Getting along

Empathy

Have you noticed this is a loaded word now? Empathy, as in experiencing some approximation of someone’s emotions (which is what I was taught to call sympathy in school) is contentious as a basis of moral action, as a biassed and anecdotal way of allocating social goods. Paul Bloom champions this framing. See also Putanumonit Jacob. If we are acting based on sympathy, the thought goes, we are vulnerable to ethnic biases and resistent to evidence-based interventions that might actually make all people better off. Apparently, etymology notwithstanding, compassion is what, in this taxonomy, we call the understanding that other people have different an legitimate experiences that we can hope to improve without waiting to feel like them. I’m going to sidestep that particular question here, because I think that question is much more complicated than the headline empathy bad. But pity unexamined I will concede is a crap way of deciding what is good, sure.

Racial and ethnic inclusion

Simonovits, Kézdi, and Kardos (2017):

We report the results of an intervention that targeted anti-Roma sentiment in Hungary using an online perspective-taking game. We evaluated the impact of this intervention using a randomized experiment in which a sample of young adults played this perspective-taking game, or an unrelated online game. Participation in the perspective-taking game markedly reduced prejudice, with an effect-size equivalent to half the difference between voters of the far-right and the center-right party. The effects persisted for at least a month, and, as a byproduct, the intervention also reduced antipathy toward refugees, another stigmatized group in Hungary, and decreased vote intentions for Hungary’s overtly racist, far-right party by 10%. Our study offers a proof-of-concept for a general class of interventions that could be adapted to different settings and implemented at low costs.

I wonder how reproducing that one has gone?

There is evidence, I am told, that narrative can also improve your empathy for other people. (Johnson, Huffman, and Jasper 2014; Bormann and Greitemeyer 2015; Oatley 2016; Kidd and Castano 2013) Diversity skills are not necessarily easy. I would like to know more about that.

Replicability-Index has an interesting round up of Implicit Bias Research:

The controversial and novel suggestion was that prejudice could work like color perception. We automatically notice skin color and our unconscious guides our actions based on this information. Eventually the term implicit bias was coined to refer to automatic prejudice.

Some highly cited studies suggested that subliminal priming influences behaviour without awareness (Bargh et al., 1996; Devine, 1989). However, in the past decade it has become apparent that these results are not credible (Schimmack, 2020).

Worth a read. The assertion here is not that prejudice, personal or institutional, does not exist. Rather, the assertion is that unconscious bias, as measured by the Implicit Association Test, cannot be shown to be unambiguously important. Worse, to the degree that it might be important it is very unlikely that it can be fixed by training. That is to say, that a convenient, unambiguous measurable and easy-to-turn-into-a-product phenomenon is not well supported by research. Largely it is a fiction perpetuated by convenience, the quirks of research funding, and suspect scientific practices.

No assertion is made that other types of systemic prejudice are not real. Other types of systemic prejudice are observable in the real world rather than in labs with questionable research practices and thus escape suspicion.

If I interpret this article correctly, I am led to wonder if this particular notion of prejudice gains public traction because it is one that you can simply wash away with some ritualised training, which would be convenient for various interests. A world in which we had to resort to careful communication, and which require sustained effort and genuine intervention in the structures that perpetuate inequity, would be more work for us all.

Musa al-Gharbi asks Who gets to define what is racist? and has some ideas. There is an interesting wedge there about the preferences of progressive activists supporting multiculturalism and the frequently-conservative People-of-Colour they speak for and how the dynamics of this representation plays out. I suspect there is a generational angle here too, but I have not run across any good examinations of it — it is very easy to imagine first-generation immigrants having different notions of racial justice than their children in any given country.

Law and fairness

Racial bias US police shootings controversy continues. Note to self to revisit SPRS and see how this plays out.

Online radicalisation

🏗: Read Paul Gill’s meta-meta-review of how terrorism recruits. I suspect that this might reveal interesting perspectives on how non-violent extremism recruits also, and polarisation happens etc.

Deep canvassing

Has a fascinating history as science, what with the famous LaCour study, which was fake, and the Broockman and Kalla study, which was real. There is a convenient Dave McRaney podcast on this theme.

For real this time: Talking to people about gay and transgender issues can change their prejudices.

Benefits of diversity

See diversity dividends.

The feelings of the relatively underprivileged previously-privileged

A keystone in the edifice of contemporary feudalism.

Keyphrase: The klansman calling the snowflake white.

• Gamergate as future of the culture wars Turned out prescient.

• 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

  I’m curious to see the demographics behind the Trump vote after this piece, which has some good lines, and a rather different and more interesting take on the dangers of video games than I am used to. But I want more data.

  In particular, this one’s not about disgruntled white baby boomer males, but about disgruntled disenfranchised youngish white males, and their proactive, rather sophisticated and techno-savvy mobilisation as a factor in the Bannonisation of politics.

