Physical Revue says "Whiteboards are Racist"

[iNow]

I reckon I’m just tired trying to erect all these GD barns by my GD self 

17 minutes ago, MigL said:

You're becoming very cynical in old age 😃 .
You really should 'lighten up' a little.

 

[dimreepr]

20 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Where exactly have you promoted a better society. If you have nothing substantive to say, don't say it...

Oh great, another one that doesn't read my post's 🙄, but thanks for the advice; here's a thought, if you have nothing to argue my point, but yet another OT cheap shot, I wouldn't mind if you just kept it to yourself (less embarrassing all round I think). 😉

This thread reminds me of the gun debate, because there's really only one argument for the defence, "fuck off, don't take my guns.", everything else is just an excuse to keep the status quo.

Edited June 18, 2023 by dimreepr

[dimreepr]

23 hours ago, MigL said:

Just in case you missed it every other time I've posted it ...
'Better' is subjective !

And as I've said before, better is objectified by society/culture/village/neighbours etc.

If only we could find a better way to inject a better attitude, in those that disagree with... Us. 🤔

[MigL]

2 hours ago, dimreepr said:

This thread reminds me of the gun debate, because there's really only one argument for the defence, "fuck off, don't take my guns."

OK.
Now we know who doesn't read others' posts.
 

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

And as I've said before, better is objectified by society/culture/village/neighbours etc.

Only once you take away individual thinking.
Is that where you want to go ?

Go help INow erect some barns, would you ?
He doesn't seem to want my help.

[iNow]

1 hour ago, MigL said:

He doesn't seem to want my help.

All help is welcome, but you seem however to be suggesting we don’t even need barns and should instead focus on wishing the rains away. 

[Intoscience]

On 6/16/2023 at 1:28 PM, dimreepr said:

 

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius

What is good for one man may be bad for another. That is the point of our arguments. 

Define a good man (person).

On 6/16/2023 at 3:35 PM, iNow said:

While this would surely be an ideal outcome, I personally classify it as extremely unrealistic and a bit pie in the sky so don't anchor myself to this as the core goal. It's a guiding lightpost, but not a destination IMO. 

Better. Not perfect. Now, not later. That's what's needed here... continued steps toward healing past injuries while IN PARALLEL striving toward avoidance of new injury. 

It's not about an ideal outcome, we all know this is unattainable. For starters what would be an ideal outcome for 8 billion people? 

It's about using the right tools, the right approach, one or many which do no further damage.

Chucking a few dollars at every homeless person you meet may seem like the kind thing to do, but does it solve homelessness?  

On 6/16/2023 at 5:07 PM, Phi for All said:

One thing that doesn't help is enforcing some kind of moral superiority by virtue of being "colorblind". Thinking that we can ignore color is a specious stance, one that sounds noble and virtuous, but is not only impossible but also detrimental to society as a whole. Skin color isn't something to be ignored, it's something to be accepted as normal rather than different or dangerous. 

But don't you see, by not ignoring color for the purpose of retribution is a false virtue? 

Yes it is (my bold) skin color is one of, if not the most fundamental attributing factors that invokes racism. By choosing not to ignore it only further invokes the very thing you are trying to dispel. 

Cut it which ever way you want to, even positive discrimination by skin color, only compounds the problem further down the line.  It's like trying to put out a chemical fire with water.

Just to be clear, the idea of ignoring skin color has nothing to do with being noble or virtuous, it couldn't be further from this premise. It's about recognising people as people, all equal. Isn't that what we all want? 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2023 by Intoscience
spelling

[dimreepr]

20 hours ago, MigL said:

OK.
Now we know who doesn't read others' posts.

You can dress it up in different clothes, but it's still a Barbie.

20 hours ago, MigL said:

Only once you take away individual thinking.
Is that where you want to go ?

It's where we always go, it's where we've always been; for instance, I supported Stoke City at school because no-one else did, I chose Stoke City because that's who my uncle supported; all my peers chose from the main contenders, Man united et al, and mostly fell in with their friends choice.

It's up to the individual thinkers to probe the consensus for flaws and suggest a better fairer way foward.

5 hours ago, Intoscience said:

What is good for one man may be bad for another. That is the point of our arguments. 

Define a good man (person).

Only in the abstract... We all know it's not good to kneel on a mans throat, even if he survived it. 

