That's not what I meant. I meant let's separate the science (i.e., what the reality is) from the technology (i.e., how to apply what we've learned about reality). Both are important and intertwined, but I need to know when you're talking about the science and when you're talking about the technology.
> I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units.
Of course. That's how social action usually takes place: by forcing those who oppose it after obtaining a coalition with enough power to do that.
> The process was very slow
That's exactly what I said in my previous comment. Social norms can change in two ways: quickly after a material change (sometimes due to social action and sometimes due to a sudden technological or environmental change), or slowly and "naturally". But social action almost invariably changes conditions first (by shoving them down people's throats).
> I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.
Indeed, that is a very interesting phenomenon and one that is currently being studied. I don't know if we have a good explanation for it yet. But again, this is mixing science with technology. That certain laws work in favor of men doesn't mean that removing them would shift the balance in favor of women (as there may be other forces in play). If I have a noose around my neck and am slowly suffocating, there is no question that this is bad. But that doesn't mean that cutting the noose is better, as I may be hanging over an abyss. So this is why it is crucial to separate observation and description from prescriptions. We can discuss them both (although I know little about political action) but they are not the same thing.
> It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.
1. Not yet (in the US, it took the south over 100 years to get over blacks' perception as subhuman; in fact it may not even be complete). 2. See above.
> I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group
You're using that word again: support. When talking about power we don't care what you think, feel or support. We care about the power you have. Those actions work to increase the power of whites. Whether all, some or a tiny minority of whites actually support those actions is irrelevant to this descriptive analysis.
> Its a meaningless term if everything everyone do is unintentionally discrimination towards someone.
That's why social scientists take great care to explain what kind of discrimination they're talking about. But your example of the elevator isn't completely artificial. Look at all the laws enacted to make public places accessible to disabled people.
> Before it, the trend where going towards less segregation. After it, to more.
Sorry, I don't see it.
> Recognizing peoples similarity is more important than to recognizes the minute way people are different, and it just happen that I prefer a society that focus on similarities than a society that focus on differences.
But we're not talking about individial differences. In America, blacks and whites aren't different in some minute way. One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries. We're talking about major, catastrophic differences in the way society has treated different groups for centuries. We can't just say, alright, from now on we're all the same, because centuries of gross discrimination and exploitation have already made significant material marks that should be addressed.
Could you be a bit more explicit. A lack of social-security-paid maternity is not technically a law, and as I mentioned, where I live it exist and is gender neutral.
A few years ago I did an experiment and made a few data searches through the Swedish law, looking at what laws explicit mention gender. Recalling right, there were six laws that explicitly mentioned women, and zero laws that mentioned men. Out of the six, four where identical written laws which guaranties that women can request a female employee in certain situation (like when arrested and searched). Personally I don't see why the law don't just grant this to everyone, which is how the medical system works (you can always request a doctor of your own gender).
Of the remaining two, one is an oddly from of insanity clause for infanticide. Not sure why pregnancy induced depression isn't just include in the practice that deals with insanity clauses, but for some reason the law writers just decided to add it under the murder section and there explicitly write that women can be given a lower punishment for infanticide in such situations.
The last law is one that I find quite sexist and lumps together women and children as incapable of contacting the victim of crime support agency after being a victim of a crime, and thus forces the police to do it for them. The effect is that statistically 7 times more funds is used when a woman is a victim of a crime then a man. I have very little understanding for why the law can't just provide this service for everyone regardless of gender, except that government funding for victim of crimes support would have to be significant increased.
> it took the south over 100 years to get over blacks' perception as subhuman
This is true, but I would assume there where a trackable trend over that time span with decreased racism. Would you say there is currently a identifiable trend in changing cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles? If so, where would you say it points to?
> You're using that word again: support. When talking about power we don't care what you think, feel or support. We care about the power you have.
A major issue with using a single method in analyzing the world is that simplifications tend to give the occasional wrong conclusion. If we where to use the same method for power in assessing which farm land is benefiting from global warming, it would not say anything about causes. The group that causes global warming, and the entities that would benefit from a few degree hotter climate are not connected. When assessing the cause of voter suppression, the group not being suppressed is unlikely to hold an significant insight to the cause.
> laws enacted to make public places accessible to disabled people.
