Does Big Data Increase Injustice and Threaten Democracy?

In Cathy O' Neil's 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction, the author discusses data driven decision-making beyond the financial sector,  and raises ethical objections and questions regarding algorithms that make decisions about qualitative issues such as who is best qualified for a job, school, or promotion and who is not. O'Neil makes at least 2 major claims in this book: a) Our culture primes us to think of mathematical models as objective, impartial, fact-based and thus, crucially, *trustworthy* on the whole. and b) Algorithms turn out to have irrational and, more importantly, discriminatory effects which have already affected many and have the potential to increasingly confer advantages on those already privileged while compounding the disadvantages and problems of those*tagged* as liabilities or undesirables.

Because of the high degree of trust most of us place in mathematical models (despite the madness of the 2008 recession) they remain opaque to us. They are seldom challenged, and when they are challenged only a few of those affected by them ever get a chance to "look under the hood" to see just how they work, and what they really do when calculating decisions. They operate without public scrutiny or even awareness. If we do not start auditing and monitoring social algorithms they may, O'Neil suggests, amplify the pre-existing inequalities in our society. If such a phenomenon goes unchecked and unchallenged, then what started out as accidental bias might be jealously guarded by those who control and benefit from the technology. This could result in a technocratic power elite. Already, she suggests, people who are tagged by "bad" address, medical and psychiatric background, ethnicity, gender, educational affiliations, et al., are discriminated against. A certain address or school may carry less cultural capital or be correlated with race or ethnicity (e.g. Howard vs. Yale). So in the absence of transparency, with uninformed and credulous citizens relying on what they think are fair decisions, a technocracy could emerge which would no longer be a matter of cumulative accidental feedback loops, but a planned plutocracy in which the "winners" will have convinced themselves that they worked for and deserve their blessings. So that's the broad outline. Below is an excerpt from a larger review that originally appeared in Scientific American in August of 2017.

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From Scientific American (8/16/17):

"Weapons of math destruction" [which the author refers to as WMDs]...are mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis.

She shares stories of people who have been deemed unworthy in some way by an algorithm. There’s the highly-regarded teacher who is fired due to a low score on a teacher assessment tool, the college student who couldn’t get a minimum wage job at a grocery store due to his answers on a personality test, the people whose credit card spending limits were lowered because they shopped at certain stores. To add insult to injury, the algorithms that judged them are completely opaque and unassailable. People often have no recourse when the algorithm makes a mistake[note: these are not actually "mistakes" but consequences of the design, which is the main point-ed].

O’Neil is an ideal person to write this book. She is an academic mathematician turned Wall Street quant turned data scientist who has been involved in Occupy Wall Street and recently started an algorithmic auditing company.She is one of the strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow algorithms to influence our lives and against the notion that an algorithm, because it is implemented by an unemotional machine, cannot perpetrate bias or injustice.

Many people think of Wall Street and hedge funds when they think of big data and algorithms making decisions. As books such as The Big Short and All the Devils Are Here grimly chronicle, subprime mortgages are a perfect example of a WMD. Most of the people buying, selling, and even rating them had no idea how risky they were, and the economy is still reeling from their effects.

O’Neil talks about financial WMDs and her experiences , but the examples in her book come from many other facets of life as well: college rankings, employment application screeners, policing and sentencing algorithms, workplace wellness programs, and the many inappropriate ways credit scores reward the rich and punish the poor. As an example of the latter, she shares the galling statistic that “in Florida, adults with clean driving records and poor credit scores paid an average of $1552 more than the same drivers with excellent credit and a drunk driving conviction.” (Emphasis hers.)

Many WMDs create feedback loops that perpetuate injustice. Recidivism models and predictive policing algorithms—programs that send officers to patrol certain locations based on crime data—are rife with the potential for harmful feedback loops. For example, a recidivism model may ask about the person’s first encounter with law enforcement. Due to racist policing practices such as stop and frisk, black people are likely to have that first encounter earlier than white people. If the model takes this measure into account, it will probably deem a black person more likely But they are harmful even beyond their potential to be racist. O’Neil writes,

A person who scores as ‘high risk’ is likely to be unemployed and to
come from a neighborhood where many of his friends and family have had run-ins with the law. Thanks in part to the resulting high score on the evaluation, he gets a longer sentence, locking him away for more years in a prison where he’s surrounded by fellow criminals—which raises the likelihood that he’ll return to prison. He is finally released into the same poor neighborhood, this time with a criminal record, which makes itthat much harder to find a job. If he commits another crime, the recidivism model can claim another success. But in fact the model itselfcontributes to a toxic cycle and helps to sustain it.

O’Neil’s book is important in part because, as she points out, an insidious aspect of WMDs is the fact that they are invisible to those of us with more power and privilege in this society. As a white person living in a relatively affluent neighborhood, I am not targeted with ads for predatory payday lenders while I browse the web or harassed by police officers who are patrolling “sketchy” neighborhoods because an algorithm sends them there. People like me need to know that these things are happening to others and learn more about how to fight them....

In the last chapter, she shares some ideas of how we can disarm WMDs and use big data for good. She proposes a Hippocratic Oath for data scientists and writes about how to regulate math models.” [At present] we are not doing what we can—but there is hope as well. The technology exists! If we develop the will, we can use big data to advance equality and justice. [O'Neil has started to do just that. She is designing algorithms to "audit" potentially harmful algorithms.]
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Quotes from the author:

-"There are ethical choices in every single algorithm we build...."

-"I saw all kinds of parallels between finance and Big Data. Both industries gobble up the same pool of talent, much of it from elite universities like MIT, Princeton and Stanford. These new hires are ravenous for success and have been focused on external metrics– like SAT scores and college admissions – their entire lives. Whether in finance or tech, the message they’ve received is that they will be rich, they they will run the world…"

-"In both of these industries, the real world, with all its messiness, sits apart. The inclination is to replace people with data trails turning them into more effective shoppers, voters, or workers to optimize some objective… More and more I worried about the separation between technical models and real people, and about the moral repercussions of that separation. If fact, I saw the same pattern emerging that I’d witnessed in finance: a false sense of security was leading to widespread use of imperfect models, self-serving definitions of success, and growing feedback loops. Those who objected were regarded as nostalgic Luddites."

-"I wondered what the analogue to the credit crisis might be in Big Data. Instead of a bust, I saw a growing dystopia, with inequality rising. The algorithms would make sure that those deemed losers would remain that way. A lucky minority would gain ever more control over the data economy, taking in outrageous fortunes and convincing themselves that they deserved it...."
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O'Neil gave a very thought-provoking 12 minute TED talk on the issues raised in her book:

Here's a link to a google API that measures the "Toxicity" levels of typed words and sentences, for those who want to see how their own word choices are scored. https://www.perspectiveapi....

Questions to consider:

Do you think that we are moving towards a secretive Technocracy in which those who control algorithms that make fateful decisions are less and less accountable and transparent? Does the author go too far in suggesting that if algorithms for important decisions in society are not challenged we may well end up with a Plutocracy perpetuated by a techno-social elite?

Suppose everybody who designed or implemented these mathematical models was a) honest and b) well-intentioned. Would that prevent the ramping up of inequalities the author discusses? Is the problem one of the ethical integrity of those who control the machines, or is it deeper (e.g. quantifying merits and qualifications mechanically is bound to produce odd results)?

Random Thoughts

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism when hate of people other than your own comes first.” Charles de Gaulle

“We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.” Chris Mooney, science writer

 “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” Carl Sagan

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.” Abe Lincoln

“The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth.” John Gray, English philosopher (b. 1948)

“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a bigger circle to include them.” Pauli Murray, transgender activist

US security agencies found that Russia and China listen to Trump as he talks on his unsecured iphone. Trump vilified Clinton in the 2016 campaign for her email server being unsecured and her sloppiness about security.

B&B orig: 11/11/18

Perceiving Reality by Controlled Hallucination

A major research focus tries to understand how people perceive reality. Originally, perception was generally believed to be a process of directly perceiving the world as it is based on signals the senses send to the brain. In that hypothesis, the brain signals or perceives what the reality is by limited processing or finessing of sense inputs. Thus, when a person looked at an apple, the brain was believed to do limited processing of the visual input into a perception that it is an apple, which is food. That is considered a bottom-up process because the brain has a relatively limited effect on direct perceptions of reality and what the senses are sensing directly reflects reality. In this model, external sensory inputs from sense organs are the main drivers of perception and the brain plays a smaller role in perception.

A more recent hypothesis proposes an opposite way of processing sense inputs. In this model, the “prediction machine model”, the brain exerts a greater influence on what is perceived relative to sense inputs from the eyes, ears, skin, etc. Here, the brain processes sense inputs by making predictions about what is being sensed based on prior experience. When for visual input from looking at an apple, the brain considers hypotheses for what the apple is or could be. The visual input acts mainly as a way to transmit prediction errors to the brain. Such input to the brain acts to rectify incorrect brain hypotheses about what is being sensed. This is considered to be a top-down mechanism of perceiving reality because the brain is the primary reality-perceiving organ, not the senses.

Thus, in essence, the newer model is a process of controlled hallucination (brain hypotheses), not direct perception of reality by sense organs. This model holds that the reality we perceive is  not a direct reflection of the objective external world. Instead, we perceive our brain’s predictions of what is causing our senses to respond as they do. Because no two brains are alike,[1] no two perceived realities will probably be exactly alike. Over time with repeated experience, the brain gets better and better at being correct about what is perceived for many things, but not necessarily all things.

Relevance to politics

The implications of the more recent model for politics could be important. In politics, a person’s brain isn’t just perceiving an apple or smelling a rose. It is trying to discern reality from extremely complex inputs. Those inputs usually implicate one or more powerful unconscious influencers of reality, including a person’s morals, ideology, religion, identity, gender, race, tribe or party affiliation and their social situation. Perceptions of an apple involve a relatively high degree of predictive accuracy by the brain. Clinically healthy people do not mistake an apple for a hamster or an orange.

By contrast, a political speech, especially one intended to mislead and trigger automatic, irrational emotional responses, will lead to a broad spectrum of perceptions that range from perceptions of mostly or completely fact, truth or reason to mostly or completely lies, deceit, emotional manipulation or irrational reasoning. In politics, two minds will rarely or never perceive the same reality from the same complex input. Even a simple political input such as a Christian cross behind a speaker evokes responses that range from positive to negative.

The process of the brain getting better at guessing about perceptions of reality is important. For example, social media echo chambers tend to reinforce perceptions of facts, truths and sound reasoning, even if they happen to false, wrong or flawed. Over time, false, wrong or flawed perceptions are reinforced and become harder to correct. That has been confirmed by cognitive and social science research. That research is consistent with prediction machine model of the brain’s role in perceiving reality, and distorting it into something it isn't when the conditions for reality distortion or denial are present.

In politics, those conditions seem to be present all the time. Their effects arguably include great social damage due to false perceptions of reality.[2]

Source: Scientific American, September 2019

Footnotes:
1. As discussed here before, people vary in their range of experiences that constitute real hallucination. The brain structure associated with reality monitoring ranges from normal, to smaller to absent and that correlates with (not necessarily causes) different frequencies of perceived hallucinations. The machine prediction model of perception sees hallucinations as a form of uncontrolled perception, not as something the brain simply makes up from nothing. In hallucinations, sensory inputs, e.g., something a person sees or smells, are considered to be failing to correct the brain's hypothesis of reality when the brain makes a mistake and either perceives something that either isn't there or perceives a distorted version of something that is there.

2. With any luck, working out how the brain perceives reality just might lead to better ways of communicating that could minimize distortions of facts, truths and reason or logic. If that turns out to be possible, it might present a pathway forward that relies less on conflict and violence than would otherwise be the case. Although the human species has been becoming less violent and brutal over the centuries, that aspect of our nature could still lead to major disaster.

A major miss-step in our history, that had helped take us to the brink?

 this is a re-post form another now closed board.

While contemplating our current problems as a country, I sometimes reflect on the Might Have Beens, where we as a nation took the wrong turns which brought us here.

One of the regrets I have for our nation is that McCain did not win the Republican primaries in 2000.
McCain won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide, and nearly upended the coronation of Bush II. Bush's adoption of a negative smear campaign was the only thing that saved him in South Carolina.
https://www.azcentral.com/s...
https://www.thenation.com/a...
I consider this a tragedy for the country. Bush, while a well-meaning man, was a real lightweight both mentally and in his character, and was dominated by his political advisor Karl Rove, and VP Cheney for the first 6 years of his presidency. McCain had character in spades, and rejected the divisiveness that Rove and Cheney urged on Bush II. Overall, I thought McCain would have been a far better president. But there were specific disasters, that are much less of a judgement call than this, which Bush's win over McCain lead to.

One was 9-11. I doubt that a more security focussed Prez could have prevented 9-11, but there is a chance.

