Can Software Make You Less Racist?

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In a comment above, Jeff writes:

“Sure they were – plenty of regressive beliefs were held in the last thousand years. The only constant is, the further back in time you go, the more regressive the belief systems. The very concept of civil rights had to be invented. That’s called progress!”

This is simply not true. There is no particular correlation between time and “progress” in belief systems. Witness the rise of fundamentalism in Islam. Or note that bans on inter-racial marriage are relatively infrequent and modern (last 200 years). Note the current assault on the First Amendment from many “progressive” fronts. Nevermind communism and socialism, “belief systems” that caused over 100 million deaths, and continue to kill in Venezuela and elsewhere.

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Alfonso Linguini has ably responded to much of this post, but there are at least two aspects worthy of further scrutiny.

First is the wholesale condemnation of the elderly, simply due to their age. Old people are racist, bigoted homophobes - a basket of deplorables if you will - who have “old fashioned ideas”. In an act of Maoist ritual denunciation Atwood even goes so far as to publicly shame his own parents, calling them out (in bold type no less!) as “definitely someone I would label a little bit racist.” Atwood pre-apologizes “if this sounds ageist” but of course it does not just sound ageist, it is ageist. Atwood dresses this up with statistics, “the idea that regressive social opinions correlate with age isn’t an opinion; it is a statistical fact.”

Second is Mr. Atwood’s continuous virtue signaling and self-praise throughout the piece. He lets us know that he is not a racist and he is not a homophobe. He has all the right stances on all the right issues. “Your neighbors are probably a little bit racist” while for him “failure to support same-sex marriage is as inconceivable as failing to support interracial marriage.” While all of these other folks have a tiny “little” bit of racism in them, the ineluctable implication is that Mr. Atwood has none. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even a little bit. Because if his publicly shamed parent is only a “little bit racist”, how can the son be superior to the father unless he is completely free of racism? (Given the human condition, the world would be a much better place if everyone exhibited only a “little bit” of any conceivable human failing. Progressives are always attempting to perfect the species and this has not turned out well.)

And I think here we get to what is so odd about this post. Ostensibly it is about using software to bring out the best in people, and to discourage our worst impulses. A noble endeavor perhaps. But it would more honestly have been titled “Old People Suck and I don’t”. The views of the elderly and Mr. Atwood’s virtue are irrelevant to the stated topic of the post. They are inflammatory and distracting as the comments show. And it is in the comments that we discover what really animates Atwood: Elderly people with benighted views voting incorrectly. He writes “there is a 60% chance that “any person age 65 or older will vote against same sex marriage laws” and “if the only voters in the country where age 65 and older, the statistics tell us there would be very little social change.”

It should be noted that it is ironic, if not galling, that in a recent previous post “They Have To Be Monsters” Atwood takes on the topic of people being cruel online and writing things they would never say to someone’s face. Perhaps he calls his parents racists to their faces, but of course even that is no justification for telling the world. Furthermore, in coyly shaming only one of parents, and not specifically his mother or his father, he has in fact shamed them both.

Finally, aside from irrelevance of the elderly shaming to the topic at hand, we have the actual arguments that Atwood has put forth in this context. Atwood maintains in general that moral progress and time are correlated, and that then, by definition, the elderly hold benighted views, while the young hold enlightened views (statistically speaking, of course!). Then he argues specifically that that opposition to same-sex marriage is one of those benighted views and equivalent to opposition to interracial marriage. Both of these arguments are erroneous, and if our host permits, I will take them up in subsequent comments.

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I think what happens is the goalposts move and the battleground changes. While I have a deep, abiding belief in “go about your business and I shall go about mine without bothering you in any way, through voting or any other method”, transgender people still make me very nervous in person.* I think 80 years from now our kids will be much more accepting of fluid gender than we adults are.

You can see this in the Oatmeal comic as well. Comparing “Negroes shouldn’t be allowed vote” to “the gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry” is moving forward 80 years in history.

As already covered earlier in the discussion, this reflects a deep innumeracy that borders on intentional obstinance. The numbers 61% (per surveys, the odds of any given 65 year old person opposing same sex marriage) and 0.005% are wildly different:

So yes, it is more likely you may be struck by a certain kind of meteor while walking down the street. That doesn’t make it any more realistic as an ongoing concern, though.

