Why Guns are not like Motorcycles

 

I.

Whenever I see the above bumper sticker or yard sign, I get irrationally angry. 

I'll explain.

Motorcycle ownership comes with costs and benefits. The benefit is that they are very fun to ride. The cost is that they are very dangerous; if you are in an accident your chance of dying is very high. (My dad told me about a friend who was in the Navy with him who had to hide his motorcycle from his own father, who was a trauma surgeon. He referred to motorcyclists as "organ donors.")

The reason I hate the messaging of the sign is that it is an attempt for motorcyclists to pass the costs (ie increased risk or injury and death) on to everyone else by making them drive more cautiously. 

If you want me to share the costs, let me share the benefits. I want access to your motorcycle one week every summer. In exchange, I will be extra observant of the speed limit.

In the absence of this campaign, what I like about motorcycle ownership is that the benefits and costs of owning a motorcycle are symmetric, the rider receives and bears both. This brings me to gun ownership, which is very much not like owning a motorcycle.

II.

There are benefits that come with owning a gun. You get to go hunting. You can protect your home and family. You enjoy firing off rounds at the gun range or at beer cans in your backyard. It's a hedge against tyranny, zombies, or a real-life Purge scenario. I'm sure there are many others I cannot think of because I do not own a gun.

There are also costs to gun ownership, costs that are unique to our country. Think of a spectrum with a total gun ban on one end and total gun freedom on the other. We live in a country that is optimized toward the gun freedom side, as compared to other countries. 

The way our optimization settings are tuned means we have easy access to guns, which leads to a lot of guns in circulation. We have more guns than any other country. We have more guns than we have people. 

There are a lot of studies that attempt to find a cause of gun violence. They control for things like strict gun laws, poverty, mental health access, voting patterns, etc. The only really reliable variable is that the presence of guns in a community increases the amount of gun violence. Therefore, the cost of our country's gun optimization setting is that we have a lot more guns, which means lot more gun violence.

And unlike our motorcycle friend, the law-abiding hunter or NRA member gets to enjoy the benefits of his gun without paying the costs. The cost is paid by the number of police officers annually killed in the line of duty. The cost is paid by the families who cannot afford to move out of their high-crime neighborhood and become victims of stray drive-by bullets. The cost is paid by people like Daniel Shaver who was executed while pulling up his pants because the cop thought he was reaching for a gun. Why? Because cops are terrified of being shot due to the high presence of guns in circulation.

I don't know what the solution to gun violence is, but I think it has to address this assymetry. The closest solution I can think of is treating gun ownership like cars; everyone has to get insurance that pays out if the gun is used to kill someone. Insurance companies will assess risk when assigning premiums. The higher the risk--no gun safe, AR-15, kids in the house, etc.--the higher the premium. 

How to Make Enemies and Influence Students

I've seen two videos going around social media that have been shown in elementary classrooms and stirred up some controversy. Both sides are making bad faith arguments and, as usual, I am going to use this post to steelman both sides and try to get to the heart of what I think the controversy is really about.

Video 1: Black Lives Matter

The first video attempts to explain the origins of Black Lives Matter. It's mostly harmless and informative. But around the 5:00 mark it mentions Michael Brown, saying he was unarmed and shot multiple times and that the officer wasn't charged. It leaves out that Michael Brown was beating the cop and reached for his gun when he was shot.

The video mentions the death of Breonna Taylor but leaves out the part where her boyfriend began shooting at the cops, who then returned fire.

The video also leaves out thousands of white people killed by cops every year, which obviously isn't the point of Black Lives Matter but its exclusion leads the young viewer to the conclusion that White people are free from police violence.

These are little nitpicky things, but their exclusion helps explain why some parents are raising an issue.

Can you imagine a video of George Floyd that just talked about his criminal past, how he was high on fentanyl, how he said "i can't breathe" while still standing, his history of heart problems, the number of cops killed in the line of duty each year? All these things are true, but they would leave out important context that would lead the viewer toward a particular conclusion that sounds like victim-blaming.

Nothing about the video is factually wrong, but it does present a story that will lead a child to believe a particular narrative. A more complete, albeit complicated narrative, would present each individual shooting as part of a complex story. Sometimes it's an evil police officer; sometimes it's racism; sometimes the deceased is actually a dangerous criminal; sometimes it's bad laws, policies, and incentives; and sometimes it's just an awful tragedy.

The fairest complaint of this video is that it tackles a complex problem by framing it as a simple narrative and it may be too complex for young students to fully grasp.

The fairest argument in favor of the video is that, as a society, we do not know how to have this conversation about race. Putting off uncomfortable conversations is ignoring a problem which will not go away.

My nuanced take is that those in favor of the video think they have all the facts but they don't. You have some facts, including facts that many other people do not have, but that is not the same as having all the facts.

A nuanced discussion about systemic racism in police shootings would look like this, but it will go way over the heads of 5th graders. This is a good opportunity for others to step up with suggestions for having these conversations, filling in the gaps via ideological diversity, and avoiding attempts to shut down speech, which is sadly the option opponents are choosing.

Video 2: Antiracism and Anti bias training

In the second video is about antiracism and anti bias training.

Around the 6 minute mark, the teacher talks about the fickle idea of race. The video later shows an image of hands and the spectrum of pigment to call attention to the complexity of color. The teacher says this is evidence that race is a social construct. I would say that one cannot build a satisfying taxonomy of race/color, making it an unreliable category. But that's why I'm not an elementary teacher.