Yes, laws tend to be discriminative in what group they want to protect and what solutions are considered acceptable. This was very clear during the burka controversy last summer in Europe. Everyone was busy talking how laws that dictate what to wear on beaches was discrimination, completely ignoring that the existence of nude beaches shows that such laws already exist in public beaches. Society has just agreed that discrimination against nudists are acceptable and people who disagree should just create their own beaches out of sight.
> One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries
Trying to repay bad blood from over 400 years is a recipe for war. Those perceiving themselves as a victim for things that happen centuries before they were born have increased stress and fight-or-flight responses, if I recall right.
> We can't just say, alright, from now on we're all the same
This just might be a bit socialistic comment, but yes we can. Those that have significant material marks, be that from being born to parents that got discriminated against or who randomly happen to end up on the lower end of the social ladder, should regardless get enough tools by society to climb out of extreme poverty. The historical cause is of lesser importance than the present need. Society should recognize past wrongness, but its a poor reason to exclude people who also need help. Help to everyone is inherently equal.
After I wrote last comment about Rosa Parks, I recall the german experiment of having women only compartment on trains, segregating women and men. 50% of the time, the female compartment will be in the front, and 50% of the time it will be in the end of the train. Do you find that compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
What do you mean? It is a property of the legal system.
> looking at what laws explicit mention gender.
BTW, that's not a very good way to find legal discrimination. For example, suppose there was a country with no laws against rape (some Arab countries are not far from that). It doesn't mention sex, but women are raped by men far more than the other way around, or even (grown) men by other men. Such an absence is a clear legal discrimination against women (and probably children).
> Personally I don't see why the law don't just grant this to everyone
I don't know, as I'm not familiar with those laws and their goals, but you should always keep thinking about power. It's OK to treat men and women differently if it doesn't create a power disparity. The goal isn't to make women and men identical, but to allow them to have equal power.
> I have very little understanding for why the law can't just provide this service for everyone regardless of gender, except that government funding for victim of crimes support would have to be significant increased.
Again, I'm not sure, but my guess is that this is a "black lives matter" point, aimed to fix a discrepancy in reality. Laws are not written in a vacuum, and sometimes laws are aimed at specific people who are discriminated against at the time the law is written. One of the first things you learn when you study history is that a new law tells you a lot about changes in society, because people don't legislate against things that don't happen or they don't perceive as threats (the threats can be imaginary). The law is not the code for a simulation program; it is a set of steps for using the collective power of the stat to interact with social reality.
> Would you say there is currently a identifiable trend in changing cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles? If so, where would you say it points to?
Of course, and it seems pretty obvious to me. As recently as a few decades ago, women who put having children on hold to have careers were viewed as freaks. Just watch Mad Men.
> Society has just agreed that discrimination against nudists is acceptable
Nudists are not a social group just as chess players aren't, and it isn't a religion, either. It's OK to argue whether forbidding nude beaches is right or wrong, but it has nothing to do with the issue of burkas on the beach.
> Trying to repay bad blood from over 400 years is a recipe for war.
It's not "bad blood". Those are real effects, which are a major cause for current conditions. And where did you get 400 years? As recently as 50 years ago, there was a legal separation of blacks and whites in the US as well as overt economic discrimination.
> The historical cause is of lesser importance than the present need.
I agree. Fixing the wrongs isn't about the past, but about fixing the current effects of past deeds. If I steal your car so you can't get to work, giving it back isn't a matter of settling past issues, but correcting the problem of you not having a car because I stole it.
> Do you find that compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
I am not familiar with that experiment or its goals.
A lack of something is not a property. The legal system lacks infinite number of things. Its not a meaningful definition if infinity is included.
> It's OK to treat men and women differently
And there we got a key disagreement. It is not OK to treat people different based on gender. Any such treatment will cause local power disparities, like bias that cause real harm.
>> why the law can't just provide this service for everyone > my guess is that this is a "black lives matter" point
The reason why the law treat women as incapable to pick up the phone and contact the agency is rather obvious. Cultural views and values. The problem is the result of power disparities for victims, where gender has a seven time factor in dictating who gets support and who doesn't. As a group, victims of crimes is one that should also be discriminated against because of their gender.
> As recently as a few decades ago, women who put having children on hold to have careers were viewed as freaks.