* To be brutally honest, women still make me nervous in person. So “person of unknown, indeterminate and/or unclear gender” makes it even tougher for me, personally. This is 100% my problem, though, that’s on me.

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There is a third odd aspect to this post: the statistical sleight of hand where accusations of racism are supported by evidence not of racism but of opposition to same-sex marriage.

First Atwood claims that as software networks grow “they begin to include older people”, and “those older people will, statistically speaking, be more racist.” Then he provides evidence that 65% of people 64 or older are opposed to same-sex marriage. From this statistic he concludes not only the obvious, that old people oppose same-sex marriage, but also that old people are racist. He extrapolates even further that “the idea that regressive social opinions correlate with age isn’t an opinion; it’s a statistical fact.”

Now there may well be evidence out there that old people are more racist than other cohorts but Atwood does not provide it. There may be evidence that old people don’t like to eat kale, but Atwood does not provide it. But the concept, indeed the Orwellian concept, of “regressive social opinions” is so broad and ill-defined that it is meaningless to call anything about it a “statistical fact” regardless of any putative evidence.

What is the definition of a “regressive social opinion”? It cannot simply be an opinion that the goes against the opinion of the majority of the young as this is tautological for Atwood’s argument. It cannot simply be the general opinion of the “left” or “progressives” or the Democrat party. One cannot make an exhaustive list of such opinions, and the longer the list grows the more likely no one would agree to the whole thing.

Atwood states that it is as “inconceivable” to not support same-sex marriage as it is to not support interracial marriage. This is perhaps the reason he assumes that evidence of opposition to same-sex marriage is sufficient to prove racism.

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I think you are missing the point by focusing on the magnitude of various statistics. Perhaps this will make it clear. There is a cohort of voters who opposed same-sex marriage in California at higher rates than you site for the elderly. Fully 7 out of 10 members of this cohort (that’s 70% for those following along at home) voted for the initiative (against same-sex marriage) that proved the downfall of Brendan Eich. Lets use this cohort in place of the elderly in your language and see how it reads:

“There is a 70% percent chance that a black person will vote against same-sex marriage laws”

“If the only voters in the entire country were black, the statistics tell us there would be very little progress for same-sex marriage.”

It’s even worse when you look at it in the context of the thesis of your post. Is there any doubt that Facebook was not only used by the young but largely the white at the start? Let’s see how this quote looks:

“But as those networks grow, they begin to include black people. And those black people will, statistically speaking, be more homophobic. I apologize if this sounds racist, but…”

Now let’s talk about using this little fact as a justification for enhancing your software.

The elderly are one of the last acceptable groups to ridicule and discriminate against, especially in the tech world, so it is not surprising that you don’t see yourself as ageist, just factual with the statistics. But those are factual statistics above, in the exact same situation, and you wouldn’t dare write those lines, would you?

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Everyone gets old. Not everyone becomes black.

I think a part of becoming old is recognizing that, statistically speaking, you are going to be a bit “old fashioned” on social issues by the time you get to be 60 or 70 years old. And to be crystal clear, by “you” I mean everyone: me, you, all of us.

You know what would be incredibly toxic to social progress: if people naturally lived to be hundreds or thousands of years old. Even beyond the profound social implications, imagine the concentrations of wealth in that scenario. It would be disastrous.

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Everyone gets old. Not everyone becomes black.

True, but I don’t see that this helps your case, in fact it makes it a little worse I think.

I think a part of becoming old is recognizing that, statistically speaking, you are going to be a bit “old fashioned” on social issues by the time you get to be 60 or 70 years old.

By definition, old people are going to be a bit “old fashioned” on all types of issues, not just social issues. They don’t like rap, but that doesn’t imply that rap is better than Frank Sinatra. It is easy to make fun of them. Where I think you go wrong is this idea of “social progress” correlated with historical time. Countries and peoples and societies are constantly moving in lot of different directions, and at any point in time the elderly may have “old fashioned” ideas that are in fact better or more moral than the population at large. There is no “law of progress”. One need only look at Turkey, for example, to see a country on a long slide from a modern western society with rights for women, free speech, etc, to primitive, regressive authoritarian rule.