Anyway, I mostly agree with this content and think it is good to share with young children. However, around the 7 minute mark she then goes on to say that this "social construction" of race was created to keep one group in power over another, and seems to suggest the idea of race was invented by the early colonial settlers. For an anti bias training, this content has an awful lot of bias.

If you are going to show students this take about how America has been steeped in racism from its foundation, you should couple it with Danielle Allen's Commencement speech, which is closer to the idea of viewing U.S. history through the progression and failures to live up to our founding ideals.

Allen starts by quoting the Declaration of Independence, musing that "It’s not just about individual rights—about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—it moves from those rights to the notion that government is something that we build together to secure our safety and happiness."

Allen tells the students that it is "our job at the end of the day is to build institutions that secure our shared rights. That means understanding the user manual." It's a great speech in and of itself, but all the more powerful when you reflect on how an African American woman can find such inspiration in our founding document. In this version of America, students feel empowered by recognizing that we were gifted with this power and have a responsibility to one another.

Instead of a tool of oppression, Allen views the legacy of our founders as a tool for moving toward prosperity. You can criticize this view but you cannot convince me it's wrong and the video's version is correct.

I'm fine with someone having a different interpretation of America's founding. But I think it's fair for a parent to see this and think our children are being taught one version of history as the "correct" one. It might be a small thing, but it will feel like they are losing the culture war by progressives flooding the curriculum with antiracist orthodoxy.

Steelmanning

The criticism of the pushback is that "you just don't want to teach about the history of racism" or "you're trying to protect your feelings from getting hurt." While the anti Critical Race Theory bills being introduced can have the effect of making it virtually impossible to teach about the history of racism, and have a chilling effect on free speech, the general worry coming from this crowd is more about the narrative around these topics is controlled by educators who do not view the world through the same lens as some parents. (In case it isn't clear, I think these bills are a terrible idea and do more harm than good.)

People outside of progressive circles use the academic term "Critical Race Theory" because they don't have the language to describe what they are seeing, which feels to them like progressive activism. And they want their kids to get an education without being turned into progressive activists.

The arguments in favor of the curriculum changes say that racism is a problem and if we are going to solve this problem, we need to educate people about it. So if you are against educating kids about racism, it must be because you want to keep racism in place and assert your white supremacy. They also argue that this sort of education is a corrective for the decades of public education that left out the important stuff about racism.

The Objectivity Problem

For most of U.S. history, public education, whether intentional or not, has optimized behavior in the direction of patriotism. It achieved this by focusing on the accomplishments of (mostly) great white men and ignoring, or downplaying, tragedies like the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa Massacre.

Notice that I never said this version of education lies. It just leaves out events in order to lead the learner to a particular conclusion that orients behavior to patriotism.

Now, if the purpose of public education was to create patriots, the purpose of the new curriculum change is to create antiracist activists. They both use the same rhetorical tool of leaving out nuance to lead the student to a particular conclusion.

A good metaphor for the exclusion of America's tragedies, in order to create patriotic students, would be to call it punching minorities in the face. There are two answers to this: punch back or adopt a "no punching" resolution. It appears modern educators have chosen the former.

I'm obviously a "no punching" kind of guy but I'm in a losing battle here. I don't think I can convince progressive educators that aiming for objectivity is even possible (see part III for my take on objectivity). Here is a long Twitter thread arguing something as seemingly as objective as science cannot help but be political, therefore justifying the intentional injection of one's politics into the classroom.

This paper argues against 'politicisation of science'. It's a seductive idea that science has been apolitical and things like decolonisation contaminate it, but it's wrong. Science has always been political - with significant impact on outcomes & culture.https://t.co/3OPqyUBgUQ

— David K Smith (@professor_dave) June 11, 2021

Three Types of Reactions to these Videos

1. Ben does not believe in systemic racism, or at least doesn't believe it's important enough to be front and center in elementary education curriculum. Therefore he works to stop these changes but does not feel the need to offer alternatives. Since he follows Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, he believes that these changes are just part of an attempt at an ideological takeover of our schools, rather than his beliefs being led by motivated reasoning (something like status quo bias).
2. Robin believes systemic racism is not only real, but the most pressing issue facing America today. Since she is highly credentialed, she believes that she is led by The Facts, has done the work, read the right books, etc., etc., rather than being led by motivated reasoning (eg confirmation bias leading her to preferring a narrative that frames history in a Oppressor vs. Oppressed lens). Since she believes her education led to this view, then it stands to follow that educating others will bring them to share that view, which is how we've ended up where we are today.
3. Coleman recognizes systemic racism, but believes the solution lies in expanding the project of liberalism and Enlightenment values. He sees inequity as a panoply of different scenarios, each deserving its own solution. He believes that mandated bias trainings and compelled speech are not only anathema to liberalism, but thwart the very efforts of Robin's antiracism. Since he reads Steven Pinker and IDW types, he believes he is above the partisan pettiness of Ben and Robin, rather than being led by motivated reasoning (eg fear of civil war and the end of liberalism due to polarization).

Robin is unable to distinguish Ben from Coleman. Coleman is unable to convince Robin that liberalism is the answer. Coleman believes that Robin is moving in the right direction but using the wrong tools. His dilemma is in deciding if he should join up with Ben in preventing Robin from using the wrong tools, believing that Ben is moving in the wrong direction.

