about Obama, statistics do not support his having made lives better for blacks in general. But he's still cited as an inspiration a whole lot. And his success seems to have inspired other blacks to try to perform at the top level. Including our current vice president. So he seems to have become a useful symbol.

Your tone seems disagreeing, but I think your second to last paragraph is making the same point I’m making?

I agree with you that it’s not fair, I’m just acknowledging that the adjudication of fairness happens outside the reach of science. It’s a matter of values not evidence.

The second to last paragraph supports a minor point you made.

But the others contradict most of what you said. The pro-affirmative action position that you outlined requires willful blindness and stupidity to accept. It is very emphatically not equally valid to the alternatives.

There may be better arguments for accepting affirmative action as valid. But that one is terrible.

> And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.

This argument is at least 40 years old and twice as tired. Richard Rodriguez was plying this in the late 80s, and the anti-affirmative action squad in Cali in the 90s.

It is not "too little too late", it is "better late than never". The disadvantages of background usually crop up as crippling impostor syndrome, which can be helped with the right reinforcement, but the idea that "fathers in jail" or "police brutality" in somebody's background invalidates their access to a higher education is a cop out at best.

The main thing this apologism hides is the inescapable fact that mediocrity + centrality wins every time. Look at any school and you will see the folks with "the right background" making it through. Meanwhile, you will also see those from the challenged backgrounds you describe often dropping out and _not_ because of grades but because the whole environment screams "you don't belong here".

we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other

Does all of world history count as data? What should we go by? Propose a test.

Given that I said we have no data that can begin to address this question, it is at best disingenuous. Because how can I offer a test without data?

It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convoluted, and poorly understood reasons of cause and effect. Therefore we can establish evidence of differences, but can't necessarily distinguish between theories about the causes of those differences.

What would make a difference is a theory of mechanism. For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running. For this we can identify specific facts about body type that help with sprinting versus long distance running, and we can identify strong evidence that these body type differences are due to genetics.

But we have no such theory of mechanism that can be applied to IQ. And therefore the mass of data we have about the existence of differences does not distinguish between potential causes of said differences.

> For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running.

World class sprinters have an over-representation of individuals descended from a specific region of Nigeria - you can't generalize that to "Nigerians sprint faster than Europeans",or "Black people sprint faster than white people" the way people do with IQ. It is also prudent to note that Kenya has a whole ecosystem nurturing long distance runners; with a wealth of scouts, academies, and trainers available to the young who show some talent, so ascribing Kenyan's prowess to nature alone is incorrect.

Nutrition and IQ are correlated independent of race; especially early-childhood nutrition. Standardized testing is further compounded by test prep and tutors (proxy for wealth). Wealth in a family correlates to parents' education level. The lack of education in older African Americans has an obvious historical explanation. Most black Americans are descended from slaves from West Africa, but don't do as well as recent West African immigrants - 29% of Nigerian-Americans have advanced degrees; more than any other immigrant group. The vast chasm between the academic outcomes of two groups that are both largely of west African descent disproves "nature" is the sole determinant of poor outcomes for African Americans.

You accept that some people run faster ("uncontroversial") but somehow it is "unknowable" whether some people think faster?

No. That there are differences in thinking speed is verifiable.

We can also verify that differences in thinking speed between individuals has a large component due to genetics, and also another large component due to environment. Everything from diet to the quality of parental interactions in early childhood.

What we can't determine is to whether genetics contributes to the differences in thinking speed between groups of people. We can identify important environmental factors like culture and racism. We can show that environmental facts matter. For example children of mixed race couples have a higher average IQ if they have white mothers. But nobody has found a way to measure what difference genetics might or might not make.

maybe we should just let the smartest individuals into the best colleges

>The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability.

I'm sorry but this is blatantly false. "Innately better" is a vague and inflammatory term, but if you define the measure, we can use straightforward statistical techniques to find correlations.

Simple example: East Africans outperform others in long-distance running. In sprinting, west Africans outperform.

We can separate confounders out because we have large data sets. You don't have to just try to compare populations as a mass. We can, for example, look at performance only of black people raised in white families. Or rich black people. Or white people raised in black families. Etc.

