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[mainiac]

So, aside from somehow making children taller, I'm not sure how we set policies to the causation, especially when it's an internalized thing and is something with our psychological makeup as a species.

Progress universally happens because people are willing to try the uncertain.  Sexism is a problem that can be solved like any other problem, you keep trying things until you see what helps.  India found that requiring local governments be half woman made a big difference.  A program that offered apprenticeships to women in a rural region also helped.  Sweden has had big successes with maternity and paternity leave programs (something Bernie Sanders is a big fan of I believe).  Japan is going to use government contracts to put some pressure on the major conglomerates.  The US has even engaged in this in the past.  The black middle class in the US came into existence in large part because the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson administrations deliberately encouraged hiring black people in government.  Judging something by "can you prove this will solve problem" is a bullshit standard that we wouldn't accept anywhere else.  The standard should be "is this something worth trying?"

The sentiment is wrong. Not everyone is equal. Not everyone's time and money is best spent at a college for 4 years of their life. That doesn't make them less valuable, or bad, or less intelligent. It just makes them different. One of the biggest problems with the US educational system is the one size fits all policy. The idea that you can make a curriculum that works equally with every student is flawed and wrong. And the idea that a person can have an easier time of something in order to fill a quota, move their way through what is supposed to be a challenging test to teach them and prove their abilities, to make sure we fill out a chart properly, simply based upon their skin color is in fact racism and does nobody any good.

Yes, the US higher education system is not pareto optimal.  That doesn't mean counter acting the effects of racism doesn't move us closer to pareto optimum.

[mainiac]

I for one say we should kick all the white people out of college.  A lot of them are just going there because their parents told them to.

[sluissa]

So, aside from somehow making children taller, I'm not sure how we set policies to the causation, especially when it's an internalized thing and is something with our psychological makeup as a species.

Progress universally happens because people are willing to try the uncertain.  Sexism is a problem that can be solved like any other problem, you keep trying things until you see what helps.  India found that requiring local governments be half woman made a big difference.  A program that offered apprenticeships to women in a rural region also helped.  Sweden has had big successes with maternity and paternity leave programs (something Bernie Sanders is a big fan of I believe).  Japan is going to use government contracts to put some pressure on the major conglomerates.  The US has even engaged in this in the past.  The black middle class in the US came into existence in large part because the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson administrations deliberately encouraged hiring black people in government.  Judging something by "can you prove this will solve problem" is a bullshit standard that we wouldn't accept anywhere else.  The standard should be "is this something worth trying?"

The sentiment is wrong. Not everyone is equal. Not everyone's time and money is best spent at a college for 4 years of their life. That doesn't make them less valuable, or bad, or less intelligent. It just makes them different. One of the biggest problems with the US educational system is the one size fits all policy. The idea that you can make a curriculum that works equally with every student is flawed and wrong. And the idea that a person can have an easier time of something in order to fill a quota, move their way through what is supposed to be a challenging test to teach them and prove their abilities, to make sure we fill out a chart properly, simply based upon their skin color is in fact racism and does nobody any good.

Yes, the US higher education system is not pareto optimal.  That doesn't mean counter acting the effects of racism doesn't move us closer to pareto optimum.

Working the problem from the wrong end. Treating the symptoms, not the cause. Bailing the boat before you plug the hole. Etc.

Except that you don't end discrimination, either through race or gender, by forcing more people in to places they don't want to be or don't belong.

Also, really? Really? Of all the words in the bloody english language, "don't belong" is what you go with?

Won't lie, the phrasing makes me want to straight up jump down your throat feet first and trailing a jackhammer -- we've been fighting that fucking sentiment in the US for the better part of a century now, and bowing to it instead of jamming people into its craw is damn sure not how I'd want to see the fight continue. Putting people in places where they "don't belong" actually has done a damn lot over the years to work us towards ending discrimination. It's never been a bloody silver bullet, but you can't fix inequality issues by keeping the unequal groups separated, either.

The sentiment is wrong. Not everyone is equal. Not everyone's time and money is best spent at a college for 4 years of their life. That doesn't make them less valuable, or bad, or less intelligent. It just makes them different. One of the biggest problems with the US educational system is the one size fits all policy. The idea that you can make a curriculum that works equally with every student is flawed and wrong. And the idea that a person can have an easier time of something in order to fill a quota, move their way through what is supposed to be a challenging test to teach them and prove their abilities, to make sure we fill out a chart properly, simply based upon their skin color is in fact racism and does nobody any good.

You're acting like they just pull random people off of the street and stick them in college. You're forgetting that these people are applying to university in the first place, meaning that they at least have some desire to actually go there.

Of course nobody is forced to go to college, but there's a very strong message sent throughout adolescence that you're not going to be worth anything as an adult if you don't go. "Flipping burgers" if you will. This is slowly changing, but it's still fairly strong and even where it's changing the push is still some sort of post-secondary education. If not a 4 year college, then some sort of technical school, etc.

[mainiac]

Working the problem from the wrong end. Treating the symptoms, not the cause. Bailing the boat before you plug the hole. Etc.