A Plea for Communitarianism

My children are being raised Catholic. I have never complained that my public school was failing to teach my children about the glory of God, the meaning of the sacraments, or how to pray to the rosary. My children get that at Sunday School.

No one has ever complained to our priest that a Sunday School teacher was indoctrinating her child with Critical Christian Theory. Everyone is there voluntarily. We're there to be indoctrinated.

My point is that there is nothing stopping parents from forming a community civic organization that meets weekly to discuss this history of racism and the importance of activism with their children.

Our community institutions have evaporated but our need for a moral community persists. I think it is a mistake for people to try to use their public school as a proxy for a moral community. It will be more meaningful, and less hostile if people create their own. (Of course, as Tanner Greer has argued, Americans no longer have a "builders" attitude.)

My super hot take: I don't care. It really doesn't matter to me what version of history we teach or what gets excluded because schools no longer hold a monopoly on information. A quick summary on my education as it relates to US history and race:

• I am aware of our country's racist housing policy because I read a review of Richard Rothstein's book from a link I found on a Pearl Jam message board.
  
• I know about the Tulsa Massacre because it was in a TV show I watched about comic book heroes.
  
• I know a lot about John Adams and Alexander Hamilton because of HBO and Disney+.
  

I learned all of this after the age of 30 and with nothing more than my laptop and a $15 monthly subscription. I didn't even mention all I've learned from Wikipedia and free podcasts. Teach it. Don't teach it. But stop acting like high school is "our one chance to get it right."

Facts Man and the Social Justice Warrior

I.

On Coleman Hughes's podcast, he talks about debunking the "Hands up; don't shoot" myth regarding the Michael Brown shooting. To his credit, he does attempt to understand why people would believe what he calls a "poetic truth", which he contrasts with empirical truth. And while I don't think his steelmanning quite gets it right, the larger issue I have is with the ineffectiveness of this approach to sensitive topics like these. 

In this context, Hughes is acting as what Annie Lowery calls "Facts Man."

"The Facts Man gives it to you straight. With his college degree, with his top-quality résumé, with his insider knowledge, with his background in euclidean something-or-other—sharpened by debating with the smartest people, who never went to school—here is what he has found. These are the data. These are more data. This. Is. It. Here’s the inevitable conclusion. It’s the only conclusion possible!"

 II.

A very progressive woman in my town posted a video on Facebook. She saw a local cop had pulled over a Black driver. She pulled her car to the side of the road and began filming. Despite the fact that nothing happened--nor does anything ever happen in our town, including complaints of police abuse--the comments on her post were filled with praise and instances of the word "brave."

I couldn't help but be reminded of Liz Bruenig's comment about a lack of opportunities for heroism in modern society. It should come as no surprise that this woman's post came just days after Derek Chauvin's conviction. The media made Darnella Frazier a star, the girl who filmed Floyd's murder. I can't help but feel that the woman was motivated by her own desires for heroism.

I felt like commenting with some statistics. Things like the lack of police complaints in our town, or how police abuse happens in violent neighborhoods, not our town. Or how nationally the vast majority of police complaints go to the same small number of cops, so going by base rates this cop is likely to be harmless.

But then I realized how much I would have sounded like Facts Man. Social Justice Warrior can be irrational, but Facts Man can be just as annoying and ineffective, even when he's right. 

There has to be a better way.

III.

John Warner wrote a Twitter thread contrasting Adam Serwer and Conor Friedersdorf's coverage of the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure denial controversy. Serwer and Friedersdorf aren't exactly Facts Man and the Social Justice Warrior--or if they are, they're the best versions of them--but Warner's analysis points toward something deeper.

Warner dislikes Conor's objective approach. 

But posing as objective (or even neutral) when you are not objective does not enhance anyone's credibility when it's apparent that you are not objective or neutral. This is why even when I agree with Friedersdorf, I roll my eyes because I know I've been subject to a performance.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) May 22, 2021

Here is why Warner likes Serwer's writing better. 

Serwer's description of the precipitating incident is in no way slanted on the facts, but it also isn't an attempt at establishing an "objective" persona. He's telling the reader where he stands so we can evaluate what's to come with that knowledge in hand.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) May 22, 2021

Warner is free to prefer whichever type of writing he likes, but I think he makes two logical errors. The first is to view objectivity/subjectivity as a binary, before rejecting the idea of objectivity at all. 

Scott Siskind explains how rationality is not a binary, but a spectrum, writing:

"You can definitely be bad at rationality, objectivity, and staying unbiased. But if you can be bad, you can also be good. You've admitted there's a spectrum from better to worse, you've admitted that the worse end deserves terms like "irrational" - so shouldn't the natural term for the better end be "rational"?"

In another post, Scott compares rationality to weight training; like objectivity, it's something you get better at the more you train. But because Warner cannot conceive of someone being objective, he becomes immediately suspicious of anyone who appears to approach topics with an objective lens. They must have some evil, hidden agenda, he thinks. 

I see a different distinction between the two writers. Serwer writes beautifully, but what is the point? He is basically reassuring liberals that they are right in believing conservatives are terrible.

Yes, by striving for objectivity, Conor has established credibility for a certain group of readers. But unlike Serwer, Conor's writing does what Amanda Ripley calls Complicating the Narrative. When Warner calls Serwer's writing "illuminating," I call it confirmation bias. Conversely, what Conor does is what I would call persuasion.