One of the theories behind that "interesting phenomenon" that is gender segregation in nations like Sweden, it describe how women after world war 2 started to have more time to spend on a career rather than spending all time on raising children. Men however are still stuck with the same expectation to support the raising of children, so their role in the work market has been static. Neither is a cultural change away from women being solely valued for their ability to raise children, nor men being valued solely for their ability to support the raising of children.
> Nudists are not a social group just as chess players aren't
Unsure if you are aware, but I find that comment highly offensive. Lets just start by quoting the lead in the wikipedia article on Naturism. "Naturism, or nudism, is a cultural and political movement practising, advocating and defending personal and social nudity". There exist a long history of nudism philosophy, culture, and values. I find your comment similar to someone saying that black people are not a social group, just as people wearing glasses aren't.
People who believe that clothing is constraining their identity is equally discriminated by a law that require specific form of clothing on beaches. All the effect of discrimination, like being hurt and feeling rejected is current reality of those people. The stigma of "being the wrong kind of person" and having that discrimination not even acknowledged is very harmful.
> And where did you get 400 years? >> One group has been enslaved for two centuries, and then forcibly put down for another two centuries
Two centuries, plus two more centuries, is four centuries.
And what material marks has been created for which black people exclusively can have? Is there a reason why the solution to those problems should not be used on society as a whole for anyone with the same material situation? It sound to me like you want solution to only go to people of black people because they deserve it more because of past injustice?
> I am not familiar with that experiment or its goals.
http://www.thelocal.de/20160329/is-germany-introducing-sex-s...
My question stand: Is it compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
Of course it is! In math, the subset of the reals that includes all non-rational numbers less than or equal to five, has the very clear, very meaningful property of not containing the infinity of numbers greater than five. It also has the very meaningful property of not including the infinity of rationals. Whether you want to define a set by what it includes or what it excludes is merely a matter of convenience, and each can be more or less meaningful depending on context. Infinity poses no problems, because things can be put into meaningful sets.
> It is not OK to treat people different based on gender.
That is your moral viewpoint. There have been many ethical discussions on this. Let me just give a quick outline of why this may be perfectly OK. If the current conditions of the population are the result of negatively discriminating against women, a very reasonable way to correct the social discrimination is by having the law give special treatment to women. There's no point debating this at length here, though, as ethical values are deeply ingrained and are very personal. I just want to point out that there are several ways of looking at this, and several reasonable ethics.
Like I said before, social sciences study the society that we have, not an imaginary model of society made of spherical cows. Similarly, I assume that activists are interested in changing the society we have by enacting laws for this society. Questions of what's fair in an ideal society may serve as inspiration for writing a constitution that should last forever, but simple laws are like a steering wheel. If the car has a flat tire and swerves to the right, a law dictates that the wheel should be held turned to the left, even if it doesn't make any sense to drive an unharmed car in this way and may even spell disaster. If the reality is that the car has a flat tire, then the law should address that reality.
So, when you see a law, don't ask "is it fair in an ideal society?" but try to see what conditions in real society the law is trying to address, and whether or not you think that would help.
> Any such treatment will cause local power disparities, like bias that cause real harm.
I think that's an empirical question. If your goal is to minimize harm (and that is a liberal goal, but not always a conservative goal, so I'm not saying that must be your goal), you just need to see which causes more harm: taking corrective action against existing discrimination or not.
> As a group, victims of crimes is one that should also be discriminated against because of their gender.
Victims of crimes are not a social group. It's a very different form of discrimination.
> Neither is a cultural change away from women being solely valued for their ability to raise children, nor men being valued solely for their ability to support the raising of children.
I think we have a strong disagreement over facts here.
> There exist a long history of nudism philosophy, culture, and values.
That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how nudists consider themselves; what matters is how they are perceived by society. Society views nudism as a practice, not as an identity (similarly, BTW, to how homosexuality was perceived in classical times, just to show you how things change). In addition, I don't think nudists' power is curtailed by society, which is the main idea here. Whether or not naked bathing is allowed on certain beaches has no effect on the power (influence) of the nudists in society.
> All the effect of discrimination, like being hurt and feeling rejected is current reality of those people.