6 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Chucking a few dollars at every homeless person you meet may seem like the kind thing to do, but does it solve homelessness?  

If everyone in society chucked in a few dollar's, then yes it could.

[Intoscience]

26 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I supported Stoke City at school because no-one else did, I chose Stoke City because that's who my uncle supported

My father supports Stoke City, because he played for them in the under 21 squad, his mentor and hero was Stanley Matthews. He quit to go earn more money working down the pit.

I went on to support Port Vale instead, my son supports Man United. 

[dimreepr]

6 hours ago, Intoscience said:

But don't you see, by not ignoring color for the purpose of retribution is a false virtue? 

It's interesting that you continue to swap out reparation for retribution.

Repair = patching the tyre and reinflation.

Retribution = kicking the tyre and hopping about with a tear in your eye. 

[Intoscience]

30 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Only in the abstract... We all know it's not good to kneel on a mans throat, even if he survived it

Unless there is a poisonous critter stuck in there, that if ingested would kill him in the most horrific painful death. 

I guess we can abstract as much as we like. The reality is there are certain things that are for the good of all people. Like saving the planet, avoiding large meteor  strikes etc... but when it gets down to morality and other more finely detailed things, then well, this is where it gets debatable.  

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

It's interesting that you continue to swap out reparation for retribution.

Repair = patching the tyre and reinflation.

Retribution = kicking the tyre and hopping about with a tear in your eye. 

Conflating the 2 is probably my mistake, but is also the mistake made by others. Reparation using subtle revenge style tactics changes things. 

[dimreepr]

4 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

Conflating the 2 is probably my mistake, but is also the mistake made by others. Reparation using subtle revenge style tactics changes things. 

That's still just kicking the tyre, unless you like to patch a tyre with a tear in your eye?

11 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

I guess we can abstract as much as we like. The reality is there are certain things that are for the good of all people. Like saving the planet, avoiding large meteor  strikes etc... but when it gets down to morality and other more finely detailed things, then well, this is where it gets debatable.  

No it doesn't, or at least it shouldn't, that's the point of the quote:

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius

IOW Don't kneel on a man's throat, unless it's consensual... 😉 

[Intoscience]

11 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

No it doesn't, or at least it shouldn't, that's the point of the quote:

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

You are the one who spends time arguing the definitions, constantly, across all subjects. You often interject with such, either for attention, obfuscation or to divert the discussion. I was merely returning the favour. 

I agree with Marcus. 

Lets just get back to the OP. 

15 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

That's still just kicking the tyre, unless you like to patch a tyre with a tear in your eye

Nope, I just like to use a patch that stays on for continued use

[dimreepr]

3 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

You are the one who spends time arguing the definitions, constantly, across all subjects.

Words are important, for understanding to follow. 

[iNow]

7 hours ago, Intoscience said:

For starters what would be an ideal outcome for 8 billion people? 

In this case, we were discussing the elimination of racist thought so let’s stick with that

7 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Chucking a few dollars at every homeless person you meet may seem like the kind thing to do, but does it solve homelessness?  

There are better systemic approaches to dealing with homelessness than chunking a few bucks randomly their way. We’re talking about reparations for systemic racism in the past though, and that’s clearly a different subject. 

7 hours ago, Intoscience said:

It's about recognising people as people, all equal. Isn't that what we all want? 

That’s part of the desired outcome, but is more of a stretch goal and isn’t the primary objective. It might assist in preventing new injuries but does nothing to heal existing past injuries (as we’ve already mentioned about 174 times already in this thread). 

[Phi for All]

8 hours ago, Intoscience said:

But don't you see, by not ignoring color for the purpose of retribution is a false virtue? 

Um, it's pronounced reparation, but this shows that you think fixing past wrongs is somehow punishing you personally.

8 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Yes it is (my bold) skin color is one of, if not the most fundamental attributing factors that invokes racism. By choosing not to ignore it only further invokes the very thing you are trying to dispel. 

Skin color is USED by racists to denigrate and demean, but it's NOT an "attributing factor". This is uncomfortably close to blaming the woman in a rape case because she was beautiful.

8 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Cut it which ever way you want to, even positive discrimination by skin color, only compounds the problem further down the line.  It's like trying to put out a chemical fire with water.