  Gamergate: Anon Defends his Safe Space […]

  gamergaters believed that online sleuthing would uncover a tangible conspiracy about how game creators colluded to further a “Social Justice Warrior” agenda. Among many others, they hacked the Skype account of the indie game developer I was working for at the time, presumably reading our conversations about the game we were making looking for the moment when we uttered “now to further the secret SJW agenda”. What they found instead was my boss patiently explaining to me the best ways to make a video game. […]

  All that work cracking Skype accounts with wordlists did not yield the tangible reward of evidence of a cabal. The real world behaves differently than a video game. There were shades of grey. It disappointed. What you did and what you got for your efforts were muddled. It was more challenging than the safe spaces of a video game, carefully crafted to accommodate gamers and make them feel — well, the exact opposite of how they felt interacting in the real world — effective. In the fantasy world of the game, actions achieved ends.

This thing about who the geeks are and whether they are in fact disadvantaged is a touch-point.

For a cultural-studies take which regards geekdom as a problem by trying to acquire the rights of other minorities, see Postmodern geekdom as simulated ethnicity. Who gets to decide if an ethnicity authentic though? If there is a cohesive set of practice or grievances common to an active community of alienated geeks is that not also deserving of understanding?

For Scott Alexander arguing that lumping all geeks in together and disregarding their grievances is a problem, see Untitled:

There is a growing trend in Internet feminism that works exactly by conflating the ideas of nerd, misogynist, virgin, person who disagrees with feminist tactics or politics , and unlovable freak.

A problem here is that like many other group classifiers, “geeks” and “feminists” in this kind of context frequently fail to refer to what they sound like they do. Feminists for example, are not in rhetorical context, “people who hold views supportive of improved outcomes for women” but rather “people who are disproportionately likely to be identified as feminists because they occupy an extreme, SEO-prominent, and possibly unrepresentative position.”

Not that I am accusing Scott Alexander of this necessarily for al that article reminds me of the most tedious of internet comment thread manoeuvres: stating “We are diverse and tolerant and moderate, not like those people over there who are all identically intolerant and extremist.”

Anyway, I digress. One argument of Alexander’s is that the counterpoint to sensitive men arguing #notallmen, is that there is a strand of internet discourse that argues #yesallgeeks. There is also one about the danger of arguing that oppression and toxicity is a zero sum game. TBC.

For a softer version, try Jon Ronson’s So you’ve been publicly shamed.

• Arthur Chu’s Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage has one particular bit of reportage on which concerns are ‘legitimate’ and the battle over whose pain is real.

  Underdogs, make no mistake, can be vicious and cruel and evil, all the more so because they have a grievance to justify their viciousness. But to be an underdog is to lack power. It means, by definition, that you’re weak, where the overdog is strong.

  I didn’t think how “legitimate criticisms” — like the legitimate criticisms of the materialism in the “disco lifestyle,” like legitimate criticisms of the cliquishness of the tiny indie video game scene — get used as fuel by reactionary hate mobs.

I’m not presuming angry reactionaries are people without legitimate grievances, although I really want to think about the reactionary and disproportionate and possibly long-term self-destructive responses here; esp scapegoating of that another party on the basis of being visible, other and/or involved, rather than plausibly to blame or malevolent, or free from oppression themselves. Just because the response is disproportionate, or ill-considered, or is harnessed for reactionary ends, should not be taken to mean something bad did not happen to the aggrieved people. Although if the thing (people) they are blaming is not the root cause and their strategy is not a real remedy it is of course an interesting question how this can be manipulated for even more nefarious ends.

For a lefty version of this problem, see The Soft Target:

Even more modest reformist goals sound increasingly forlorn at this end of modernity. […] All the institutions and systems involved in what seem to be the most awful, oppressive or unjust dimensions of everyday life in the 21st Century seem to be vulnerable to nothing but their own frailties and contradictions. The powerful are mostly behind walls, inside fortresses. They have the money and the influence to outlast or overwhelm most legal challenges. They don’t particularly fear mass protest, not that there seems to be much danger of protests being genuinely massive in the United States as they have been in many other countries. The political process is drowning in oligarchic money, and even if reformers get elected, they often find it nearly impossible to challenge entrenched interests or do much beyond tinker with the status quo.

Most targets are hard, both in the sense of “difficult” and “protected”. So what has happened in a lot of what passes for democratic politics in the 21st Century, particularly in the United States, is a preference for soft targets: institutions that have to remain ‘open’ in some sense to protest and dissent, or individuals and groups who are compelled for some reason or another to remain accessible and responsive to public criticism.

Directable generalised rage is a fungible coin in modern politics. See: “I don’t have a job because black people/asians/latinxs/women took it”. There is no reason that this cannot be true in some sense; the question is how society regards fairness around such things.

Separate but equal?

Research group finds creating boundaries key to reducing ethnic violence.

Calling out/calling in

• Getting called out: How to Apologise by Franchesca Ramsey
• How to tell people they sound racist by Jay Smooth
• Failing to call men out on misogyny
• Asam Ahmad notes certain pathologies of callout culture, loosely, making a public performance of it creates a tribal shaming procedure which causes much harm and reduces the chance of causing good.

References