You talk a lot about experiences here, but all these answers express beliefs, not experiences.
Unless you have comprehensive measurement such as cameras etc., information about experiences are necessarily mediated by human beliefs.
However, human beliefs can be about many other things than experiences; e.g. about statistics/general societal tendencies, about options for change, about epistemology, about future trajectories, etc..
Beliefs about experiences constitute a specific form of beliefs, and experiences are in a sense the “native” way for humans to gain information about the world (i.e. hunter-gatherers have experiences too, but they probably don’t work with statistical data), so they are probably the place where humans form their richest/most-detailed/most-informative opinions about.
Beliefs can be arbitrarily biased—just think about modifications of your method: Instead of asking black people about their “experiences” with the police, you could ask police officers about their “experiences” with black people.
In the post, I specifically suggested that asking the police would make for a good followup:
We also shouldn’t forget that this is only a part of the story. I asked black people to describe their experiences, but I haven’t allocated time to ask police about their experiences. A functioning policy for society should presumably address both the problems black people face and the problems the police face.
When you say that my suggestion here is “arbitrarily biased”, what do you mean by that?
A far better approach is to actually test common sentiments by more reliable means (e.g. crime statistics). Doing standpoint epistemology seems no more valuable than doing arbitrary opinion polls.
Could you help me understand how looking at crime statistics would help enlighten us about the problems black people face with the police? I think they would be more illuminating about the problems the police or society face with black people.
But also, I don’t think statistics are all that epistemically different from surveys?
Help me out if I’m misunderstanding something here, but my understanding is that both my survey about experiences and crime statistics ultimately originate in experiences where people have interacted with the police. Cops and the people they interact with then process those experiences to remember them and make sense of what to do.
Where my approach differs from crime statistics is that my approach then just ends there, asking people about what they’ve figured from the interaction. Meanwhile in the case of crime statistics, police are given authorization to decide that some interaction is sufficiently harmful that they should arrest the person involved in the interaction. And then they kick off a governmental system of having people come out to investigate the scene of the crime and form their own experiences/beliefs from their observations, and having people to interrogate the experiences of the people involved in the interaction, and similar. And then based on this, records get created in the bureaucracy about the crime (which can then be abstracted into statistics), and punishments gets dealt to the person involved in the crime.
(Also, I’ve heard that since this whole process is very expensive and time-consuming, and potentially error-prone, they almost always use plea bargains where the person getting punished is offered a lighter punishment if they will state that they are guilty of a crime? Or something?)
So on the one hand, the crime statistics are based on information that has been investigated by multiple parties. But on the other hand, the crime statistics are very directly coupled to huge punishments and rewards, and are dependent on rigid and expensive bureaucracy, and they are disempowering in that you have no way of obtaining your own information about crime statistics, because it requires kicking off some huge bureaucratic machine, which you cannot afford. Plus crime statistics are very abstract. Both methods probably have their place, though.
As for opinion polls, when I think opinion polls I usually think of something like “How much trust do you have in the police on a scale from 1-4?”. In such polls, there isn’t really very much information in each response, e.g. if there are 4 response options then that makes for 2 bits of information. Contrast this with the responses I got, which seemed to have tons of bits of information.
In the context of qualitative interview questions like this, straightforwardly taking the answers to be about “the problems black people face” or “the problems the police faces”, presupposes, about individual opinions on what these problems are, that these beliefs are neither incorrect, confused, or otherwise inaccurate. Again, imagine interviewing pre war Christian Germans to find out “the problems Germans face with Jews”.
Qualitative interviews are even less reliable than opinion polls, since in those polls we get at least statistically significant results about which (possibly unjustified or incorrect) opinions are common and which are uncommon. But open ended questions can’t be statistically analyzed in this way.
Qualitative interviews can have value to come up with questions for opinion polls in the first place, or to come up with hypotheses to test by other means. I would just warn against overestimating the value of such open ended questions by interpreting them to directly report actual experiences or problems.
Again, imagine interviewing pre war Christian Germans to find out “the problems Germans face with Jews”.
I don’t have any clear imaginations of what would happen in this case?
Like I know that antisemitism was rampant there at the time, so probably you would get a lot of angry negative opinions. But what would they be? “My pastor’s friend’s niece was killed by a Jew”? “Jews control the banking system which is evil and also they are breeding like rabbits”? “There’s a group of child prostitutes downtown, and their pimp is Jewish”?
