Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> That doesn't imply the non-existence of objective reality. A fact is a fact regardless of the identity of the speaker.

Sure. And facts are extremely hard things to find. With all the money we spend on science, we have a relatively small number of them. What individuals have is mainly opinions about facts.

That's why discussions seeking truth are such hard and subtle work. It's also why facts are frequently irrelevant to people's behaviors in this realm. See, for example, this graph:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/149390/record-high-approve-black-...

It isn't a graph of people coming to reasoned understanding on a topic. It's a graph of people with old opinions dying off.

> It is possible for a PhD to learn something from an undergrad. Moreover, it isn't strictly less understanding anyway, it's a different perspective. Which is all the more reason why people should try to hear each other.

I strongly believe it is less understanding. As a member of various dominant groups, my understanding of things like race and gender was very coarse. That's because I didn't have to pay any attention to those things; they almost always worked in my favor. When that's not the case, people are forced to pay more attention.

If you want to argue that generally attention does not lead to better understanding, you're really arguing that discussion is futile, because a major function of discussion is to turn people's attention to a topic.

> Not listening to someone (i.e. ignoring them) is not the same thing as attacking them because they said something you don't want to hear.

I agree with that, but don't see its relevance to the discussion. Could you say more?

> Sure. And facts are extremely hard things to find. With all the money we spend on science, we have a relatively small number of them. What individuals have is mainly opinions about facts.

I don't think talking about "opinions" is interesting. That word lumps so many things together that it doesn't mean anything useful. People have facts, logic, assumptions and priorities. The last two aren't objective. You can prove or disprove an assumption but it's commonly expensive to do it, and until somebody does, it remains something that reasonable people can disagree about.

But the real trouble is priorities. Should we imprison an innocent man or let ten guilty people go free? The answer to that question has objective consequences but they aren't uniformly distributed, so those more likely to be victims of criminals who go unpunished and those more likely to be innocent people falsely convicted will rationally prioritize different things without either of them being wrong in any objective sense. But that's politics. People have to come to terms with each other without attacking each other or we end up in a civil war.

> I strongly believe it is less understanding. As a member of various dominant groups, my understanding of things like race and gender was very coarse. That's because I didn't have to pay any attention to those things; they almost always worked in my favor. When that's not the case, people are forced to pay more attention.

But now you're talking about generalities when we're dealing with individuals. Using the color of someone's skin to make stereotypical assumptions about them is the thing we're supposed to be doing away with. You can't tell by looking at someone how much thought they've put into something.

And even if the stereotype is often correct, perspective is still a different axis than quantity. It is useful to know when and to what degree proposals will create a backlash and resentment that may do more harm than good, especially when there are less adversarial paths to the same result.

None of which addresses the original point in the article, which is that many of the statistics driving headlines (women are paid 77 cents on the dollar, one in six women are sexually assaulted) are misleading or false, and people have been unjustifiably attacked for pointing that out.

> I agree with that, but don't see its relevance to the discussion. Could you say more?

The context of the discussion is that people are attacking speakers for saying true things inconvenient to the attackers' causes, even to the point of trying (and sometimes succeeding) to destroy their careers and reputations. Your counterargument seems to be that people have no obligation to listen to the speaker; but the speakers' complaint is not that they're being ignored, it's that they're being unjustifiably attacked.

> People have to come to terms with each other without attacking each other or we end up in a civil war.

Are you talking about physical attacks or mere vigorous disagreement? If the former, I agree, but that seems off topic. If the latter, then could you please name some major societal changes that happened without disagreement so vigorous that people felt attacked?

I also think that for topics of social justice, your standard is one-sided. Historically oppressed groups are attacked, and not just verbally. Look at America's long history of lynching, for example. Or gay bashing, both physical and verbal. A standard that requires people pursuing social justice to be forever meek but doesn't as vigorously require that of those sustaining injustice is in effect a standard that helps maintain injustice.

> But now you're talking about generalities when we're dealing with individuals.

The article is about general patterns, so perhaps our best compromise is that we are talking about general patterns of individuals. If you want to talk about an individual case, we could certainly do that. But that would be a change of topic.

> Your counterargument seems

I was addressing the discussion here. If it appears to relate to one of the many points in that article, I apologize; that was not my intention.