Of more certainty, the Bush presidency produced four disasters for this country, which McCain would have avoided:

* Iraq War
* torture and abandonment of due process
* Extreme disconnect between Military/Security agencies, and the populace
* Massive budget deficits

As a military strategist, I am fairly confident that McCain would not have undertaken a 2nd discretionary war (Iraq), when the first and necessary war (Al Qaida) had not yet been won.
McCain led the effort to overturn the torture program of the Bush admin, so he would not have
supported the torture, renditions, incommunicado detentions, etc that Bush adopted from the world's dictatorships.

McCain would not have called upon Americans to go out shopping, when their service members
were at war. Our service people were always stunned when they rotated home, and it was like there was no war. This should have started with 9-11. Rather than a paternalistic "I will do everything possible to never let this happen again" (IE, torture, violate civil rights, etc), McCain would have honored the dead as HEROES, not VICTIMS! A nation at war, fighting for the Enlightenment values of Human Rights, Religious Tolerance, and Democracy would have been far more resistant to the anti-military/security conspiracy theories of the Truthers, and of the anti-muslim religious bigotry.

As the leading deficit hawk in congress, McCain would not have already emptied our bank account before the Great Recession hit.

Bush gets the blame for the Great Recession, unjustifiably. This was actually a Bush strength, and the best thing he did in his presidency. He created the bank rescue fund, and prevented a second Great Depression. McCain may have mismanaged this recession, and turned it into a depression -- but I don't have reason to think that he would have been less competent than Bush, so this is not a reasonable expectation from a McCain win.

So, the four greatest disasters of the Bush presidency would have been avoided, with no obvious downsides, if the right man had carried the day.

Instead, the pursuit of negative politics, and smearing one's opponents, was pretty much enshrined as the way to win elections!

So -- was this one of the major national missteps on the way to our current climate of partisan hostility and non-communication? Or am I totally misjudging what happened in 2000 and its consequences?

Is Moral Authority Inherent in Fact, Truth and Logic?

“But it cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” U.S. Supreme Court, Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 545 (1945)

Constitutionally protected free speech includes facts, truths, and sound reasoning, (collectively, honest free speech), and lies, including lies of omission or truth-hiding, flawed reasoning and unwarranted emotional manipulation (collectively, dark free speech). Unless a legal line is allegedly crossed, e.g., defamation, incitement to violence or false advertising, the courts usually won't even consider lies or flawed reasoning because that isn't what the law is for. Unless someone crosses a legal line or is testifying under oath and lies to the court (perjury), the courts do not see any difference between truth and lies or sound reasoning and flawed reasoning. Outside the courtroom, the scope of free speech in public is vast. Politicians, ideologues, pundits and marketers are all free to do an essentially unlimited amount of lying and flawed reasoning to the public with no legal liability.

When considering the scope of free speech in public, moral authority seems to be equal to all forms of free speech from the legal point of view. What about from a social point point of view?

When asked about politics, most people would say that their perceptions of reality and reasoning is firmly grounded in facts and logic. In general, most would claim to dislike and not employ things like lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity (truth-hiding), and maybe also unwarranted emotional manipulation such as fomenting irrational fear, hate, distrust or bigotry. It is reasonable to believe that over about 85% of adults would claim they prefer facts, truths and sound reasoning over lies, deceit, truth-hiding, flawed reasoning and probably also emotional manipulation.

It is also reasonable to believe that some people believe that at least for politics, the means justify the ends, and thus they are willing to admit that they would lie, deceive, hide truth, apply flawed reasoning and emotionally manipulate to get what they want.

Assuming there is a social preference for honest free speech in politics, does that reflect a belief that there is usually more moral authority or value in honest free speech compared to dark free speech? If it isn't a matter of morality or ethics, then what is basis for the preference?

And, what about people who would not hesitate to use dark free speech in politics to get what they want? They can morally justify lies, deceit and emotional manipulation as a way to achieve good social outcomes, which justifies their behavior. They can even morally justify it as something that benefits themselves, but that benefit then flows to the rest of society. They can also justify dark free speech as something that God would approve of.

Is there more moral authority or value inherent in relying on fact, truth and logic than in relying on lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity and unwarranted emotional manipulation? Or, is it the case that morals and moral behavior are so personal and so subjective that there is no point in even trying to discern any kind of socially meaningful difference between honest free speech and dark free speech?

Political Correctness: More Moral Than Politically Incorrect

In a 20-minute video, Reverend Rob Schenck discusses the dangers of harsh, politically incorrect rhetoric by political and religious leaders speaking in public. At present, many conservatives and populists believe that political correctness has been a detriment to America and its society. In essence, Schenck is arguing the opposite. He backs his argument up with real world examples of what he is talking about. Schenck, an Evangelical Minister, wrote My Words Led to Violence. Now Trump's are too for Time magazine (August 6, 2019).



Schenck's harsh anti-abortion rhetoric helped dehumanize pro-abortion people, calling doctors who perform abortions murderers, and other names. That was his attempt to dehumanize the people he bitterly opposed and morally condemned. 1:35 He considered pro-abortion people to be morally defective and not worthy of the same respect as an anti-abortion person. 11:10

In an article for Time magazine Schenck wrote: "As a national anti-abortion leader for more than 30 years, I routinely used inflammatory language from the podium. At rallies for the activist anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue, I depicted doctors who performed abortions as murderers, callous profiteers in misery, monsters and even pigs."

After one doctor that Schenck rhetorically attacked in public was murdered, Schenck reflected on what role he had in fomenting the killing. He finally came to believe that humanity was God's greatest gift and all people are human and all deserve the same dignity and respect.12:50 Now, his message is one of being careful about not using harsh political rhetoric in public. He has come to believe that some people in an audience look for permission in the words of political speakers on a powerful speaking platform. 15:10 Schenck points out that the president has the most powerful stage in the world and he must understand that his words can foment violence. Some people will take from harsh political rhetoric permission to "act on their most hideous impulses," regardless of whether the speaker intended such permission or not. 16:05 Once a person is dehumanized, someone inevitably will go out and hunt them down and unleash their murderous impulses.

Schenck argues that the president can and must stop the harsh rhetoric because sooner or later, someone innocent will be murdered by a listener who heard permission to kill in the president's words, again, regardless of whether permission was intended or not.