The other error Warner makes is to discount the effect of persuasion. Persuasion is so rare now that when people like Warner come across it, they mistake it for something nefarious. They assume people like Conor must have some secret evil motive. But what if Conor's motive is simply to update the priors of readers who are open to having their minds changed? Because I can guarantee you that Serwer isn't changing anyone's mind.

In an interesting column, Tom Chivers wonders "When did we give up on persuasion?" Chivers is curious about people's reaction to Scott Siskind's writing and draws a conclusion.

"When was the last time you read an article, an opinion piece, that you felt was trying to persuade you of something? To argue a position that you don’t hold, and make you believe it?

I suspect such experiences are rare. It is easier to write things for people who already agree with you: to make them cheer or feel clever, or to remind them how dreadful the other lot are. It’s also more fun. 

I’m not talking about reading a column that disagrees with you. I’m sure you read them regularly, or at least the headlines: pieces get hate-shared all the time among people who disagree with them. But they are not written to persuade, and readers are not persuaded. The intention, I think, is to provoke a reaction, to elicit cheers and boos. Not, primarily, to change minds."

IV.

To me, the myth-debunking Facts Man is as pointless as the callout-culture Social Justice Warrior. I think the world would be a better place if both archetypes cared more about the art of persuasion. 

Facts Man doesn't change minds when he debunks. He only angers his interlocutor and riles up his base. In other words, he writes and speaks for those who already agree with him.

Social justice warrior doesn't achieve social justice when he calls out or cancels someone. He just adds to the growing resentment of his outgroup.

The only positive thing both men achieve is higher status within their ingroup. There must be a third way.

I've reimagined what I think Braver Angels should look like. I think it's a mistake to recruit reds and blues as reds and blues. The people they recruit should not have politics as the top layer of their identity. The people they recruit should be Antitribalists. They should recruit Persuasion Man.

Their goal should be to recruit Gladwell's connectors, mavens, and persuaders. People who take debunked myths and present them in a way not intended to make others feel dumb, but to update their priors. People who explain to Facts Man why he should sit this one out and let people be empirically wrong if they're not hurting anyone. People who show Social Justice Warrior how to call in, rather than call out. Or better yet, just ignore people who say mean things. 

The Antitribalists care about truth and justice, but not as much as they fear civil war. The Antitribalists start from a place of empathy. They study, listen to, and learn the language and culture of Facts Man and Social Justice Warrior. They are bayesians, who constantly evaluate and update their beliefs when presented with new information.

They focus on their cognitive biases and work to overcome them and be less wrong. They recognize that persuasion is a two-way street; they cannot expect to change others' minds if they will not change their own.

The Antribalists recognize the irony that a group of people being against tribes is, in fact, a tribe. And they are okay with this because they are bound the similarities of the ingroup rather than hostility toward the outgroup.

Richard Hanania wrote an essay titled "Why is Everything Liberal?" His conclusion is that liberals simply care more. Consider this a post for the Antitribalists out there to care more.

The Slippery Slope to Losing the Culture War

                                    Pixabay — mstlion

I.

I was having a conversation with a conservative friend recently. She was upset that Penn State was changing the class year's names (freshman, sophomore, etc.) to be more inclusive and less hierarchical. Trying to follow the scout mindset, I asked her to continue that line of thinking. Why was this change bad? What did it portend? How does it affect her?

What I came to take away was that the Penn State change really was a low stakes battle. But it was a sign that her tribe was losing the war. It wasn't about the name change as much as it was liberals getting another W.

I've seen people on Twitter lose their minds over a presentation that begins with a land acknowledgment. I've been very critical of the coercive use of Critical Theory-inspired movements.  But a land acknowledgment? Really? Who gives a shit?

But now I understand the resistance. It's a sign that the other tribe has won another battle and it feels like they are losing the culture war.

II.

In my worshiping and compression post, I described how progressives view the "default setting" of humanity:

"For example, I think Ibram Kendi, and the successor ideology at-large, think the default setting of America is racism. In How to be an Antiracist, he describes the birth of the "conjoined twins" (capitalism and racism) in 1450 Portugal, tracing it to the founding of the United States. 

The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, that America was founded on protecting slavery. In this view, the only thing to save us from falling back into slavery, and allowing racism to grow like metastic cancer, is the constant practice of antiracism in the face of the institutions that uphold racism (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.)."

Looking back, I don't think I did a great job describing that viewpoint. For starters, that description doesn't align with how I described the other groups. I wrote that conservatives fear that losing the culture war means we descend to barbarism. Enlightenment liberals fear that losing the culture war means we descend to civil war. Libertarians fear that losing the culture/policy war means we descend into totalitarianism. (I don't feel confident in my ability to steelman Trumpism, but I would say they fear that losing the culture war means being replaced by socialist-loving immigrants.)

But what about progressives? Why does my description of a default setting and fear of losing sound so clunky?

First, I think a better description would be to say that their belief is that our default setting is for one group to accumulate power (eg White people) and use it to oppress everyone else. They fear losing the culture war means descending into total White Supremacy oppression. 

I like that definition better because it works on both the cultural and policy level. This helps me understand the aggression toward capitalism; they conflate it with White Supremacy. In both instances they see that a bunch of white dudes have accumulated power/capital and are using it to assert their dominance/extract labor from everyone else.

