I'm currently sitting in a cafe in Copenhagen actually having this discussion with some Danes. They do not understand AT ALL the American way of life, or the desire to work 80-100 hour weeks. Nor do i blame them. They seem to have a pretty chill existence here and are all happy as far as i can tell.

Btw, these are the friendliest people! I suspect that friendliness correlates with happiness.

Is this the same invitation you've made before to people here: to meet up with your "friends" who will relish the prospect of putting someone right? lolwil

A pharmacist making 100k is a successful person. They have a doctorate and a cushy job with good benefits. How are you calling that anything other than a success? Who gives a **** what other pharmacists make? Successful people don't judge themselves based on how they compare to the national average salary. They don't care as long as they're happy with what they have.

A pharmacist making 60k is a success. Especially in a small town with low COL.

To be clear, not everyone in America shares the same views. We are pretty diverse, but I'd say as a whole Americans do work hard, and it seems most articles I read about it support that view.

Yes, I've changed my response to this. I agree.

Grunching because wtf else would I be doing, but, uh, this mother****er phrased this in this way.

If the space aliens came down tomorrow, well named is so much moar smrtr than wil that those poor aliens would not be able to readily discern well named and wil are even the same species.

bwahahah he said "seem" "decently" intelligent

i have no idea what this ****ing context is but i already know it's gonna be an entertaining few pages

ALIEN 1: What I'm saying is they both look like hairless apes but watch what happens when that one opens his mouth; instead of human speech in the form of sound waves, literal feces just flies out of it in every direction.

ALIEN 2: Yeah dog, this is bananas.




The thing to understand is these aliens see in higher dimensions, so, what we perceive as convoluted MadLibs-style nonsense, they perceive in its actual form, that is, actual s**t. It's similar to the way a rendering of a tesseract is attempted in 3-space in that we're really just seeing a warped and non-real shadow of the actual form in a higher dimension. What we see as angry gibberish is actually n-dimensional hyperpoop.

p.s.












hyperpoop

Okay, but this is an issue that comes up a lot in conversations about racial discrimination: outcomes vs motivation, the what and the why. I don't think it does much good to separate them the way you do. The bump on my head is evidence the damn door hit me in the head last night, so let's do something about that door. Why did it hit my head, because I ran into it. Turns out we don't need to fix much about the door, it's working fine. Perhaps I should just drink less.

Pointing out that many black people are subject to discrimination in the hiring process and calling that evidence of racial discrimination without parsing out the reasons why might be akin to blaming the door in my silly example, or in a more serious one, pointing at black crime rates and calling that evidence of racial tendency to violence is blaming blacks. Isn't it?

That sort of statement can be very misleading. I think focusing in too closely on the outcomes like that risks missing the forest for the trees. Claiming we have empirical evidence of black's violent tendencies leads people to claim we should do something about those darned violent blacks, or at least it prevents good arguments about problems with the prison-industrial complex sinking in.

Likewise, claiming you have empirical evidence of racial discrimination in the workforce (that only an idiot or racist would dispute, lol conservatards, lol SMP) leads people to claim we should do something about those damn racist capitalists, etc., etc, and it hardens them to good arguments on why less regulation on business can help the economy and ultimately help everyone.

Again, what if the biggest factors behind the resume call back discrepancies between whites and blacks have much less to do with the racial component of the names, and more to do with socioeconomic status implications, or even simply the commonality of the names. From the 2008 study you linked earlier:

http://hosted2.ap.org/APDefault/*/Ar...e01f3e04e9844b
This study backs up the idea that the racial implications of the names have less to do with the discrimination than uniqueness of the names, so even though the outcome is that many black people are subject to discrimination in the hiring process, so is anyone else who has an uncommon name. It might be more useful and accurate to state that you have found empirical evidence of uncommon name discrimination in the hiring process, and for everyone to understand that when considering how important their unique name is to them while filling out their resumes.

Still grunching but, uh, WORKING HARD OR HARDLY WORKING AMIRITE?!?

Srsly tho, I'd suggest somebody suggests to wil a reading recommendation which would be The Good Earth by Buck but LOZL BOOKZ.

Ok it's like this but instead of squares it's poop:

fyp

So make one. IOr do you feel entitled to have someone do it for you?

Not really.

How did your dog know when you were posting?

...

What?

Haha this post is actually spot on.

Sure. And I usually go to great pains to explain the relevant distinctions. I'm sure you've read many of those posts so I don't think it should surprise you at this point. Besides that I'm referring to a common (and legal) definition of "discrimination".

See for example the US Equal Employment Opportunity Committee page on racial discrimination. EEOC is the federal entity which enforces non-discrimination laws related to employment:

You'll note that the definition of discrimination being used is entirely based in outcomes, not intentions.