I would like to know what the results would be, to be honest. Probably there would be a need to take them with a heavy grain of salt, but I can’t take them with a grain of salt without taking them in the first place.
In the context of qualitative interview questions like this, straightforwardly taking the answers to be about “the problems black people face” or “the problems the police faces”, presupposes, about individual opinions on what these problems are, that these beliefs are neither incorrect, confused, or otherwise inaccurate.
I don’t think we have to take everything as 100% dogma.
Rather, the important part lies in getting a better understanding for each other’s perspectives. There are presumably a lot of things we don’t know, but the information in this survey seems at least to me to be hugely valuable in getting an understanding of what black people face.
Qualitative interviews are even less reliable than opinion polls, since in those polls we get at least statistically significant results about which (possibly unjustified or incorrect) opinions are common and which are uncommon. But open ended questions can’t be statistically analyzed in this way.
I think a qualitative question can reasonably well prove the existence of an opinion in a person. This allows lower-bounding the prevalence of the opinion, as one knows that it exists in everyone who expressed it. In particular, qualitative questions automatically weight the probability of an opinion being expressed by its prevalence in the population, because only those who have the opinion would express it.
However, I think a lack of mentioning an opinion in a qualitative question does not necessarily prove that one does not have that opinion, because qualitative questions are fairly loose and so one might simply not get around to saying it. I think this can probably be mitigated in a qualitative interview, as the interviewer can control the conversation to keep going back until the opinion has been confirmed or disconfirmed.
One other worry I forgot to mention however: I could be totally wrong here, but presumably most applications of this kind of “standpoint epistemology”, in the last ten years, comes from researchers I would suspect of being far-left activists. If so, those people would of course be very eager to interview people they believe in their political worldview to be victims of oppression, i.e. especially black people and women. They would very rarely interview white men or Asians or police officers about their “experiences” or “problems”. This can lead to publication bias, where a lot of “problems” and “experiences” of particular groups get published, but hardly any of other groups which fall outside the concern of the predominant political ideology of those researchers. Then the evidence is biased in virtue of the selection effects at place.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but from what I’ve heard a lot of left-wing academics don’t even try all that hard to reveal black people’s experiences, but instead mainly use black people as a tool to say that right-wingers are bad.
I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but I’d think it is best addressed by doing more to map out different people’s experiences in a publicly accessible way.
That is what I am getting at when I say:
And these principles don’t have to be disempowering. While “shut up and listen” may sound tiring, it is important to remember that going out to find people willing to educate you (possibly in exchange for payment, as in this post) is an active action you can take in order to improve your understanding of your world. Knowledge is power!
One of the benefits of Standpoint Epistemology is that it is very efficient. People naturally observe and remember many of their experiences as they live their life, and it is relatively quick to just ask them about it. This post only took me about a day’s worth of work, and less than $100 worth of money. If scaled up to be more comprehensive, it would presumably take more work, but presumably also be more informative.
My ideal outcome for this post would be if more people went out and mapped more groups’ perspectives of more situations.
Unless you have comprehensive measurement such as cameras etc., information about experiences are necessarily mediated by human beliefs.
However, human beliefs can be about many other things than experiences; e.g. about statistics/general societal tendencies, about options for change, about epistemology, about future trajectories, etc..
Beliefs about experiences constitute a specific form of beliefs, and experiences are in a sense the “native” way for humans to gain information about the world (i.e. hunter-gatherers have experiences too, but they probably don’t work with statistical data), so they are probably the place where humans form their richest/most-detailed/most-informative opinions about.
In the post, I specifically suggested that asking the police would make for a good followup:
When you say that my suggestion here is “arbitrarily biased”, what do you mean by that?
Could you help me understand how looking at crime statistics would help enlighten us about the problems black people face with the police? I think they would be more illuminating about the problems the police or society face with black people.
But also, I don’t think statistics are all that epistemically different from surveys?
Help me out if I’m misunderstanding something here, but my understanding is that both my survey about experiences and crime statistics ultimately originate in experiences where people have interacted with the police. Cops and the people they interact with then process those experiences to remember them and make sense of what to do.