Doctors treat symptoms when necessary; otherwise people die.  Symptoms can in fact make a disease worsen if not treated.  Governments should treat symptoms when necessary for the same reasons.

[Bauglir]

wall o' text

yes okay my jokes are bad and i should feel bad, i apologize

edit: for what it's worth, yes, i agree, that's why i listed all those hidden variable explanations in with the discrimination against women bit that you then went on to explain to me as if i hadn't - and i'd have listed something similar for racial discrimination, but it would not have flowed as well, though in retrospect i now realize it would have made my intent clearer

also, yes, scalia either believes or has convinced himself that he believes (based on his past history i'm convinced it's the latter, but whatever floats your goat, it's not really relevant) that it isn't race but it is class and social expectations, but he just flubbed the delivery so badly that i felt some sarcastic comment on what he actually said was warranted

[Reelya]

Working the problem from the wrong end. Treating the symptoms, not the cause. Bailing the boat before you plug the hole. Etc.

Doctors treat symptoms when necessary; otherwise people die.  Symptoms can in fact make a disease worsen if not treated.  Governments should treat symptoms when necessary for the same reasons.

Also, dealing with symptoms means you don't need to know the cause. And we're often pretty shit at actually identifying the key causes for complex social phenomena. At least if you treat a symptom you can be pretty sure the symptom exists. Often different social theories' "root causes" are completely incompatible and in some cases might not exist at all.

[Strife26]

Reasonably useful blog post about Scalia's stupid question

   http://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/12/10/the-mismatch-between-scalias-troubling-question-and-the-troubling-reaction/

[Bohandas]

So, aside from somehow making children taller, I'm not sure how we set policies to the causation, especially when it's an internalized thing and is something with our psychological makeup as a species.

Progress universally happens because people are willing to try the uncertain.  Sexism is a problem that can be solved like any other problem, you keep trying things until you see what helps.  India found that requiring local governments be half woman made a big difference.  A program that offered apprenticeships to women in a rural region also helped.  Sweden has had big successes with maternity and paternity leave programs (something Bernie Sanders is a big fan of I believe).  Japan is going to use government contracts to put some pressure on the major conglomerates.  The US has even engaged in this in the past.  The black middle class in the US came into existence in large part because the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson administrations deliberately encouraged hiring black people in government.  Judging something by "can you prove this will solve problem" is a bullshit standard that we wouldn't accept anywhere else.  The standard should be "is this something worth trying?"

I think the most obvious and probably most effective (though probably not the most practical) solution would be total obfuscation. Mandate that anything that could indicate race or sex be hidden during the hiring process; face, voice, name, everything.

[Lord Shonus]

Working the problem from the wrong end. Treating the symptoms, not the cause. Bailing the boat before you plug the hole. Etc.

Doctors treat symptoms when necessary; otherwise people die.  Symptoms can in fact make a disease worsen if not treated.  Governments should treat symptoms when necessary for the same reasons.

Also, dealing with symptoms means you don't need to know the cause. And we're often pretty shit at actually identifying the key causes for complex social phenomena. At least if you treat a symptom you can be pretty sure the symptom exists. Often different social theories' "root causes" are completely incompatible and in some cases might not exist at all.

The problem is that treating the symptom is rarely more than palliative care - it makes you feel better, and can keep that symptom from killing you, but the root problem will never go away. Acute conditions can go away on their own as long as you keep the symptoms down, but chronic problems never will. In medical terms, this is the difference between, for example, dysentery (which can be cured by pouring saline into the patient so they don't shit themselves to death by dehydration) and syphilis (which will cause medical problem after medical problem until it kills you unless you kill it first).

Socially, treating the symptoms is an excellent solution for unemployment, undernutrition, and housing (generally temporary problems) but will do nothing to help when the problem is both entrenched and completely different from what you're trying to solve - it does you less than no good if your employer is arbitrarily required to pay you more money than your time with the company or previous work experience justifies (which is what most attempts at solving the gender pay gap entail - when comparing people with the same time-in-position and the same duties women make around 98% of what men make, 100% below six-figure income levels) because not only will that disappear once the balance of political power shifts, but you'll be less likely to have a job in the first place unless they are forced to hire you, and you WILL be hated by your co-workers.

[RedKing]

Newest Quinnipiac poll has Trump back on top in Iowa by a point. Which is less than MoE, but better than the 10 points behind that he was in Saturday's DMR/Bloomberg poll, or the 2 points behind in yesterday's FOX News poll. Of course, without empirical evidence like actual votes to gauge against, we don't know how the accuracy of these various pollings are. Maybe Quinnipiac has a pro-Trump lean.

In any case, the merest specter of losing Iowa seems to bring out the attack dog in Trump. It's what precipitated his harangues about Ben Carson, and now it has him saying that Ted Cruz is "frankly, a little bit of a maniac". (I'm sure our resident mainiac would not be amused by the comparisons to Ted Cruz).

