From: Chris Hibbert (chris@pancrit.org)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 22:54:59 MDT
Peter wrote (in a discussion with Lee):
> If you had carefully read the web page that Chris pointed us to, you
> would have seen clear signs that you are attacking a straw man. That page
> qualifies the claim that racial classifications are nonsense by saying:
> Please understand that I do not claim that the concept of ``race'' is
> totally meaningless.
> and endorses the classification of some people as members of minority
> and majority races for the purposes of detecting discrimination.
Peter, I was confused by your message, so I tried to find this
endorsement in order that I could be clearer about what I meant (and
hopefully what Les had in mind as well.) I found the following
passage, which seems to be what you meant:
The most direct way to fight discrimination in housing or
employment is to send a well-qualified minority applicant to a
suspect and, if the applicant is refused, send a less
well-qualified majority applicant. If that person is accepted,
repeat the experiment once or twice to be sure, then nail them!
In this quote, his point is that some people (let's call them "bigots")
are making distinctions based on superficial characteristics. Les
appears to believe that it is reasonable to prohibit making some kinds
of distinctions in housing and employment. (As a libertarian, I limit
the context in which I'm willing to prohibit discrimination mostly to
government employment and purchasing. I'm willing to let private
individuals discriminate on whatever bases they wish to, but I find it
unacceptable for people who have extracted money from taxpayers by
force to be allowed to use their position to perpetuate discrimination.)
In order to prevent bigots from discriminating when we wish to prohibit
it, it is reasonable to track the attributes the bigots pay attention
to. That doesn't make the attributes relevant for other purposes.
I think Les admitted in his article that race does mean something in
some places. There is a distinction between most of the people in
Ghana and most of the people in Norway and it's reasonable to call it
race. It's not very useful to try to find the same degree of
distinction between groups in the US, or to try to figure out which of
a few small groups Les Earnest should be assigned to.
Peter continued:
> I suspect that the word "nonsense" is being used in some sophisticated
> sense that you and I have not yet grasped. Until we can understand how
> this claim of nonsense manages to invalidate some uses of classification
> but leaves others unaffected, we shouldn't claim to understand Chris'
> claim well enough to determine what is wrong with it.
The narrower sense of nonsense that I intended when I wrote
> Any studies done in the US that try to correlate
> anything with Race are nonsense
is easier to explain. As Les pointed out, the classification systems
that have been used in this country for several hundred years have
extremely low correlation with the underlying partially segregated
breeding stocks. A single african ancestor among one's grandparents
was sufficient to categorize people as black. There's an astounding
variety of ancestry among people within any of the categories "black",
"hispanic-surname", "pacific-asian islander", or "white". I doubt
there have been more than a handful of studies done in the US in the
last 300 years that claimed to be correlating something with race that
used any better classification than those.
That means that Herrnstein and Murray couldn't have had any base data
to work from that was meaningful on the subject of correlations between
intelligence and race. Any studies that base a conclusion on this
level of classification of the race of the participants are nonsense.
Does that give you enough more understanding of what I was getting at
to allow you to discuss my claim?
Chris
--
Currently reading: Joseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain
Judea Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems;
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio
Chris Hibbert
http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert
chris@pancrit.org
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