Sklansky recently said something very similar in a thread over in P. People are allowed to be wrong without wearing hoods.



I'd be glad to do that, Brian. It would both interest me and stretch my mind to find ways to explain concepts to you that you might not understand well. More so if I thought it would help you be a better person. Also, the "science" of racism is nowhere near as well studied or refined as the material sciences. Hard, reproducible results are much less easily attained, so excuse me if I think your comparison is a bit off in the first place.

Pretty much what Brian said, but I left the " " off "expert" to keep this becoming a fight between hard and social scientists. I'll come out and say it now that I doubt there are really racism experts in the same way there are experts in hard sciences. If so, I imagine they'd have come up with a better solution to ending racism by now than pointing and screaming at offenders. Maybe they can show us where I'm off base.

Right. To get specific, the tangible negative economic results of racism against blacks weren't dramatic 50 years or so ago. This is partly because of the reasons you stated (a population that's less educated and in a smaller percentage won't have as negative an impact if excluded), partially because so many people were racist and doing it (thereby diluting the competitive disadvantage), and partially because we do not have a truly lassez faire system that can swiftly punish and eliminate the incompetent in the market.

However, the good news is that part of this equation is now dramatically different. Racism is now seen as the disease that it is, so racist behavior in the marketplace not only puts you at a competitive disadvantage, but it pisses people off. You see a business that systematically refuses to hire or serve black people? That makes the news. That bull**** gets media attention, and people won't shop/do business there (which probably isn't difficult given that the business is already inherently inferior for the reasons I've already discussed). While I'm generally against anti-market forces at play, I personally think this one is great.

How did society get this way? Easy. 100+ years of racists getting weeded out of the population through natural selection. Despite the fact that the maladaptive effects of racism were less severe throughout the first half of the 20th century, it was enough to effectively squash droves of them out and make every generation substantially less racist than the last. The proof is in the pudding as they say.

While I'm confident that we're close to ridding ourselves of them for good rather soon, the process could certainly be accelerated with less policies that allow dullards to thrive despite their failures. Racists are dropping like flies, and the Flynn Effect is still currently going strong, so it's clear that natural selection is working, but it's working slowly. If you want to eliminate racism quicker, the solution is obvious. The market needs to be more competitive and free to swiftly eliminate the racist dullards (and other dullards) before they can pass on and instill their ignorance.

Here is a basic review: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_b..._United_States

That is why I asked whether you were considering the possibility.

I'd like to see a discussion of how we determined that Avacado's number is the maximum number of moles that can exist in an orchard.

Not true. See "race baiters" discussion ITF.

People who use clumsy and ill-informed heuristics like social Darwinism to explain social outcomes are usually racist and usually (in this day and age at any rate) stupid.

I think you are confusing ignorance for stupidity, which is an important mistake undermining your overall point. Different racist theories have adapted to sound convincing to different classes for centuries and the current time is no exception. See SMP.

So basically all bets on your theory are off in any approximation remotely resembling the real world as anyone experiences in it. I agree with that. But don't leave out systems not usually thought of as socialist which, in fact, are. You should see what I am getting at clearer than most since you work in finance where there is an implicit assumption that the aggregate risks being taken, the systemic risks, are socialized.

Lol, that's pretty good I would have expected an alchemy joke, but I guess that would imply the science has already advanced beyond that level.

That is an okay concept to start finding answers about non-racial thinkers, however categorically stereotyping non-racial thinkers as racism deniers not an accurate portrayal. This is a good spot to consider if the confirmation biases of racial thinkers contribute to the formation of this stereotype?

Not really. It is just an article to be read. That is why I posted it.

I completely agree with you, any business owner/manager that discriminates is only hurting himself. If you pass on hiring capable individuals on the basis of race your competition will certainly jump at the chance to bring them on board and improve their business. When you try to explain this to people on the left this is what you get.

Is the assumption that there aren't any more active white supremacists who won't try to exploit a captive racially-biased consumer base? Because that assumption is mistaken.

We previously hypothesized ITF how citizens would likely cause persistent disruption of segregated businesses through acts of protest.

The white supremacists just need to finally accept defeat in the face of triumphant humanity and be content that they can be almost as racist in their own minds and homes as they want.

A desirable end result of taking the implicit bias test would be individuals who take the knowledge and go forward with some kind of practice of being consciously aware of their own thoughts when they are racially stereotyping, right?

I'm still very curious, and wonder if anyone else is curious, about when a person STOPS being a racist?

This is too broad a statement to be true. We can think of scenarios where businesses would perform better by exercising racial discrimination, from legit reasons such as casting race-specific movie characters, to contemptible reasons such as having a largely racist customer base who would be less likely to patronize your business if you hire non-whites. There are still plenty of examples. Do you disagree with laws that seek to prevent the contemptible forms of discrimination, such as the EEOC laws, or are you just claiming you think our society is not racist enough anymore to find examples where discrimination on race is profitable?