Please explain this one to me. An example of positive discrimination please, and how it's caused problems further down the line. And I see that you've stopped using "fighting fire with fire".

8 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Just to be clear, the idea of ignoring skin color has nothing to do with being noble or virtuous, it couldn't be further from this premise. It's about recognising people as people, all equal. Isn't that what we all want? 

ALL of the POC I know are very proud of their heritage, and they LOVE the color of their skin. I want to be an ally in their fight for equitable treatment, so I recognize them as people, and these people have differently melanated skin than I do. It's obvious, it's apparent, and it's beautiful. It costs me nothing to acknowledge the differences that make people unique.

[TheVat]

3 hours ago, Phi for All said:

ALL of the POC I know are very proud of their heritage, and they LOVE the color of their skin. I want to be an ally in their fight for equitable treatment, so I recognize them as people, and these people have differently melanated skin than I do. It's obvious, it's apparent, and it's beautiful. It costs me nothing to acknowledge the differences that make people unique.

I would only add that "color blind" can also be actively harmful.  In medicine, pretending all people are the same has tended to result in poor, even negligent, treatment where there are real racial differences.   Same with gender, where the gender-blind 1SFA approach has caused harm to female patients.  

When we are really comfortable as a nation with differences, we will celebrate them, not pretend that we're all just featherless bipeds.  

Happy Juneteenth!

[CharonY]

19 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I would only add that "color blind" can also be actively harmful.  In medicine, pretending all people are the same has tended to result in poor, even negligent, treatment where there are real racial differences.   Same with gender, where the gender-blind 1SFA approach has caused harm to female patients.

The opposite is also true. Folks have historically assumed ethnic differences and many things in practice turned out to be harmful. Some of them are clear biases (such as assumption that black folks are more pain resistant), others are more insidious. What it boils down to in medical sciences is that many minorities are underrepresented in research and the treatment is therefore biased towards where the data is. And this happens to be white and male. One way trying to address this is to encourage researchers to specifically seek out minority cohorts, as opposed to the past (meaning perhaps 10 years ago) where white men were considered the gold standard.

It also points to structural issues, as many cohorts are recruited in universities, in which few ethnicity make up most of the student body. Again, a blind approach only works if the system in which it works does not lead to a sorting of outcomes (which it still does).

There is also a feedback issue here. Folks treat certain minorities (especially First Nations, Pacific Islanders and black folks) sub-optimally, so they have worse health outcomes. But then biomarkers from the unhealthier groups are used to establish the "healthy" baseline, so that folks thought that e.g. kidneys from black folks have more effective function that those from white folks. These has then resulted in delayed kidney transplantation for black folks, which is only been addressed somewhat recently.

There was the hope that algorithms that are considered unbiased (i.e. no racism) could address that. But again, the systemic issues counteract that. For example, algorithms widely used in healthcare provide risk scores to patients.

Quote

They found that because the tool was designed to predict the cost of care as a proxy for health needs, Black patients with the same risk score as White patients tend to be much sicker, because providers spend much less on their care overall. This study contributes greatly to a more socially conscious approach to technology development, demonstrating how a seemingly benign choice of label (that is, health cost) initiates a process with potentially life-threatening results. Whereas in a previous era, the intention to deepen racial inequities was more explicit, today coded inequity is perpetuated precisely because those who design and adopt such tools are not thinking carefully about systemic racism.

Original paper https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax2342

The tricky bit is that it is not always obvious, as machine learning (or AI) is often a bit of a black box and you do not necessarily know how they weigh things.

So in a colorblind approach, where the outcomes are not investigated along racial lines, these effects would have been missed (and currently keep being missed, though in the last few years racial biases in algorithms are widely discussed).

Going away from the medical field, I believe there is a growing consensus that colorblind policies as a whole perpetuate racism (as even the dissenter in the Supreme court decision Plessy v. Ferguson assumed) that are inbaked into the system (something that has been mentioned plenty of times already).

 

[Phi for All]

36 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I would only add that "color blind" can also be actively harmful.  In medicine, pretending all people are the same has tended to result in poor, even negligent, treatment where there are real racial differences.   Same with gender, where the gender-blind 1SFA approach has caused harm to female patients.  

When we are really comfortable as a nation with differences, we will celebrate them, not pretend that we're all just featherless bipeds.  

Happy Juneteenth!

