[Banthum]

>That in general the well being of Native peoples in the US, of African Americans is devalued. It is witnessed in the exclusion in drug trials, in the diseases that pharma considers worthwhile to address...

Speaking about medical research specifically:

You seem to say these outcomes are because of white racists "devaluing" black and native peoples' well-being in an evil act of collective racism.

A simpler explanation would be: There are far fewer blacks and natives than whites in America, which means fewer sick people to help and fewer customers, which means their unique illnesses get less research focus.

The same effect happens between common diseases and rare diseases irrespective of race. Common diseases get studied first, because that's where the most good can be done. This isn't because the well-being of people with rare diseases is "devalued".

Frankly I'm concerned you jump so quickly to a mass accusation of collective racial evil (which echoes historic hatred against other high-performing ethnic groups) when a simpler explanation is so obvious.

[tptacek]

When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.

Here, you've provided a perfect illustration of why we have the term "structural racism". Structural racism is the emergent discrimination arising from the circumstances that created our status quo. You'd think an audience of computer scientists would have an especially good intuition for emergent systems properties.

Here's a simple explanation for how African Americans can be discriminated against in health care without any of the doctors or nurses involved having overtly racist impulses:

Until the nineteen seventies --- within many of our conscious lifespans! --- African Americans were actively, overtly, deliberately discriminated against in real estate. They were redlined out of white neighborhoods and into low-income neighborhoods. Naturally, once real estate lenders would allow them to buy houses in any neighborhood they wanted, African Americans of means began buying houses anywhere they wanted. Unlike low-income "white" people, low-income "black" people were stuffed into neighborhoods that were first deliberately underfunded, and then further disinvested by the vicious cycle of neighborhood flight ---- like a run on a bank.

The hospitals, doctors offices, pharmacies, and medical service providers available in those neighborhoods are poorer than those in white neighborhoods due to disinvestment.

The unbelievably awful people who designed and executed on redlining are probably long retired by now. Many of them are no doubt deceased. Most of us would recoil from racial barriers in real estate lending. We all believe ourselves to be well-intentioned. Samuel L. Jackson has a retort our best intentions.

[BearGoesChirp]

Grandparent has been deleted and I can't see it, so I'm not sure what their post was, so I'm aiming this response in more at the terms being used and their underlying meaning.

>When people try to explain why you're coming to broken conclusions due to broken reasoning, they get attacked as radical leftists for using the straightforward terminology we have for describing the phenomenon we're discussing.

How much of this is caused by people have past experience with selective application of different lines of reasoning.

For example, use the legal's systems racial and sex based discrimination. If we look at racial discrimination, it should be pretty clear that minorities have it much worse than whites. And there is a lot of research on this. If you then look at it based on gender, it appears there is even stronger discrimination based on gender than on race, with males much worse off than females (and a minority male receiving the worst of each). But the treatment of this online seems quite different. While it is a personal anecdote, on multiple occasions I've been told the racial discrimination is caused by structural racism against minorities that treats them worse than whites at every step on the system (from being more likely to be stopped and searched, to being more likely to be convicted given equal evidence, to receiving harsher sentences), and then being told that the gender discrimination is caused by sexism against women, resulting from the legal system treating women as children every step of the way (meaning they are less likely to be stopped and searched, less likely to be convicted, and receive less time). These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning, yet I've seen both used as the same time.

I think it is at this point you get people who become opposed to the underlying reasoning because it appears that the group using the reasoning is starting with an assumption and then picking the logic that best fits their assumption. And I think many of the people you encounter online who use this reasoning are doing just that. People of every political and other leaning like to manipulate data to fit their world view. Combined with a lack of exposure to the actual scientists who work on this it can paint people's view of the language. To say nothing of scientist being humans and thus there being examples of scientist being very non-scientific about some issue (while I don't know of any examples on this particular issue, I did read through case of correspondences published in a scientific journal dealing with classification of certain behaviors as mental illnesses where some scientist were making some very indefensible arguments concerning evolution of which numerous counter examples were available that basically boiled down to "there is no way trait X evolved because it isn't reproductively advantageous in our environment").

And to be clear on my own stance, I do think that systematic racism exists in our current system, including in sub-systems where there are no racist members. There are agent models that show with even a small in-group bias, completely devoid of any out-group bias, you can have a system where out-group bias is apparent. For example, a system of entities of type A and B where A's has a certain preference for grouping with other A's, but no preference for not grouping with B's, ends up behaving similar to a system where A's have a preference for not grouping with B's.

[pvg]

Grandparent has been deleted and I can't see it

Go to your HN profile and turn 'showdead' on. It hasn't been deleted, users flagged it.

[BearGoesChirp]

Oh, I thought it was something depending upon getting a certain rep and I hadn't hit it yet. Thanks.

[dragonwriter]

> These seem like polar opposite lines of reasoning,

The problem is you are viewing them as reasoning about the cause from the effect alone rather than reasoning about the cause from a combination of the effect and masses of historical evidence.

[blaurenceclark]

You completely missed the point. I specifically put statistics in my article to refute this.

In many clinical trials African Americans that contract various conditions at the same rate or higher than White Americans represent only 1% of the clinical trial versus 15% of the population. While 95% of the trial are White Americans but they are only 60% of the population. There is clearly a disparity here.

I also use the word "Neglect" they haven't recently purposefully ignored minorities (although in the past they did), But the people that want to run the trials put the trials in the neighborhoods (read mostly white populations) that they have worked with before and want to cover. Therefore trials aren't being run where Minorities live.

This is where the "systemic racism" comes into play.

[arionhardison]

> Frankly I'm concerned you jump so quickly to a mass accusation of collective racial evil (which echoes historic hatred against other high-performing ethnic groups) when a simpler explanation is so obvious.

Do you live in America? Are you familiar with US history? If both of these are true then I dont understand why its so hard for you to grasp the fact that much of this was done out of malice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment - I guess you think this was a "mistake" too?