Uncomfortable topics: Let's talk about race

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

He's a troll from Zoklet or Totse2 or whatever.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Squiddy: Called it in 2011 http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,30911.msg1122448.html#msg1122448

[Freeky]

Squiddy: Called it in 2011 http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,30911.msg1122448.html#msg1122448

That's not Squiddy, that's Demo Squid.  :/  SQUIDDY IS AWESOME FLORIDIAN.  DEMO SQUID IS AWESOME DUDE IN LONDON.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Squiddy: Called it in 2011 http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,30911.msg1122448.html#msg1122448

That's not Squiddy, that's Demo Squid.  :/  SQUIDDY IS AWESOME FLORIDIAN.  DEMO SQUID IS AWESOME DUDE IN LONDON.

My bad. But it's cool having a DUAL SQUID BOARD.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I read a very interesting book over the weekend called "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking". It covers some very interesting examples of how snap judgments can be very beneficial, at the same time covering examples of how things like unconscious racism/sexism can be very problematic. The author makes a very interesting argument that, even in cases of apparent racism/sexism, it may be completely unconscious on the part of the individual. In cases where cops have responded violently, in cases where women weren't selected for jobs in an orchestra and even in cases where African Americans get harsher sentences in the US court system... he argues that it may often be due to an unconscious decision rather than a conscious act of racism.

Much of his argument dovetails nicely with the BiP concept. For societies that have negative stereotypes, the people in those societies have a very difficult time of being without some level of unconscious prejudice, around those stereotypes. On the upside, the author also covered some experiments that indicate that these unconscious behaviors can be reprogrammed. In one set of tests that measured unconscious racism, the performance of the testers improved after reading articles on positive role models from that particular race.

In another experiment, they found that minority students performed worse on tests where they were asked their race at the beginning of the test.

All in all, a very interesting book.

[East Coast Hustle]

Gladwell is a fucking hack. He's also a shill for the tobacco industry.

[Doktor Howl]

He's a troll from Zoklet or Totse2 or whatever.

We knew that, because that was his screen name on Totse2.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I just realized that I was more surprised than I ought have been by his behavior, because my drunkbrain mixed him up with someone else who has a letters-numbers forum name.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I read a very interesting book over the weekend called "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking". It covers some very interesting examples of how snap judgments can be very beneficial, at the same time covering examples of how things like unconscious racism/sexism can be very problematic. The author makes a very interesting argument that, even in cases of apparent racism/sexism, it may be completely unconscious on the part of the individual. In cases where cops have responded violently, in cases where women weren't selected for jobs in an orchestra and even in cases where African Americans get harsher sentences in the US court system... he argues that it may often be due to an unconscious decision rather than a conscious act of racism.

Much of his argument dovetails nicely with the BiP concept. For societies that have negative stereotypes, the people in those societies have a very difficult time of being without some level of unconscious prejudice, around those stereotypes. On the upside, the author also covered some experiments that indicate that these unconscious behaviors can be reprogrammed. In one set of tests that measured unconscious racism, the performance of the testers improved after reading articles on positive role models from that particular race.

In another experiment, they found that minority students performed worse on tests where they were asked their race at the beginning of the test.

All in all, a very interesting book.

Yeah, he's talking about the Harvard implicit association tests I linked to in another thread; very worth checking out, if only for some self-insight.

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

I've never seen anyone take one and not be mad afterwards.

I'm biased against white people and prefer light-skinned brown people over dark-skinned brown people, FWIW. Almost all of us carry prejudices we aren't conscious of, it's what we do with them when we know about them that's important.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I took the one for associations of weapons with black people vs white people earlier today.

I automatically want to fault the way the test works, since it "trains" you in the first round to use the same key for "weapons" as for "black american", and then it switches it in a later round. But maybe I'm just offended by myself.

If you'd asked me to self-assess, I would have told you that I associate weapons with white people, mainly because I associate guns with white hillbillies, and melee weapons with white SCA nerds and LARPers. I would have assumed that I'd be biased against associating black people with weapons, because I'd assume (not based on any kind of actual knowledge) that more black people avoid carrying weapons for fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when cops roll around.

[Wolfgang Absolutus]

I've taken one of those race association tests before and come up with being most comfortable with other Black people and least comfortable with White people which is to be expected considering both the things my father has told me about his life as a Black American, my own experiences with racism by mostly white people, and all of those history classes where white people generally did crappy things.

In terms of the race thing though I have found that I kind of understand some of the obsession with the masked man without a secret identity, two prominent examples being V (from V for Vendetta) and The Joker. Their face is just what they have chosen and not what they are born with creating an unease in those who face them because they can't be easily classified. They are unpredictable because they don't mesh with preconceived notions preprogrammed by society. This gives them more control over their image and other people a bit less. Due to this quality it becomes understandable to see why they inspire such obsession. Sometimes I feel like I would like it if I didn't look easily identifiable.