Like I said in an earlier comment, feelings of hurt and rejection are usually what conservatives attribute to liberal goals because that is a feature of conservative thought. Liberal thought is about power. Similarly, sociologists are not concerned with feelings of rejection -- that's what clinical psychologists do; they study the flow of power. A person like Donal Trump can feel very hurt and rejected, but that doesn't change how much power he's got.
> Two centuries, plus two more centuries, is four centuries.
Yes, but those 400 have barely ended. It's not ancient history. People the age of my parents have lived through that.
> And what material marks has been created for which black people exclusively can have? Is there a reason why the solution to those problems should not be used on society as a whole for anyone with the same material situation? It sound to me like you want solution to only go to people of black people because they deserve it more because of past injustice?
Again, you're talking politics. I don't know or want to talk about what laws are fair. I want to explain how the social sciences analyze society. But just to explain the reasonableness of an ethical system that is different from yours, let me point out that the same material conditions can be due to different causes. John may not have a car because he lost all his money gambling. You don't have a car because I stole it (so now I have two cars). An ethical system that would compel me to give you back your stolen car is not necessarily discriminatory towards John.
> Is it compatible with the successful abolishment of gender segregation in buses that the feminist movement fought for?
Probably. Why? Because social activists like feminists fight for equality of power. The same segregation can be a vehicle for curtailing women's power or it may not. Let me give you an example: Suppose I have a bar and I put a sign on that says, "gays, please sit in the back room where no one can see you". Now suppose I have a sign that says, "gay party every Tuesday night in the back room!" Questions of fairness aside, even though the result is the same, the first curtails a groups power and the second does not. Why? Because seats on a bus or in a bar are not themselves sources of power. I can't influence more people from the front seats of the bus than from the rear seat. What matters is whether you send a signal that some group is worth less. If people see signals that some groups are worth less all day, they come to believe they're worth less, and that is how the group's power is harmed. Now, you could say that the second sign makes people believe that straight people are worth less because they don't get a party. But this is wrong, because it is already an axiom of current society that straight people are not worth less.
It can be if they have meaningful attributes to differential themselves. To anchor that to social-security-paid maternity, it only relevant as an attribute if it has been considered but then rejected. Such qualification would distinguish it from any arbitrary element of the infinite set, and the qualification can be supported by facts.
> I just want to point out that there are several ways of looking at this, and several reasonable ethics.
This is why I earlier mentioned that difference feminism and Egalitarianism to be like the left and right. Both claim to have the same goal but significant different in values and ethics. Acknowledging the similarities is important, but also understand why most focus is on the differences.
> not an imaginary model of society made of spherical cows
No one has been talking about theoretical society. I could interpret it as an attempt to devalue ethics based on equality, but there we would just hit a wall of disagreement.
> try to see what conditions in real society the law is trying to address, and whether or not you think that would help.
So the law in question clump together women and children and define them as incapable to ask for support. The conditions that brought that law is ridden with cultural values of women, and caused by values that defines women as helpless victims. The local power disparity is very clear, as is the harm.
> If your goal is to minimize harm ... you just need to see which causes more harm: taking corrective action against existing discrimination or not.
Or let me put the same question. What causes more harm: Taking actions that treat people equally, or take discriminate action in order to save money.
> Victims of crimes are not a social group.
This is the second time you define what is and isn't a social group, and I don't find it fact based. To reference Robert Sapolsky, a special skill of human behavior is its ability to be part of multiple social groups at the same time. Victims of crimes is a group that deserve societys protection and understanding. Its not a place where gender should have a seven times impact. Its the other side of the coin that lets race and gender be the most significant factor in determining punishment for criminals.
> I think we have a strong disagreement over facts here.
The good thing with science is that science change when the facts change or when people provide better theories (often praised as the difference between science and religion).
> It doesn't matter how nudists consider themselves; what matters is how they are perceived by society
This is also why not all religions are treated equal. A Muslim friend once said that smaller religions that didn't have 20% global followers in the world should not have their believes respected in the same way. From egalitarianism view I disagree, and its a poor method for harm reduction.
> Whether or not naked bathing is allowed on certain beaches has no effect on the power (influence) of the nudists in society.
Since nudism is generally banned and made illegal in practically all societies except when done in excluded areas, I would say it has a very direct and explicit power effect on them as a group. We could of course say that beaches are minor thing, but so we could also say about burka wearers being denied access to beaches has no effect on the power of the Muslims in society. Just because nudists are a popular group to discriminate against doesn't make it less of a discrimination nor ethical.