Some of what Schenck refers to has already happened. Trump's harsh rhetoric has stirred some people to try to murder people in groups that the president has vilified and dehumanized. Only intervention by police prevented the murders that Trump has authorized by his immoral, politically incorrect rhetoric. For example, a California man was arrested and charged with making threatening calls to Boston Globe journalists after Trump's attacks on the press: "A California man was charged Thursday with threatening to shoot and kill Boston Globe journalists, calling them “the enemy of the people,” in response to the newspaper’s nationwide editorial campaign denouncing President Trump’s political attacks against the press."

As far as Evangelical support for the president, Schenck sees Evangelicals supporting Trump as having "made a deal with the devil", asserting that "we've sold our principles for political gain."  17:15 He sees the situation as trading respect for human life for degrading of human life. 17:35 In his opinion, Evangelical support for Trump amounts to "a bid for political power." 18:15

Book Review: The Knowledge Illusion

Now if arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly . . . . have won very great rewards . . . . But as things are . . . . they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness . . . . What argument would remold such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by argument the traits that have long since been incorporated by character. Aristotle on the distinction between unconscious intuitive-emotional vs conscious deliberative thinking

Summary: The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (Riverhead Books, New York, 2017), like the 1991 book, The User Illusion, focuses on how the human mind operates in a bubble of self-deceit about how much it knows and understands. The User Illusion, emphasizes human data processing power, information theory, the second law of thermodynamics and the physiology of cognition as it was understood at the time. The Knowledge Illusion uses current cognitive and social biology research to ask basically the same questions about the human condition. Both come to the essentially the same conclusion about the vast gulf between how little humans can and do know compared to how much they think they know.

The Knowledge Illusion builds on the existing concept of innate human limitations. The book describes profound insights about what human cognitive limitations mean for how we do politics and most everything else, and by clear implication, the well-being of the human species.

Review: The Knowledge Illusion was written by two cognitive scientists, Steve Sloman (cognitive, linguistic and psychological science professor, Brown University, Editor-In-Chief of the journal Cognition) and Philip Fernbach (professor of marketing, University of Colorado, Leeds School of Business). Fernbach's academic affiliation points out a segment of American society, marketing, that has long understood human cognitive and social and used that knowledge to sell the public. Along with politicians, political groups and special interests backed by professional public relations efforts, marketers are experts in human cognitive biology and how to appeal to the unconscious human mind to get what they want.

The Knowledge Illusion is very easy to read and well organized. It is written for a general audience. It uses a only a few technical terms, which makes it easy to focus on the ideas without much effort to digest terminology. The few core technical terms that are used are important and necessary to describe the book's core concepts. This book is well worth reading for anyone wanting easy access to some current insights about (i) how the human mind perceives, thinks about and deals with the world and politics, and (ii) how to see and do things differently.

The following illustrates where the current science stands.

1: A test for ignorance - the illusion of understanding: It wasn't until 1998 that a simple, reliable method to measure self-deceit was devised. This test has turned out to be very reliable: “We have been studying psychological phenomena for a long time and it is rare to come across one as robust as the illusion of understanding.” The basic test consists of the following three questions. 1. On a scale of 1 to 7 (1 = no understanding, 7 = complete understanding), how well do you understand X, where X is anything from how zippers or flush toilets work, or how well do you understand a political issue?
2. In as much detail as you can give, how does X work or what is X, e.g., how does a zipper work or what is the thinking behind climate change belief?
3. On the 1 to 7 scale, how well do you understand X?
What happens is that when most, not all, people find they know little or nothing about the topic at hand, their score drops. Their illusion of understanding (called the “illusion of explanatory depth”) has been broken. When these questions center on issues that implicate politics such as climate change or genetically modified foods, people with extreme beliefs tend to become less certain and less extreme.

Authors Sloman and Fernbach point out that this method of punching holes in personal belief works by using question 2 to force people to think outside their personal belief systems. The simple belief- or ideology-neutral question ‘how does it work?’ isn't psychologically threatening until people people begin to realize how little they actually know. That cognitive trick forces recognition of reality vs belief disconnects. By the time people understand their own ignorance, it is too late to raise personal belief defenses.

For political issues, this veil of ignorance-piercing cannot be done by providing explanations of climate change or genetically modified foods and then pointing to policies that make sense based on reality. That direct attack method simply doesn't work. Most people have to be ‘tricked’ into seeing their own ignorance, making external facts and logic unpersuasive.

2: Two minds and two operating systems: Unconscious-emotional and conscious deliberative: Sloman and Fernbach describe data showing that people who tend to think slowly and consciously do not show a statistically significant drop in their scores in the ignorance test described above. People who are fast, intuitive, unconscious thinkers, about 80% of adults, generally show a significant score drop in the 3-question ignorance test.

Interestingly, the following three question test is sufficient to distinguish unconscious, intuitive thinkers from conscious, reasoning thinkers (answers at footnote 1 below).
1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
2. There is a patch of lily pads in a lake. The patch doubles in size every day. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
3. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long does it take 100 machine to make 100 widgets?
People who get all three questions right are slow, conscious thinkers, while people who get one or more wrong are fast intuitive thinkers, e.g., various differences between the groups are measurable. The three questions are designed to make the incorrect answer jump right out, which is what most people respond with. By contrast, not responding with the wrong answer requires a mindset that, in essence, checks its work before answering. The slow thinkers do not change their scores in the ignorance test because they are more deliberative about what they think they know. Deliberative thinkers are better grounded in reality than intuitive thinkers.

3: We don't like seeing our personal illusions shattered: Shattering political illusions by coaxing people to think outside their belief systems elicits a backlash in response to (i) seeing reality for what it is, and (ii) how different reality is from what personal belief was. The implication for political leadership is obvious. Sloman and Fernbach sum it up like this:

“Unfortunately, the procedure does have a cost. Exposing people's illusions can upset them. . . . We had hoped that shattering the illusion of understanding would make people more curious and more open to new information . . . . This is not what we have found. If anything, people are less inclined to seek new information after finding out that they were wrong. . . . . people don't like having their illusion shattered. In the words of Voltaire: ‘Illusion is the first of all pleasures.’ . . . . People like to feel successful, not incompetent. . . . . A good leader must be able to help people realize their ignorance without making them feel stupid. This is not easy.”

Echoing Aristotle, Sloman and Fernbach observe that “scientific attitudes are not based on rational evaluation of evidence, and therefore providing information does not change them. Attitudes are determined instead by a host of contextual and cultural factors that make then largely immune to change. . . . . beliefs are deeply intertwined with other beliefs, shared cultural values, and our identities. . . . . The power that culture has over cognition just swamps [any] attempts at education.”