On another tangent to this tangent could this be apart of the reason the western world finds such a problem with Burqas? They get rid of the form we are used to and programmed to see and instead leave us with something we are unsure about. An unsolvable mystery, a shroud and a mind, but nothing physical like body qualities and body language to tie it down to. It creates an uneasiness in our minds and makes us want to destroy Burqas by doing things like passing no Burqa laws like France has done.  The president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that burqas are "not welcome" in France, commenting that "In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity". Something to think about.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I actually did OK on the light and dark skinned one.
Going to take some more tomorrow so I can get mad. Sometimes getting mad is a good thing.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I took the one for associations of weapons with black people vs white people earlier today.

I automatically want to fault the way the test works, since it "trains" you in the first round to use the same key for "weapons" as for "black american", and then it switches it in a later round. But maybe I'm just offended by myself.

If you'd asked me to self-assess, I would have told you that I associate weapons with white people, mainly because I associate guns with white hillbillies, and melee weapons with white SCA nerds and LARPers. I would have assumed that I'd be biased against associating black people with weapons, because I'd assume (not based on any kind of actual knowledge) that more black people avoid carrying weapons for fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when cops roll around.

Yes, that is a frequent criticism of the design and I often wonder if the results might be very different if it was done the other way around.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I read a very interesting book over the weekend called "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking". It covers some very interesting examples of how snap judgments can be very beneficial, at the same time covering examples of how things like unconscious racism/sexism can be very problematic. The author makes a very interesting argument that, even in cases of apparent racism/sexism, it may be completely unconscious on the part of the individual. In cases where cops have responded violently, in cases where women weren't selected for jobs in an orchestra and even in cases where African Americans get harsher sentences in the US court system... he argues that it may often be due to an unconscious decision rather than a conscious act of racism.

Much of his argument dovetails nicely with the BiP concept. For societies that have negative stereotypes, the people in those societies have a very difficult time of being without some level of unconscious prejudice, around those stereotypes. On the upside, the author also covered some experiments that indicate that these unconscious behaviors can be reprogrammed. In one set of tests that measured unconscious racism, the performance of the testers improved after reading articles on positive role models from that particular race.

In another experiment, they found that minority students performed worse on tests where they were asked their race at the beginning of the test.

All in all, a very interesting book.

Yeah, he's talking about the Harvard implicit association tests I linked to in another thread; very worth checking out, if only for some self-insight.

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

I've never seen anyone take one and not be mad afterwards.

I'm biased against white people and prefer light-skinned brown people over dark-skinned brown people, FWIW. Almost all of us carry prejudices we aren't conscious of, it's what we do with them when we know about them that's important.

Yeah I saw your post after I wrote this. Very interesting.

In one of the examples he discussed the events surrounding the death of Amadou Diallo. On one side, people claim it was "in the heat of the moment", on the other side, people claim it was overt racism. The author argued that it may well have been unconscious racisim, which due to the close quarters and how quickly everything happened basically put the cops on an auto-pilot with their unconscious managing the whole mess (they couldn't see out of their BiP). He pointed out that once the heart beat of a human reaches a certain point, their conscious thinking shuts off and they're acting entirely automatically. He believed this was important, because its a result (perhaps) not of the racism of the cops, but rather their lack of proper training of the unconscious response. He He provided some examples of private security firms that actually train their employees in such a way that their heart rate doesn't accelerate so much during an intense situation, allowing them to remain cool and function at a conscious level, as well as training of the unconscious response so that if things escalate too much they won't make the wrong "Blink" decision.

This could mean that the behavior of cops toward minority groups could be a problem of training, more than a problem of racism. His point was that we may be able to 'fix' the former, while the latter would be far more difficult to fix.

He gave an example of orchestras which were almost all male up through the early 80's (especially the horns), because of the prejudice that women simply didn't have the lung capacity to perform. The people selecting new performers generally "heard" what they expected to hear. However, once blind performances were instituted, where the performer plays behind a screen, the numbers began to quickly change and now its about a 50/50 split in the horn sections. The judges admitted that what they 'heard' was different once they no longer had the visual cue that it was a man or woman (or that they hold the instrument in a weird way, or have poor posture etc).

Rather than waiting for "prejudiced" judges to retire and be replaced by less "prejudiced" judges, they found a real solution that could be implemented now. He then asked what would happen if defendants weren't physically visible to a judge and jury, if their race, sex and physical appearance weren't included in the data available to those judging them... would we see a change in the obviously absurd numbers around minority sentences?

I felt some of his arguments were pretty weak, but a few like this one, seemed to me, to take a very interesting direction...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Implicit prejudice training is very functional in a lot of situations. One of the detectives in Hillsboro is trying to get it implemented in the Hillsboro police force, and it sounds like the chief is interested, so that will be interesting to observe, if it pans out.