I guess there really is a fork in the road somewhere because I just wept again at the thought of wil procreating, again.

Congratulations wil, that is very cool.

Thank you.

When someone is looking through a list of resumes, with names, there is a whole host of biases that could creep in. Going off of WN's thinking, one would have to think of race in order to draw the conclusion the person is a Christian. If a person has a bias against non-Christian names, they may or may not consider race. What's more, and the point, there is no indication which persons were excluded based on race, and which were excluded for other reasons. That nuanced perspective is what's missing from his fancy worded explanations. With that said, I would agree, there is some unknown amount of racial discrimination occurring in the selection and hiring process.

This issue is not me looking through a lens of Christian exclusively, it's that WN (despite saying otherwise) is looking through a lens of race, exclusively.

My position is not all that controversial, but since I'm pointing to other potential biases, other than race, it has to be refuted, as nothing can share the limelight with racism. It gets refuted with a logical fallacy that's been defended for several post now, by several people.

So, is that a yes?

Congrats to you and your fam.

Seems like we have two definitions of Christian name here, neither of which is obviously wrong.

1. A name commonly used by Christians
2. Biblical names.

In common usage in the UK, Christian name can also just mean your first name rather than your surname. That's also fine.

Here's how words work: once he's told you in a simple and articulate way what he means (definition 1) rattling on and on about how your definition is the only one is pointless obfuscation.

Wil: +1 on grats

That's not the argument you are ignoring. This is (emphasis added to some relevant bits):

There's a reason I went to all the effort of writing this much longer explanation to expand upon and clarify what you quoted.

Using your A, B, and C, we arrive at

P1) Black people [are] Christianity
P2) Black people [are] also the name Shanika
C) All Christians are the name Shanika

That's not an association fallacy, it's just gibberish. But it's gibberish that bears precious little resemblance to any argument I've made. I tried to massage your A,B,C into a form that would not be gibberish but there's no way to really do it, so I've just left them as is above. For example:

This parses, but has a different meaning, and is no longer in the form "A is a C", because the "is a" relationship is one of group membership. "Black people are in the set of people named Shanika" would have the proper form but is both false and not a claim I've made. B and C have to be sets, and A needs to be either an individual member of both sets or some subset of both sets. Otherwise you don't have an association fallacy. This is also clear if you look at the example from first order logic:

(∃x ∈ S : φ(x)) ⇒ (∀x ∈ S : φ(x))

"if there exists an x in S such that phi(x) then for all x in S phi(x)"

S has to be a set. x has to be an individual in S or a sub-set of S. I've made no argument that can take this general form, which is why you are unable to supply an A,B,C based on my argument that is actually coherent.

Here is what my actual argument would look like if written in a syllogistic style

You seem to be trying to use P2 and P3 to form your association fallacy, but it's necessary to the association fallacy that the conclusion is based on two premises about the group membership of A, and not a transitive relation between A, B, and C. The general form of my P2 and P3 is

Leaving aside that my actual argument involves probability, so it should be "A is very likely to be a B" and so on. I left that out for clarity, although of course it matters because it's not a purely deductive argument. The conclusion depends on the actual probabilities, i.e. it's empirical. But since you aren't arguing with the empirical claims it's simpler to present it this way.

The above is obviously not an association fallacy. You've also completely ignored P1, which is really the crux of the disagreement. The bulk of the post you've ignored explains why P1 is a good way to categorize names for the purposes of this research. Again, even though it's clearly not the only possible method of classification. You also ignored the end of that post which points out another problem with your definition of "christian name", but I've left that aside for now.

This is false. I explicitly brought this up here. Further, you seem to have lost track of who is arguing what. My argument is that names like Shanika signal race (being black) far more than they signal religion. It's not at all clear to me how this could amount to trivializing the history of stereotypically black names. Part of your confusion though seems to be that you are still not grappling with my P1 and the reasons for using it in this context, which have nothing to do with identity and everything to do with what information a name signals to a potential employer.

Jesus Christ these racists sure work hard don't they? If there was an anti Christian bias it would show up in white names that were also Christian names. In effect it would minimize the results the researchers found.

He's trying to argue that there's an anti-non-Christian-name bias, not that there's a bias against Christians.

You're still correct that given the definition of "Christian name" he's appealed to, and the methods used by the studies, the results don't support that hypothesis. It's just that rather than being a problem because of white names that are also Christian names, it is because of white names that are not (by his definition) Christian names, i.e. because they have no specific semantic connection to Christianity.

It's still laughable

Stop pretending I do not understand your argument.

It's not my, it's your context, albeit, paraphrased

You said:

You associated AA's to Christianity (true, you did this) , and by virtue of that association you attributed Christianity to the name Shanika (true you did this) by virtue of Shanika being a typically black name (true you did this). Nothing about that sentence mischaracterizes your statement. It's an accurate reflection of what you wrote, and is a clear association fallacy.


