This has actually proven to be the case; there are a number of studies on assaults committed against taxi drivers, and all (I've seen) come to the conclusion that males and African-Americans are much more likely to be violent.

These comments make me feel almost like a Luddite. I don't fear technology, but I fear technologists and their apologists.

I am not apologizing for anyone. It should be rather unsurprising that men are more violent to taxi-drivers than women, as men are incarcerated at a rate between 10-30 times higher than women.

Can you provide any reputable data that proves this to be accurate? Please share the link or provide evidence, otherwise you are exasperating the problem that the article outlines.

I have stopped responding when people simply ask for citations. Saying "citation needed" is a low-value comment, and I have better things to do than look up studies which I've read, and you will probably dismiss out-of-hand. If you have good evidence which contradicts my comment, please post it, so that myself and others can learn.

I definitely understand the inclination to avoid doing this sort of citation-finding work, but I think the approach you've chosen is a worse one than you think. You say comments that only ask for citation are low value, and that may be true, but I think comments that are of the form, "the studies I have seen say (insert very debatable thing)", without providing any support, are even lower value. By this logic, you can say anything you want, while implying that it has been studied by experts, when in fact you just made it up. I wish this were a straw-man hypothetical, but this sort of discourse is actually so common now that whenever I see someone vaguely cite "something I have seen in studies", I assume it actually means "something I heard someone say they saw in studies", and that it is totally fabricated.

It's also pretty rich to have the position that you won't put in the work to back up your statements, but that those who call you out on that should be willing to do the work to disprove you. Just replying to you with "I have seen studies that say the opposite" is equally as (un)convincing as what you've said.

I wrote a comment which described the state of my knowledge, and would be fine if another commenter said they disagreed for any reason (anecdotal or evidenciary). If the respondent had said "I looked, but could not find studies which correspond with what you are saying", I would have made more effort.

The problem behavior which I have seen cropping up on Hacker News is people asking for citations as a quick and easy way of invalidating other people's views, while justifying downvotes (which have become far too common). I have also observed that many will ask for studies, then either ignore them for viewpoint or ad hominiem reasons, or attempt to invalidate the study by nit-picking. If the original commenter lied or pulled numbers out of thin air, it is fair to call them out (in my view), but laziness on the part of the respondent is no justification for snark.

Apparently, some of us consider what you said to be an "extraordinary claim" requiring evidence. You are essentially saying:

"Prove 'the state of my knowledge' is wrong."

The burden of proof lies with the original claim maker, not the respondent. This is not a bar room conversation from the 90s, we are literally on the internet; citing one's sources isn't too much to ask.

What is your standard for evidence? Without knowing that, I cannot hope to give 'conclusive evidence'.

Do you have a white-list, black-list, or other standard for sources? What type of evidence would satisfy your standards, and what are the minimum sample size, maximum p-value, and robustness with respect to alternate causes? Do you require some amount of replication, peer review, or publication?

No one asked for "conclusive evidence" - although, of course, it would be nice. But it's reasonable to ask for the sources that informed your view.

As much as I love HackerNews, questions like this are simply offensive, unacceptable and ridiculous.

I'm reminded of an article I read in a magazine or newspaper a long time ago. Briefly, a school district gave IQ tests to all of the children in a particular grade. There was a bimodal distribution, with the black children scoring significantly lower than the white children.

Most officials in the district concluded that the test must be culturally biased or flawed in some other way, and were going to ignore the results.

One teacher, though, decided to operate under the assumptions that (1) the test was not flawed and so was showing a real difference between the children, and (2) there was no inherent racial difference in the students, and so started looking for other explanations for the lower performance of the black kids.

He found that all the black children lived in older housing, built in the in the early '70s or earlier. All the white children lived in newer housing, built after 1980. He knew that we had stopped using lead paint in housing in 1978, and wondered if the black kids could be suffering from lead poisoning.

They and their houses were tested, and sure enough, the black kids were living in high lead environments. One of the effects of lead poising is a reduction in cognitive abilities.

The houses were cleaned of lead, and the children treated, and within a couple of years the gap on IQ tests went away.

If that teacher thought like you did he would have just dismissed the question of whether or not the black kids' performance was due to a real cognitive difference as offensive, unacceptable and ridiculous, and those kids would have went through much or all of the rest of their childhood and teen years suffering from cognitive impairment and the accompanying limitations on their futures.

The question was offensive. The teacher asked and very carefully answered a question about demography, using IQ tests not as an assessment of racial superiority but as an epidemiological indicator. Here, the the question is "maybe black people are just problem passengers". It's a pipe bomb thrown into the conversation, not an attempt to get closer to the truth.

I can see how it could be read that way. I gave a lot of weight to the words "disproportionately likely" in his phrasing ("might be disproportionately likely to cause problems"), and assumed he was suggesting things like the correlations between race and crime or between race and tipping (both things that might be of interest to a taxi driver).

The race and crime correlation comes about because poor people are more likely then middle class or wealthy people to commit the kind of crimes that a taxi driver would worry about, and wealth distribution is not independent of race in the United States, with black people disproportionately represented among the poor.

I have no idea where the race and tipping correlation comes from. It's well known in waiter circles, with both white and black servers complaining about poor tips from black people. There was an interesting literature review and discussion of this topic published by the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration: http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

These and similar correlations raise some interesting questions. Humans naturally generalize from experience and make predictions based on correlations. Since race is visible it gets involved in those correlations. Other factors, like economic status, that are probably closer to the actual cause of whatever behavior one is observing and generalizing from are not directly visible so we don't use them as much in our generalizations.

So one question that comes to mind is can we make those lower level factors more visible? What if an Uber driver got essentially a background check on their potential passenger, giving income level, education level, arrest record, and so on? Would drivers be less likely to generalize based on race if they could instead generalize on those other factors? Then if a driver had 300 white passengers and 100 black passengers in a month and 5 whites and 10 blacks caused problems, instead of generalizing that blacks are problem passengers the driver might notice that all 15 of the problem passengers were involved in gang activity and the generalization becomes "don't pick up people involved in gang activity".

I realize that giving the aforementioned information to drivers would be a big loss of privacy for passengers. Maybe there is an inherent conflict between privacy and reducing race-based generalizations, much like the conflict between privacy and security.

I bet a good writer could make an interesting science fiction story around that idea and its implications.

The data is pretty clear, if we're afraid to discuss it, the problem will never get solved.

Albeit it might be more acceptable to discuss it from a monetary perspective, e.g. "Why are urban poor crime rates so high"

Acceptable, sure, but I don't see how introducing a proxy would make our research more effective.

It could very well be the case that race is itself a factor for anti-social behavior.

Can you help me understand how my question is ridiculous?

They always need to consider crime rates in these studies. One was posted about Amazon Prime a while back showing they weren't delivering to a number of mostly-black areas. This they said was evidence of racial discrimination. They didn't mention that those areas, which I recognized, were a bunch of "hoods" very high in violent crime and theft. Most truck drivers will resist going into such places not to mention liability or cost conscious companies. So, the truth about them avoiding dangerous areas got distorted into them just being racist.

Need to always account for that. In this case, they're talking Seattle and Boston. I don't know how much crime is involved in these areas or what amount of the study happened in ghetto areas. If these were minimal, then it would be evidence of racism. If not, then crime angle has to be examined.