The first has nothing to do with social science, the second is dogma, and the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism. I reject all, in favor of the approach taken here:
The first has nothing to do with social science, the second is dogma, and the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism. I reject all, in favor of the approach taken here:
"the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism"
No. That's BS and you know it. Realism is not racism. Realism is not essentialism. Realism is merely saying "the statistical distributions of any feature between human population groups or the sexes will tend to overlap but the means and standard deviations of those distributions can differ and sometimes to a significant degree."
Your claim about disguised animus is exactly the kind of typical smear the left tries to deploy to avoid the mountain of evidence - to win the argument by dirty tricks instead of, you know, argument. As a common social judgment it makes it completely impossible for anyone to present a contrary case in a fair and rigorous manner without knee-jerk categorization of them of a bigot and the permanent ruination of their public reputation to great personal risk and expense. It is completely incompatible with a healthy intellectual culture of open, quality discourse.
Arnold is disappointingly not living up to his presumption against "asymmetric insight" in liking this comment, since this is a canonical example of ad hominem, not engaging on the merits, claiming that one's opponents have secret evil motives, and that their arguments and evidence don't have to be countered and can all be ignored because they are all just lies that thinly veil those motives.
I asked nicely, and I'll ask nicely again. Please explain the axiom in your own words. And, if you are willing to put in some extra effort, to explain why one must follow such an axiom. Just yesterday in that discussion about philosophy, Arnold joked about ideas that couldn't be easily and accurately summarized. Is that what we're dealing with here?
After accusing me of knowingly spreading BS, engaging in smears and dirty tricks and ad hominem attacks about secret evil motives, etc. and accusing Arnold of endorsing this.
I did not respond in kind. This is not the kind of interaction that appeals to me.
I rejected all three perspectives, not just the one you are defending, and provided links to explain why. I have nothing more to add.
I'm sorry I really don't have time for this, if the references aren't helpful just ignore them. You may also want to look at the subtitle of Glenn's memoir, out in April, if you think his views are left wing. I have a blurb on the book in case that's of any interest.
It seems like you spent more time explaining that you don't have time while typing out references than it would take to explain the axiom. As near as I can tell from digging around for five minutes the anti-essentialism axiom merely states that for any particular thing or individual with any set of features or attributes there are worlds where the individual won't have one of them. That's... not terribly difficult to understand, and not terribly useful in the conversation; it is basically just saying that unless something is a defining trait of a thing, that thing need not always have the trait. It might always have the trait in the world we happen to inhabit now, of course.
I'm fairly certain that Handle is pretty familiar with Loury's work and that he's encountered the ideas before. If you want to have a dialogue it would be best to summarize the axiom here so there was something to discuss.
Right. I'm very familiar with all that - Loury's been trying to sell this nonsense for years - you may have noticed it hasn't gone anywhere, because it's not worthy of getting anywhere.
This is all pretty embarrassing on Rajiv's part in my opinion, and tellingly so. I wasn't asking him to do anything hard, just stop "arguing from famous name" and lay out the idea in plain language.
Here, let me do it for Rajiv. "When you see a racial disparity, in your effort to explain that disparity, only look for non-genetic explanations."
This is the intellectual equivalent of "the axiom of Calvinball" - "Oh, you say I'm losing because down on points? How about I change the normal rules and three-point shots count as zero? Now, I'm winning!"
If you don't believe me, here is Loury in his own words, "Anti-essentialism is a related notion, and I'm saying, "There's inequality between these racial groups." And one way to account for it would just be to say that they are different, that some people came from Africa, some people came from Northern Europe, some people came from Northeast Asia. These populations are essentially different, different in their genetic makeup in ways that bear on social outcomes. And while that could be true, it's a scientific claim, it's a scientific claim, for the sake of my argument, I was assuming that it was not true. And I'm getting criticized for making that assumption by some developmental and psychologists who study the heritability of human intelligence, because they want to question whether or not the claim is true. I'm not addressing the biology of race, I'm saying for the sake of my argument, I'm going to try to explain racial inequality without reference to essential disparity."