The only thing that makes progressives different from all the other groups is that they don't frame the default settings as a "descent" to their greatest fear (ie White Supremacy). They think they already have lost. White Supremacy has been winning since time immemorial. 

This helps me understand why it's so difficult to talk across ideological lines. Libertarians think the government is already too big. Enlightenment liberals think we are already too polarized. Conservatives think society is already too permissive and chaotic. So collectively, they are understandably confused when progressives lump all these groups together, based on most of them having white skin, and declare that not only are they the bad guys, but they're winning the culture war. 

We're all living different narratives and in each version, someone else is winning.

(As an Enlightenment liberal, I just want to say that I do not think polarization is worse than racism. I just think that we cannot solve racism, or any major problem, until we solve polarization.)

III.

The Georgia voting laws dominated the news cycle for quite some time. Some people argued it was the worst thing ever and others said the hype was overblown. At first, I thought the different reactions was a decouple vs. contextual dichotomy. In other words, how you felt about the laws depended on whether you could decouple them from Georgia's history of racism and voter suppression or whether that context always played a role on how we should interpret them.

For instance, here is a breakdown of how the law is being overblown, with the exception being the part that takes power away from the Secretary of State. That part is actually scary overreach.

But even if a progressive reads the above link and believes every word, they will not be comforted. Because just like my friend hearing about the rather benign Penn State name change, the voter law is a sign that progressives are losing the war. No matter how much you downplay the effects of the law, it will always be interpreted as "My outgroup used their power to put into law something that takes power away from my ingroup." If you're a progressive, this reifies your fear that we are descending into White Supremacy.

IV.

I like the decoupling vs. contextualizing idea. It helped me understand why some people just talk past one another, why we can't even seem to agree on what we're arguing about. Decoupling is considering facts on their merits, irrespective of their context, while contextualizing says that true honesty must acknowledge cultural context.

However, I think the dichotomy is flawed. I don't think the world is made up of people who are decouplers OR contextualizers. I'm not even talking about a spectrum. I think the flaw is that the description is fluid. In some contexts, I'm a decoupler. In others, a contextualizer. The determining factor is how much skin me or my tribe has in the game.

Take the Masterpiece Cakeshop. Should a Christian baker be allowed to refuse a cake for a gay couple? As a straight, non-Christian, I don't have any skin in the game. So whatever my opinion, it is decoupled from the context. 

Now consider the biracial student forced to confess his white dominance in his sociology class. This is the unnecessary race-baiting of Critical Race Theory that increases polarization and puts the culture wars in a pressure cooker. As an Enlightenment liberal who believes our default setting moves us toward civil war, I cannot decouple this scenario from it's context in the polarization culture war. I place it right within the context of the polarization problem. In this case, I am a contextualizer.

So if someone seems to be overreacting to a news story, ask yourself: Is it possible they view the world as a different war than the way I view it? Do they have a different belief about the default setting of humanity?

Is their biggest fear White Supremacy, civil war, barbarism, totalitarianism, or something else different than my biggest fear? If so, are they contextualizing this story as just a battle in a larger war they feel they are losing?

My point is that we all overreact to seemingly mundane news stories and that our reaction has less to do with the context of the story than with the overall feeling that our team is losing. If your response to this point is to justify why your war is more righteous than someone else's war ("Boo Hoo, Christians. You have to call it a Holiday Tree? Guess what? I'm fighting against White Supremacy, which has been oppressing black people for 400 hundred years!") then you're missing the point of living in a multicultural society. We have to make space for everyone, and, yes, that includes the antiracists. 

I think an important step is for members of each tribe to ask themselves: Where do I draw the line? At which point do I concede a battle, knowing that any one group should not have too much power, even if it's my tribe in power?

As an Enlightenment liberal, the American Civil War is a good example. If keeping two factions from tearing one another apart includes allowing a violation of human rights (eg slavery) then I am going to sit this one out or align with whoever is on the side of human rights.

The biggest threat to progress

Thesis: the biggest obstacle to a political party's goals is not the power and reach of the other party's critics, but the aggressive nature of the party's own fanatics who make more enemies than allies. For example, the biggest threat to a wealth tax isn't Sean Hannity, it's Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I am going to set my confidence interval at 65%.

At the end of this post, I am going to make a forecast that can be tracked. The forecast will be based on my thesis.

 I've made the case that the biggest threat to things like racial equity and expanding the welfare state comes from the left. I argue that the people Paul Graham would call "aggressive conventionals" (people who are "fighters" when they're in your ingroup but "bullies" when they're in your outgroup) push passive, moderate, or otherwise politically disengaged people to more reactionary positions that fight back against progressives. Their aggressiveness should be curbed so the more civil among us can court these moderates.

The other argument is that reactionaries and aggressive conventionals on the right are the biggest threat to progressive goals. Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham are out there telling lies and saying harmful things that radicalize their listeners. We should deplatform them and limit their speech so they do not expand their audience and bring more people to their side.

If I'm being honest, I cannot prove which is the bigger threat. Based on what I know of human behavior, it is easier to push people than to pull them. They are more likely to identify with an ideology that is against something they hate, than for something they like. 

So, no, I don't think "giving a platform" to some toxic person is going to make much of a difference in their pursuit of gaining followers. However, I also don't think I can court many moderates to the left if the far left would just tone down their "abolish the police" rhetoric. But I still like to try.