Importantly, the authors constantly point out that the world is far too complex for people to have broad, deep knowledge. They argue that, in view of amazingly severe human cognitive limitations, we have no choice but use other people and the world itself for data and analysis. The ramifications of that shoot through all of politics. That's where illusions of knowledge come from.

The Knowledge Illusion is highly recommended. There is much more to it, and this short review cannot do the book justice. In particular, this book will help (i) people with the moral courage to begin a serious, unsettling journey in self-reflection, and (ii) people interested in trying to understand why politics is what it is.

This stuff isn't for the faint of heart or for hard core political ideologues. For people open to it, this kind of knowledge can challenge and upset a person's worldview and self-image. That's not the ideologue's mindset.

Footnote:
1. (1) The ball costs 5 cents, (2) 47 days, (3) 5 minutes (each machine takes 5 minutes to make one item).

B&B orig: 9/5/17

The War on Truth: Gun Lobby Trumps Science and Politics on Gun Violence

The NRA record on truth speaks for itself

The president met with the leader of the radical gun rights organization (NRA) and accepted their propaganda opposing universal background checks for gun purchases. The NRA's groundless conspiracy theory is that background checks for guns will lead to confiscation of all guns. No evidence supports that false claim. Recent polling indicates that about 85-90% of Americans favor universal background checks.

So, once again, lobbyists with money talks and public opinion walks. That is the norm in American politics, where “even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.” Demands backed by campaign contributions and bribes from economic elites and organized interests dictate policy by compliant politicians, not public opinion. Here the organized interest is the NRA, the economic elites are gun manufacturers and the compliant politician is the president.

The attack on truth: Even worse than accepting an American president accepting a crackpot conspiracy theory, is the president's immediate attack on truth. Presumably, that idea came from the NRA. The basis for trying to shut down information flow to the public is simple and popular: An ignorant public is easier to deceive than an informed public. Politicians know this. So does most everyone else with an agenda, including political parties, marketers, religious groups and gun manufacturers.

A Washington Post article, After Trump blames mental illness for mass shootings, health agencies ordered to hold all posts on issue, indicates that a “Health and Human Services [HHS] directive on Aug. 5 warned communication staffers not to post anything on social media related to mental health, violence and mass shootings without prior approval. ..... Many researchers and mental health experts said Trump’s comments contradicted well-established research. ..... While mental illness is sometimes a factor in such shootings, it is rarely a predictor, according to a growing body of research. Most studies of mass shooters have found that no more than a quarter of them have diagnosed mental illness. Researchers have noted that more commonly shared attributes include a strong sense of resentment, desire for notoriety, obsession with other shooters, a history of domestic violence, narcissism and access to firearms.”

The HHS denied that there was any attempt to squelch information flow. Instead, the agency said it was holding off on commenting to allow the president to speak first before government experts could speak freely. That makes no sense. Cognitive science is clear that when false information followed by corrections, the false information is often more persuasive than the later correction.[1] That is evidence of the president’s and the NRA’s intent to deceive the public by resort to dark free speech[2], which is deeply immoral.

This not the first time that the NRA and republican politicians have attacked research that could lead to inconvenient truth. For example, this 1993 NEJM paper, Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home, led congressional GOP politicians to pass a ban on federal funding for research on the causes of gun violence a couple of years later. The NRA lobbied for and got that funding ban, which is still in place today. The data described in that 1996 research paper led the researchers to conclude that mere gun ownership is a risk factor in domestic shooting deaths. As discussed here before, that was something gun manufacturers did not want the public to know anything about. That kind of information had to be shut down and suppressed as much as possible.

Given the circumstances, it seems reasonable to refer to the next mass shooting as something along the lines of “Trump-NRA event #1”, “Trump-NRA event #2”, etc., to make clear that both the president and the NRA favor keeping as many guns in circulation as possible, including keeping guns in the hands of killers who are not mentally ill. That reasoning is perfectly logical because universal background checks could be used to detect both mentally ill people and the majority of mass shooters who are not mentally ill.

Footnotes:
1. “Generally speaking, misconceptions regarding climate change, evolution, and healthcare reform could be harder to correct, as people’s religious beliefs and political identities are deeply implicated ..... Further, the data showed that ‘beliefs in constructed misinformation (fictional events or studies) were easier to debunk, whereas beliefs in real-world misinformation tended to be more resilient to change.’” The same applies to other kinds of information that implicate personal beliefs and identity, including false beliefs about gun safety and ownership risk.

2. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or otherwise protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide corruption (~ lies and deceit of omission), and inconvenient truths and facts, and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)

Social Science: Women's Anger & Asymmetric Social Responses

An NPR program, The Takeaway, broadcast a series of stories on the different social responses to expressions of anger from men and women. Links are given below. The asymmetry is not trivial.

The Tuesday broadcast: One set of experiments simulated a jury online with a single juror who is holding out and trying to convince the remaining jurors to change their minds. The holdout juror, not a real person, was given a male or female name and the fake juror expressed their opinions in either angry or neutral language. The impact on groups of jurors was then assessed. When the holdout juror's argument was expressed in neutral language, the test jurors changed their minds about 7% of the time. But when anger was expressed by men, the test jurors changed their minds about 18% of the time, while the angry woman juror changed no minds at all. Clearly, an angry male was more persuasive than a neutral male or female, while an angry female was completely unpersuasive.

In another experiment, people were shown videos of lawyers delivering closing arguments the experimenters wrote up. The arguments were delivered in a neutral or angry way by male and female attorneys and people listening to the arguments were asked to assess the attorneys. People in the experiment rated the angry male attorney arguments more highly than the calm arguments. By contrast, angry female attorneys were rated lower than neutral female attorneys.

The experimenters conclude that “things are very complex for women in the workplace,” especially in professions where women need to persuade people. The experience is not uncommon among women in the workforce. Emotion is a powerful tool in persuasion and if women are deprived of it, they are at a disadvantage. In situations where expressing emotion is appropriate, being neutral and calm can be seen as weakness. The playing field is not even for men and women, at least when it comes to expressions and use of anger in the workplace.

The researcher commented that in general, when a woman expresses anger in public, that is perceived to reflect a problem with the woman. By contrast, social science research indicates that when men express anger, people generally assume there is a legitimate reason having nothing to do with the man.

This is a social gender norm that arguably leads to economic inefficiency by negating a useful workplace tool. Women’s talents are being wasted by this social norm. The researchers argue that society needs to adapt to appropriate shows of emotion by women in society.

What that does not consider is other ways to see this situation. Maybe society should be less accepting of shows of emotion by men. Or, maybe nothing can be done because asymmetric social responses to anger are deeply ingrained in human cognitive and social biology.

