What people feel safe in expressing, when "safe" means "safe from peers disagreeing with you," is a terrible reason to believe something. If I came back with a poll of my local area that said all of my peers thought racism wasn't systemic, would you council me to agree with them? That's an extremely dysfunctional way of thinking.
Not only should you never, ever base your beliefs based on avoiding the discomfort of being an outsider, but you also should never, ever, use majority opinion as some sort of proof of... anything.
If you did, you’d have advocated for slavery if only you’d been born south of the Mason Dixon years ago.
Here is some statistical evidence for systemic racism: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-systemic-racism-in-charts... (Shockingly this is actually pretty good despite being from Business Insider)
Honestly, I'd just edit the link at this point if I could since it seems to have triggered so many people. My assumption, again, was that anyone who doesn't believe in systemic racism at this point is not going to be swayed by statistical evidence. I am not advocating that any critical thinker be persuaded by majority opinion.
Luckily we're all critical thinkers here and we crave statistical evidence. I assume that means we also all believe systemic racism is a problem in the US. But in case you're an outlier I hope that link helps.
That said, everything in that link has been true literally forever (for the US.) But opinions are only changing now. Maybe 30% of the United States didn't see those stats before now but I find that hard to believe. I think social proof, despite not being actual proof, is more powerful than you folks would like to believe it is.
None of those charts appear to be controlled for confounders. Doing that correctly is hard, but not doing it at all is ridiculous. It allows you to "prove" that many engineering schools (with majority-white admissions boards) are racist against white people in favor of Asians, or that "racism" exists to the benefit of first generation African immigrants who by many metrics are better off than the US population average.
> I think social proof, despite not being actual proof, is more powerful than you folks would like to believe it is.
It can be effective in convincing people on political issues, but that's pure tribalism. It's anti-science, because it "works" independent of whether there is any truth in the assertion or not.
The one I found interesting was marijuana, where at least we have two measurements of the same thing, smoking up and getting caught with the stuff. That could be expanded on, as there's a thesis out there that police focus their resources unreasonably on black people.
A really good study that investigated this would be something like the essays in Steven Levitt's books. A load of numbers, a load of potential explanations, dig into the numbers and every explanation falls (eg if abortions reduced crime it would be correlated across other datasets, ie countries) except for one or two.
At the moment my leaning is actually with you, but mainly from anecdotal evidence. Almost every trip I've had to America has has this weird race-vibe to it at some point. I go to a wedding, and everyone is 95% a minority race. I go to a comedy night, comedian jokes about my race. I hear someone talking, I somehow know what colour they are before I see them. So something about the society has race coded into it.
And then of course there are these horrendous incidents that we hear about every now and again, where some poor black man has been shot by police. I'm sure far more have simply been mistreated, because just by it coming up in conversation with other people, it turns out one of them witnessed such a beating.
But what we need is proper statistical evidence. The BI charts you've got there would be torn apart by an economist in a second.
Anyway, I think the systemic racism discussion isn’t so clear and requires heavy analysis to get it right, you can’t hand wave it, and I’d love to have a nice discussion, but not so much to have it here.
The fact that this meta-view (that one shouldn't feel comfortable expressing a certain position) is becoming mainstream is deeply concerning. It is a terrifying attempt at extracting compliance from political opponents.
Considering the truly abysmal track record of the social sciences [1], this seems at the very least understandable with regards to the "non-hard" sciences.
> >"If you don't believe this you're in the minority now" has never in history been a good argument for anything
> I hear you. I originally had "and you don't really like minorities do you?" but thought it was a bit below the belt. I guess without the cruel dig it's not as relevant though.
> I'm not confident that evidence will change the mind of someone who continues to deny systemic racism though. But social proof is very powerful even if it isn't evidence. I don't mind if people believe the right thing for the wrong reasons.
There are plenty of minorities I don't really like. Such as police officers. Or sociopaths. But that's not because they're minorities, and given a choice between a belief that's popular and false versus one that's unpopular and true, I'll pick true one hundred times out of one hundred, and only grudgingly comprehend the distinction.
Anything that can make people believe the right thing for the wrong reasons is just as effective (and usually more so) at making them believe the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, and needs to opposed regardless of whether it happens to have invoked "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" at the moment.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution