Simpson’s paradox is a simple mathematical explanation for the error, “political correctness” is a complex socially-constructed one intimately tied up with particular political positions. Occam’s Razor favors the former, overwhelmingly so.
There is no need to introduce the hypothesis that the error is due to people not agreeing with the particular political views of the Blue Party (which is what the “political correctness” hypothesis states), when simple math suffices to explain it.
There is no need to introduce the hypothesis that the error is due to people not agreeing with the particular political views of the Blue Party (which is what the “political correctness” hypothesis states), when simple math suffices to explain it.
If the Blue Party has the belief that it’s evil to ever think that any non-white racial group is on average worse at anything than white people are and if this belief is one of the most important beliefs of the Blue Party then what there is no need to introduce here is Simpson’s paradox.
Steve Landsburg (like myself) is a college professor. The President of his university recently attacked Landsburg on politically correctness grounds. Landsburg’s post was an implicit attack on blank slate politically correctness.
Yes, I understand that you’re saying that all Blues hate the truth; that Blues are the opposite of decent people — that they speak lies out of love of deceit; their veins run with corrosive black ichor; they despise all that is good and natural in the world; they invert the ritual of the Mass and perform lewd acts with the consecrated Host; their women dress as men and their men dress as women; they curse crops, cause milk to sour, and make men’s penises shrink and vanish. And that only the sacred, knightly courage of the Greens can exterminate the Blue threat, make the land prosperous once again, bring smiles to the faces of the children, and lead us marching joyously into a new age of shining order and righteousness.
I get that. That was all obvious when you said “political correctness”, because that’s what “political correctness” means — it is an accusation of bad faith. It means “the other side tell lies, and they refuse to allow the truth to be spoken.”
What I’m asking you to recognize is that this is a more complicated hypothesis than the Simpson’s paradox hypothesis. Politics will pretty much always be more complicated than math, and conspiracy theories always more complicated than mathematical errors. And so they require more evidence.
“Greedy reductionism” implies explaining-away the data on the basis of a reductionist theory; e.g. Skinner’s explaining-away of the experience of consciousness.
The only thing being explained away here is the “political correctness” explanation, not the data.
Also the two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive.
Conditioning on one of two independently sufficient causes detracts from the other’s plausibility.
It is impolite to mention demographic change, especially when racial differences are obvious. “Our increases in income are counteracted by the swelling ranks of poor non-whites” does not make newspaper editors happy.
But they’re not “counteracted” at all. White people’s wages have actually increased. You don’t have to try very hard to put a positive spin on the fact that everyone is making more money, women are becoming more equal with men, and previously poor non-whites are now finding more jobs. What’s not to like?
It seems unlikely to me that people discovered this explanation for the data and then covered it up. More likely that they simply hadn’t noticed that Simpson’s paradox was in effect (maybe because they never even looked at the demographic data).
There’s a similar situation with PISA scores: American students of all races are the highest or second highest scorers of that race. The average American PISA score is mediocre, though, because the US’s racial balance is not, say, Shanghai’s or Finland’s racial balance.
America has less Europeans than Finland does, and less Asians than Shanghai does, and more Hispanics and Africans than either. Asian Americans and European Americans score better on the PISA than Hispanic Americans or African Americans. I’m using the word “balance” to mean “distribution,” not some measure of race relations.
Cowen built a lot on the median income in The Great Stagnation; reading it, there was not a whisper about demographics, though Cowen is a pretty honest author usually (and in fact was the one who publicized this one!).
Publicized it, I said, not discovered it. Cowen has a huge readership, and pretty much anyone who ever hears of this will do so because Cowen publicized it; and Cowen knows this, so the honesty argument is still true.
No, I got it from Henderson’s blog, but the source data got lost and reconstructed as Tyler. I haven’t seen any Marginal Revolution post publicizing it.
simply hadn’t noticed that Simpson’s paradox was in effect
You don’t understand academic culture. Steve Landsburg (like myself) is a college professor. Because of political correctness almost no college professor would dare point out what Landsburg just did.
You’re underestimating both how good economists are at math and how bad we are at resisting political correctness.
You don’t have to try very hard to put a positive spin on the fact that everyone is making more money, women are becoming more equal with men, and previously poor non-whites are now finding more jobs. What’s not to like?