To what degree? Quantify it. Does it hold true if people do not associate religion with Shanika? If religion is not associated with the name, you think someone baised against non-Christians names may have some bias when they see that name? (here we go back into your association fallacy that states because its a black name, and black people are 85% Christian, that means "duh" its a Christian name.....and everyone would automatically assume Shanika is a Christian name, simply becasue she has a typically black name, who are typically Christian) If so, quantify the differences.

What your cronies miss is, you are trying to interject your flawed definition of a Christian name into my argument.

See, you have to attack me, not my argument. You can't find fault with my argument, so.....you call me a racist. Neat trick that's been played out.

Even if you were right, it does nothing to invalidate my arguments. The idea that Mohamed gets a fair shake is awesome....I disagree.

What you do not seem to grasp is I'm not arguing the meaning, I'm pointing there being no correlation between the name Shanika and Christianity. You attempt to associate them based on race. Black people are typically Christian, and Shanika is a typical black name.

Let try this, is Shanika a typical Christian name? In your world, it only becomes a Christian name if the person is black. In your world, race determines the religious connotation of that name, and you do not see an issue with thinking that way. I'm done.

Congrats wil!

I got some Qs...

Is there a name for what the deplorables are doing here ITT? I'm sure there's good enough AI now a days to code a bot that can generate endless hypothetical nitpicks to hypothetical studies. I could have a nice chat with Sabo about confidence levels, false positives, and repeatability... and he'd enjoy that way more than the deplorables ever will. In the end, aren't you trying to argue when to go for two... to a buncha peeps who deny football is real?

I dunno. Probably some fine fellows over at rationalwiki.org have come up with something?

Heh. I like the analogy. Mostly I was just amusing myself. It was kind of fun trying to find a way to shoehorn my argument into the form of an association fallacy. Like logical madlibs.

Nobody's denying that NFL exists. We're just saying that in their secret inner hearts most of them are just very confused rugby players.

No, I'm sure you're just posing very interesting questions that lead us to the conclusion that landlords aren't really racist they're just sensibly only renting to white folk. I wouldn't wish to make conclusions as to your character from that.

No, it hasn't. The bit on the EEOC page I directed your attention towards make the point that a policy can constitute race-based discrimination if it has a "negative impact on people of a particular race and color", regardless of motivation, intent, or the apparent racial neutrality of the policy. You seem to be reading it as if this means that a policy is only discriminatory if it exclusively has a negative impact on some particular race, but that's not how disparate impact works as a legal principle. A policy can run afoul of discrimination laws under "disparate impact" if the policy disproportionately and unnecessarily impacts one group of people (in a protected class) more than others. Disproportionately does not mean exclusively.

So, if someone brought a complaint to EEOC that the ABC Corp. discriminates against blacks in their hiring process, and through a process of discovery it was determined that ABC Corp. had systematically favored candidates with commonplace white names over candidates with names that were not common white names, and this latter group was disproportionately African American, but also included white dudes named after characters from Transformers, there is still a legal basis for finding ABC Corp. to be engaged in racial discrimination, precisely because the outcome of the bias disproportionately harms African Americans. They might also be guilty at the same time of discrimination on the basis of national origin, i.e for excluding Asian candidates. Obviously ABC Corp. should also, in this hypothetical, stop discriminating against Starscream Jones and Bumblebee Smith, but that moral imperative falls outside of the EEOCs jurisdiction because of the way protected classes are defined.

Look at the results of every study that's been cited. Including the one you cited. All of them find evidence of discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity as defined above.

It seems the main point of confusion is about "racial discrimination" needing to be exclusive of discrimination on the basis of unfamiliar names. It doesn't have to be exclusive. It just has to be disproportionate in impact.

I do agree, to be clear, that the results of the 2008 study you cited should influence the way people think about the causes of this problem. But, as I said, I thought so to begin with, which is why my first post points out different results between two studies and discusses the fact that it's not clearly and exclusively a problem of racially-motivated discrimination. The whole reason I worded that post the way I did was because I thought it was important to add some nuance. So when you write:

From my perspective, from the beginning, I've been trying to suggest a more nuanced understanding of the issue. Just like in all my other posts about the importance of racial inequality in the US. But the point has always been that although the causes and motivations are complex and varied, the outcomes are disproportionately harmful to various minority groups and that constitutes a social problem worthy of attention.

The two things are orthogonal. I call you a racist because you are putting forward the weakest of arguments against a fairly rigorous study showing institutional racism. You even admitted I attacked your argument so feel free to **** right off *******.

Right, which is why I asked you to define Christian name. You and well named are defining "Christian name" differently. When he says it, he means "people with that name are very likely to be Christian".

Yeah, but what about Clinton?

Brilliant. Do you deny the dilemma I presented exist? Instead of discussing the dilemma, you want to say I'm a racist for pointing it out. You want to pretend I'm attempting to justify their actions....I'm not.

Hint: I'm not arguing against the study. I've stated no less than two times that the study presents evidence of racial bias. I took issue with the idea it measures the extent of that bias. People like you do not seem to understand the nuances of such a distinction, even though they are expansive.