Clothing is a central part of practically every culture that exist, similar to gender identity. Native culture is easiest distinguished by what they chose to wear. It is rooted deep in signaling, and can be easily identified in the most common religions to the smallest of sub cultures. Looking at nudists and transgenders, its questionable which group causes more reaction from people who defends their cultural views by denying others.
> sociologists are not concerned with feelings of rejection
Harm reduction is however important, and self identity is a key reason why society at large should be supportive of transgender rights. We should be careful when ever hate, discrimination and disempowerment is direct against people who society defines has having the wrong self-identity.
> An ethical system that would compel me to give you back your stolen car is not necessarily discriminatory towards John.
We are and have talked about equality of results. Retrieving a stolen car is more justified, and as a species we are more geared towards punishing injustice than fairness (Ref: game theory). It does however make it a poor building block for a ethical model, and a bad roadmap for equality. If cars ownership were a essential material state (and it isn't), providing cars for everyone would be an acceptable solution.
> Probably. Why? Because social activists like feminists fight for equality of power.
And here we got a key contradiction between activism done by equality feminism and difference feminism. One pulls one direction, the other in the opposite direction. Just because difference feminism believes that its for the greater good doesn't make it less of a contradiction.
A key message that this kind of gender segregation sends out is that gender-identity is a key attribute for which people should be sorted into. It creates a local power disparity, where women is viewed as worth more than men in some areas, less in other.
> What matters is whether you send a signal that some group is worth less.
This is a key aspect for most political movement, be that new feminism, Egalitarianism, mens right movement and so on. No one want to see signals that some groups they identify with are worth less all day long. Its harmful.
They are. Perhaps I wasn't making myself clear: they are not a social group in the sense studied by sociologists and historians who study power, racism etc..
> I would say it has a very direct and explicit power effect on them as a group.
It does not. Power is basically influence. Whether or not nudists are allowed to take their clothes off in public beaches bears zero impact on their influence in society (e.g. the money they can acquire, the high-position jobs they can get, the political office they can be elected to etc.)
> but so we could also say about burka wearers being denied access to beaches has no effect on the power of the Muslims in society.
No, because Muslims are discriminated against outside beaches because they're Muslim. Nudists are not. Therefore, like segregating buses, this sends a signal.
> Looking at nudists and transgenders, its questionable which group causes more reaction from people who defends their cultural views by denying others.
Again with reactions :) This is not about reactions, not about feelings, and not about identity. I am talking only about power. The reaction to the way transgenders dress is only relevant in this context based on their existing status in society. If I (not a transgender) would walk outside wearing women's clothes on Halloween and would get laughed at, it is completely different -- in this context of power -- from a transgender who gets laughed at, because of the transgender's existing status. Same goes for Muslims.
> punishing injustice than fairness
It is not about punishing past injustice. It is about correcting (stopping) an ongoing injustice. You don't have a car because I am currently still holding on to it.
> Just because difference feminism believes that its for the greater good doesn't make it less of a contradiction.
I think you're obsessing too much about the details, and I can't help you because my value system is not disturbed by the same things that disturb yours. Unless I were a veteran feminist activist considering a certain political tactic, I just wouldn't worry about the differences between "difference feminism" and other forms of feminism. The differences between different feminist activities are much more subtle than you make them out to be.
I care about politics in the large -- who wins, who loses -- and not so much about the ethics of every single law. I have never studied the philosophy of law or ethics, so I can't contribute much there.
> No one want to see signals that some groups they identify with are worth less all day long. Its harmful.
Right, but sociologists -- again -- don't study what's right or wrong, and are not concerned with how people feel. If men were actually made significantly less powerful than women in society, or if whites were actually made significantly less powerful than whites, then that would be something that's very interesting to historians and sociologists. As this is currently far from reality, these things you talk about are simply outside the scope of most of social science. I guess they're in the realm of ethics.
If transgender people were not allowed to wear clothing of their choice, or act outside their born gender, no discrimination could happen (in the context of power). Same with Muslims. Identification is required for the form of discrimination you are talking about, and that which is illegal is not done in the open.