So here is my best argument for why I think the aggressive left is making things worse for progressives.

Campaign Tactics

Scott Alexander analyzed the voter turnout approach vs. court swing voters approach to winning elections. He found that there isn't much evidence either approach works better at getting more voters, but the more extreme a candidate is the more she turns out voters to vote against her. 

Likewise, extreme candidates do a better job of making enemies than allies.

Support for BLM

In the following section, I opine about polling data regarding support for Black Lives Matter. It might be too boring/confusing, in which case you can skip to the Bad Phrasing section. My basic point is that support rose sharply after George Floyd's death and dissipated rather quickly. The sharpest change was in the reduction in people who had no opinion on BLM; most of them now oppose BLM. I find it unlikely that this group takes their cues from Fox News and what changed their behavior was the rioting and anti-police rhetoric.

According to FiveThirtyEight, The death of George Floyd polarized White America's attitudes toward Black Lives Matter. If I'm reading this correctly, at the time of his death, attitudes were the same; 35% support, 35% oppose. This means 30% had no opinion. We are now at 49% oppose (an increase of 14%), 37% support (an increase of 2%), meaning 14% have no opinion (a decrease of 16%). 

People could have moved from support to oppose, or support/oppose to no opinion, but it seems more likely that, of the 16% of pollsters who are no longer in the no opinion category, 14% moved to oppose and 2% moved to support. So what moved them, watching Fox News' unfavorable coverage of the riots or reading New York Times op-eds about abolishing the police?

Moving the Fencers

In a past blog post, I coined the term "fencers" to describe the White respondents who are on the fence about supporting BLM, the people who said they "somewhat support" the organization. In a June 2020 poll, those who leaned Democrat were at 30% and those who leaned Republican were also at 30%. In a follow-up September poll, that number for republicans had dropped from 30% to 14%, while the number for democrats rose from 30% to 36%.

However, the overall change--including responses for both "somewhat" and "strongly" support--dropped for both groups of White respondents. Republicans went from 37% to 16%; Democrats went from 92% to 88%. For simplicity, here are the June numbers and here are the September numbers. Notice that left-leaning "strongly support" dropped from 62% in June to  51% in September.

So what likely happened is left leaning respondents moved from "strongly support" to "somewhat support". I doubt that 11% decrease is the result of them turning on Tucker Carlson and drinking his Kool-aid. 

So something happened that shrunk overall support for BLM for every racial group--except Blacks, who picked up a point, although the FiveThirtyEight graph shows even their support has dropped a bit since then--even when controlling for ideology. And according to the FiveThirtyEight data, that drop has continued or at least leveled off.

Why was there such a rise in support that quickly began to fade? Did Fox News give favorable coverage after George Floyd's death and then quickly change their stance? Or did sympathy turn to apathy once rioters began burning down police departments and tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant? Whereas "Justice for George Floyd" was a rallying call, "All Cops Are Bastards" became a deterrent. 

(I tried using Infoplease to look at the top stories in August, and found three stories about riots that could have dampened support of BLM, which would then show up in the September polls. But then I looked at June, when poll numbers for BLM were still high, and saw three more stories about riots, so maybe they didn't make much of a difference.) 

Bad Phrasing

David Shor is an election expert and posits that two topics don't poll well and hurt Democrats at the ballot: defund the police and socialism. The main problem is messaging. A recent poll shows that only 18% of respondents support "defund the police." 

This FiveThirtyEight story shows that while most Americans oppose "defund the police" when you break it down by specific policies you get better results.

"For instance, when Reuters/Ipsos queried people about “proposals to move some money currently going to police budgets into better officer training, local programs for homelessness, mental health assistance, and domestic violence,” a whopping 76 percent of people who were familiar with those proposals supported them, with only 22 percent opposed. Democrats and independents supported these proposals in huge numbers while Republicans were split, 51 percent in favor to 47 percent opposed."

So this seems like an easy fix. Just focus your message on the stuff that polls well. But wait! This is a post about how the left can't get out of its own damn way.

It wasn't an accident. Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist.

Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence. I am done with those who condone government funded murder.

No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) April 12, 2021

Trump Good for Immigration?

Does this happen on the right? Maybe. This Gallup poll asks people if immigration should increase, decrease, or stay the same. For the first time since they began asking this question in 1966, more people favor increase than decrease. 

What did the Democrats do to sway public opinion? Probably nothing other than give Donald Trump enough rope to hang himself. Trump made the demonization of immigration and the promotion of nationalism the core of his campaign and it seems to have backfired. 

Here is a Google Trend for "illegal immigration":

There is a huge spike in 2006, when the House passed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which later died in the Senate. Another bump in 2010, when Congress considered the DREAM Act, which later died. And that's about it. Nothing Trump did got people talking about immigration quite like past pro immigration policies.

So it's possible that Trump's angry rhetoric actually tilted public opinion in support of immigration.

Unite the Left

In Against Murderism, Scott Alexander critiques defining racism by its consequences (basically Antriracism before the term was ubiquitous), writing:

"Suppose the KKK holds a march through some black neighborhood to terrorize the residents... The march is well-covered on various news organizations, and outrages people around the nation, who donate a lot of money to anti-racist organizations and push for stronger laws against the KKK. Plausibly, the net consequences of the march were (unintentionally) very good for black people and damaging to white supremacy. Therefore, by the Sophisticated Definition, the KKK marching the neighborhood to terrorize black residents was not racist. In fact, for the KKK not to march in this situation would be racist!"

