Push to get rid of their low status traits usually comes from low status people, or parents who don’t want their children to stay low status (or people who sell them the treatment).
People already use some highly harmful substances to make their skin paler. Paler skin requires doesn’t give even a tiny fraction of benefits of being really “white”, and side effects are far greater than what I proposed. By extrapolation if there was a magic pill you could take to make yourself permanently Caucasian without any significant side effects, plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly. Of course we are unlikely to see this being tested, as such procedure seems unlikely to occur.
Except the reasoning on the OkCupid blog is completely worthless because of this little note:
We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.
In other words, they fucking control for physical attractiveness. If men found e.g. Black women more physically attractive en masse, their charts wouldn’t reflect that. What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.
What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.
Perhaps either falsification in beauty rankings (‘that black chick isn’t too hot, but for a black chick she’s pretty good, so I will give her a high rating even though I’d likely ignore her’), or the exact opposite (“she’s hot, but I’d rather an equally hot white chick”); oh the irony...
Why in the world does this make it worthless? They’ve discovered an effect above and beyond any possible aesthetic trends in the assorted races; if they hadn’t included that control, the data could be written off with “well, maybe white men are just all so ridiculously attractive, of course people write them back”.
If you want to predict someone’s actual response rate, the model is fine—you can get an accurate prediction by plugging in that person’s information into the model, provided they’re in the attractiveness stratum of the data pool used to fit the model. But for OkCupid’s claimed causal inference, we’re interested in counterfactual inquiries like, “What sort of response rate would black woman X get if she were white?” But we can’t twiddle just the race variable in the model to get the answer: if X were white, her attractiveness rating would be different too, and she might end up in a different stratum than the one addressed by the model. Since there are no results for that counterfactual stratum, the model cannot address the counterfactual, i.e., it can’t be used to make causal claims.
The problem is that if you’re trying to detect racism, the variables you’re controlling for had better be independent of racism, which in this case they obviously aren’t. Actual racism could go either way and still be consistent with their findings. At the very least I’d like to see the data before and after applying the control; this would give us more information, but probably wouldn’t let the OkCupid team make sweeping generalizations about me like “White guys are shitty” (actual quote).
Attractiveness is wildly subjective. If people find the features of minority races to be less attractive than the features of white people, that just is a type of racism. Any possible objective standard of physical attractiveness (candidates include symmetry, youth, koinophilia relative to the world population, health) would have only the weakest possible correlation with race.
Nearby in this thread, gwern gave an example of how an attractiveness rating can be influenced by factors other than actual subjective attractiveness to the rater… and how those factors can be related to, yes, race. If after reading his comment you’ll still think you know an unambiguous way to interpret the post-control data that OkCupid published, I’d really like to hear it. To me the whole situation looks more like a trainwreck.
They also ignore massive selection effects. Most significant, and obvious, is the fact that most OKCupid users are white. If I were a black or Asian person interested only in other people of my race, it would be much wiser for me to find a site dedicated to finding people of my race, which exist. If I’m white and I only want to date white people, there are so many that I’ll be just fine.
They were measuring person-attractiveness, not picture-attractiveness.
Reply rates depend on what person’s profile says, how they act in messaging etc. A black person with similar picture-attractiveness and height will be much less overall attractive than a white person.
Feel free to ask them for uncorrected data, or picture-attractiveness by race, the effect might very well turn out to be even stronger.
There are certainly some blacks who value lighter skin and straighter hair, but saying that they really want to become white makes as much sense as saying that a white woman who gets a tan really wants to become black. Two other major problems:
plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
This does not follow. It would depend on what subgroup took it and which did not. I also think you seriously need to go talk to some actual black people before you make this claim.
There’s earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you’re “Black”. It’s naive to think that people would stay “Black” voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.
You assume that, holding all else constant, but changing people’s skin color, all these things would go away. This actually sounds like cartoonish, 18th-century-style racism to me. I would love to see some theoretical description of the problems faced by blacks such that merely changing their skin color/facial features would solve most or all of these problems—I rather believe they’re caused by complex social, cultural, and economic factors that are ultimately independent of race. You could carve out a subsection of whites with similar characteristics, if you picked the right selection criteria.