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For Atwood it is as “inconceivable” to not support same-sex marriage as it is to not support interracial marriage, and he assumes that evidence of opposition to same-sex marriage is proof of racism. Bans against interracial marriage and bans against same-sex marriage are in the same basket of “old fashioned ideas”, unsupportable by reason, logic, evidence or right thinking people. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bans on interracial marriage had nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with racial discrimination. They have actually been fairly rare in history, and have only shown up in societies that enslaved another race. They have no basis in common or natural law. They have always been part of a panoply of laws specifically designed to oppress a specific group of people in a specific time and place. Race is not part of and has never been part of the definition of marriage in any society at any point in history. It was precisely because interracial marriage is in fact real marriage that it had to be explicitly banned. When bans on interracial marriage were lifted, it was indeed progress, but only the sense that repealing the 18th Amendment was progress: It removed bad law and restored things to the way they had always been. Removing bans on interracial marriage in no way changed the definition of marriage.

The same is not true of same-sex marriage, which fundamentally alters the definition of marriage, and indeed much more. Traditional marriage between a man and a woman is a universal human institution that has developed in all societies in all parts of the world in all cultures. Some of these cultures have been very tolerant, even supportive, of homosexual behavior, yet all shared the definition of marriage. Marriage is a universal human institution for one reason: children. If human beings could reproduce asexually by clipping a fingernail and placing it in water, marriage would never have been invented.

It is honest but erroneous to argue that same-sex marriage is a good thing. But it cannot be maintained that it does not change the very definition of marriage, and will have profound effects on the institution and much else. Let’s examine just one aspect of this change. Same-sex marriage means nothing if it does not mean that same-sex marriages are equal to opposite sex marriages. They cannot be second class marriages or treated differently in any way. This means that when married couples want to adopt children no preference can be given to opposite-sex couples. It cannot be argued that having a parent of each sex is a benefit to children. It cannot be argued that a woman, as a female, brings a unique and valued perspective to raising children. The same of course holds for men: It cannot be argued that a father, as a man, a male influence, is important to a child’s life. To hold any of these ideas is to be a bigoted homophobe. Motherhood and fatherhood are two of the immediate casualties of same-sex marriage. (Of course there are countless studies over that last 70 years that show the importance of fathers and mothers that must now be discredited and superseded.)

It is supremely ironic that the only place progressives reject the benefits of gender diversity is marriage. Nothing can make a marriage more diverse, in a truly meaningful way, than a man and woman (except an interracial marriage! – which makes beautiful children too!). For progressives a woman, as a female member of the human species, brings untold benefits to an all-male corporate boardroom, to an all-male congress, to a student body, to an all-male workforce. But a woman brings nothing (nothing at all!) to a marriage. To deny this is to condemn same sex marriage to second class status. There is only one way to eliminate this cognitive dissonance, and that this to call into question and then destroy very concept of male and female itself. And as night follows day this is happening. It is no accident that the transgender activists leapt into action as soon same-sex marriage became accepted. These activists are not just looking for a safe, private place to use the bathroom. The very labels male and female, men and women, ladies gentlemen are anathema to them and must be destroyed. For example at Vassar College, the transgender activists are not satisfied with additional single use bathrooms that the college has provided - they deface the bathroom doors by taping over the men and women signs. At campuses nationwide there is an assault on the English language itself with respect to pronouns. At Michigan, students can request a pronoun of choice, and professors can be disciplined for not using it. This is a logical outcome of same-sex marriage. Indeed it is an attempt at a post-implementation fix for a flawed concept.

Same-sex marriage changes everything. It changes everything because it alters the definition and thus the institution of marriage beyond recognition. It is nothing like interracial marriage, which always was and always will be true marriage, despite unjust racist laws.

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Extremely well said David; I’ve never looked at the same-sex marriage issue this way. You’re certainly correct that it’s had ramifications that we didn’t really expect.

This is just my opinion of course but I honestly feel more hate and bigotry coming from the left than traditionalists or conservatives these days. Amazing to see how things change.

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I’m all for less race-centric thinking in the world, but the Nextdoor example is surpassingly silly. Three of the four must-be-included-alongside-race fields are almost instantly transient (clothing), and the fourth (hair) only takes a little longer than that. For better or for worse, the color of someone’s skin is basically one of two immutable characteristics about them you can observe at a distance, and the other (height/weight) is well-known in witness psychology to be deeply unreliable unless the person is standing next to something to use as a measuring stick.