Your attempts to defend laissez faire capitalism as some shining perfect system handed down by God to Ayn Rand are noble, but can you show even one example where a racist died off for being racist? How exactly is this natural selection taking effect? If anything it looks like the stupid racist hicks are breeding faster now than ever. If racism has diminished over the past half century, and I agree it has quite alot, it's from being exposed, shown to be wrong, and taught in schools and sitcoms.

I think everyone forms racial predudices and sterotypes, much like they do naturally with anything and everything else. People stop being racist, or at least diminish it, through a combination of attention, experience and education.

Hitler?

I am happy that my efforts amused you.

Science matters, but me knowing the best solution to dissolve your flesh and leave behind bleached bones doesn't tell me whether I ought to dip you in one.

Whatever your methods, I hope they prove more practical than turning lead to gold. Regardless, I'd prefer cremation.

No. Our system is still meritocratic enough to weed out racists and other dullards, as evidenced by the dramatic decline in racists over the past century or so. As for the second bit, you're going to have to elaborate. Are we talking about systemic risk in terms of portfolio theory, i.e., the macroeconomic risk that remains after fully diversifying to eliminate the non-systematic firm-specific risks? I'm not sure how this ties into the current discussion.

I do agree with you that the rate at which racist hicks and dullards breed does seem frightening, but it's important to remember that their life expectancy is substantially shorter than educated, intelligent people.

Of course specific examples are hard to pinpoint, but think of it on a larger scale. Whenever someone earns a Darwin Award, whenever someone starves on the street, and whenever someone freezes to death under a bridge, they were more likely to be less intelligent, less likely to be educated, and therefore more likely to be racist. There are certainly non-racist hobos and racist rich people, but as long as those at the bottom are racist at a proportionally higher rate than the general population, natural selection will have its way with them. I agree that education efforts can help as well though. When racists die off I'd prefer it to be due to a lack of intelligence and capability of logical thought, not simply due to being uneducated.

Out of respect, you should probably keep this discovery on the down low. People who dedicated their lives and blood to the struggle for human rights, as well as the the surviving descendents and living friends and relatives of those who died in that struggle, might be given to even more grief and anger if they were to understand that it was all for nothing. I mean, they might as well have sat back, done nothing, and wait for social Darwinism to take it's course since that was all that executed change anyway. If only you could go back in time and school Lincoln to your social Darwinist theories we could have avoided the whole Civil War.

Citation needed.

You are exempting your theories from applying to socialized or what you seem to consider rigged systems. Yet the very sector of the economy you work in is is highly socialized and rigged. We could talk about the lack of market discipline, the role of active state (tax payer) support, the effect of historical targeted exploitation of segments of the population as a prohibition to meritocracy etc. in any number of sectors of the economy. But since you brag about working in finance, I thought, why not start there.

You're new to the industry, right? But I think a lot of people in your industry share the use of this Darwinism heuristic and use it to explain almost anything. However I am wondering if they used it when going to Washington with the hat in their hand begging for a bailout. I don't remember hearing a lot of Ayn Rand social Darwinist bull**** from the Financial sector around that time.

The only people complaining that the system is rigged are the ones who are losing because they lack the ability to adapt to the system they find themselves in.

"Practical" is difficult. Not everyone has the same goals and no one has offered to put me in charge.

Ive known alot of racist people and I have never heard anyone say they will not patronize a certain business because they employ too many minorities. You may have a point with the movie characters. Read user reviews for the new Annie movie, alot of hate.

Exactly. I could probably count on one hand the number of people left in this country who say "I'm boycotting you because you hire [insert race here] people." But there's a HUGE amount of people who'd raise hell (myself included) if a business were still openly discriminating against (or even made disparaging remarks against) those of different races in 2014. I used to live pretty close to one of those trailer trash hick towns growing up, and there was a hardware/convenience store I never frequented for this reason. While I'm perfectly aware that the plural of anecdote isn't data, it's worth noting that place isn't around anymore. I'd like to think the owner starved to death soon after, but the reality is he probably just soaked up welfare while continuing to bitch about Obama. At least he never married/had kids though, because who the hell would want to marry that.

I suppose my point from this is that there's a variety of reasons (particularly in today's society) that racism and its often-accompanying lack of logic and critical thinking is maladaptive, and we should do as much as we can to enhance this maladaptivity (in a non-violent, rights-oriented way of course) for the sake of our gene pool. What do we think about doubling the size of welfare checks to those who agree to a vasectomy? Or we can be even more subtle and only offer per-child tax writeoffs to college educated couples. There's a lot of fun we could have with this.