Using cosmetics to lighten skin is NOT the same as trying to “heal blackness”. White people often darken their skin with chemicals (sunless tanning). This is NOT because they don’t want to be white, or because they are trying to “heal whiteness”. This is just a cosmetic change. In the United States at least, blackness is a boolean data type. You either are black or not. Being 25% black=Black all the way. Lightening skin is not about decreasing blackness.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
I’m glad you’re mentioning it, I didn’t as I thought it was far too clear the opposite way.
So, in spite of very high cost (estimated $45k-$105k) of cochlear implants, very low quality of sound (described by some as human language sounding like “a croaking dalek with laryngitis”), requirement of surgery with possibility of complications, unpredictability of results, very short battery life (1-3 days), requirement of bulky external equipment (this problem is getting gradually solved) etc., popularity of cochlear implants exploded from 49k users worldwide in 2002 to 150k users in 2008.
I’d be willing to bet any money in prediction markets at imminent death of the “deaf culture” in a few generations (or for practical reasons some proxy like popularity of cochlear implants, percentage of deaf children in developing country learning sign languages etc.)
Some people from the “deaf culture” are protesting because they built their identity on this back when it was not treatable (so “not an illness”). Now as it’s treatable it’s considered an illness by the society, most importantly by parents of deaf children, and people who recently lost hearing. That’s exactly the shift I predicted.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white
Not to spam it everywhere, but here’s an exchange that summarizes the parallels between the two cases.
Note that this happened with, for instance, Italian immigrants to the US. There was a huge industry in teaching immigrants to look/act/talk more like Americans. This probably resulted from anti-Italian discrimination, especially during WWII.
Push to get rid of their low status traits usually comes from low status people, or parents who don’t want their children to stay low status (or people who sell them the treatment).
People already use some highly harmful substances to make their skin paler. Paler skin requires doesn’t give even a tiny fraction of benefits of being really “white”, and side effects are far greater than what I proposed. By extrapolation if there was a magic pill you could take to make yourself permanently Caucasian without any significant side effects, plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly. Of course we are unlikely to see this being tested, as such procedure seems unlikely to occur.
Here’s data on how being “White” as opposed to “Black” drastically increases your mate selection opportunities. There’s earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you’re “Black”. It’s naive to think that people would stay “Black” voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.
Except the reasoning on the OkCupid blog is completely worthless because of this little note:
In other words, they fucking control for physical attractiveness. If men found e.g. Black women more physically attractive en masse, their charts wouldn’t reflect that. What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.
Perhaps either falsification in beauty rankings (‘that black chick isn’t too hot, but for a black chick she’s pretty good, so I will give her a high rating even though I’d likely ignore her’), or the exact opposite (“she’s hot, but I’d rather an equally hot white chick”); oh the irony...
...Wow, that’s another great catch. I really should’ve thought of that one myself. Kudos.
OkCupid, are you here? Are you listening? =)
People don’t just look at pictures when they decide if they’re attracted to someone, and correction was only for picture attractiveness.
Why in the world does this make it worthless? They’ve discovered an effect above and beyond any possible aesthetic trends in the assorted races; if they hadn’t included that control, the data could be written off with “well, maybe white men are just all so ridiculously attractive, of course people write them back”.
If you want to predict someone’s actual response rate, the model is fine—you can get an accurate prediction by plugging in that person’s information into the model, provided they’re in the attractiveness stratum of the data pool used to fit the model. But for OkCupid’s claimed causal inference, we’re interested in counterfactual inquiries like, “What sort of response rate would black woman X get if she were white?” But we can’t twiddle just the race variable in the model to get the answer: if X were white, her attractiveness rating would be different too, and she might end up in a different stratum than the one addressed by the model. Since there are no results for that counterfactual stratum, the model cannot address the counterfactual, i.e., it can’t be used to make causal claims.
ETA: Andrew Gelman calls this the fallacy of controlling for an intermediate outcome.