Taking the example of IQ, which is the most important statistical measure in these discussions, we can also look at poor populations with high IQ, like Jews (at certain historical times) or various groups of people from East Asia. Vietnamese boat people are a great comparison. It has to be explained how they were so successful despite facing the very similar or arguably worse challenges (e.g. holocaust) as other population groups.

Or look at subgroups of black people, like Nigerian immigrants to America, who have generally better social outcomes than average whites.

All this has been studied to death for decades and many conclusions are well-supported by statistics (at least as well-supported as lots of noncontroversial findings).

Separating out confounders is easier said than done. When you look at the performance of black people raised in white families they are still exposed to media, teachers, and peers who have expectations of them based on appearance. Even with that population, racism remains a confounder.

Likewise while you can look at historical Jews as a poor population with high IQ, you have the confounder that even then Jews placed a strong cultural value on education and intelligence. And therefore, even while they were poor, Jews were likely to work to improve themselves on both. Therefore this leaves open the question of how much of the difference is due to this cultural factor versus innate genetics.

In the case of Vietnamese boat people, we have families that literally risked their lives for a chance at a better future. This attitude taken to a new country suggests that we should expect them to make the most of any opportunity that they can find. How much of their subsequent success is due to this attitude?

On Nigerian immigrants, I'd need to see a source to believe your "generally better social outcomes" comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans puts the 2018 median household income for members of the Nigerian diaspora into the USA at $68,658. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26... the median household income for white non-Hispanic households at $70,642. At least on the easiest to check social outcome, whites are still doing better.

That said, Nigerians who arrive here tend to be motivated and well-educated. I'm not sure how you can distinguish that from genetics. Doubly so since the poster child for racist claims about IQ is the poor performance of US blacks. Blacks whose African ancestry includes a significant share of Nigerian.

So yes, we can cite volumes of statistics. And it is easy for find lots of books like The Bell Curve that actually do. But when you dig in you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor.

You won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to cultural rather than some genetic factor either.

This is an isolated demand for proof. At the level of proof you're demanding, basically nothing can be said about anything in terms of social science one way or the other. There are basically never 'single statistics' that are isolated from all alternative explanation.

Instead, one should apply the same standards and skepticism to all hypotheses. In this case, both for and against genetic/cultural explanations.

(Even so, "you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor" is untrue; differences in athletic performance satisfy this demand.)

Culture largely flows from genetics, so I'm not quite sure what you are getting at.

If culture flowed from genetics, then we would not expect to see the very large cultural shifts that history documents time and again in rather short periods of time.

For example from the middle ages to the present, individual self-control greatly increased and this caused homicide rates to drop by a factor of 10. See https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel... for verification.

Elizabethan England was incredibly bawdy by all accounts. And yet the same country a few centuries later was Victorian England, one of the most sexually uptight societies on record. Genetics didn't change that much, how did that happen?

Germany from the mid-1800s through WW 2 was one of the most warlike societies imaginable. Germany since has turned into a country of peaceniks with no interest in invading anyone, and who are unable to even cough up what they promised for self-defense. How did that happen?

The truth is that while factors from genetics to parasites like toxoplasma can impact culture, culture changes far too rapidly to be dismissed as simply an outcome of genetics.

Can you elaborate on your statement?

I think it is more likely that culture drives genetics. If you have a group whose culture favors intermarriage, where marriage is encouraged and even arranged between families with intellectual success, and which enables the resulting couples to have many children, that would tend to drive the genetics of the group.

Sexual selection is tied to culture.

All the studies I’ve seen of these attributes fail to control for external factors in a way I find convincing.

The logic of this comment is that there is somewhere a celestial point tally system that accumulates the genetic trauma of past generations, catapulting Jewish people to the top of the leaderboard for their racial experience of the Holocaust, and giving the lie to argument that generations of ongoing discrimination --- redlining ended within some of our lifetimes! --- and low SES conditions for disfavored minorities has any impact on their scholastic performance.

It is, to put it mildly, not at all well established how SES and assessed intelligence interact.

But then Asians come along and outperform whites at the supposedly racist metrics. So much so that whites require affirmative action policies like Legacy Athletics and Dean's List. Simultaneously defeating both white supremacist arguments as well as anti-merit ones

No. The truth is not unknowable. Some truth is unknowable, though.