What he's saying is, I'm not making the kind of argument that qualifies as a reliable argument about empirical reality, cause it might go into inconvenient or uncomfortable truth territory. I'm just gonna avoid that whole badland minefield and restrict myself solely to the pleasant and popular meadows of pretty lies. He isn't fooling anybody who doesn't already really want to go along with this nonsense. For a so-called "intellectual", this kind of thing is frankly ridiculous.
Loury was getting criticized because he was taking a whole set of strongly-evidenced and compelling explanations completely off the table because ... uh ... reasons. Cause if you disagree with my special-case argument rules, you're a bad person. When people asked him in what other realm of empirical inquiry does anyone ever apply such special axioms or rules, he couldn't come up with anything, because, duh, that's not how things work.
I think, charitably, Loury's stance is perfectly concordant with addressing what (to him) may seem maddening - that blacks appear to be going in retrograde since the Great Society actions, and what can be done about that.
Just writ small, it must be crazymaking to compare black intellectuals of the past - with those that are most celebrated today. Of course, this phenomenon of intellectual prestige becoming a sort of oxymoron is hardly limited to blacks, much as it may be something that people who read wordy substacks may ignore.
No, his stance is not at all concordant with that concern, let alone 'perfectly'. You're not being 'charitable' in choosing among a set of plausible interpretations of his words, you are acting like his defense attorney, making up arguments he never thought of himself and reasons that never motivated his actions.
Look, I don't know why anyone feels it necessary to make up these defenses for elite public intellectuals that they never made themselves, -for- themselves, when one might assume they should be perfectly capable of doing so.
But, for the sake of argument, let's dive into the multiverse and imagine parallel dimension Loury-2, hovering around in a robotic recliner and sucking down a milkshake while traveling through space with WALL-E on humanity evacuation vessel "The Axiom".
Loury-2 *could* say, "Ok, I am *not* actually talking about the big disparities between the groups. Those - like most things in human affairs - are caused by some combination of Nature and Nurture, and Nature definitely plays a big, important role. Those who deny the contribution of Nature to those differences are just wrong. It's not that I'm "not willing to go there" or "not gonna look at that", that would be ridiculous. As a courageous and brave explorer for truth wherever it may lead, I am perfectly willing to look ugly truths square in the face and call them facts regardless of what society may prefer to believe. No, I am only talking about the *part* of those differences which we can say with high confidence is caused almost exclusively by Nurture, per my rigorous argument that I can demonstrate from scientific, empirical data. Now, this is only important and actionable in those few cases when Nurture (or 'environment', or 'culture' or however you want to say it) is definitely much more important than Nature in explaining some big difference, because only then would a disparity reveal itself to be at least theoretically avoidable or amenable, and only then would it make much sense to call for political action, state regulation, intervention, and redistribution or major changes in environment and culture, as something that would have a major impact in narrowing those disparities.
For example, there has recently been a big uptick in reckless driving-related fatalities among young black American males. It is not plausible that today's YBAM are significantly genetically distinct, as a group, on average, from those of just a few years ago, or from similar subpopulations in other countries, and so here is a big change in behaviors and outcomes that also expanded the disparity in outcomes between that group and other subpopulations, that we can say with confidence is NOT due to nature and has mostly to do with some kind of big change in nurture, the environment, culture, law enforcement's give-a-damn-ness or however you want to say it.
We don't have to think about race and genetics when we ask about the causes of this bad change, and we don't have to think about race and genetics when trying to figure out how to make things better again. These are the very narrow set of sub-areas on the broader controversial topic that are the only ones I'm interested in investigating, because, one would hope, the analysis wouldn't prove to be as controversial and triggering as the rest of the stuff.
But, by the honor of my name of Loury-2, I must confess that I was naïve about the ability to avoid getting snared up in the nest of heated racial controversy, but when the analysis pointed to the cause of "less traffic law enforcement" and then pointed toward the solution of "try more traffic law enforcement, like you used to do a few years ago" - the enforcement had disparate impact, and the usual suspects called it all 'racist' anyway. Man, no matter how hard you try to be careful and nice, you just can't win on this stuff anywhere in the multiverse!
I’m only going by having listened to him speak on his podcast a few times. I imagine he thinks it is entirely possible that government policy has had a dysgenic effect across the board.
It seems you are against focusing on the disparities that aren't racism and aren't genetic, be they environmental, cultural, social, or whatever. WHY? To me this seems the sweet spot, a combination of under-considered and likely to have high potential for a large benefit.
Good grief, you got this completely backwards; did you even read the thing I mentioned about the reckless driving deaths? That is a prime example of a sudden increase in bad things happening disproportionately to YBM because of a non-racist change in policy which could and should be reversed to the also-not-racist former policy. Of course we should look for and act upon those things, duh!
But guess what, we can't, because common sense, fair law enforcement has disparate impact and the usual suspects are going to call it racist and by doing so, successfully oppose it anyway.
It's like saying I'm against gardening which I should recognize is a good, easy, and fun way to get some fresh, tasty produce. Hardly! I am an avid gardener! However, we are currently under Mongol invasion, and it doesn't make sense to plant a garden when it is predictably going to get immediately crushed under the hooves of golden hordes cavalry, just like for each of the last 40 attempts. It is suicidally foolish to indulge in any of these futile distractions while the enemy is at your gates and within them. You need to defeat the Mongols first, there is no alternative. Loury, "As Euclid taught, if we start by assuming there are no Mongols, then ..." No! The problem is the systemic embrace of the claim that reality is such that when one sees disparate impact on protected groups, one should presume that unjust discrimination is to blame. That claim is false, and everything that stems from it is wickedly unjust, and there is no end to possible newly wicked innovations that are variations on that theme that will eventually grow like a cancer to infect and control all human affairs without exception or place of refuge. This is exactly analogous to what occurred with the false tenets of socialism in all "actually existing" communist societies, and with this stuff it's now happening to us. Genghis Khan is right there staring us in the face, and Loury is saying maybe we should focus on what we can do that won't make him try to conquer us. Um, hello, he's a Khan, his business is conquering, and business is good. Especially when people are trying really hard not to do anything that might actually stop him.
I think Handle has assumed too much by Kling's "Like" but he is exactly right to complain about "thinly disguised racial essentialism." As I have no idea how to access Loury's intro and preface without getting the book, I had to use Google to get a better idea on essentialism. If it does indeed focus on the innate, that's not the same as a realism that includes culture. Note that a racial essentialist could be a realist but a realist does not have to be an essentialist.
It's possible I assumed too much, and if so I deserve Arnold's harsh correction and clarification should he wish to provide one (it's his place, he has every right to do whatever he wants.) I also admit that who 'likes' which comments is a petty thing to get worked up about. I found it surprisingly out of character; I would have expected a line like that to have spoiled the 'likability' of the comment.
I suspect there is a disconnect in meaning and intention here. On the one hand there is the perfectly reasonable position, "One should not *immediately jump* to genetic causes, *to the exclusion* of environmental causes, every time one is trying to explain some new observation of a major disparity between ethnic groups." That's fine, at least, so long as it is paired with "Likewise, one should not *immediately dismiss* genetic causes and dogmatically insist that all big, bad disparities are mostly environmental."
I think Loury and those like him are trying to smuggle in a *different* position, but under the guise of the reasonable one above. The position that one should *only* look for non-genetic explanations, and perhaps only propose or accept genetic explanations reluctantly and in desperation as a last resort when all other attempts have failed, is very distinct from the one above.
For one thing, as experience of decades and millions of examples have taught us, the non-genetic explanations quickly migrate to unfalsifiable territory where no one ever has to admit they fail. And if they haven't 'failed' anyone who proposes or accepts genetic explanations for anything is doing so not reluctantly, but, because 'prematurely', intentionally, i.e. they are a bad evil bigot moron hater, etc., etc. and you shouldn't listen to them, or even allow them to speak in a place where others could listen to them.
This is "Loury's axiom". It is of course no 'axiom' but just an arbitrary rule of ideological constraint on epistemic investigation which in practice operates as a thumb on the scale ensuring the the only possible conclusions one can draw are politically correct, but alas, not factually correct. Stripped of its purportedly nice intentions, it is just a new version of "'Shut Up!' he explained."
My guess is that someone who is in the favor of the former position is very tempted to support the second position, because, given how the second position is expressed in a confusing and misleading way, it's very easy to mistake it for the same thing. But it's not. The reason I ask people to express these ideas in their own, simple words is because, when you pull the sheepskin off, whoops, turns out it's a wolf.
Arnold, you have a number of people in your comments section who both subscribe to racial essentialism in their view of the world, and seem to object to being called racial essentialists, considering this to be an insult. They misunderstand and mischaracterize Glenn Loury's objection to this view of the world. I have no wish to engage with them any further, but would like to explain to you why I find this position objectionable on both scientific and moral grounds.
I'll do so with a simple example taken form a recent paper with Dan O'Flaherty, link below, extract follows:
"The State of Mississippi adopted a new constitution in 1890 that identified the conditions under which a citizen would be permitted to vote:
\begin{quote}
Every male inhabitant of this State, except idiots, insane persons and Indians not taxed, who is a citizen of the United States, twenty-one years old and upwards, who has resided in this State two years... and who has never been convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy, and who has paid... all taxes which may have been legally required of him... is declared to be a qualified elector.
\end{quote}
The list of crimes here is striking for what it excludes. Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, all violent felonies that today carry the harshest sentences, were not considered disqualifying. The reasons for this were subsequently explained by the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1896 case Ratliff v. Beale as follows:
\begin{quote}
It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution. Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,---a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
\end{quote}
That is, the rationale for stripping rights from those who had committed “furtive” crimes while declining to do so for those convicted of more serious and violent offenses was to selectively disenfranchise African American men, who had won the right to vote by 1869 under the 14th and 15th amendments to the United States constitution. Unable to exclude this group by name, the framers of the Mississippi constitution chose instead to rely on stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. By careful curation of exclusionary criteria, they “swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise.” And this was stated baldly and approvingly by the Mississippi Supreme Court itself."
The racial essentialists of the 19th century considered whites to be more inclined to commit "robust" crimes like robbery and murder, and less inclined to commit "furtive" crimes like fraud and embezzlement. The racial essentialists of today see things differently, they see whites as less inclined to commit the robust crimes. Both are reasoning from correlations, assuming causal linkages where none can be proved to exist. Loury's view, which I share, is that this is scientifically lazy and morally repugnant.
While certainly (inadvertently?) generous to the "racial essentialists of the 19th century" for their supposed belief that the more indefensible, lethal crimes were the sole province of whites, I am not sure how to square the assertion with Mississippi's withholding of gun rights from freedmen, in that same period.
Of course, once guns became widely available to all - after about 1910? 1915? - that quaint notion you describe (if true) was put to rest.
The first has nothing to do with social science, the second is dogma, and the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism. I reject all, in favor of the approach taken here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/abs/why-should-we-care-about-group-inequality/81715DC592EA8ECD5315151E33C78BD9#
Paired with the axiom of anti-essentialism advanced here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Anatomy_of_Racial_Inequality/R0R2AAAAMAAJ?hl=en
Implemented formally (for one example) here:
https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article/12/1/129/2317165
"the third is thinly disguised racial essentialism"
No. That's BS and you know it. Realism is not racism. Realism is not essentialism. Realism is merely saying "the statistical distributions of any feature between human population groups or the sexes will tend to overlap but the means and standard deviations of those distributions can differ and sometimes to a significant degree."
Your claim about disguised animus is exactly the kind of typical smear the left tries to deploy to avoid the mountain of evidence - to win the argument by dirty tricks instead of, you know, argument. As a common social judgment it makes it completely impossible for anyone to present a contrary case in a fair and rigorous manner without knee-jerk categorization of them of a bigot and the permanent ruination of their public reputation to great personal risk and expense. It is completely incompatible with a healthy intellectual culture of open, quality discourse.
Arnold is disappointingly not living up to his presumption against "asymmetric insight" in liking this comment, since this is a canonical example of ad hominem, not engaging on the merits, claiming that one's opponents have secret evil motives, and that their arguments and evidence don't have to be countered and can all be ignored because they are all just lies that thinly veil those motives.
I suggest you read some of the links posted, especially Loury's book. I don't think you understand what the axiom of anti-essentialism means.
Please explain the axiom.
Just read the preface and introduction to the book it won't take long
I asked nicely, and I'll ask nicely again. Please explain the axiom in your own words. And, if you are willing to put in some extra effort, to explain why one must follow such an axiom. Just yesterday in that discussion about philosophy, Arnold joked about ideas that couldn't be easily and accurately summarized. Is that what we're dealing with here?
"asked nicely"
After accusing me of knowingly spreading BS, engaging in smears and dirty tricks and ad hominem attacks about secret evil motives, etc. and accusing Arnold of endorsing this.
I did not respond in kind. This is not the kind of interaction that appeals to me.
I rejected all three perspectives, not just the one you are defending, and provided links to explain why. I have nothing more to add.
For the record, YOU opened by accusing realists of being bigots. That IS bull, and being bull, it IS an ad-hominem smear about secret evil motives.
I'm sorry I really don't have time for this, if the references aren't helpful just ignore them. You may also want to look at the subtitle of Glenn's memoir, out in April, if you think his views are left wing. I have a blurb on the book in case that's of any interest.
Well folks, you can't say I didn't try (edit: to give him ample chance to explain himself).
It seems like you spent more time explaining that you don't have time while typing out references than it would take to explain the axiom. As near as I can tell from digging around for five minutes the anti-essentialism axiom merely states that for any particular thing or individual with any set of features or attributes there are worlds where the individual won't have one of them. That's... not terribly difficult to understand, and not terribly useful in the conversation; it is basically just saying that unless something is a defining trait of a thing, that thing need not always have the trait. It might always have the trait in the world we happen to inhabit now, of course.
I'm fairly certain that Handle is pretty familiar with Loury's work and that he's encountered the ideas before. If you want to have a dialogue it would be best to summarize the axiom here so there was something to discuss.
Right. I'm very familiar with all that - Loury's been trying to sell this nonsense for years - you may have noticed it hasn't gone anywhere, because it's not worthy of getting anywhere.
This is all pretty embarrassing on Rajiv's part in my opinion, and tellingly so. I wasn't asking him to do anything hard, just stop "arguing from famous name" and lay out the idea in plain language.
Here, let me do it for Rajiv. "When you see a racial disparity, in your effort to explain that disparity, only look for non-genetic explanations."
This is the intellectual equivalent of "the axiom of Calvinball" - "Oh, you say I'm losing because down on points? How about I change the normal rules and three-point shots count as zero? Now, I'm winning!"
If you don't believe me, here is Loury in his own words, "Anti-essentialism is a related notion, and I'm saying, "There's inequality between these racial groups." And one way to account for it would just be to say that they are different, that some people came from Africa, some people came from Northern Europe, some people came from Northeast Asia. These populations are essentially different, different in their genetic makeup in ways that bear on social outcomes. And while that could be true, it's a scientific claim, it's a scientific claim, for the sake of my argument, I was assuming that it was not true. And I'm getting criticized for making that assumption by some developmental and psychologists who study the heritability of human intelligence, because they want to question whether or not the claim is true. I'm not addressing the biology of race, I'm saying for the sake of my argument, I'm going to try to explain racial inequality without reference to essential disparity."
What he's saying is, I'm not making the kind of argument that qualifies as a reliable argument about empirical reality, cause it might go into inconvenient or uncomfortable truth territory. I'm just gonna avoid that whole badland minefield and restrict myself solely to the pleasant and popular meadows of pretty lies. He isn't fooling anybody who doesn't already really want to go along with this nonsense. For a so-called "intellectual", this kind of thing is frankly ridiculous.
Loury was getting criticized because he was taking a whole set of strongly-evidenced and compelling explanations completely off the table because ... uh ... reasons. Cause if you disagree with my special-case argument rules, you're a bad person. When people asked him in what other realm of empirical inquiry does anyone ever apply such special axioms or rules, he couldn't come up with anything, because, duh, that's not how things work.
I think, charitably, Loury's stance is perfectly concordant with addressing what (to him) may seem maddening - that blacks appear to be going in retrograde since the Great Society actions, and what can be done about that.
Just writ small, it must be crazymaking to compare black intellectuals of the past - with those that are most celebrated today. Of course, this phenomenon of intellectual prestige becoming a sort of oxymoron is hardly limited to blacks, much as it may be something that people who read wordy substacks may ignore.
No, his stance is not at all concordant with that concern, let alone 'perfectly'. You're not being 'charitable' in choosing among a set of plausible interpretations of his words, you are acting like his defense attorney, making up arguments he never thought of himself and reasons that never motivated his actions.
Look, I don't know why anyone feels it necessary to make up these defenses for elite public intellectuals that they never made themselves, -for- themselves, when one might assume they should be perfectly capable of doing so.
But, for the sake of argument, let's dive into the multiverse and imagine parallel dimension Loury-2, hovering around in a robotic recliner and sucking down a milkshake while traveling through space with WALL-E on humanity evacuation vessel "The Axiom".
Loury-2 *could* say, "Ok, I am *not* actually talking about the big disparities between the groups. Those - like most things in human affairs - are caused by some combination of Nature and Nurture, and Nature definitely plays a big, important role. Those who deny the contribution of Nature to those differences are just wrong. It's not that I'm "not willing to go there" or "not gonna look at that", that would be ridiculous. As a courageous and brave explorer for truth wherever it may lead, I am perfectly willing to look ugly truths square in the face and call them facts regardless of what society may prefer to believe. No, I am only talking about the *part* of those differences which we can say with high confidence is caused almost exclusively by Nurture, per my rigorous argument that I can demonstrate from scientific, empirical data. Now, this is only important and actionable in those few cases when Nurture (or 'environment', or 'culture' or however you want to say it) is definitely much more important than Nature in explaining some big difference, because only then would a disparity reveal itself to be at least theoretically avoidable or amenable, and only then would it make much sense to call for political action, state regulation, intervention, and redistribution or major changes in environment and culture, as something that would have a major impact in narrowing those disparities.
For example, there has recently been a big uptick in reckless driving-related fatalities among young black American males. It is not plausible that today's YBAM are significantly genetically distinct, as a group, on average, from those of just a few years ago, or from similar subpopulations in other countries, and so here is a big change in behaviors and outcomes that also expanded the disparity in outcomes between that group and other subpopulations, that we can say with confidence is NOT due to nature and has mostly to do with some kind of big change in nurture, the environment, culture, law enforcement's give-a-damn-ness or however you want to say it.
We don't have to think about race and genetics when we ask about the causes of this bad change, and we don't have to think about race and genetics when trying to figure out how to make things better again. These are the very narrow set of sub-areas on the broader controversial topic that are the only ones I'm interested in investigating, because, one would hope, the analysis wouldn't prove to be as controversial and triggering as the rest of the stuff.
But, by the honor of my name of Loury-2, I must confess that I was naïve about the ability to avoid getting snared up in the nest of heated racial controversy, but when the analysis pointed to the cause of "less traffic law enforcement" and then pointed toward the solution of "try more traffic law enforcement, like you used to do a few years ago" - the enforcement had disparate impact, and the usual suspects called it all 'racist' anyway. Man, no matter how hard you try to be careful and nice, you just can't win on this stuff anywhere in the multiverse!
I’m only going by having listened to him speak on his podcast a few times. I imagine he thinks it is entirely possible that government policy has had a dysgenic effect across the board.
It seems you are against focusing on the disparities that aren't racism and aren't genetic, be they environmental, cultural, social, or whatever. WHY? To me this seems the sweet spot, a combination of under-considered and likely to have high potential for a large benefit.
Good grief, you got this completely backwards; did you even read the thing I mentioned about the reckless driving deaths? That is a prime example of a sudden increase in bad things happening disproportionately to YBM because of a non-racist change in policy which could and should be reversed to the also-not-racist former policy. Of course we should look for and act upon those things, duh!
But guess what, we can't, because common sense, fair law enforcement has disparate impact and the usual suspects are going to call it racist and by doing so, successfully oppose it anyway.
It's like saying I'm against gardening which I should recognize is a good, easy, and fun way to get some fresh, tasty produce. Hardly! I am an avid gardener! However, we are currently under Mongol invasion, and it doesn't make sense to plant a garden when it is predictably going to get immediately crushed under the hooves of golden hordes cavalry, just like for each of the last 40 attempts. It is suicidally foolish to indulge in any of these futile distractions while the enemy is at your gates and within them. You need to defeat the Mongols first, there is no alternative. Loury, "As Euclid taught, if we start by assuming there are no Mongols, then ..." No! The problem is the systemic embrace of the claim that reality is such that when one sees disparate impact on protected groups, one should presume that unjust discrimination is to blame. That claim is false, and everything that stems from it is wickedly unjust, and there is no end to possible newly wicked innovations that are variations on that theme that will eventually grow like a cancer to infect and control all human affairs without exception or place of refuge. This is exactly analogous to what occurred with the false tenets of socialism in all "actually existing" communist societies, and with this stuff it's now happening to us. Genghis Khan is right there staring us in the face, and Loury is saying maybe we should focus on what we can do that won't make him try to conquer us. Um, hello, he's a Khan, his business is conquering, and business is good. Especially when people are trying really hard not to do anything that might actually stop him.
Also, my assumption is I’ve only ever heard/read/glanced at - about 5% of any one person’s views.
I think Handle has assumed too much by Kling's "Like" but he is exactly right to complain about "thinly disguised racial essentialism." As I have no idea how to access Loury's intro and preface without getting the book, I had to use Google to get a better idea on essentialism. If it does indeed focus on the innate, that's not the same as a realism that includes culture. Note that a racial essentialist could be a realist but a realist does not have to be an essentialist.
It's possible I assumed too much, and if so I deserve Arnold's harsh correction and clarification should he wish to provide one (it's his place, he has every right to do whatever he wants.) I also admit that who 'likes' which comments is a petty thing to get worked up about. I found it surprisingly out of character; I would have expected a line like that to have spoiled the 'likability' of the comment.
I suspect there is a disconnect in meaning and intention here. On the one hand there is the perfectly reasonable position, "One should not *immediately jump* to genetic causes, *to the exclusion* of environmental causes, every time one is trying to explain some new observation of a major disparity between ethnic groups." That's fine, at least, so long as it is paired with "Likewise, one should not *immediately dismiss* genetic causes and dogmatically insist that all big, bad disparities are mostly environmental."
