> in science there’s no place for identity politics

Sounds like a "theory vs practice thing". Do you believe that identity should not, and/or does not affect a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential?

Of course I believe that in theory it should not but in practice it does. Organizations that try to correct, compensate, steer, etc. things towards where they should be, need to exist because things are not where they should be. There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise. (I personally have no idea if BlacksInAI does this job well or not. The choice of Ethiopia in this case does not look great)

I believe that identity may affect a person’s ability to do science, since there’s a correlations between identity and economic status.

That said, science is about equality of opportunities, not about equality of outcomes.

This means that we should of course strive for having easier access to universities for people of all backgrounds.

But after that Academia is PURE meritocracy.

Anyone who fights for more graduates with a certain identity, or more researchers with a certain identity, or more professors with a certain identity is SEVERELY misguided.

> But after that Academia is PURE meritocracy.

Are you claiming it is a pure meritocracy or that it aspires to being such? If the former then I think that's remarkably optimistic to the point of naivety so I'll presume you mean the latter.

Academia is not perfectly meritocratic but is most likely the most meritocratic environment in the world, particularly in science.

> But after that Academia is PURE meritocracy.

This is pure naivety.

>things are not where they should be

Citation needed.

>There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise.

If you make a claim that something should be done, the burden on proof is on you to substantiate that claim.

> things are not where they should be

Are you seriously trying to claim that science is a perfect meritocracy?

Seriously?

Science is probably the most meritocratic field in the world.

I don't disagree. But that statement doesn't contradict the original point.

Not sure about perfect but it's probably close.

If you can solve any of the outstanding problems no one is going to care where you come from, gender, political views, socioeconomic status etc.

That seems quite meritocratic to me. Compare that to say a distinguished position such as a Supreme Court judge appointment.

>Are you seriously trying to claim that science is a perfect meritocracy?

I'm not making any particular claim about science. I'm making a general claim about reason: someone making a moral argument must provide some reason or evidence to support that argument. In this particular case, it means that if someone wants to make a claim that there is something morally wrong with the distribution of scientists with respect to some particular characteristic, the onus is on them to support their claim (refute the null hypothesis).

That’s a bit silly though. A citation can’t somehow “prove” a moral statement. I think it’s clear that the commenter was assuming the reasonable moral claim that ethnicity/gender/etc. should not affect one’s opportunities in science, and then claiming that there is still work to be done in achieving that goal.

>A citation can’t somehow “prove” a moral statement.

A moral statement doesn't prove itself. Someone has to prove it, either by providing an argument themselves, which the poster didn't do, or citing an external source of proof.

>ethnicity/gender/etc. should not affect one’s opportunities in science, and then claiming that there is still work to be done in achieving that goal.

That claim still requires a supporting argument: evidence to support that ethnicity/gender/etc. is affecting peoples' opportunities in science.

This is a much better phrasing of the point I was stumbling to make. Thank you.

If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion.

So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?

>If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion.

The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their mind just by stating an opinion.

>So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?

Personally, I agree that science is not a perfect meritocracy, but I'm not convinced it's due to discrimination by scientists: I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race. If there is a problem I'd suspect it's due to other factors; if there are fewer people with a particular characteristic studying science in university or high school, then seems like the root cause of that would be the real problem. You can't expect scientists to hire a certain percentage of people with that characteristic if the percentage of science graduates with that characteristic is much lower.

I made a similar point in another comment below but I'll repeat it here. I think it's unlikely you provide supporting evidence every time you make a factual claim because if you did it would be astonishingly laborious to carry out any kind of conversation.

And a brief look at your post history shows many examples of statements unaccompanied by supporting evidence.

As laudable as your sentiments are, they are rather unrealistic. We make unsupported claims all the time because normal human communication is not the same thing as rigorous chains of deductive statements.

If you look at the original post I was responding to, it asked the post it was responding to to supply scientific evidence to refute the claim it was making. It's one thing to make unsupported statements, it's another thing entirely to make an unsupported statement then claim the burden of proof is on somebody else to supply scientific evidence to refute one's claim (a claim for which no evidence has been provided).