But here I would say that the definition being presented here do clash with reality. Making the act of doing identifiable faith, transgender, or other self-identity illegal in order to protect those groups from discrimination is not exactly how society in general view discrimination. The closest we get is the argument behind uniforms, where the idea is to hide peoples social group identity and strengthen the new social group. While partial effective, I have also heard that humans are quite good at identifying social groups even when hidden. It would imply that nudists are not so blessed from discrimination as you describe, and as a minor note I also recall quite a few movies where a nudist family is found out inside a gated community.
> You don't have a car because I am currently still holding on to it.
In that example society will provide cars to anyone that needs it. I have a car, and you have one.
The stated moral question was if society should fix material situations for everyone rather than exclusively those that are in a material situation because of past discrimination.
I will also remind that in this made up example, the suggestion solution was to treat everyone equal from this point on. Any existing discrimination are to be stopped, be those positive or negative.
> if men were actually made significantly less powerful than women in society ... As this is currently far from reality
A fact I disagree with, especially in local context but also on a global scale. Money and work positions are useful proxies for power, but they are an imperfect representation and devalues all other form of influence that exist. For example, living 10 more years in average is a quite power property, and extends influence of the social group.
The race situation is more clear in the local context of US, but less so on a wider scale. Money is again used here as a proxy, but comparing money in one nation to money in a other nation is imperfect. Mots nations are not ruled by the richest person in that nation. Its also very questionable to compare a poor farmer influence in one nation with a poor farmer influence in an other. Influence at international politics tend to be limited to a small number of people.
To take a trivial example from game theory, a seller and a buyer discussing price. In the classic example, the agreed price represent the result of sellers power vs the buyer power. Since its trivial, control, influence and cause-effect reflects the same values, so if the price is low it means the buy both has higher power and more control over the price.
But then we add a second seller. The position of the buyer has increase and we would say that the buyers power has increased. Inter-group competition influence the result, but the buyer aren't in control over how that competition plays out.
Then we add an government entity that adds regulation which incidentally limits supply. This increase the sellers power, but is completely outside the control of the buyer and the seller. This entity has no stake in the outcome of the transaction, derive no power from it, but got full control.
When talking about power disparity, we need to define what resource the groups are competing over, but also acknowledge that it won't tell us anything about who controls the outcome. To do that we need to define cause and effect, and that require more than just looking at the result. As a political matter, I believe that government intervention should focus on power disparity when it impacts the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and it should do so by addressing each individuals need. It should focus on control disparity for everything else.
> I believe that government intervention should ...
That's politics, and is really not my thing. But even if you are interested in social science solely from the political perspective (like an engineer who's interested in science just so they can build what they always wanted to), I think you should separate the more descriptive elements (the science) from the prescriptive ones (technology), as the latter do not always directly flow from the former, and also require a good dose of ethics, which is may be very personal.
You say that the social science concentrate on areas where it is meaningful, but much of what we have discussed is focused on the end result. Do the property owners have, in the average, the upper hand in negotiations and do they get their way most of the time. Its an odd place to stop asking further question and not ask the question that really matter, which is what model can predict the price tomorrow.
The big benefit of such model is that such theories can be tested, and later used in prescribing ways to influence the outcome.
But even if we had a good explanatory mathematical model, it could not be used to predict anything because of a technical reason, although one that seems to be -- as far as we know -- limited by theoretical constraints: our mathematical techniques simply do not allow us to predict the behaviors of systems with so many variables and so many interactions. Even numerical simulations (the kind used in weather forecasting) would diverge very quickly. In fact, measurement alone would likely take more time than the validity duration of the prediction.
The problem is not unique to the social sciences. Even if biologists could understand the evolutionary mechanism in its entirety, it seems like prediction is beyond our means. All we can do is work back from results to causes, and figure out which evolutionary pressures were more powerful. Computer science is limited by similar constraints: we can explain how a bug came to be, but working forward in time and preventing all bugs requires a computational effort that is probably out of our reach. So the social sciences -- except for very special cases in psychology, where the number of variables is kept artificially low -- is content, like biology and computer science, to provide historical explanations only.
But we don't need perfect models. Sometimes its enough just to get a idea over what influence the outcome. The popular science book freakonomics has a famous example where its describe crime and what influenced the outcome. Interestingly, it involved neither actions done to the criminals nor victims.