I agree, and Happy Juneteenth. Color blindness wrt race is supposed to be free of bad intent, I get that part, but how is it interpreted by people who are finally getting a voice about the color of their skin? White people used skin color against them in the past, so POC learned to keep quiet about it. Now they want to be proud of their heritage and ethnicity, but the white people who say they support that want to pretend they can't see it?!

"I'm your ally and I want what's best for you, but since skin is all one color then there is no problem." This is what I hear when I hear someone claim to be color-blind to race.

[CharonY]

I think a great quote is:

Quote

The Constitution is both color blind and color conscious. To avoid conflict with the equal protection clause, a classification that denies a benefit, causes harm, or imposes a burden must not be based on race. In that sense, the Constitution is color blind. But the Constitution is color conscious to prevent discrimination being perpetuated and to undo the effects of past discrimination.

 

And a nice article to go with it How the ‘Color-Blind Constitution’ Got Weaponized - The Atlantic.

In Europe folks take pride in color-blindness and quite a bit of discrimination gets ignored because of that (for a long time the official line in Germany is that there is no racism).

[StringJunky]

11 hours ago, iNow said:

In this case, we were discussing the elimination of racist thought so let’s stick with that

There are better systemic approaches to dealing with homelessness than chunking a few bucks randomly their way. We’re talking about reparations for systemic racism in the past though, and that’s clearly a different subject. 

That’s part of the desired outcome, but is more of a stretch goal and isn’t the primary objective. It might assist in preventing new injuries but does nothing to heal existing past injuries (as we’ve already mentioned about 174 times already in this thread). 

If you don't prevent the new injuries, you are going up a down escalator.... moving stairs.

Edited June 19, 2023 by StringJunky

[Intoscience]

16 hours ago, Phi for All said:

Um, it's pronounced reparation, but this shows that you think fixing past wrongs is somehow punishing you personally.

Skin color is USED by racists to denigrate and demean, but it's NOT an "attributing factor". This is uncomfortably close to blaming the woman in a rape case because she was beautiful.

Please explain this one to me. An example of positive discrimination please, and how it's caused problems further down the line. And I see that you've stopped using "fighting fire with fire".

ALL of the POC I know are very proud of their heritage, and they LOVE the color of their skin. I want to be an ally in their fight for equitable treatment, so I recognize them as people, and these people have differently melanated skin than I do. It's obvious, it's apparent, and it's beautiful. It costs me nothing to acknowledge the differences that make people unique.

Honestly, there is no point in responding to you. We have clearly different views on the subject (even though we want the same eventual outcome). No matter how I respond you will twist my comments, and throw it back at me. 

But here goes,

There you go my bold, skin color is used by racists to degenerate and demean (all good so far). So it is used as an attributing factor - "feature as characteristic" to discriminate against. 

Yes I've stop using fighting fire with fire, a better analogy is using water to douse a chemical fire. 

I'm proud to be white, I'm proud of my heritage, I love my skin color, can this imply I consider my self as part of a superior race? This is exactly how racism came about (in the context of this thread). 

Can we just stop this nonsense, and see people as people regardless of their color, weight, height ethnics...

[StringJunky]

General comment: people should appreciate the friction of different viewpoints and not get upset when someone smites at  their long-held convictions. This is an adversarial forum, just by the nature of its core purpose: promoting and discussing science.

Does one learn anything meaningful and novel in echo chambers?

Are we parrots?

Edited June 20, 2023 by StringJunky

[dimreepr]

5 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Can we just stop this nonsense, and see people as people regardless of their color, weight, height ethnics...

I'm afraid not, because it's nirvana and it's essentially unattainable; society objectifies better, for good and ill, and it's tremendously difficult to say no too ones family/culture.

Culture tends to move like a continent, very slowly but with the occasional sudden and explosive jerk's. 

[iNow]

12 hours ago, StringJunky said:

If you don't prevent the new injuries, you are going up a down escalator.... moving stairs.

Makes sense. Why did you think I needed this explained to me?

[Intoscience]

36 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I'm afraid not, because it's nirvana and it's essentially unattainable; society objectifies better, for good and ill, and it's tremendously difficult to say no too ones family/culture.

Culture tends to move like a continent, very slowly but with the occasional sudden and explosive jerk's. 

I agree, probably unattainable in reality. But this should not prevent us from trying and at least starting somewhere on the right footing.