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Funny, I have been going through police dispatch reports lately, and you would not believe the amount of 911 calls that basically boil down to “there’s a brown person on our block.” That’s bad, worse was when I heard a cop on the radio last month trying to describe to dispatch why he was going to pull over and shake down a pedestrian, he sort of stumbled, paused, and finally said “he looks like he’s from the (brown part of town)”

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Highly unlikely based on the data I’ve seen, plus the last few hundred years of history. It seems your entire viewpoint here is based on your opposition to same sex marriage?

I believe treating fellow human beings with respect and dignity is far more important than concerns about harming the abstract concept of marriage. I think it’s irresponsible to put abstract concepts on a pedestal and use that as a justification to deny others happiness.

When a “concept” is endangered, I’m always going to come down on the side of real human beings. I would argue that broadening marriage to include same sex couples makes it a more inclusive and more loving institution, which is central to the concept of marriage. After all, without love, what kind of marriage do you have? :two_hearts:

By denying other people, other real actual human beings, public recognition of the love they share, you are doing more damage to the “institution” of marriage than any same sex couple ever could. Love is important, you say, but only the right kind of love, by the right kind of people. What kind of love is that?

If this boils down to “my God can beat up your God”, then so be it. My God will see your God on the playground at 3pm and we’ll find out who’s right. Be there or be square!

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Jeff, to quote Tina Turner, what’s love got to do with it?

In order to understand if we are harming marriage, we need to understand what marriage is, what the purpose of it is, what function does it serve. Love is not central to the concept of marriage. Love has never been a requirement for marriage. People get married who are not in love, people fall out of love and stay married, and people can fall in love while they are married. Falling out of love has never been legal grounds for divorce. However, the inability or unwillingness to consummate the union has always been grounds for divorce or annulment. And to consummate a marriage, you need a functioning man and a woman. You ask “without love, what kind of marriage do you have?” The answer is simple: a loveless marriage. But it is still a marriage. Without a man and woman, there is not a marriage at all. A man, a woman, and children are central to marriage, not love. As I wrote above children are the very reason marriage exists at all.

(Another reason we know that marriage is about children is that same-sex marriage advocates were not satisfied with civic unions that gave them every legal benefit of marriage except adoption. We could have created new contracts - “love unions” - that were identical to marriage in every way except for children, and this would not have been satisfactory.)

Why is marriage a permanent contract? Why don’t we have term-limited marriage contracts? Why is marriage an exclusive contract? Why is infidelity grounds for divorce? If marriage is about love between consulting adults, why should it be permanent? Why should it be limited to two people? Are you against plural marriage? If so, are you denying happiness to people who love more than one person? These questions and many more must be thought about and answered before we can honestly say what will or will not harm marriage.

Now regardless of what marriage is, perhaps you don’t care about it and its purpose, only the desires of consenting adults. As you stated, you come down on the “side of real human beings” over the institution of marriage. This is a fine sentiment, but there are other human beings you have forgotten about: children. Children are the reason marriage exists in the first place, not the emotional well-being or self-actualization of adults. Same-sex marriage necessarily entails same-sex adoption, and worse, the production of children to specifically satisfy the emotional needs, the happiness, of same-sex couples – the commodification of children. To knowingly, willfully, purposefully deprive a child of his natural mother or father is, to put it mildly, not a nice thing to do. It is certainly not “treating a fellow human being with respect and dignity.”

It takes nothing away from the nobility of adoptive parents or single parents to recognize this. No single mother looking out for the best interests of her child, is pleased the child does not have a father in his life. Adoptive parents recognize that their child has experienced a loss, the very reason the child is available to be adopted. To purposely create that loss, however, is a morally suspect act – unless – unless one believes that men and women, as male and female members of the species bring nothing to the table, and furthermore that blood relationship is meaningless – that a mother is as happy to take home a random baby from the hospital nursery as she is her own blood.

And it is not only the produced children of same-sex couples that are harmed. By undermining marriage itself, by necessarily destroying motherhood and fatherhood, same-sex marriage harms all children. Broadcasting that fathers are dispensable leads to more divorce, more single parents, more fatherless boys.

As for “my God will see your God on the playground”, reason, logic, history and biology are more than sufficient to make the case that same-sex marriage changes everything. The implications of same-sex marriage cannot be logically denied. The destruction of motherhood and fatherhood, the destruction of the concept of male and female, the commodification of children, the acceptance of plural marriage, all follow inexorably. These implications may be welcomed or feared, but they cannot be logically denied.

