Starting on a brief personal note…

I’m a bit disappointed with myself for being absent from this blog for the past few weeks. In a Reddit AMA last week, my favorite blogger said that the limiting factor on his productivity is the amount of time he has in a day. This to me is an ideal that I wish I could always be at. The limiting factor on my productivity is almost always my mental capacity to avoid the infinite potential sources of short-term gratification, and to motivate myself to do the things that I get deeper and more long-lived satisfaction out of. Writing this blog is one of those things. My capacity to enforce mental discipline is pretty correlated with my overall state of mind and mood. I think you can actually probably fairly reliably track my mental health by just looking at how often I’m posting here!

I’m also disappointed because I have been thinking about a great many interesting things that deserve posts. I like the idea of using this blog as a faithful recording of my intellectual life, and having discontinuities doesn’t help with this. Much of what I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks is related to meta-ethics, but it also goes more broadly into the nature of philosophy in general. I hope to write up some posts on these soon.

In the meantime, I’ve also been compiling some interesting factoids I’ve recently encountered related to social justice. Here they are, with sources!

Race

• Bias against blacks in the justice system can be found in sentencing and in arrests for drug use, but not in arrest rates for violent crimes, police shootings, prosecution rates, or conviction rates. Source.
• Juries in the Deep South were commonly all-white up until the 1986 case Batson v Kentucky (where loopholes that allowed exclusion of blacks from juries were closed). (from Just Mercy, p. 60)
• Black Americans graduate from high school at the same rate as white Americans (92.3% vs 95.6%). Source.
  • In 1968, these numbers were 54.4% and 75%.
  • Percentage of college graduates age 25 to 29: 22.8% and 42.1%. (19.3% gap)
• White adults who don’t graduate high school, don’t get married before having children, and don’t work full time have much greater median wealth than comparable black and Latino adults. Source.
  • Consumption habits can’t explain the wealth gap: white households spend more than black households of comparable incomes.
  • The median white single parent has 2.2 times more wealth than the median black two-parent household and 1.9 times more wealth than the median Latino two-parent household.
• Poverty rates among African Americans have declined substantially: 34.7% in 1968 to 21.4% in 2016. Source.
  • Among whites: 10% in 1968 to 8.8% in 2016.
• Great table showing the change in socioeconomic circumstances of blacks and whites in the US from 1968 to 2018: (Source)  
  • Most strikingly in that table… Median household wealth is 10 times higher for white Americans than black Americans (but it used to be 20 times higher).

Gender

• There is a 7% unexplained wage gap between men and women in the US. Source.
  • Controlling for college major selection, occupational segregation, hours worked, unionization, education, race, ethnicity, age, and marital status.
• Female leaders are evaluated slightly more negatively than equivalent male leaders (controlling for leadership style). Source.
  • The discrepancy is more pronounced for autocratic leadership styles, and vanishes for democratic leadership styles.
• Most anthropologists hold there are no known societies that are/were unambiguously matriarchal. Source.
• Experiments show that women value temporal flexibility relatively more than men, and men value income growth relatively more than women. This is the most powerful explanation of the wage gap. Source.
  • Right after college, wages are pretty similar between men and women, and the wage gap appears as time passes, indicating that ‘innate’ differences aren’t hugely at play (including bargaining ability and temperament).
  • 75% of the wage gap is due to differences within occupations, and only 25% across occupations.
  • Among the top-paying occupations (salary ≥ $60K), the within-occupation corrected pay gaps are biggest where there’s lots of self-employment (explained by self-employment being more demanding).
• Symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the ‘90s, which served as a natural experiment that found significant gender bias against women. Source.
  • The analysis found that in a blind audition for preliminary rounds, the same woman was 9.3% more likely to be hired (from 19.3% to 28.6%), and the same man is 2.3% less likely to be hired.
  • For final rounds, the same woman was 14.8% more likely to be hired in a blind audition (from 8.7% to 23.5%).
  • Introduction of blind auditions also caused an explosion of female auditions.
• The rate of false reporting for sexual assault is in the range of 2-8%. Source.
• Estimates of the prevalence rate of campus sexual assault in the US vary hugely, from .61% to 27% of female students, depending on survey definitions and methodology. Source.
• The percentage of trans men that report lifetime suicide attempts is 46%, trans women is 42%, LGB adults is 10-20%, and among the overall US population is 4.6%. Source.
  • Suicide attempt rates are lower (by about 9%) among trans women that are perceived by others as women, but are the same among trans men.

Other

• “The IAT is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior.” Source.
  • Many early studies on IAT as a predictor of discriminatory behavior had serious methodological problems, including falsification of data by an “overzealous undergraduate”.
  • IAT has a test-retest reliability of .55 on a scale from 0 to 1.
  • Meta-analyses of the IAT-behavior link show that race IAT scores are weak predictors of discriminatory behavior.
  • IAT tests done on fictional races that are identified as one oppressed and the other privileged show “implicit bias” against the oppressed group.
  • More noise in the data predictably biases the IAT score downwards
• When people hear stereotyping is normal, they may do more of it. Source.
• The “few antibias trainings that have been proven to change people’s behavior” look at bias as a habit that can be broken. The Prejudice and Intergroup relations lab at UW Madison has had promising results with these type of trainings. Source.

Some takeaways: A lot of the concerns of the social justice movement are clearly very valid and rooted in real issues of societal inequalities that have been handed down to us by previous generations. That said, however, there is a good degree of subtlety required in the analysis of race and gender issues that is missing in the mainstream social justice movement.

The oft-cited 23% gender gap is misleading to say the least, and the actual percentage due to discrimination is unclear but something less than 7%. The focus the Black Lives Matter movement puts on racially biased police shootings is unjustified, and the focus would be better placed on disparate sentencing and drug arrests. And more generally, the overall trends in racial inequality in the United States look extremely positive in virtually every dimension.

It also looks like current methods at identifying and intervening on things like implicit bias and stereotyping leave a lot to be desired. This has some serious implications for questions about actual practical solutions to issues of racism and sexism… even if we acknowledge their existence and seriousness, this does not mean that we should jump on board with any plausible-sounding diversity training program. The question of how to solve these issues is highly nontrivial and deserves a lot of careful attention.