ingleswood

I mean I agree with you that it was wrong to use the word 'rednecks' to refer to people protesting at the Capitol. However this doesn't seem at all to be an example of what the other poster claimed, of people who loudly object to racial slurs and yet 'mock rednecks and Wal-mart shoppers'?

So if the police escalate a situation and shoot someone who is not a violent criminal, because he is black and therefore more likely (from the police officer's point of view) to be a violent criminal than a white person in the same situation, that's the system working as designed?

Do you understand that this is exactly what people who say 'the police are racist' mean when they say it?

This is far too simplistic. There are well studied phenomena by which people apply bias along the following lines (an arbitrary example chosen):

1. I believe a stereotype that Swedish people are more friendly than Scottish people. 2. I know this person is Swedish, so I will tend to judge their behavior as generally friendly when I would interpret the same behavior by a Scottish person as less friendly. 3. I tend to assume that Scottish people do better in this job than Swedish people, perhaps because I've seen more Scots and fewer Swedes succeed in the past. 4. I therefore believe that success in this job is anti-correlated with friendliness. 5. The person in front of me would perform poorly in this role - not because he is Swedish, but because he is too friendly.

Note that although in practise, I might reject a Swede and accept a Scot (who is exactly as qualified and exactly as friendly) for the same job, I don't have any dislike of Swedish people, nor do I seek to avoid hiring them. In fact I might personally prefer Swedes to Scots (because they are so friendly) and seek out their company, yet still behave as above! That's literally the meaning of unconscious in unconscious bias.

Interesting that you are claiming both that people making hiring decisions are not biased along class lines and that any such bias would be rational and based on ability.

My point is that the 'average employee', as compared to the 'median employee', is probably distorted much less than 'average shareholder' compared to 'median shareholder'.

Therefore I don't agree with you that while the average employee might be richer than the average shareholder, the median employee might be poorer than the median shareholder. If the average employee is richer than the average shareholder (which I doubt), then the median employee is probably much, much more richer than the median shareholder.

The right tail of Amazon shareholders' wealth is much longer than the right tail of Amazon employees' wealth, since it includes the richest (and 21st richest) person in the world. The best paid employee in the world probably doesn't work for Amazon, and they are also much less rich compared to the median employee than the richest person is compared to the median wealth holder.

That isn't a good thought experiment.

Unconscious biases are likely to have much more effect in ambiguous situations where it's harder to try to understand someone's motivations or how to react, than in a situation where those things are clear. Their absence in the latter does not imply their absence in the former.

> Another perspective is that a lot of bias isn't "I don't like X people", but rather "I feel X people are disproportionately Y, and I don't like Y"

Of course. But the answer to this depends on: 1. the source of the belief that 'X people tend to be Y'. 2. The truth or otherwise of that belief. 3. The source of the dislike of Y. 4. Whether or not Y is a reasonable cause for dislike.

Suppose that I tell you that the most important political issue for me is the welfare of animals, and in particular, that animals raised for meat should be stunned before they are slaughtered. There are definitely some people for which this is a genuinely held and rationally arrived at belief, consistent with their other beliefs and actions. There are others for which this is a device for attacking certain religious communities, through opposition to halal and shechita. Isn't it correct that we should try and understand which is taking place before responding to it?

Presenting objective data to someone arguing an irrational position in bad faith does no good - the bad faith argument simply adapts.

Isn't the existence in a more realistic hiring process of a huge weight of objective and reasonable criteria an unjustified, unlikely and politically subjective assumption?

Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0.01% by speech and accent, 64.99% by other class, race and gender markers, and 35% by reasonable criteria such as competence? Why wouldn't this be your base case assumption?

Do you believe that being black or white has no impact? If not, then racism and white privilege are real things that exist. The presence of other forms of discrimination and oppression does not change this.

Reading the thread shows a very different story to the one in the GGP.

Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol rioters 'rednecks' or for accusing rednecks of being Capitol rioters.

I don't see where that poster told someone off for using racist slurs, but I believe you that it happened.

Not sure this is even one example of what was claimed above to happen 'a lot'?

Do you have a hypothetical explanation for why, if people are only allowed to evaluate speech and accent, they prefer a certain group, but if allowed to evaluate lots of different more meaningful things, which all lead to the same conclusion about competence EXCEPT for speech and accent, that preference no longer applies?

That seems like an extraordinary claim unless you have some evidentiary base for it.

> The solution was to allow background checks again.

I'm not sure this learning shows what you think it does, nor that the 'solution' is really a solution. Employers don't want to hire black people because they fear they might be criminals, and background checks allay this fear, allowing them to hire a subset of black people they feel are ok? To me this confirms that both background checks and hiring managers have a tendency to be racially biased, and the 'solution' is simply accepting of that bias.

Suppose your prior on whether or not there was communication between the Roman-era Mediterranean and America is 50-50.

What's more likely, pineapples were known in ancient Rome but there's only a single picture of one ever where the strange and exotic fruit isn't even foregrounded, and no mention in any written text ever? Or there's one mosaic among all preserved images and writings which has a weird anomalous representation of something European that could be interpreted as a pineapple?