Based on the information discussed in the Tuesday broadcast, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that. And, there is some evidence that the # MeToo movement, with public expressions of anger by many women, is beginning to normalize women’s expressions of anger about sexual harassment and assault. That is some evidence that maybe the norm can be softened completely or to some lesser extent, but it will likely take time and educating the public.

Monday: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/releasing-her-rage
Tuesday: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/women-are-punished-expressing-anger-men-are-rewarded
Wednesday: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/workplace-strategies-women-and-their-rage
Thursday: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/mother-mother-pop-cultures-response-womens-anger

B&B orig: 7/29/18

The December 2017 Tax Cut Law: Rationale, Effects and Moral Landscape

The GOP tax cut bill was sold to Americans as tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases for wealthy people like the president that would pay for themselves. It has turned out that the benefits flow mostly (~80%) to wealthy people like the president and corporations. It has mixed effects on middle class taxpayers, with decreases for most but increases for some. The president repeatedly claimed his tax would increase, but in fact they significantly decreased. Fact checker Snopes rates as true the claim that the Republican-sponsored Tax Cuts and Jobs Act includes a deduction benefitting golf course owners.

CNBC reported that “corporate taxes collected for the October-December [2018] period have fallen 17 percent from a year earlier, while taxes collected from individuals have fallen about 4 percent.” Corporations used a significant slice of their tax benefits to buy back stock to reward stock owners, including executives. Benefits to the economy from corporate spending on equipment, R&D and employees appear to be fading. That data contradicts congressional Republican claims in 2017 that the tax cuts would be revenue-neutral, with the federal deficit projected to add about $1-2 trillion in 2018-2025.

On top of the 2017 tax cut law, the president wanted to go one step further to help redistribute additional wealth to the wealthy. The New York Times wrote in 2018: “The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives.

Currently, capital gains taxes are determined by subtracting the original price of an asset from the price at which it was sold and taxing the difference, usually at 20 percent. If a high earner spent $100,000 on stock in 1980, then sold it for $1 million today, she would owe taxes on $900,000. But if her original purchase price was adjusted for inflation, it would be about $300,000, reducing her taxable “gain” to $700,000. That would save the investor $40,000.

Capital gains taxes are overwhelmingly paid by high earners, and they were untouched in the $1.5 trillion tax law that Mr. Trump signed last year. Independent analyses suggest that more than 97 percent of the benefits of indexing capital gains for inflation would go to the top 10 percent of income earners in America. Nearly two-thirds of the benefits would go to the super wealthy — the top 0.1 percent of American income earners.”

In essence, this tax cut would continue a long US trend of redistributing wealth to the wealthiest individuals and households. This redistribution policy using tax law has been a treasured conservative goal for decades. For context, this represents a snapshot of what Americans think wealth distribution should be compared to what it is based on a 2010 survey.

Some candid comments from politicians and bureaucrats:
1. “This is going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me. This is not good for me. . . . I think my accountants are going crazy right now. . . . . This is not good for me. Me, it’s not so — I have some very wealthy friends. Not so happy with me, but that’s OK. You know, I keep hearing Schumer: ‘This is for the wealthy.’ Well, if it is, my friends don’t know about it. . . . . It’s all right. Hey look, I’m president. I don’t care. I don’t care anymore.” -- President Trump, remarks on tax plan, St. Charles, Mo., Nov. 29, 2017

2. The tax cuts will lead to a spike in Americans’ insurance premiums. Repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual insurance mandate is a major driver behind coming premium hikes. -- Former Trump HHS Secretary Tom Price

3. “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'” -- Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY)

4. “The financial contributions will stop” if the GOP failed to pass its tax cuts. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

5. “Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed. “Get it done and we’ll open it back up.”-- wealthy Texas GOP political donor Doug Deason referring to the “piggy bank” being closed for donors

6. “Fundamentally the bill has been mislabeled. From a truth in advertising standpoint, it would have been a lot simpler if we just acknowledged reality on this bill, which is it’s fundamentally a corporate tax reduction and restructuring bill, period.” -- Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC)

7. The tax bill won't pay for itself as claimed. Instead, the tax cuts will boost national debt by nearly $2 trillion, despite long-standing republican rhetoric that tax cuts pay for themselves by generating higher economic growth. Mulvaney acknowledged to Congress this year that the administration’s lowered its revenue projections by $1.8 trillion over the next ten years due solely to the effects of the tax cut. -- Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney

8. The tax bill is an attack on blue states that didn’t vote for the president. “They go after state and local taxes, which weakens public employee unions. And getting rid of the mandate is to eventually dismantle Obamacare.” -- Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore

9. “The most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.” -- Trump National Economic Director Gary Cohn

10. The tax bill incentivises companies to keep some jobs overseas. “With a territorial system, there will be a real incentive to keep manufacturing overseas.” -- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)

11. “If it ends up costing what has been laid out here, it could well be one of the worst votes I’ve made. I hope that is not the case, I hope there’s other data to assist, whether it’s jobs or growth or whatever.” ..... “None of us have covered ourselves in glory. This congress and this administration will likely go down as one of the most fiscally irresponsible administrations and congresses we’ve had.” -- Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN)

12. Trump speaking a few hours after he signed the bill into law to happy patrons at Mar-a-Lago “You all just got a lot richer.”

13. The average American family would get a $4,000 to $9,000 raise under President Trump's tax plan. -- Trump White House advocating for passage of the tax bill

14. The corporate tax cut isn’t “trickling down” to workers. “There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers. In fact, they bought back shares, gave out a few bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.” -- Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Sources:
1. https://thehill.com/policy/finance/382663-corker-tax-cuts-could-be-one-of-worst-votes-ive-made
2.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/26/koch-network-piggy-banks-closed-republicans-healthcare-tax-reform
3. https://newschannel9.com/news/connect-to-congress/sen-corker-calls-congress-trump-administration-one-of-the-most-fiscally-irresponsible
4. https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/here-are-6-times-republicans-told-truth-about-their-disastrous-tax-cuts
5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/16/the-average-american-family-will-get-4000-from-tax-cuts-trump-team-claims/
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/us/politics/a-main-street-tax-speech-becomes-a-trump-riff-on-the-rich.html

The moral landscape: One can argue that in a liberal democracy, a political moral imperative is to at least consider public opinion. The tax situation mostly ignores public opinion, offering only a fig leaf, but is highly responsive to and rewarding of special interest demands for more money (the data below is from a 2010 survey).