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This post follows a disconcertingly propagandist formula:

  1. Introduce the topic of racism using an example (Neg. Shouldn’t be allowed to vote) which most readers would indeed consider racist
  2. Later, introduce a more controversial (in other words, conceivably less racist or non-racist) example, that is Nextdoor users posting along the lines of “Dark-skinned man broke in to car”
  3. Present Nextdoor’s censorship as a common-sense solution which no sane person could possibly disagree
  4. Present the censorship of any public discourse that is any way even remotely “racist”, even when the poster discloses their real name and address, as a positive force in society.

Hello Silicon Valley… we are a big country, and not everyone shares the same values. Thank you for reading.

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No, children are the reason sex exists. And sex has been doing quite well for itself so far as an institution.

It isn’t, and never was. Look around you. Read about divorce rates.

“I no longer wish to be married” is grounds for divorce as well.

No, they do not.

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Jeff, I am glad to see you recognize that children are the reason sex exists, though I imagine stating this today among one’s friends and co-workers might impair one’s social standing. However, sex is a biological function, not a human institution, and children being the reason for sex in no way negates the proposition that children are the reason that marriage exists. These two things are not mutually exclusive. What, then, is the origin of marriage, if not children? Why has marriage across all time and culture, even culture that celebrated homosexual love, been the union of a man and a woman? Why has failure to consummate been grounds for divorce if children are not the reason for marriage?

And yes, marriage is a permanent contract, despite the fact that many marriage contracts are broken. Try going home and asking your wife: “honey, how would you feel if we had a 3 year term on our marriage? If we both like the way things are going, we can renew the contract for another 3 year term after that. This is how I deal with my internet service provider, why should our arrangement be any different?” I would be prepared to be slapped in the face.

A marriage contract is unique in this regard. No other contract is valid with a lifetime term of the participants. Now it is certainly true that no-fault divorce has considerably weakened marriage, but no one, yet, is suggesting term limited marriages. Why is that? Because a term limit obviously makes the entire concept of marriage meaningless. (Just as same-sex “marriage” does, by the way).

You dismiss my argument that same-sex “marriage” makes acceptance of plural marriage, among other things, inevitable. But you make no case. How will you defend marriage against a man and two women who want to be married? A threesome that can, according to the news last week, actually produce a child that shares all of their DNA? What arguments will you present to them to deny them happiness and their “right” to marriage? In order to make any reasonable argument you must have some working definition of what marriage is, and why their particular union should be denied the status of marriage. You have summarily jettisoned at least two of the pillars of the traditional definition of marriage. Are you confidant that you can stand firmly on those that remain? Do you even know what they are? Perhaps more importantly, why would you even want to defend marriage against plural unions?

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Great update on Nextdoor:

The point was to add friction to the process—to make users stop and think just enough to be purposeful in their actions, without making Nextdoor so laborious to use that it drove them away.

Exactly the way I design software as well: Training Your Users

There is more to do:

Not everyone feels that way. Neighbors for Racial Justice believes that Nextdoor isn’t doing enough. From a technical perspective, they’re right—both Mohit and Tolia tell me this. For one, although a significant number of members use the service on their phones, Nextdoor hasn’t fully rolled out similar measures to prevent people from describing potential miscreants only by race in its iOS and Android apps yet. (The company says it has completed a design.) Also, much of the discussion that occurs in the crime and safety category doesn’t happen in the company’s carefully calibrated posts — it takes place in the comments that respond to those posts. Nextdoor hasn’t yet found a way to monitor those conversation threads for racial profiling. “We need to figure out a way to create friction in those modalities as well,” says Tolia.

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I also got this when signing up for Airbnb, which was nice.

(I had some kind of problem with my old account and I could no longer log into it, so I had to create a new one…)

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Statistically speaking, old people are significantly less progressive, even on issues that I consider extremely clear cut, like is it OK for a relative to marry someone of a different race? I mean, who answers that with a “no”?

Considering 65 and older is far and away the biggest bar on this chart, I’m going with my original hypothesis.

(Also quite sad is “republican” at 16%. That’s awful. So a 65+ year old republican…)

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More news on this front, from June of this year. Big jump from boomers which is nice to see.

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