> I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race.

Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously? There's a fairly robust body of work on the topic of unconscious bias that would have to be almost entirely invalid for that statement to be true.

>Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously?

By "making a decison based on race" I mean making a conscious decision in which race is a significant factor. If you want me to be more specific, I'll restate that as: in my estimation, any racial bias that may exist among the scientists I've met is not significant enough to in aggregate result in a difference greater than 1% in the ratio of people of any particular ethnicity hired compared to people of other ethnicities. I'd suspect other biases have far greater effect, e.g. against people from no-name universities.

I find your answer confusing. You initially clarify that you're talking about conscious decisions but your later claim is broad enough to include both conscious and unconscious bias.

I might agree that conscious racial bias is rare but I would find it harder to accept that unconscious racial bias is as uncommon as you claim. Does that sound reasonable?

If no evidence is presented, the argument is invalid. This also applies to forums.

I highly doubt that you apply this principle consistently yourself. In fact I just skimmed your comment history and there's a wealth of arguments presented without supporting evidence.

Very true. But you made a controversial statement without backing it up. Then you replied with a typical "just a forum" excuse. Which probably means: You can't find sources to back up your statement, or available sources contradict your statement.

If someone wants a source to my comments, I'll provide it as best I can.

> But you made a controversial statement without backing it up.

1. I didn't make the original statement

2. The reason I became involved in this debate is because the original statement seemed very far from controversial to me and I was rather dumbfounded that anyone felt the need to ask for supporting evidence.

The original claim was "things are not where they should be" and the context was "a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential" irrespective of their nationality, gender, ethnicity etc.

For this to be controversial someone would have to be making the rather extreme counter-claim that scientific achievement is based solely on ability.

You can see by the reponses that this is quite controversial.

Maybe, but the burden of proof lies with the person who made the argument. ("things are not where they should be")

> You can see by the responses that this is quite controversial.

I don't think the tangent this discussion has taken is any indication that the original claim was controversial - merely that it's very easy to get bogged down in meta-discussions that detract from the actual issue being discussed. I don't think anyone could reasonably dispute the original statement - unless their interpretation of it was wildly different to mine. If that's the case then it's not lack of supporting evidence that's the problem - it's clarity of communication.

AI, particularly when we consider applications and algorithms that impact policing, medical applications, loan servicing, ad targeting, etc. is inherently an enterprise that cannot be divorced from structural issues intersect with race (among other issues). That scientists from impacted communities are drawing attention is an important step forward.

> there’s no place for identity politics.

There's no such thing as an absence of identity politics. Only the politics of the status quo, which as we know has not been fantastic for PoC, women, LGBT+, ...

> There's no such thing as an absence of identity politics.

Sure there is! Its name is meritocracy.

Sure, the concept exists but you'll be hard-pressed to point to instances of it existing currently... Overcoming historical biases doesn't happen just by deciding to be a meritocracy.

Two candidates for a position in the academia are not evaluated in terms of historical bias, they are evaluated looking at their CV, track record, publications, etc...

That’s meritocracy. And there’s no place for this “historical biases” in the decision making process in the academia. At least not in science.

Biases exist for more reasons than biased interviewers. Within certain structures, well-meaning people doing their jobs will inadvertently propagate injustices and biases. There is evidence for this. This isn't hard.

Meritocracy and identity politics are different things, not antonyms. In fact, I'd argue that the goal of identity politics is to establish a meritocracy that enables all people to flourish.

If there are institutional barriers to identity groups participating in scientific communities then there is a need for “identity politics” in those scientific communities to identify and remove the barriers. For example, I think the increased participation of women in science over the past century happened because of “activist” scientists acknowledging there were real barriers to women participating in science and then consciously dismantling those barriers.

As a scientist from a minority I would say that I found no barriers in science, except for merit. Talking about today’s science of course, no 19th century one.

I can accept that maybe there are still some barriers in some situations I am not aware of, but then the message should not be “more blacks in science” or “more women in science”.

That’s countereffective and humiliating for minority people: the focus should be on the barriers, if any, not on the headcount. We are not pandas in need of protection.