> Are you talking about physical attacks or mere vigorous disagreement?

There is a distinction to be drawn between vigorous disagreement and intentionally causing harm to the other party. Trying to get someone fired or similar is not a "physical" attack but it is certainly an attack.

> I also think that for topics of social justice, your standard is one-sided. Historically oppressed groups are attacked, and not just verbally. Look at America's long history of lynching, for example. Or gay bashing, both physical and verbal. A standard that requires people pursuing social justice to be forever meek but doesn't as vigorously require that of those sustaining injustice is in effect a standard that helps maintain injustice.

It isn't a double standard. Neither side should be engaged in any such thing and anyone who does is wrong regardless of which side they're on.

> The article is about general patterns, so perhaps our best compromise is that we are talking about general patterns of individuals. If you want to talk about an individual case, we could certainly do that. But that would be a change of topic.

It's not about a specific individual case, it's about the concept of applying generalizations to individuals. "There is more variation within a race than between races."

> It isn't a double standard. Neither side should be engaged in any such thing and anyone who does is wrong regardless of which side they're on.

My point isn't about the standard. It's about selective enforcement. That is, the people I see telling people interested in social justice that they're just too darned strident don't obviously demonstrate an equal desire to police the people causing the injustice.

> It's not about a specific individual case, it's about the concept of applying generalizations to individuals.

I think that can be done poorly, but I think it's a generally useful first-pass heuristic. Especially so the way I'm applying it here, which is to say that my fellow white dudes should spend more time listening to voices they would not otherwise hear before holding for on topics which they are much more likely to be ignorant. Those who have already done the listening are not harmed by that.

> My point isn't about the standard. It's about selective enforcement.

Then you're trying to fix the end that isn't broken. The problem is not that people are objecting to bad behavior in the one case, it's that they're not objecting in the other.

> I think that can be done poorly, but I think it's a generally useful first-pass heuristic.

So is not interviewing black job applicants because they are more likely to have received a poor education. But we ought not to do that because the heuristic is often wrong and the individuals have no ability to control what box you put them in when it is.

Thanks for your advice on how I should spend my time, but I think otherwise. If you would like to fix the hypocrites, you are welcome to do so. I think the way to fix that is reducing the power imbalances so that the shitty opinions of formerly dominant groups are irrelevant to the currently downtrodden. As I mentioned elsewhere, I value civil dialogue, but I value civil rights more. When the two conflict, I am ok with some incivility in the service of fixing bigger problems.

>So is not interviewing black job applicants because they are more likely to have received a poor education. But we ought not to do that because the heuristic is often wrong and the individuals have no ability to control what box you put them in when it is.

No, we ought not to do that because it reinforces a major societal oppression of black people. If you've ever run a hiring process, you'll know you use all sorts of possibly-unfair heuristics. The point of hiring isn't to be maximally fair to every individual; it's to get good people while not contributing to negative externalities like, say, America's centuries-long history of being shitty to various minority groups.

Would it be fair to summarize your position as "facts about the lives of people who are substantially different from us are difficult to obtain; therefore, we should defer to their personal experiences"? If not, could you correct this summary?

I guess if I had to summarize my point it would be that those of us who are for historical reasons unfairly advantaged should work especially hard at listening to people who aren't. Especially so when we want to discuss topics relating to that historical advantage.

E.g., all people have opinions on race. But as a white person I try to recognize that my opinions have been shaped by a system that unfairly favors me, and part of the way it does that by limiting the amount I hear about the experience of non-white people with respect to race. (By the way, I don't think this involves much conscious malice; it's just one of the bugs you get when primates have to build a civilization from scratch.) So to the extent that I want to have informed opinions on race, I have a lot of work to do.

I'd add that even accounting for the learning value of listening, I think there's another value to it. Black people are already generally aware of what white people think about racial issues; they have to be. So I try to separate when I want to be heard from when I think I have something to say that is actually helpful to the people I'm talking with. In the former case, I try to favor silence. There are other ways I can feel heard, and helping other people feel fully heard is a great way to create some willingness for them to listen when I actually do have something possibly helpful to say.

>those of us who are for historical reasons unfairly advantaged should work especially hard at listening to people who aren't

I see. Thanks for the explanation.

If you don't mind I have a follow-up question -- actually two related ones. The approach you are suggesting is essentially about ethics and epistemology at an individual level. What I wonder is, how, if at all, should it extrapolate to government action? I.e., to what degree should government decisions about aiding people who are at a disadvantage be informed by listening to them versus dispassionate observation and statistics?

I ask because "listening" is inherently hard to "scale" to a national level in a large nation. In a Western liberal democracy the usual answer on how to do this seems to be "voting." In practice besides voting the supposed public voice of any disadvantaged group is also shaped by self-appointed spokesmen for the disadvantaged, typically journalists and academics. Personally, I have little faith in either doing more good than harm.

My second question is, how should it be determined who is considered advantaged and who is considered disadvantaged?

Gladly.

I think that both people and governments should work from both stories and statistics. Statistics help us understand one way. As narrative creatures, stories help us differently. In particular, I think empathy is much easier to find with stories than raw data, and empathy is vital for functioning societies.

As to noticing privilege, I think we have good ways to measure some sorts of privilege. E.g.:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474

But I think it's incumbent on all of us to understand what power we have and use it wisely. For me, both stats and stories have been useful. The stats are widely available, but here are some collections of stories:

http://everydaysexism.com/

http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

And I also really benefited from Project Implicit, which helped me understand how my own subconscious biases were contributing to various societal problems:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

For me, privilege checklists have been helpful in seeing how I got lucky, what advantages I happen to have:

http://danilocampos.com/2013/02/unpacking-my-knapsack-the-pr...

http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

I also really benefited from seeing these issues as the tail end of long historical imbalance. E.g.:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519...

I definitely agree with your point that spokespeople and media gatekeepers are often part of the problem. That's what makes me hopeful about things like Twitter. There I can make a decision to seek out individual voices and add them to the mix of what I see every day.

Is that helpful?

Quite so. Although I was already familiar with some of the material you link to I think I understand your position better now.

One thing that is still unclear to me is how the government should work from stories. If you mean a write-your-congressperson kind of approach I am very sympathetic to that. However, nearly all other means of aggregating stories I think are prone to distortion by the middleman is involved (not necessarily deliberate).

Thanks.

I'm not sure I understand your question about government. To my mind, a government isn't really a coherent actor. The individuals within it should have a good understanding of the problems they're working on, and for me that should include a personal, empathetic understanding of the individuals affected. Which I think is mostly what happens. I think a lot of our problems happen where government actors (officials and staff alike) are not representative with respect to the problem. E.g., Ferguson was such a mess because there was a strong race/class differential between the government and the governed. That not only created problems, but kept them from getting solved and prevented an effective response when things boiled over.

So if I understand the question correctly, I think that everybody should collect stories and that the aggregation should mainly be internal and via trust relationships. E.g., a congressperson can't meet everybody, and they'll have a particular set of biases depending on how they grew up. But their can cultivate a diverse selection of staff and advisors, and they can encourage those people to seek out broad contact with society.

That said, I think statistics-driven checks on things can help point out holes in that aggregation of stories. I recently heard about a city that was working on their long-term housing plan. Their main means for citizen contact was through public meetings about the plan. But a little looking at stats showed that the people at the public meetings were all homeowners, while the city was half renters. I'm sure city officials were disproportionately homeowners as well, and also more likely to know homeowners.

I'm also excited to see to what extent the Internet lets us avoid the various filtering biases. Even today a St. Louis politician could have manually used Twitter to get a semi-random sampling of stories as a check on what they were learning officially. I have a lot of hope for how technology shifts can help us transform citizen engagement in government.

This does answer my question in a very satisfactory way.

Since you mention Ferguson, the theory I currently hold is that tensions between the police and the policed are, in practice, inevitable if the two differ in race, ethnicity, language or religion. Through their sheer visibility these differences have more weight than any difference that otherwise exists between the government and those it governs. The only plausible way to resolve this tension that I see is by ensuring the police force of a community is recruited from that community and represents its ethnic and cultural makeup.

I definitely agree. I think the great apes, us included, are naturally tribal. As the various sportsball empires show, we just like picking sides. If we want society to work well, we have to consciously work against that tendency. And I share your view that self-policing works way better than other-policing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com