I find that hard to believe, since your entire line of argument depends explicitly on separating them. And you do it yourself in this post, when you acknowledge the racially disparate consequences of employment discrimination but posit a non-racial theory about the cause. It seems to me that it would be more accurate to say that while you want very much to separate outcomes from motivations, you want to reserve the words "racial discrimination" to describe specific motivations, rather than certain outcomes. This is an idiosyncratic definition.

To the part about crime rates: no. My previous post addressed this analogy. To the first part: see above.

I think you have that precisely backwards. What is the point of worrying about all of this stuff to begin with? Isn't it to try to make society work better for everyone? Any good measure of "work better" is going to be a measure of outcomes. Also, of course, it's much easier, and has far fewer downsides, to regulate behavior, rather than beliefs and motivations. My concern with racial inequality is not with castigating white folks for being evil. It's to make people's lives better. That's mostly a matter of changing outcomes.

See above, but also I'll point out again that you can only arrive at the conclusion that therefore this has nothing to do with race if you ignore the fact that our evaluations of what names are unique or unusual are also tied to race and ethnicity. It's not an accident that we think typical white names are normal, but typical black names are weird. It's a bit odd, for example, to claim that a result that finds dislike for both black and Russian names (or Asian names) discredits an argument about racial discrimination. Race and ethnicity are closely related (though not identical) concepts. Call it ethnocentric discrimination if you prefer, it's still a troubling result.

While I think this is mostly true I think a distinction can be made. Many people are more worried about whether the outcomes are fair than about what they are. In their mind, if a poor person is "deservingly" poor, that is fine; if they are poor for a reason deemed unfair, then it is a problem.

I agree with you. I think it's an oversimplification and a false dichotomy to say that we have to pick only one: caring about outcomes or caring about motivations. Sometimes there's only so much you can reasonably do to alter outcomes. Anti-racist consciousness-raising is also intended to change people's motivations and beliefs, and that is clearly important. But if we're trying to diagnose social issues relating to discrimination, then I think the argument for prioritizing measures of outcome over measures of intent is strong.

There's also a much larger conversation to be had about changes in racial ideology from the 60s until today (that is the subject of Racism without Racists, a book I've recommended a few times), which is quite relevant. But I tend to write overly long posts even when I over-simplify things like this, so sometimes I just accept the over-simplification to try to get to the point.

I didn't mean it to completely dismiss racial motivations, but my clumsy wording does seem like that. Point is that the study claimed uniqueness was a better predictor of discrimination than race. That makes more sense to stress than the racial component of discrimination. And we haven't even accounted for socioeconomic status/class implications or political implications of names. Do you think class, political orientation and uniqueness should be legally protected from discrimination in hiring?

Often in these discussions (realize I'm not just talking about ours, but typical discussions on these forums, and magazine articles, talk shows, etc., the stuff that drives political opinion) the focus is on only race, as if there are not other important factors involved. If the conclusions of the study are right and uniqueness is the driving factor behind the discrimination, then the outcome is you evidently have much less racial discrimination than previously estimated because the previous studies have ignored (not bothered to measure) all of the white people who were discriminated against based on their names as well (by using the most common names like Michael and Michelle and leaving out Bubba and Kaylee) which adds important perspective. They have therefore painted an incomplete picture of who is actually being discriminated against, thereby perhaps falsely creating or at least overstating the "particular race" part of your EEOC definition. Forest for the trees.

Your reasoning has some flaws. Mainly correlation does not imply causation. I would agree the reason for an unusual name is generally associated with race, religion, ethnicity, and culture, among many other subjective things. Correlating the reason for those names onto the reason why they are disregarded during evaluations is...well... another logical fallacy.

I can use your same pretense, same study data, and make an argument its religious discrimination, based upon favoring christian based names...and this shows you the flaw with the study. It correlates variables, rather than test them. Oddly enough, it only focuses on a few correlated variables (black names) and does not mention other potential biases that could lead to these results, i.e. religion. Those type of studies are just like push polls.

A few things

1) I didn't say that our evaluations of what names are unique or unusual are exclusively tied to race and ethnicity.

2) I think you're going to have a tough time with your religious discrimination argument given that a very large majority of African Americans are Christians.

3) I agree and have said explicitly that these studies do not demonstrate causation as far as motivations go. However, we're also not restricted to using only the results of these studies when interpreting their results. We can also pay attention to history. The abductive argument in favor of an explanation from race/ethnicity over other factors is pretty obvious.

Um...are you telling me Shanika is a Christian name? How do you know that name is not passed over for religious purposes, while at the same time making the argument it's because it's a typical black name?