Thursday, December 24, 2020

Through the Lens of Salience

From The Economist:

"In America the big liberal shift took place in the mid-1960s. To deal with the legacy of slavery, liberals began to concede that you need to treat the descendants of slaves as members of a group, not only as individuals....

“To say that whiteness is a standpoint”, [Robin] DiAngelo writes, “is to say that a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race—‘just human’.”

This is a long post about the tension between the center-left individualist identity and far-left groupishness identity. I am going to give examples of how the far left makes tactical errors by viewing individuals, especially individuals who think of themselves as individuals, through a groupish lens. Then I'm going to critique individualism, which is not as individual as most people think it is. Finally, I am going to define my group and how I think it can do better.

I.

After the election, everyone had access to the same data but were drawing different conclusions. Consider the following headlines:

From MSN Newsweek: "Donald Trump Made Gains in Every Demographic Except For White Men". 

Meanwhile, Vox writes: "Election results: White people make up the majority of Trump voters". 

Not to be outdone in the hyperbole department, Charles Blow at the New York Times writes: "Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy".

Here's an angle I'd like to see explored: why are White people the most diverse voting bloc? The chart below shows the last two presidential votes by race, the longer the bar the more that race supported a given candidate.


White people are closest to the center, which means they had the most people voting for both parties. No one talks about going after the "white vote" because it is not a monolithic group. People who work on campaigns know that simple truth, yet so many of the far left continue to make that mistake.

Here is another interesting angle: Why are Black Americans the most uniform voting bloc? Nikole Hannah Jones wrote a long Twitter thread about that very topic. 

When you identify with a racial group, you tend to associate others by their racial group. This can lead to oversimplification.

II.

Consider this blog post titled "White Rage, White Guilt." The writer works in a bookstore and describes the post-George Floyd jump in sales for books like  So You Want to Talk About Race and How to Be an Antiracist. The store quickly ran out of books and the employee had to field calls from distressed white women who didn't want to have to wait.

The author then makes this leap in logic:

"And yet, despite all of the learning that supposedly took place via these books, in early November 2020 exit polls stated that among white women, Trump still held their support: An estimated 55 percent of white women voted for Trump."

Forget for a moment the historic inaccuracy of exit polls, which overrepresented in-person (read: Trump) voters and think about how, in 2020, we can observe the behavior of a few white women in an upperclass, well-educated clientele and think it is a good sample of all registered voters nationally. 

Another example comes from an Op-Ed in the New York Times called "‘Reach Out to Trump Supporters,’ They Said. I Tried." After the 2016 election, the writer, Wajahat Ali, went around the country speaking to Trump supporters.

"My standard speech was about how to “build a multicultural coalition of the willing.” My message was that diverse communities, including white Trump supporters, could work together to create a future where all of our children would have an equal shot at the American dream. I assured the audiences that I was not their enemy...

Those in the audience who supported Mr. Trump came up to me and assured me they weren’t racist. They often said they’d enjoyed the talk, if not my politics. Still, not one told me they’d wavered in their support for him. Instead, they repeated conspiracy theories and Fox News talking points about “crooked Hillary.” Others made comments like: “You’re a good, moderate Muslim. How come others aren’t like you?”

In Ohio, I spent 90 minutes on a drive to the airport with a retired Trump supporter. We were cordial to each other, we made jokes and we shared stories about our families. But neither of us changed our outlook. “They’ll never take my guns. Ever,” he told me, explaining that his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Mrs. Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns."

I really admire his effort, although I think it was a mistake to make conversion a part of his speech. Ali continues:

"What was my reward? Listening to Mr. Trump’s base chant, “Send her back!” in reference to Representative Ilhan Omar, a Black Muslim woman, who came to America as a refugee. I saw the Republican Party transform the McCloskeys into victims, even though the wealthy St. Louis couple illegally brandished firearms against peaceful B.L.M. protesters."

(This mistake happens on the right too. Most Democratic candidates showed strong support for socialist programs, as well as advocacy for woke culture, which caused many Trump voters to vote against the moderate Biden, including many Latinos. The fact that Biden has been a centrist for his whole career didn't matter, voters took the socialist movement and applied it to the individual.)

The book store owner is wrong because she viewed white women as a monolithic voting bloc, when White people are the most heterodox voting racial group. While there was probably some ideological churn, for the most part it was White Democrats who didn't pay attention to pre-Floyd police brutality who bought your books, not Trump voters. 

Ali is wrong because he assumed the people who talked to him were representative of the broader category of Republicans and Trump voters. The types of people who denigrated  Ilhan Omar and enshrined the McCloskeys are not the type of people who willingly hold polite conversations with a liberal Muslim man.