I think Loury and those like him are trying to smuggle in a *different* position, but under the guise of the reasonable one above. The position that one should *only* look for non-genetic explanations, and perhaps only propose or accept genetic explanations reluctantly and in desperation as a last resort when all other attempts have failed, is very distinct from the one above.
For one thing, as experience of decades and millions of examples have taught us, the non-genetic explanations quickly migrate to unfalsifiable territory where no one ever has to admit they fail. And if they haven't 'failed' anyone who proposes or accepts genetic explanations for anything is doing so not reluctantly, but, because 'prematurely', intentionally, i.e. they are a bad evil bigot moron hater, etc., etc. and you shouldn't listen to them, or even allow them to speak in a place where others could listen to them.
This is "Loury's axiom". It is of course no 'axiom' but just an arbitrary rule of ideological constraint on epistemic investigation which in practice operates as a thumb on the scale ensuring the the only possible conclusions one can draw are politically correct, but alas, not factually correct. Stripped of its purportedly nice intentions, it is just a new version of "'Shut Up!' he explained."
My guess is that someone who is in the favor of the former position is very tempted to support the second position, because, given how the second position is expressed in a confusing and misleading way, it's very easy to mistake it for the same thing. But it's not. The reason I ask people to express these ideas in their own, simple words is because, when you pull the sheepskin off, whoops, turns out it's a wolf.
Arnold, you have a number of people in your comments section who both subscribe to racial essentialism in their view of the world, and seem to object to being called racial essentialists, considering this to be an insult. They misunderstand and mischaracterize Glenn Loury's objection to this view of the world. I have no wish to engage with them any further, but would like to explain to you why I find this position objectionable on both scientific and moral grounds.
I'll do so with a simple example taken form a recent paper with Dan O'Flaherty, link below, extract follows:
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-981-33-4016-9_10-1
"The State of Mississippi adopted a new constitution in 1890 that identified the conditions under which a citizen would be permitted to vote:
\begin{quote}
Every male inhabitant of this State, except idiots, insane persons and Indians not taxed, who is a citizen of the United States, twenty-one years old and upwards, who has resided in this State two years... and who has never been convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy, and who has paid... all taxes which may have been legally required of him... is declared to be a qualified elector.
\end{quote}
The list of crimes here is striking for what it excludes. Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, all violent felonies that today carry the harshest sentences, were not considered disqualifying. The reasons for this were subsequently explained by the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1896 case Ratliff v. Beale as follows:
\begin{quote}
It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution. Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,---a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
\end{quote}
That is, the rationale for stripping rights from those who had committed “furtive” crimes while declining to do so for those convicted of more serious and violent offenses was to selectively disenfranchise African American men, who had won the right to vote by 1869 under the 14th and 15th amendments to the United States constitution. Unable to exclude this group by name, the framers of the Mississippi constitution chose instead to rely on stereotypes that were prevalent at the time. By careful curation of exclusionary criteria, they “swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise.” And this was stated baldly and approvingly by the Mississippi Supreme Court itself."
The racial essentialists of the 19th century considered whites to be more inclined to commit "robust" crimes like robbery and murder, and less inclined to commit "furtive" crimes like fraud and embezzlement. The racial essentialists of today see things differently, they see whites as less inclined to commit the robust crimes. Both are reasoning from correlations, assuming causal linkages where none can be proved to exist. Loury's view, which I share, is that this is scientifically lazy and morally repugnant.
While certainly (inadvertently?) generous to the "racial essentialists of the 19th century" for their supposed belief that the more indefensible, lethal crimes were the sole province of whites, I am not sure how to square the assertion with Mississippi's withholding of gun rights from freedmen, in that same period.
Of course, once guns became widely available to all - after about 1910? 1915? - that quaint notion you describe (if true) was put to rest.
Is there any context in which you would actually debate someone on the subject of race realism? Genuinely curious.