So far, the federal debt has increased contrary to what the public was told, with net wealth redistribution going to to top. In a 2018 article entitled Trump’s Tax Cut Was Supposed to Change Corporate Behavior. Here’s What Happened., the New York Times wrote: “Skeptics said that the money companies saved through tax cuts would merely increase corporate profits, rather than trickling down to workers.”

Trickle down economic theory was originally called the Horse & Sparrow theory. In an earlier, more honest period, Horse & Sparrow was used to describe the idea as feeding a horse enough oats so that some pass through and fall on the road for sparrows to pick thought the packaging before eating. We all know who the horses and sparrows are: Very few horses and very many sparrows.

Despite the foregoing moral morass, republican politicians sometimes still claim the moral high ground:

It is a matter of differing worlds views. For example, congressional republicans do not see the president profiting from his properties as anything to be concerned about in terms of corruption, actual conflict of interest, or violations of any law. By contrast many sources, and at least some conservative sources believed that the charitable foundation that Hillary Clinton and her husband controlled constituted serious perceived or actual conflicts. By comparison with the Clinton Foundation, which made its finances public, the properties that the president owns and still operates represent perceived or actual conflicts that are probably 10- to 100-fold more serious because the money flowing through them and the opacity of their operations are probably 10- to 100-fold greater.

B&B orig: 7/31/18, 5/5/18

Big Business Morality: Considering More Than Just Shareholders?

The Washington Post reports that the organization representing the nation’s most powerful chief executives, the Business Roundtable, may be reconsidering the core corporate principle that shareholders’ interests should come above all else. The overriding moral principle has been maximizing shareholder value (profits) is the top priority. Although WaPo does not couch the issue in terms of morals, corporate introspection about corporate morality and social responsibility seems to be occurring. 

But despite the rhetoric, it is unclear that any significant changes will be forthcoming. The Business Roundtable's statement is vague, short and arguably consistent with the rhetoric of existing corporations. The CEOs who signed the document could continue business mostly or completely as before and simply claim they made significant changes. Three of the five main points are:

• Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.

• Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.

• Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

That is aspirational, but vague to the point of being meaningless.

The origins of corporate morality: The modern corporate view of corporate responsibility to shareholders above all others dates at least back to the 1970s. A Newsweek article from 2017, Harvard Business School and the Propagation of Immoral Profit Strategies, included these comments on corporate morality:

Friedman didn't shy away from taking alarmist stances. If you want to get noticed in economics, you pretty much have to do so—just ask Paul Krugman. "[Speeches] by businessmen on social responsibility," Friedman wrote, "may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron first of Government bureaucrats."

It was a remarkable intellectual sleight of hand. Executives who act in ways most of us would consider moral—with an eye to the environment or some other social goal—are, Friedman said, acting immorally. When Joel Bakan interviewed Friedman for his 2005 book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the economist repeated the point he'd made nearly 40 years before, but with a twist. In Friedman's view, "hypocrisy is virtuous when it serves the bottom line," Bakan observed, "[whereas] moral virtue is immoral when it does not." 

In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." Flouting the midcentury view (and that of the most influential faculty at the Harvard Business School) that the best type of CEO was one with an enlightened social conscience, Friedman claimed that such executives were "highly subversive to the capitalist system."

Against the backdrop of that moral mindset, is the Business Roundtable statement more fig leaf than substance? 

Does Ethnonationalism Constitute a Form of Racism?

The president nominated Steven Menashi to the New York-based Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. In 2010, Menashi (a Jewish American) published a law review article entitled Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy, which can be downloaded here. His article includes this:

“The sociologist Robert Putnam has concluded that greater ethnic diversity weakens social solidarity, fosters social isolation, and inhibits social capital: ‘[I]nhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.’ These findings confirm that the solidarity underlying democratic polities rests in large part on ethnic identification.

Surely, it does not serve the cause of liberal democracy to ignore this reality. .... The trouble, however, is that ‘the democratic principle does not define the framework within which it operates.’ Because it embraces a principle of universalistic human equality, modern democratic thinking cannot justify the particularistic national context in which liberal democracy was nurtured and continues to thrive. The difficulty with the modern attitude is that it assumes human equality exists prior to political society and that liberal democracy springs logically from this preexisting fact. But this gets the chronology wrong. ‘We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights,’ writes Arendt. ‘Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice.’

People face the reality of difference; there are not only the distinctions of ethnicity, sex, religion, and so on, but also each individual’s particular attributes. People become equal through a mutual decision to disregard such differences in the distribution of political rights. In this way, human equality is the product of liberal democracy rather than its source.”

It is important to recognize equality “as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights” because otherwise equality “will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different.” A political order may insist that certain human differences are irrelevant while people themselves regard those differences as meaningful and are consequently reluctant to recognize others as their equals. Where the political order does not account for differences which correspond to deeply felt allegiances, the fact of difference becomes a threat to the political order. “The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity—which are identical with the limitations of human equality. Thus, the Weimar Republic saw no difference between Jews and Gentiles while a majority of Germans found the difference all too meaningful—and their insistence upon difference found horrific violent expression.

Sometimes, then, differences must be openly acknowledged in the political sphere so that equality can be established on the basis of our differences rather than in denial of them. National rights—and national governments—serve this role.”

Rachael Maddow aired a segment characterizing the article as an argument that ethnic purity is an important aspect of liberal democracy.

 

Several sources characterized Maddow's segment as a smear job that mischaracterized what Menashi was saying in his article. Mensahi rebutted Maddow's piece, with one source (The Daily Signal, a radical right source) citing portions of his response: “I take seriously the role of the United States as a nation of immigrants and of Israel as a home for the Jewish people, both of which are important because of suffering that has been caused by ethnic nationalism. ..... Carrie Severino, general counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network [a radical right source], tweeted about Maddow: ‘Had she actually read his law-review article, she would know that Menashi says the exact opposite of what Maddow claims. Intentional distortion?’”

Law and Crime, a factually reliable center-left source, wrote: “Writing for the National Review, attorney Ed Whelan argued that Maddow’s segment was rife with false claims and grossly distorted the article’s scope and purpose: Menashi’s argument about national identity is clearly not about ‘racial purity’ or a ‘unifying race.’ Indeed, the fact that Israelis from Ethiopia are black makes it impossible to take seriously the claim that Menashi is making a case for “racial purity.” Menashi further states that it ‘is not even clear … that Israel’s national identity can even be described as ‘ethnic’” (in a narrow sense of that concept), as Israeli Jews come from ‘Argentina, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen.’”

To provide some context, a 2018 research article (downloadable here), Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust. A Critical Review of the Literature and Suggestions for a Research Agenda, commented: “In this chapter we critically review the empirical evidence for a negative relationship between contextual ethnic diversity (measured locally within countries) and social trust. We cautiously conclude that there are indications of a negative relationship, although with important variations across study characteristics including national setting, context unit analyzed, and conditioning on moderating influences.” The authors go on to propose additional research to advance understanding of possible relationships between ethnic diversity and social trust.

What is going on here?: Is Menashi a racist? Is he arguing for a white ethnic nation and against ethnic or racial diversity? Or, as the Daily Signal writes do Maddow and MSNBC “need to apologize for this anti-Semitic attack” which some call a racial smear?

How Can We Assess Racism?

In a recent discussion on another topic, the matter of how science can measure racism came up. The issue was raised in the context of our president arguably being racist, but what about some or maybe most of his followers? Some social science data indicated that social unease, not racism per se or economic concerns was the main factor in Trump's election. This comment started a discussion on how to think about racism as a complex matter of biology and overt behavior: It is more complex than that. For most affected folks, it's not racism per se. It is fear-unease about demographic and social changes (which includes a race component, but not necessarily racism), America's shifting global military and economic dominance, etc.

A response to that was expressed as follows:

"Demographic and social changes" is code for racism, full stop. I realize you think it's more complex than that, but when has this ever been used in a way that did not straightforwardly equate to saying "whites are afraid of their new status as a non-majority?" Nothing you say here suggests any other meaning. Nothing I have ever seen or heard has ever made a meaningful distinction between whatever complexities are supposed to accompany this and racism.

Assuming for the moment that I'm right in this regard, then what does it mean to say that for "affected folks" are motivated by the gradual dissolution of white political dominance except that whites are motivated by racism?

If whites are motivated by racism, then why should any of the politics of the post civil rights era have been possible? Why should lax immigration policies - legal or otherwise - have been allowed to continue for so long? More to the point: why should this sudden concern about a trend which is literally decades old suddenly manifest in a way which is so plainly coincident with economic crises for working class white males, who've suffered more and recovered less over the long run from the financial crisis than any other demographic group? ( And for that matter, why is it that this fact is so rarely acknowledged? )

That led to this: One paper that influenced my thinking made these comments: “Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012. Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”

Trump and other authoritarians are playing on those sentiments by fomenting all sorts of bigotry including racism.

Which led to this:  The question is whether or not their actions are racist, or in other words whether or not they are holding certain races to different standards. The answer to that question is unambiguously "yes". Chanting "Jews will not replace us" is an example of racism, though in this case primarily a sinister, if veiled, threat.

Assuming that the flawed logic Dr. Mutz applies is representative, the flaw that she and some other social scientists are making is an important category mistake. The mistake is believing and arguing that the kind of data involved here allows one one to dissect and establish a cause and effect relationship between one or more psychological states (conscious or not) and causes of behavior.
In this case, the observations of behavior that one can call 'consistent with racism' can arise from multiple causes including 'social unease' over impending demographic change, economic complaints or pressures, actual racism and maybe other psychological states the data is not designed to detect.

Exactly. Treating racism as the original cause of all this is closed minded, and it literally denies the principle of sufficient reason, a bedrock principle of scientific endeavor. We must ask ourselves what the underlying causes of racism are, and in this regard the Civil War era yields many lessons.

I generally agree here, too. I do disagree with the term "actual racism", however, since the only distinguishable feature of racism is how the racist treats other races, not what they think. Since I disagree with the idea that racism is a phenomenon without its own ulterior reasons, I can agree that the causes for it might be disparate, but I cannot agree with the idea that a given cause makes the resulting behavior any more actualized.

It's important to bear in mind the reasons why we're having this conversation, why we're trying to understand what motivates contemporary white racism. I hope my example of the heart attack and anxiety treatments makes this clear: we cannot expect that a mismatched treatment will successfully cure the patient - quite the opposite, in fact. The purpose of this inquiry is to identify an effective strategy to combat white racism.

In my view, clamping down on speech, whether dark or not, is not helpful in the long run. Suppression of shared ideologies no longer works in our computerized, connected social networks, and I think some sort of eruption will happen sooner or later, and its opponents will be less aware of it, and therefore less prepared, than they should be. HRC's campaign is an object lesson in this regard.

I think material explanations are more useful than psychological ones, not least in part because the former can help explain the latter, but the latter cannot explain the former. This does offer the possibility of a causal relationship being established which can be empirically tested. We can ask, for example, if racist behavior becomes more widespread or severe during periods of economic prosperity. Yes, this too is only a correlation, but unlike correlating psychological causes it suggests a course of action, an experimental strategy for mitigating racism. Similarly, we can test the explanation from social unease, and its relationship to racist behavior and economic status. At a first approximation we can ask ourselves how economic prosperity might affect social unease and/or mobility, etc.

The answers to these questions, the results of these tests will offer a much more effective strategy than merely stating the symptoms will.
                                                                                                                                                  

It seems reasonable to believe that racist behavior can arise from different mental or emotional states, including fear, feelings of unease over economic pressures and demographic changes. Although mental states can be detected in various ways, it isn't clear that (1) there is a single mental cause for observed overt behavior that appears to be racism, or (2) that science can accurately measure mental cause and effect at present.

The discussion included an assertion that "clamping down on speech, whether dark or not, is not helpful in the long run," seems contradicted by current cognitive science belief about politics, this for example about how the mind processes incoming information:

The first step is automatic, uncontrollable unconscious processing, which occurs in less than one second. In this mode of thinking, unconscious feelings precede and shape conscious thinking before we are aware that this has happened. 

The available evidence reveals this first step is heavily biased if the information is contrary to personal beliefs, morals and social identity. In those situations, unconscious processing distorts information to make it more acceptable to the person’s pre-existing beliefs, morals and identity. Information that confirms pre-existing beliefs, morals and identity, even if it is false, tends to be uncritically accepted as true.

Thus, whether we like it, or accept it or not, our brains respond emotionally and judges incoming information before we are aware of it. Racism can arise from that. So can fear and other emotional responses.

With no exceptions that I can recall, all the Trump supporters I have dealt with over the years forcefully claim they are not racist. Does their support for an arguably racist leader make them racist? With no exceptions that I can recall, all of them forcefully deny that Trump is a racist. Should we care what their mental state is and just look at overt behaviors and make judgments on that basis alone? What is fair here? What is possible in practice? How much can science say about this without a solid basis in probative empirical data?