III.

Is it wrong to categorize people by their race? And why are White people more reluctant to identify by their race?

As a White American, it's hard to understand what it's like to be a person of color in a predominantly white culture that constantly reminds you of your race. For people of color, especially Black Americans, it creates an us/them distinction, which has the effect of unifying "us".

John Turner developed a self-categorization theory. He said that what causes us to adopt one self-categorization as opposed to another is the "relative salience" of that category. What makes a category salient? When a comparable or contrasting category is present.

In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris writes:

"Thus, the social category adult is not salient when you're in a roomful of adults, but as soon as some children enter the room it becomes salient....

"When a particular social category is salient and you categorize yourself as a member of it - that is when the group will have the most influence on you. That is when the similarities among the members of a group are most likely to increase and the differences between groups to widen."

For the most part, White Americans are surrounded by other White Americans, making race less salient. So there is less unity, group bonding, and consistent voting patterns. 


The above slide is from a mandatory diversity training session. Look at the bullet points about the racial makeup of politicians; US Congress: 90 percent white, US Governors: 96 percent white, top military advisers: 100 percent white, etc. The implication seems to be that these White people are looking out for all White people, regardless of political affiliation. 

For whoever wrote these slides, race is a salient category. They look at Congress, see a bunch of white faces, and conclude, "these people represent them, not us." White people look at Congress and see good guys (Democrats/Conservatives) and bad guys (Conservatives/Democrats), regardless of race.

Part of what makes diversity training like this so unsuccessful is that the language is made for groupish identitarians and instead is delivered to individualistic people. It tells them: "Your identity is wrong. Stop thinking of yourself as a center-right, small government, civil liberties, Southern Baptist, Dallas Cowboys fan and start thinking of yourself as a White person."

IV.

I think the decline of religion and civic participation has created a need for group bonding, which makes the allure of Robing DiAngelo's message so seductive. 

White Americans are told that it is a privilege to not wear our race as an identity, a privilege that leads to ignorance and harm toward BIPOC populations. Unlike persons of color, White people can never be united as victims of oppression, but the antiracists offer them something better. They can distinguish themselves from the bad (racist) whites and show they are the good (ally) whites. Instead of race, the salience becomes ideological: wokeness.

Race never informed how White Americans voted because it was not a part of their identity; it wasn't a salient category. Antiracism has now created a wedge among White people: the antiracist allies and the people who are sick of being called racist.

For the antiracist, this isn't even about assuaging white guilt as much as it is giving one's self over to the thrilling feel of belonging to a community that unites over a common enemy: racists. And Dr. Kendi made this distinction very easy: a racist is anyone who is not an antiracist.
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Friday, December 18, 2020

Kill the Demon, Destroy the Wall

 

"Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 in which he suggested how the second law of thermodynamics might hypothetically be violated.

In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small door between two compartments of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, the demon quickly opens and shuts the door so that only fast molecules are passed into one of the chambers, while only slow molecules are passed into the other. Because faster molecules are hotter, the demon's behaviour causes one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down, thereby decreasing entropy and violating the second law of thermodynamics."

I.

In my review of The Third Pillar, I quoted a reference in the book to a study about schools' gifted student programs. The study found that "there is no overall improvement in results as the benefit to the brightest is cancelled out by the drag on the rest." In other words, putting a student in a gifted program will raise their scores while also lowering the scores of the students in the class the gifted student was removed from.

In a study called The Social Structure of Schooling, researchers found a similar phenomenon when schools used tracking. Put a bunch a smart kids together and their grades go up. Put a bunch of low performing kids together and their grades go down. 

This is Maxwell's Demon in the classroom.

There should be more disorder, more entropy, more poor kids finding success and rich kids falling behind. But there is a demon in our society that interferes, which causes feedback loops we all get stuck in.

You can draw different conclusions from these studies. Maybe you think it means that successful people are only that way because of unearned privilege of being placed in the fast molecule room, or that schools need to spend more on low performing students at the expense of high performing students. But I think the lesson should be that society underrates the impact of peer influence.

The number one villain here is zoning regulations, not a lack of spending on public schools in poor neighborhoods. Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark, NJ public schools didn't work because it did not address the core problem: kids being stuck in the slow molecule room. Infusing the slow molecule room with money isn't the same as infusing it with fast-molecule students. 

Instead, we need to kill the demon and [Ronald Reagan voice] tear down that wall.

II.

