| 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. |
>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.