Speaking as a leftist who disapproves of “honesty” and “fairness” to still-living opponents in a culture war… haha, no way! Why the flying fuck would we want a “positive spin” on a competing project, especially the fact that it seems to move towards our own declared preferences? We want people to get unhappy, restless and desperate; that’s the only opportunity to really engage their implicit assumptions! Our folks have even been kind of up-front about that, really:
“I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword”—Matt. 10:34 ″...the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it.”—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism ”The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”—Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Of course, it’s not very certain how much actual influence hardcore and committed leftists really have over American upper-brow media. Nonetheless, it’s fun to pretend that someone like Dumbledore on crack might be behind our ever-present intellectual confusion.
P.P.S. Although the “cultural Marxists’” reputation on the modern Voldemort flank is rather more impressive than that of Dumbledore’s—certainly a plan to “destroy the Western civilization” sounds rather bold and badass. Unfortunately for the Right, as shown above, such “destruction” and “subversion” are in fact just an ancient, refined and respected tradition of the Western civilization. It suffuses much of our general cultural outlook and gives it a unique character, I’d say—or, some angry and cyncial observers would say, it comes from an underlying feeling of pride, achievement and triumphalism. Only a culture immensely secure in its own dominance and privilege would try such relatively scathing self-criticism. That’s oh so human. I’m not perfectly OK with it, but I’d be even less cool with an openly “white nationalist” or “racially realistic”, Apartheid-style thinking.
Also. Why e.g. Carlyle should necessarily be ascribed more merit, cultural or otherwise, than e.g. Susan Sontag is beyond me. They were both fairly talented writers with a clear individual voice, and highly elitist. How certain… contrarian elements can say that all fans of the latter are a traitorous degenerate menace to all that is White, while even a communist wouldn’t attack the former because Hitler and Goebbels happened to like him… well, it’s pathetic.
[The above is basically bullshit without a good spin behind it.]
The error comes more from the map-warping power of political correctness than from the Simpson’s paradox.
Edit: look at what happened to the then Harvard President Larry Summers when he discussed why women might be underrepresented in the sciences.
Simpson’s paradox is a simple mathematical explanation for the error, “political correctness” is a complex socially-constructed one intimately tied up with particular political positions. Occam’s Razor favors the former, overwhelmingly so.
There is no need to introduce the hypothesis that the error is due to people not agreeing with the particular political views of the Blue Party (which is what the “political correctness” hypothesis states), when simple math suffices to explain it.
If the Blue Party has the belief that it’s evil to ever think that any non-white racial group is on average worse at anything than white people are and if this belief is one of the most important beliefs of the Blue Party then what there is no need to introduce here is Simpson’s paradox.
Steve Landsburg (like myself) is a college professor. The President of his university recently attacked Landsburg on politically correctness grounds. Landsburg’s post was an implicit attack on blank slate politically correctness.
Yes, I understand that you’re saying that all Blues hate the truth; that Blues are the opposite of decent people — that they speak lies out of love of deceit; their veins run with corrosive black ichor; they despise all that is good and natural in the world; they invert the ritual of the Mass and perform lewd acts with the consecrated Host; their women dress as men and their men dress as women; they curse crops, cause milk to sour, and make men’s penises shrink and vanish. And that only the sacred, knightly courage of the Greens can exterminate the Blue threat, make the land prosperous once again, bring smiles to the faces of the children, and lead us marching joyously into a new age of shining order and righteousness.
I get that. That was all obvious when you said “political correctness”, because that’s what “political correctness” means — it is an accusation of bad faith. It means “the other side tell lies, and they refuse to allow the truth to be spoken.”
What I’m asking you to recognize is that this is a more complicated hypothesis than the Simpson’s paradox hypothesis. Politics will pretty much always be more complicated than math, and conspiracy theories always more complicated than mathematical errors. And so they require more evidence.
That’s all.
NO!
I’m not saying that the Blues hate the truth. I’m saying that on one small set of issues the Blues have beliefs independent of the truth.
Yes, but in this situation, a situation over which I have a huge amount of local knowledge, politics is the simpler answer.
Greedy reductionism strikes again. Also the two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive.
“Greedy reductionism” implies explaining-away the data on the basis of a reductionist theory; e.g. Skinner’s explaining-away of the experience of consciousness.
The only thing being explained away here is the “political correctness” explanation, not the data.
Conditioning on one of two independently sufficient causes detracts from the other’s plausibility.
How so?
It is impolite to mention demographic change, especially when racial differences are obvious. “Our increases in income are counteracted by the swelling ranks of poor non-whites” does not make newspaper editors happy.