Ted Cruz, to his credit, responded by linking to a clip from Flashdance on his Twitter account. Well played, you crazy Canadian diamond, well played.

[Loud Whispers]

I for one say we should kick all the white people out of college.  A lot of them are just going there because their parents told them to.

Not actually a bad idea

[Shadowlord]

If you can't - or don't know how to - treat the cause, treating the symptoms is better than doing nothing. There are plenty of conditions that can't be cured yet, but their symptoms can be alleviated or ameliorated to some degree - Parkinson's, for example.

Bringing it back to the subject of racism, even if you can't force everyone in the country to not be a racist, you can still have laws or policies that try to reduce or eliminate the impact of past, present, and future racism (which is why the voting rights act existed, for instance). I'm not suggesting not trying to eliminate racism, of course. I think part of the point of forced school integration was to try to get kids to grow up together and get used to seeing each other as equals, not seeing all blacks as scary criminals, or all whites as gun-toting racists, or w/e. There are voices in society that are stoking the flames of racism, however, and apparently quite a few people are listening rather than calling bullshit on them. The thing is, it's so easy to convince someone that all X are Y by just giving them examples of Xs being Y and scaring them - the human brain works that way normally, that's how it evolved. It's illogical and unscientific, but it's how you think unless you've learned to think better. (Why is it that way? Well, if you're a primitive human hunter-gatherer and you see a tiger kill one of your clan-mates, which is better for your survival: "That tiger needs to die, but there's no need to jump to conclusions about other tigers on the basis of only one example." or "Shit! We'd better watch out for tigers from now on!")

[sluissa]

I think part of the point of forced school integration was to try to get kids to grow up together and get used to seeing each other as equals, not seeing all blacks as scary criminals, or all whites as gun-toting racists, or w/e.

Look up Brown vs. Board of Education before you start spreading some idea of why you THINK it happened.

[Lord Shonus]

If you can't - or don't know how to - treat the cause, treating the symptoms is better than doing nothing. There are plenty of conditions that can't be cured yet, but their symptoms can be alleviated or ameliorated to some degree - Parkinson's, for example.

Bringing it back to the subject of racism, even if you can't force everyone in the country to not be a racist, you can still have laws or policies that try to reduce or eliminate the impact of past, present, and future racism (which is why the voting rights act existed, for instance). I'm not suggesting not trying to eliminate racism, of course. I think part of the point of forced school integration was to try to get kids to grow up together and get used to seeing each other as equals, not seeing all blacks as scary criminals, or all whites as gun-toting racists, or w/e. There are voices in society that are stoking the flames of racism, however, and apparently quite a few people are listening rather than calling bullshit on them. The thing is, it's so easy to convince someone that all X are Y by just giving them examples of Xs being Y and scaring them - the human brain works that way normally, that's how it evolved. It's illogical and unscientific, but it's how you think unless you've learned to think better. (Why is it that way? Well, if you're a primitive human hunter-gatherer and you see a tiger kill one of your clan-mates, which is better for your survival: "That tiger needs to die, but there's no need to jump to conclusions about other tigers on the basis of only one example." or "Shit! We'd better watch out for tigers from now on!")

Racism isn't responsible for schools graduating students that can barely read because if their graduation rates drop any further they lose the little bit of funding they have. Racism isn't responsible for kids growing up with no direction other than the local gangs because Mommy's working 16 hours a day to try to keep things together and there's no father in the picture. Racism isn't responsible for growing up in a neighborhood where it is considered perfectly acceptable to stab somebody because they "stole" your girlfriend. Fixing any ONE of those problems will do more than any affirmative action program or "let's make sure that employers don't know what color the applicants are" band-aid, but any attempt to do so is shouted down because "RACISM IS THE PROBLEM, YOU BIGOTED JACKASS".

[sluissa]

I repeat my point that looking for a "root cause" of this issue is a waste of time. Racism is a cause. Classism is a cause. Poverty is a cause. Defacto segregation is a cause. Poor graduation rates is a cause. Poor hiring rates is a cause. Local crime rates is a cause. Fatality rates are a cause.

The causes are the symptoms, and the symptoms are the causes. Fixing one doesn't make the rest go away- they all need to be fixed. Only once they're all fixed will the solutions no longer need to be applied. Affirmative action can end once there's no need for affirmative action- right now, there is.

This is far more complicated an issue than fixing one singular problem will resolve. There's a lot of complex interactions going on here, on many different levels. There's no one problem and there's no one solution.

The problem with things like affirmative action are that they are a stopgap measure, a pain killer, a crutch. You see it all the time with government programs. A measure is implemented, with entirely good intentions, to help something necessary get started. But then it becomes relied upon. It gets viewed as doing SOME good, so it's obviously the only direction worth moving in, so more and more is added, with diminishing returns, and in the end the problem never gets solved, a few people are helped, but disproportionate resources are used in order to keep those few people propped up. And the stopgap measure can never be taken away or else shouts of "won't somebody think of the X?" be heard and then it's political suicide to attempt to do anything about it. And thus it remains in place forever.