I know he's trying to be hyperbolic to make a point but I don't think it's quite the own he thinks it is. That is basically what happened during the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally! This Civiqs poll of Black Lives Matter support shows that the Charlottesville rally made people more favorable toward BLM. 

The Hard Work

I get that people want to denigrate what Ibram Kendi called "moral suasion." It's slow-moving and produces small results. But it's the best thing we've got because more aggressive approaches just push people to the other side and embolden the enemy. However, I did set my confidence interval at 65%, so it wouldn't be too difficult to have my mind changed.

Forecast: since Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts, the right will spend the next several months talking about how the trial was unfair and police need more protection. Black Lives Matter will largely be out of the news. As a result, support for Black Lives Matter will increase again. According to the Civiqs poll above, support is at 47% as of April 17, 2020. I predict that it will be 49 percent by June 1. My confidence interval is 55%.

Short Takes Part II

 In my review of How to be an Antiracist, I used #ShutdownSTEM as an example of someone applying antiracism to an area that has nothing to do with racism. I was trying to show an example of well-intentioned activism obstructing innovation and technological progress that will actually improve quality of life for all races.

Two things have changed my mind. First this Twitter thread about motion sensor faucets not working on black skin. Then, an update I made to that same post about facial recognition software producing more false positives on black and brown faces. These things should have been caught before the products made it to the market.

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 In "Diversity Training has a Rationality Problem" I suggested that the best way to fight implicit bias is not with diversity training but with empirical tactics to combat bias at the subconscious level (eg reordering a stack of resumes in a way that preference is given to Black candidates). In that vein, it turns out that using a rubric can completely eliminate racial bias in grading. Much cheaper and more effective than a $20,000 session with Robin DiAngelo. More science, less racism.

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More evidence to support my belief that two parent families are an underrated privilege:

"Children residing in households with unrelated adults were nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than children residing with 2 biological parents" https://t.co/icG891KFZm pic.twitter.com/ZCHjDWbAbG

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 13, 2021

Two-parent privilege even overcomes racial disparities:

"simply waiting until marriage to have children is a positive predictor of multiple “success variables,” including income. When Prager wrote in 2016, the poverty rate was nearly 25 percent for white children born into single-mother families, but only 7 percent for black children born into two-parent families.”

In my blog post "Through the Lens of Salience" I wrote about how, when intersectionality is used in diversity training, it usually stops at race and gender, which is really unfortunate since more context is always needed. In the example above, the Black child in a two-parent family is more privileged than the White child with a single mom. 

As Conor Friedersdorf shows, controlling for only race and gender will lead to the conclusion:

"that to be Black and female is to be “the most unprotected person in America,” many students might come away with the impression that Black women are the demographic group most likely to be killed by police in America.

According to a 2019 paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the lifetime risk ... for ... white men [is] 39 per 100,000. For Black women, the authors find, the lifetime risk of being killed by police is 2.4 to 5.4 per 100,000." 

Being white and male is a privilege, except when it isn't. Privilege still matters, but it is also context-dependent. So let's choose messaging that doesn't demonize our fellow citizens and actually makes everyone feel included.

---

In my post "Everyone is Wrong About Robin DiAngelo" I suggested ways to increase support for Black Lives Matter by thinking of how messages can push or pull "fencers", people who said they "somewhat support" BLM. 

This whole idea of coalition building and gaining the support of fencers comes up a lot in my writing. It turns out that someone already said this much better than me. Here are my favorite quotes from that post:

"Social norms are the only way to achieve cooperation without coercion ...This means that the social norms that promote cooperation are the most valuable thing we have.... 
And this means that nothing is more harmful than the norms that promote polarization and hamper cooperation.”

He then uses an image as a way to picture the spectrum of racist voters.

He then writes: 

"If half the country voted for Trump, the median Trump voter is at the 75th percentile of racism. That’s 0.67 standard deviations more racist than the median American, and 1.33 SDs more racist than the median Clinton voter (and people like the New York Times). On the other hand, there are 6,000 registered KKK members out of 242 million American adults, that more than 4 SDs out on the racism axis."

Which is a math-y way of saying that there is a whole contingent of Trump voters (fencers!) that are much closer to what we consider normal than they are to actual Nazis. Stop calling them names and start working on gaining their trust because, as he writes, we'll need them.

"Trump is especially worrying in regards to racism .... To combat that, we need to build an overwhelming anti-racist coalition. We can’t risk having just 51% of people on our side, we need at least three-quarters of the country. That means we need the “orange quarter” on my chart, the 25% of Americans who voted for Trump but are less racist than the median Trump voter."

Anyway, the whole blog post is fantastic and speaks to everything I care about.

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In my blog post "Kill the Demon, Destroy the Wall" I wrote about how the racial makeup in a school can make things better or worse for African-American students, but we didn't have enough research into the right ratio. I found some new research that looked at "acting white," something I am very uncomfortable writing about and I feel like a need a disclaimer before continuing.

Disclaimer: the authors of the report are testing the thesis of whether "acting white" is real and find that it mostly is not. However, they find certain instances in which data suggests it could be happening. So when I write "acting white" I'm just using their words to describe the data points they are referencing, I am not making any claims about whether or not it exists. I'm only interested in the data as it relates to my idea of Maxwell's Demon in the classroom.