Thanks for the link, that description applies to OkCupid’s analysis perfectly.
The problem is that if you’re trying to detect racism, the variables you’re controlling for had better be independent of racism, which in this case they obviously aren’t. Actual racism could go either way and still be consistent with their findings. At the very least I’d like to see the data before and after applying the control; this would give us more information, but probably wouldn’t let the OkCupid team make sweeping generalizations about me like “White guys are shitty” (actual quote).
Attractiveness is wildly subjective. If people find the features of minority races to be less attractive than the features of white people, that just is a type of racism. Any possible objective standard of physical attractiveness (candidates include symmetry, youth, koinophilia relative to the world population, health) would have only the weakest possible correlation with race.
Nearby in this thread, gwern gave an example of how an attractiveness rating can be influenced by factors other than actual subjective attractiveness to the rater… and how those factors can be related to, yes, race. If after reading his comment you’ll still think you know an unambiguous way to interpret the post-control data that OkCupid published, I’d really like to hear it. To me the whole situation looks more like a trainwreck.
They also ignore massive selection effects. Most significant, and obvious, is the fact that most OKCupid users are white. If I were a black or Asian person interested only in other people of my race, it would be much wiser for me to find a site dedicated to finding people of my race, which exist. If I’m white and I only want to date white people, there are so many that I’ll be just fine.
They were measuring person-attractiveness, not picture-attractiveness.
Reply rates depend on what person’s profile says, how they act in messaging etc. A black person with similar picture-attractiveness and height will be much less overall attractive than a white person.
Feel free to ask them for uncorrected data, or picture-attractiveness by race, the effect might very well turn out to be even stronger.
Nice catch!
There are certainly some blacks who value lighter skin and straighter hair, but saying that they really want to become white makes as much sense as saying that a white woman who gets a tan really wants to become black. Two other major problems:
This does not follow. It would depend on what subgroup took it and which did not. I also think you seriously need to go talk to some actual black people before you make this claim.
You assume that, holding all else constant, but changing people’s skin color, all these things would go away. This actually sounds like cartoonish, 18th-century-style racism to me. I would love to see some theoretical description of the problems faced by blacks such that merely changing their skin color/facial features would solve most or all of these problems—I rather believe they’re caused by complex social, cultural, and economic factors that are ultimately independent of race. You could carve out a subsection of whites with similar characteristics, if you picked the right selection criteria.
Allow me to suggest “rednecks” as a candidate.
Using cosmetics to lighten skin is NOT the same as trying to “heal blackness”. White people often darken their skin with chemicals (sunless tanning). This is NOT because they don’t want to be white, or because they are trying to “heal whiteness”. This is just a cosmetic change. In the United States at least, blackness is a boolean data type. You either are black or not. Being 25% black=Black all the way. Lightening skin is not about decreasing blackness.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don’t cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
I’m glad you’re mentioning it, I didn’t as I thought it was far too clear the opposite way.
So, in spite of very high cost (estimated $45k-$105k) of cochlear implants, very low quality of sound (described by some as human language sounding like “a croaking dalek with laryngitis”), requirement of surgery with possibility of complications, unpredictability of results, very short battery life (1-3 days), requirement of bulky external equipment (this problem is getting gradually solved) etc., popularity of cochlear implants exploded from 49k users worldwide in 2002 to 150k users in 2008.
I’d be willing to bet any money in prediction markets at imminent death of the “deaf culture” in a few generations (or for practical reasons some proxy like popularity of cochlear implants, percentage of deaf children in developing country learning sign languages etc.)
Some people from the “deaf culture” are protesting because they built their identity on this back when it was not treatable (so “not an illness”). Now as it’s treatable it’s considered an illness by the society, most importantly by parents of deaf children, and people who recently lost hearing. That’s exactly the shift I predicted.
Really?
Then again...
Not to spam it everywhere, but here’s an exchange that summarizes the parallels between the two cases.
Note that this happened with, for instance, Italian immigrants to the US. There was a huge industry in teaching immigrants to look/act/talk more like Americans. This probably resulted from anti-Italian discrimination, especially during WWII.