It isn't just poor parents without college degrees that are holding their kids back. In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris writes:

"British studies have shown that when delinquent London boys move out of their city their delinquency rates decline - even if they move with their families. By living in one neighborhood rather than another, parents can raise or lower the chances that their children will commit crimes, drop out of school, use drugs, or get pregnant."

It's probably wrong to blame the family for a problematic child, often times it's the school and community that influence him.

A New York Times study shows that poor white boys are more likely to become successful than poor black boys, and that rich white boys are more likely to stay rich, while rich black boys are more likely to end up poor, which is disheartening to say the least. 

The NYT study looked for outliers and found that:

"The few neighborhoods  (where poor black boys do well as well as whites)  ... were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.

"Other fathers in the community can provide boys with role models and mentors, researchers say, and their presence may indicate other neighborhood factors that benefit families, like lower incarceration rates and better job opportunities."

This is perfectly in line with Harris's research: It's not the makeup of the child's family that matters, it's the makeup of the families in the child's community.

I've touted the importance and privilege of two-parent families, but I wasn't totally correct. Outside of the home, parents have little influence over their children. Instead, children absorb the values of their peers, which is partially a reflection of their peers' parents. 

The best predictor of a child's future earnings is a combination of their parents' earnings and their friends' parents' earnings. So when towns pass things like single family zoning, they prevent the benefit a disadvantaged child would get from the positive influence of living in that community.

This is Maxwell's Demon in the community.

III.

Here is the problem with tearing down the wall and creating a demon-free society. If you eliminate gifted programs and other opportunities for high income parents to give their kids a leg up, they will just find new ones. The Seattle public schools equity initiative led to high income parents pulling their kids out and putting them in private schools. And even if highly educated parents to opt to mix their kids with low-income students, their children will see a reduction in test scores and an increase in things like dropping out, incarceration, or teen pregnancy (offset by a decrease in those things for low-income children).

The challenge is to create a great enough incentive for high income parents to open the door and let their kids into the slow molecule room and to tweak the settings just right to maximize the benefit of the slow molecules and minimize the harm of the fast molecules. There are a few uphill battles. First, scalability.

Research shows that children learn better in smaller classrooms. 

"After four years, it was clear that smaller classes did bring substantial improvement in early learning in cognitive subjects such as reading and arithmetic. Following the groups further, the Lasting Benefits Study demonstrated that the positive effects persisted into grades 4, 5, 6, and 7, so that students who had originally been enrolled in smaller classes continued to perform better than their grademates who had started in larger classes."

In small classes, teachers are able to convince students they are a unit so the salience becomes the classroom, rather than race or class distinctions, which have the Maxwell's Demon effect of feedback loops. I mentioned earlier that spending more on education will not fix the problem, but the right kind of spending can help. Any spending to reduce classroom size is a good start.

Second, not just any teacher will do. You need the right classroom leader who can make the classroom unit salient. A leader will define the stereotype the classroom has of itself and prevent students from falling into separate groups that perpetuate the Maxwell's Demon effect. The right teacher, like Miss A, can turn the entire class into an "us" that sees itself as scholars.

Third, you have to get the mix right when you try to de-sort the molecules. Without the right things in place, mixing molecules can make things worse. Janet Schofield's research in the racially-diverse Wexler school showed that students clustered by race and adopted opposing attitudes toward school that became more pronounced over time.

Harris's research found that:

"Whether a classroom of kids will split up into contrasting groups depends partly on how man kids there are ... whether kids will form groups that differ in village of origin, or in race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class, or academic ability, depends on how many there are in these social categories....

Number is important. A few students from a different socioeconomic class, ethnic group, or national background will be assimilated to the majority, but if there are enough of them to form their own group they are likely to remain different and contrast effects may cause the differences to increase. At intermediate numbers, things can go either way: two classes with the same number of majority and minority students may in one case split up into groups and in the other remain united. It will depend on chance events, on the characteristics of the individual children, and, crucially, on the teacher."

The final challenge is stereotype threat. Claude Steele found that all you have to do to lower the score of a bright black kid on a test of academic ability is to give her, before she takes the test, a short questionnaire that includes the question 'Race?' The same thing happens when you test a woman and ask her gender. (There is some evidence of replication failure for stereotype threat.) 

In contexts where gender is less salient, girls and young women do better in science and math. Women's colleges produce a disproportionate number of outstanding female scientists. Likewise historically black colleges and universities produce a disproportionate number of outstanding black scientists. 

This research is a good argument for HBCUs, and unfortunately, a bad argument for black spaces in majority-white colleges.  