They find that "acting white" is most prominent in schools that are less than 20 percent black, and tends to disappear in schools that are more than 80 percent black. They say it increases with "interracial contact." This aligns with Judith Harris' work--the more interracial contact a student has, the more race becomes a salient category, the more likely students will adopt opposing stereotypes to distinguish themselves from their peers. 

The researchers also say "acting white" is more salient in public schools and low-income families, this makes sense as Harris suggested that in a predominantly White school, a Black student would be assimilated into the culture.

Also of note, the report mentions the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, which assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five large cities. They found that females exhibit lower arrest rates, improvements in education and mental health, and are less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Males, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in risky behaviors, had no decrease in arrest rates, and experienced more physical health problems (e.g., injuries or accidents).

This accords with the New York Times study which showed that controlling for class eliminated the wealth gap between black and white girls, while a gap persisted when looking at black and white boys.

Is Malcom X Winning?

Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images

(disclaimer: I refer to the ideas of Dr. King and Malcolm X throughout this blog post. I acknowledge that their views are complex and continued to evolve throughout their tragically short lives. My intention is not to narrow their beliefs. I purposefully use the term "legacies" because what I'm writing about is how they are most remembered today, what the most influential aspect of their beliefs are, what ideas of theirs are shaping today's discourse, even if those ideas represent a small part of their overall ideologies.)

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are probably the two biggest names from the Civil Rights era. They both wanted to end the system that treated African Americans as second-class citizens, but they had opposing visions of what a future America would look like for their children. 

For most of my life, it seemed that King's vision won, by which I mean captured the narrative and dominated the discourse. His face was the one most associated with Black History Month. Everyone in my elementary school could recite the first few lines from his "I have a dream" speech. Everyone in college read Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Over the last year, however, I've noticed that Malcom X's ideas are making a comeback. In fact, within certain groups, I think his ideas have won.

Although he later changed his views, his legacy is separatism, similar to a term today known as "spaces." From Wikipedia:

"While the civil rights movement fought against racial segregation, Malcolm X advocated the complete separation of blacks from whites. The Nation of Islam proposed the establishment of a separate country for African Americans in the southern or southwestern United States as an interim measure until African Americans could return to Africa."

So Malcolm envisioned a world apart from White America, a world in which they are free from White oppression. Dr. King, on the other hand, envisioned the Beloved Community.

"As early as 1956, Dr. King spoke of The Beloved Community as the end goal of nonviolent boycotts. As he said in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s busses, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

This sounds more like integration. It's definitely not separatism or "segregation, but woke."

In a private community Facebook group, I asked if using pandemic pods that include students from marginalized backgrounds could help reduce the inevitable inequity that will arise through remote learning. I was directed to this blog post and admonished that pods are bad and you cannot even try to diversify them. 

The blog writer addresses the question "Would it be more socially just to invite families with fewer resources to join our pod?", saying, "this entire conversation is largely an exercise in privileged people trying to feel better about their own complicity in generations of inequality and injustice." Wow, bad faith much?

What struck me wasn't so much the poor reasoning as the aggressively shutting down of any notion of mixing. I think this is X's legacy bubbling up: Help Black Americans but do it from a distance.

It reminded me of this article by a Black writer who describes the COVID-19 lockdown like a dream come true because he doesn't have to interact with White people. Or Jamele Hill writing "It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges." Or the families that bought 97 acres of land in Georgia to create a city safe for Black people. These aren't people interested in a Beloved Community. These are people who want their own space.

Patents and Racism

One of the most interesting stories I've read is this research into the effects of racism on patents. Around the turn of the 20th century, African Americans filed patents at roughly the same rate as white inventors. They invented all kinds of stuff during this time—an elevator, rotary engines, a tapered golf tee, a dough kneader, a telephone system, a fertilizer distributor, and a bunch of other things.

Two things killed their progress: Plessy v. Ferguson and the Tulsa massacre. The former supports King's vision, the latter supports X's.

Tulsa was known as the Black Wall Street. It had become famous as a bustling, affluent community, a place where Black Americans could settle and live well. It had its own newspaper, hospitals, schools, banks, and a bus service. In other words, it was a Black space free from White oppression. That is, until a White mob massacred its residents and burned the place down.

Plessy v. Ferguson, on the other hand, led to segregation. African Americans became locked out of libraries and commercial districts. But they were also cut off from talking to other (White) inventors. In other words, they were denied the social capital and networking opportunities available in integrated communities.

Risk/Reward

I believe that if we pursue X's vision, there will never be equality. You can tax and redistribute money all you want, which will help some. But social capital is a source of the privileged that cannot be taxed and redistributed. The only way to tap into that is through integration, which cannot happen in Malcom X's world. 

The direction we take for civil rights is important to me because these visions are not compatible. And my ideas, like here and here, involve integration. If we choose Malcom X, I will be fighting a losing battle. 

My sense is that the direction people take will depend on their comfort with risk. Malcom X's vision is the safer route, but it has a lower ceiling and will never close the racial wealth gap. Dr. King's vision has the highest ceiling, but comes with the risk of microaggressions, racism, stereotype threat, and screwing up the Maxwell's Demon ratio so that Black students perform worse and/or seek riskier behavior (especially boys).

But I also recognize that it's not up to me. African Americans can and should be the ones deciding which type of world they want.