But they’re not “counteracted” at all. White people’s wages have actually increased. You don’t have to try very hard to put a positive spin on the fact that everyone is making more money, women are becoming more equal with men, and previously poor non-whites are now finding more jobs. What’s not to like?
It seems unlikely to me that people discovered this explanation for the data and then covered it up. More likely that they simply hadn’t noticed that Simpson’s paradox was in effect (maybe because they never even looked at the demographic data).
They are for the metric of median wages.
There’s a similar situation with PISA scores: American students of all races are the highest or second highest scorers of that race. The average American PISA score is mediocre, though, because the US’s racial balance is not, say, Shanghai’s or Finland’s racial balance.
I’m curious by what steps of reasoning do you pick out the hypothesis of “racial balance” rather than, say, “income inequality”?
It’s not at all clear to me how “income inequality” is a theory that predicts the datapoints I’m discussing here.
It’s not at all clear how “racial balance” is, either. That’s why I asked the above, with a link to the relevant Sequences post.
America has less Europeans than Finland does, and less Asians than Shanghai does, and more Hispanics and Africans than either. Asian Americans and European Americans score better on the PISA than Hispanic Americans or African Americans. I’m using the word “balance” to mean “distribution,” not some measure of race relations.
Cowen built a lot on the median income in The Great Stagnation; reading it, there was not a whisper about demographics, though Cowen is a pretty honest author usually (and in fact was the one who publicized this one!).
Drat, I hat-tipped Cowen instead of David Henderson of Econlog, in an example of the Matthew Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect_(sociology)#Sociology_of_science
Publicized it, I said, not discovered it. Cowen has a huge readership, and pretty much anyone who ever hears of this will do so because Cowen publicized it; and Cowen knows this, so the honesty argument is still true.
No, I got it from Henderson’s blog, but the source data got lost and reconstructed as Tyler. I haven’t seen any Marginal Revolution post publicizing it.
Whoops, you’re right; it was Henderson/EconLog, not Cowen.
You don’t understand academic culture. Steve Landsburg (like myself) is a college professor. Because of political correctness almost no college professor would dare point out what Landsburg just did.
You’re underestimating both how good economists are at math and how bad we are at resisting political correctness.
Speaking as a leftist who disapproves of “honesty” and “fairness” to still-living opponents in a culture war… haha, no way! Why the flying fuck would we want a “positive spin” on a competing project, especially the fact that it seems to move towards our own declared preferences? We want people to get unhappy, restless and desperate; that’s the only opportunity to really engage their implicit assumptions! Our folks have even been kind of up-front about that, really:
“I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword”—Matt. 10:34
″...the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it.”—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
”The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”—Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Of course, it’s not very certain how much actual influence hardcore and committed leftists really have over American upper-brow media. Nonetheless, it’s fun to pretend that someone like Dumbledore on crack might be behind our ever-present intellectual confusion.
(I’m just making random Aqua vs. Turquoise noises again.)
P.S. I’m so adopting “Dumbledore on crack” as a brief summary of the Frankfurt School to recommend it to HPMOR fans.
P.P.S. Although the “cultural Marxists’” reputation on the modern Voldemort flank is rather more impressive than that of Dumbledore’s—certainly a plan to “destroy the Western civilization” sounds rather bold and badass. Unfortunately for the Right, as shown above, such “destruction” and “subversion” are in fact just an ancient, refined and respected tradition of the Western civilization. It suffuses much of our general cultural outlook and gives it a unique character, I’d say—or, some angry and cyncial observers would say, it comes from an underlying feeling of pride, achievement and triumphalism. Only a culture immensely secure in its own dominance and privilege would try such relatively scathing self-criticism. That’s oh so human. I’m not perfectly OK with it, but I’d be even less cool with an openly “white nationalist” or “racially realistic”, Apartheid-style thinking.
Also. Why e.g. Carlyle should necessarily be ascribed more merit, cultural or otherwise, than e.g. Susan Sontag is beyond me. They were both fairly talented writers with a clear individual voice, and highly elitist. How certain… contrarian elements can say that all fans of the latter are a traitorous degenerate menace to all that is White, while even a communist wouldn’t attack the former because Hitler and Goebbels happened to like him… well, it’s pathetic.
[The above is basically bullshit without a good spin behind it.]
It’s not just impolite, it’s an act that makes one unclean.