In the case of race we are both in agreement that there exist a power difference, ie that the outcome is not identical. What we have not talked about it what influence it. For example, is it the material starting point that causes ripple effects and influencing the outcome? If so there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect. If we can't find such support, it would strongly hint towards invalidating such theory.
Sure, this is very common in the social science.
> there should be some validating data from isolated local areas where the material starting point is smaller or greater, result in a detectable effect
Absolutely. What do you think sociology/history/anthropology journals publish? They're full of such studies.
If you don't recognize the politics in science, you end up with eugenics and bias in the data.
If you separate science from politics, you get decision not anchored in reality. The biggest improvement to government process (a field rarely talk about) in the last 200 years was the cost-benefit analyses. Scientific methods are a core part of government.
> It's just that these things tend to change on their own once material conditions have changed
Lets structure this a bit, since we have two different theories: is it social values that leads to material conditions, or is it material conditions that leads to social values.
If its the first case is true, we should see signs of social values being changed while material conditions lagging behind. The opposite should be true for the second case.
I would claim that the case of the solider lacks to mention a critical third-party. Its not that the soldiers themselves that decided to integrated the units. Its an outer force, in this case the military leadership who do not share the same cultural values of the soldiers, and that outer force is what forces a material change for which later results in a cultural acceptance by the soldiers.
Take Japan after WW2. Its was not that the Japanese suddenly decided to change their cultural views about Imperial rule. The allies, who did not share the cultural views of those in Japan, imposed a material change (ie, the forced surrender and statement from the emperor). After a time, citizens of japan accepted the new reality and cultural values and norms changed.
An other case would be to look at the revolution that created the Soviet Union. People didn't just suddenly decide to create a revolution, and then after a few years have cultural values changed. The cultural values changed much earlier, primarily because of lost wars, which cause people to loose faith in the tsarist autocracy. The process was very slow, and took somewhere between 100 and 50 years, ending with the revolution. At that point, Social norms had already changed, a fact that the Tsar Nicholas II where very aware of.
To ground this into current situation with men being more pressured into taking higher paying jobs than women, the government as a third-party would need to basically go in and decide who works where and how much people should get paid, and the government would need to have a different cultural view than the rest of the population. I doubt either requirement could happen, the first because communism had already tried it, the later because a government with different cultural views than the population is unlikely to get voted in.
> But the lack of social-security-paid maternity leave and subsidy of child care, still work against women in the US.
Is that a positive decision for men? I know that where I live, Sweden, both those things exist and our work market is even more gender segregated that the US work market.
If we consider the extreme pressure that the dating site data shows, how much will a few months/year of paid leave change things. Will men start to seek women who can support a family, thus sending social pressure for women to seek higher paying jobs? Will women change their cultural values of seeking men with higher paying jobs?
Looking at Sweden, what it did is to silence the false myth that women are a bigger risk to employ than men. It did not change the cultural expectancy that society has on from female and male roles in society.
> the Republican party has been working for years to curtail the voting power of blacks
There is indeed political efforts to win at all costs and to try prevent voters from voting rather than win them over. I would not go and claim it is anything supported by white men as a group, but rather a fringe behavior by people whose income is based on being an politician. A other word for it would be corruption, buts its not commonly used word for describing such behavior.
> I can invite people to a party on the roof of my building, which has no elevator. I discriminate against handicapped people without intending to.
There will always be people who are unintentionally discriminating against if we remove intent from discrimination. Claustrophobic people can't use elevators, Acrophobes can't be on the roof, and Agoraphobia don't like open spaces. Its a meaningless term if everything everyone do is unintentionally discrimination towards someone.
>> Its only in the last 30 years that the movement changed course. > I strongly disagree with that.
I can see the effect in sex segregation. Before it, the trend where going towards less segregation. After it, to more.
> That side wants everyone to be treated in a way that recognizes that people are different
How is that different from saying that they want people to be treated different? Just because you added the word "recognizes", don't change underlying statement.
The story of Rosa Parks isn't how society failed at statistical power distribution where half the time men sat in front and women in the back of the buss, and other half of the time they should have switched places. Such system don't recognizes that people are more alike than different. Recognizing peoples similarity is more important than to recognizes the minute way people are different, and it just happen that I prefer a society that focus on similarities than a society that focus on differences.