Where my approach differs from crime statistics is that my approach then just ends there, asking people about what they’ve figured from the interaction. Meanwhile in the case of crime statistics, police are given authorization to decide that some interaction is sufficiently harmful that they should arrest the person involved in the interaction. And then they kick off a governmental system of having people come out to investigate the scene of the crime and form their own experiences/beliefs from their observations, and having people to interrogate the experiences of the people involved in the interaction, and similar. And then based on this, records get created in the bureaucracy about the crime (which can then be abstracted into statistics), and punishments gets dealt to the person involved in the crime.
(Also, I’ve heard that since this whole process is very expensive and time-consuming, and potentially error-prone, they almost always use plea bargains where the person getting punished is offered a lighter punishment if they will state that they are guilty of a crime? Or something?)
So on the one hand, the crime statistics are based on information that has been investigated by multiple parties. But on the other hand, the crime statistics are very directly coupled to huge punishments and rewards, and are dependent on rigid and expensive bureaucracy, and they are disempowering in that you have no way of obtaining your own information about crime statistics, because it requires kicking off some huge bureaucratic machine, which you cannot afford. Plus crime statistics are very abstract. Both methods probably have their place, though.
As for opinion polls, when I think opinion polls I usually think of something like “How much trust do you have in the police on a scale from 1-4?”. In such polls, there isn’t really very much information in each response, e.g. if there are 4 response options then that makes for 2 bits of information. Contrast this with the responses I got, which seemed to have tons of bits of information.
In the context of qualitative interview questions like this, straightforwardly taking the answers to be about “the problems black people face” or “the problems the police faces”, presupposes, about individual opinions on what these problems are, that these beliefs are neither incorrect, confused, or otherwise inaccurate. Again, imagine interviewing pre war Christian Germans to find out “the problems Germans face with Jews”.
Qualitative interviews are even less reliable than opinion polls, since in those polls we get at least statistically significant results about which (possibly unjustified or incorrect) opinions are common and which are uncommon. But open ended questions can’t be statistically analyzed in this way.
Qualitative interviews can have value to come up with questions for opinion polls in the first place, or to come up with hypotheses to test by other means. I would just warn against overestimating the value of such open ended questions by interpreting them to directly report actual experiences or problems.
I don’t have any clear imaginations of what would happen in this case?
Like I know that antisemitism was rampant there at the time, so probably you would get a lot of angry negative opinions. But what would they be? “My pastor’s friend’s niece was killed by a Jew”? “Jews control the banking system which is evil and also they are breeding like rabbits”? “There’s a group of child prostitutes downtown, and their pimp is Jewish”?
I would like to know what the results would be, to be honest. Probably there would be a need to take them with a heavy grain of salt, but I can’t take them with a grain of salt without taking them in the first place.
I don’t think we have to take everything as 100% dogma.
Rather, the important part lies in getting a better understanding for each other’s perspectives. There are presumably a lot of things we don’t know, but the information in this survey seems at least to me to be hugely valuable in getting an understanding of what black people face.
I think a qualitative question can reasonably well prove the existence of an opinion in a person. This allows lower-bounding the prevalence of the opinion, as one knows that it exists in everyone who expressed it. In particular, qualitative questions automatically weight the probability of an opinion being expressed by its prevalence in the population, because only those who have the opinion would express it.
However, I think a lack of mentioning an opinion in a qualitative question does not necessarily prove that one does not have that opinion, because qualitative questions are fairly loose and so one might simply not get around to saying it. I think this can probably be mitigated in a qualitative interview, as the interviewer can control the conversation to keep going back until the opinion has been confirmed or disconfirmed.
Okay, these points seem reasonable.
One other worry I forgot to mention however: I could be totally wrong here, but presumably most applications of this kind of “standpoint epistemology”, in the last ten years, comes from researchers I would suspect of being far-left activists. If so, those people would of course be very eager to interview people they believe in their political worldview to be victims of oppression, i.e. especially black people and women. They would very rarely interview white men or Asians or police officers about their “experiences” or “problems”. This can lead to publication bias, where a lot of “problems” and “experiences” of particular groups get published, but hardly any of other groups which fall outside the concern of the predominant political ideology of those researchers. Then the evidence is biased in virtue of the selection effects at place.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but from what I’ve heard a lot of left-wing academics don’t even try all that hard to reveal black people’s experiences, but instead mainly use black people as a tool to say that right-wingers are bad.
I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but I’d think it is best addressed by doing more to map out different people’s experiences in a publicly accessible way.
That is what I am getting at when I say:
My ideal outcome for this post would be if more people went out and mapped more groups’ perspectives of more situations.