Unfortunately we don't know the right number yet to know the ideal settings for getting the most benefit out of peer influence and the best ways to minimize the Maxwell's Demon effect. But if I could wave a magic wand I would do three things.

Reduce classroom size. Reward/retain/attract teachers who are leaders in the classroom.

Abolish single family zoning.

Incentivize highly educated, high income parents to put their kids in low performing schools. 


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Thursday, December 17, 2020

Best of 2020

 2020 was a crap year but there was still a lot of good content. Below is my yearly round up.

"War over being nice" by Joseph Gentle

"How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?" By Yuval Levin

"The Enemies of Writing" by George Packer

"Unbecoming American" by Johann N. Neem

Best exposition
Nothing about these pieces was exceptionally new or illuminating but they explained the history and context of things like critical theory, classical liberalism, and civilization.

"In America the big liberal shift took place in the mid-1960s. To deal with the legacy of slavery, liberals began to concede that you need to treat the descendants of slaves as members of a group, not only as individuals. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, argued that affirmative action, though a breach of liberal individualism that must eventually be dispensed with, had to stay until there was reasonable equality of opportunity between groups.”

“The appeal of critical race theory—or at least its manifestation in popular writing—is partly that it confidently prescribes what should be done to fight injustice...

“Liberals have no such simple prescription. They have always struggled with the idea of power as a lens through which to view the world, notes Michael Freeden of Oxford University. They often deny that groups (rather than individuals) can be legitimate political entities. And so liberal responses to critical race theory can seem like conservative apathy, or even denial."

"Liberalism and Its Discontents" by Francis Fukuyama.

A good history of liberalism, humanism, and Enlightenment values. Why they emerged, their flaws, how they've come under threat, and why they should not be abandoned.

"Markets worked more efficiently if individuals were not constrained by obligations to kin and other social networks. But this kind of individualism has always been at odds with the social proclivities of human beings."

"The Chump Effect" by James B. Meigs.

 A good perspective on the free rider problem in contemporary society.

"Thousands of norms, rules, and traditions make civilized life possible. Some, like paying taxes or not littering, are enshrined in law. Others are informal. Most of us take pride in adhering to basic standards of etiquette and fairness, to say nothing of following the law. And we have a deep emotional investment in having the people around us follow these norms as well. There’s a reason that we call selfish, disruptive, or criminal behavior “antisocial.” We know that if everyone stopped paying their taxes, or started running red lights and shoplifting, our society would be on its way to collapse."

"Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

A fair and honest take on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander, and rationalism.

My favorite Slate Star Codex essays (RIP)


Shameless Self Love
My favorite writings from yours truly. 








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Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Short takes

 I wrote a long blog post comparing the issue of trust among countries. One of my issues is that the measure asks people what they think rather than observing how they behave. As it turns out, someone did a study based on behavior. Scandinavian countries still come out on top.

My post on formative institutions was about many things, but in one section I made the case for the necessity of media as an institution. Similarly, Tanner Greer makes the case for why Substack will not be as disruptive as many people think. 

I wrote a blog post about my depression and how reading and learning something new is a way of drowing that out. Now it appears there is some science that backs up my behavior. 

"In recent years, other dopamine pathways in the brain have been proposed that are strongly linked to the reward value of information. People who score high in the general tendency toward exploration are not only driven to engage in behavioral forms of exploration but also tend to get energized through the possibility of discovering new information and extracting meaning and growth from their experience....

"Don’t understand why everyone else around you is so interested in sex, drugs, and money, and you get so turned on by stimulating ideas and learning new and interesting things? Now you have a potential answer: You may be highly sensitive to the reward value of information."

I support ideological diversity. Now, science supports it. 


Contrasts a previous study I read that showed teachers favoring boys over girls on math tests.

Again, my messy post on formative institutions was about many things. One of them was why I think it's a mistake to make police brutality a racial issue rather than a human rights issue. As a reminder, here is a list of unarmed white people killed by cops. This affects everyone.

In my blog post "True, Kind, and Necessary" I cited a tweet from Bret Weinstein speculating about the coronavirus possibly being created in a lab. His intention wasn't to point the finger at China but to draw attention to the fact that, if true, it will shape how we go about creating a vaccine. However, after reading that Moderna developed the vaccine in just two freaking days, way back in March, I have to downgrade Bret as an expert on viruses.

My most viewed blog post, by quite a wide margin, is called "Ideology is a Pair of Sunglasses". I wrote about the power of viewpoint diversity in cancelling out false negatives and false positives. In a single tweet, John Wood Jr. summarized what I was trying to say.

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