Which of these basic hypotheses supports reparations?

I'm pretty sure there needs to be a 3) blacks are poorer as well.

The logic of reparations does not require poverty on the part of the victim.

It requires acknowledgement of an injustice, and a requirement that the perpetrator has to make good on it. In the case of blacks we have forcible capture, slavery, a variety of discriminatory laws and policies, lynchings, and so on. There is no shortage of historical wrongs done to blacks that were never meaningfully made up for.

So far, so good. However the logic runs into some major problems. First of all, what are the rights of current blacks to reparations due to the wrongs done to their ancestors? Second, how do we identify the perpetrators who need to owe repayment? Third, is it fair to punish those descendants now for the actions of ancestors that they do not know? And fourth, what reparation would be sufficient?

My personal position is as follows.

First, if we extend to one group reparations for wrong past, we have to extend this to all groups. That way lays insanity. I'm half Irish. My ancestors were targeted by the KKK for being Catholic, targeted by the English over centuries for being Irish, and escaped to the USA from an entirely preventable famine. Every ethnic group can rehearse its own story of victimhood, and the act of doing so primarily harms those groups again.

Second, identifying perpetrators is hard. For example American blacks are more likely to be descended from slaveholders than the average white American. I grew up in poverty and there were no slaveholders in my ancestors for at least the last 200 years. I don't think it is fair to ask me to pay for the crimes of other people's ancestors.

Third, holding people accountable for the actions of their ancestors crosses the line into collective punishment. Collective punishments of all kinds are considered human rights violations, no matter how strong the rationale. See https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule103 for a list.

Fourth, no one-time cash reparation can make up for the ongoing problems that we continue to inflict on black communities. Therefore rather than focusing on the justices or injustices of such reparations we should focus on fixing what we continue to do wrong in the present. Of which, unfortunately, there is no shortage.

Things that your forefathers suffered, may be 6 to 10 generations before you. Can you name one thing which directly or indirectly affects you today because of their sufferings?

Slavery was that long ago.

White's were sold as slaves in North Africa before black slaves where brought to America. Even white women were sold as sex slaves and they used to call them "White Gold". ( You can search for term "White Gold Slavery")

Do whites also get reparations?

Additionally nobody talks about modern day slavery, which are sex slaves. There are millions of women stuck in that trade who were forced in to it against their will and they cannot leave.

I can trace behavioral patterns back 4 generations in my own family. And the only reason I can't go farther is that I have never talked to anyone who knew my great great grandparents. (Which would be difficult given that they were born in the 1800s and died before my birth.)

And even if you don't know what the connection is, that doesn't mean that there isn't one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/ and https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenet... are examples explaining some of the research on how epigenetics can pass trauma down the generations. We don't know how far it can transmit.

However, regardless of whether there is an impact, EVERY ethnic group has severe trauma in its past. And you generally don't have to go back more than a century or two to find it. The best thing to do is fix our present, and try to create a better future. Which, globally, we've generally been doing at a breathtaking pace.

Albeit with important exceptions. Such as problems that teenage girls began having with mental health starting about 10 years ago. Which may be tied to social media applications.

Take both of the two, and add the theory of compounding interest

They're poor now because they were prevented from gaining wealth then, and wealth grows geometrically

I think the logical conclusion of this argument is that reparations should be paid for from a wealth tax? (as opposed to the likely default of "from general revenue")

You can shift the analysis from “black” to “poor” or “poor and black” or “poor and white” but it doesn’t get you out of the subjectivity trap.

Wokeness, like all forms of racism, is embraced by the ruling class for the purpose of dividing the working class.

Because they don't believe that black underprivilege is merely explained by poverty, and well, they're right.

I agree with this, and have been working to get this implemented at the large bank I work for. Being from a lower socio-economic background cuts across diversity characteristics and makes life a lot harder.

It's starting to get some traction with regulators as well: https://www.progresstogether.co.uk/

College educationally various outreach efforts are targeted to first generational students (those most likely to not have knowledge about how to maneuver the educational system). Unfortunately this leaves some holes, as not all student with parents who went to college know how to maneuver the system.

Basically whatever metric you choose will leave gaps. And if you try to universally implement a system you get other negative effects (from cost, to information overwhelm, to non-adaptability).

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