devinhelton

Isn't there a problem with this Buzzfeed analysis in that it assumes that the engagement for fake news is actually real? We know that a ton of the engagement for fake news is itself faked for ad fraud purposes -- http://sadbottrue.com/article/profitable-info-dump/ -- so I'm not sure what we can learn from the raw numbers that Buzzfeed had access to.

We don't have one media. It's more accurate to say that we have leftist media (Jacobin, Chomsky), establishment liberal media (NY Times), generic for profit media (NBC nightly news, etc ), conservative populist media (Fox, Breitbert), conservative high-brow media )(City Journal, Commentary) and that all of them will at times exaggerate the crimes of their enemies and whitewash the crimes of their allies or ideological compatriots. Chomsky for example was himself guilty of whitewashing the Khemer Rouge back in the mid-1970s when he should have known better (see http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm )

Or read this New York Times obituary about Mao which totally whitewashes him -- http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.... The NY Times is hardly amplifying the crimes of communism!

Or going back further consider how the liberal mainstream press whitewashed the horrors of communist Russia (see this review of Malcolm Muggeridge's memoirs for example -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... )

At this point I have come to the belief that it is very hard to trust any media source unless you personally know something about the subject and can figure out which sources are credible about that topic.

Why I don't find that evidence convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13904403

Except the elders in the late Roman empire who complained about how citizens would rather cut off their thumbs than fight in the Roman army. Their decadence did actually doom them.

In general in history, decline and an increase in decadence is the norm, reductions in decadence are the exception. So many elders are in fact correct when they complain about the next generation. But the decline can often continue slowly for many generations before an outside tribe is strong enough to come in and conquer the decadent people.

This was the line taught in my freshman sociology class, but I have since been convinced that money spent on social welfare does not explain international differences in various social ills.

The idea that allowing businesses to discriminate poor minorities would actually help them is the worst kind of revisionism.

That is not what I argued.

The claim from mid-century academic sociology was that public housing (and later vouchers) in and of themselves would reduce crime and other social ills. You didn't need punitive work houses -- if you just gave the poor better housing they would start behaving better. I see no evidence that this was the case. And with regards to public housing especially, it seems to have contributed to worsening crime and social ills.

I follow footnote 17 and download the paper, and there is nothing in the paper about academic gains. I think the footnote must be going to the wrong place.

I have heard a similar claims elsewhere, but when I looked at the data it is not at all convincing. Here is Professor David Armor, who researched integration and desegregation for decades analyzing the data (From page 93. of Forced Justice):

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"Figure 2.7 shows black and white reading achievement between 1971 and 1990 for thirteen-year olds (most of whom are eighth-graders). In 1971, when most blacks in this age group had been educated in segregated schools, black thirteen-year-olds trailed whites by 39 points. Over the next two decades, white scores remained virtually constant, starting at 261 and ending the period at 262 points. In contrast, black scores rose steadily for most of the period, starting at 222 and ending at 242 points (following a drop of a point in the latest assessment)..."

"A number of studies and several noted educators have invoked the harm and benefit thesis by suggesting that black achievement gains observed in the NAEP might be attributed in part to school desegregation....Ironically, the desegregation explanation has never been tested by examining the relationship between achievement and racial composition of schools using the most appropriate source of data, the NAEP itself. Since the NAEP established achievement trends for blacks in the first place, it makes sense to test the desegregation theory by comparing achievement trends for blacks in segregated versus desegregated schools. If the desegregation theory is correct, larger achievement gains would be expected for blacks in desegregated schools than for blacks in segregated schools..."

"Achievement trends for blacks in desegregated versus segregated schools has only recently become available for NAEP data. ...Figure 2.9 shows trends in reading achievement for black thirteen-year-olds according to the racial composition of their schools. The desegregation theory is clearly not supported by the NAEP data. While blacks in majority-white schools generally score somewhat higher than blacks in predominantly minority schools (although not in every year), the trend in reading between 1975 and 1988- when the largest black gains occurred-shows that thirteen-year-old blacks in predominantly minority schools have gained virtually the same as blacks in majority-white schools. In the case of math trends, blacks in predominantly minority schools actually gain 10 points mare than blacks in majority-white schools. By 1990 there was only a 2-point difference between the math scores of segregated and desegregated black students....This pattern of gains for segregated versus desegregated black students in the NAEP is replicated for other age groups as well."

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That was from 1995. More recent NAEP scores show the same thing -- https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/sc... The racial achievement gap is the same size no matter the school composition. Black students do little better in schools that are more white. (And that little difference is probably correlation not causation -- higher achieving black parents both have higher achieving kids and are able to afford schools in more white areas, when you control for socioeconomic status the correlation almost disappears).

One of the few John Oliver segments that I actually liked was his one on how so many academic studies are bogus ( http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/john-oliver-scientific-studies... ). There are all sorts of problems with confounding variables, p-value hacking, cherry-picking data, etc. But what he missed is that all the problems he criticizes about health studies also plague the social science literature. And then he does exactly what he complains about when he cites that Rucker Johnson paper. You need to look at the entire literature not just one paper. And you need to put much more weight on papers with clear and straightforward methodology and where other people have checked the math and replicated the results. Rucker Johnson's paper fails on all accounts. It strikes me that Rucker may have made some obvious mistakes, but I cannot tell for certain because he has not published his data and calculations.

To the extent that I myself have looked over the entire literature, my conclusions are in line with these conclusions that were made when the U. S. Department of Education did a review in the 1980s of all the case studies of integration (From David Armor's Forced Justice, page 91):

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"Desegregation did not cause any decrease in black achievement. On the average, desegregation did not cause an increase in achievement in mathematics. Desegregation increased mean reading levels. The gain reliably differed from zero and was estimated to be between two and six weeks [of a school year] across the studies examined. The median gains were almost always greater than zero but were lower than the means and did not reliably differ from zero."

"Studies with the largest reading gains can be tentatively characterized [as having] small sample sizes two or more years of desegregation, desegregated children who outperformed their segregated counterparts even before desegregation began, and desegregation that occurred earlier in time, involved younger students, was voluntary, had larger percentages of whites per school, and was associated with enrichment programs. None of the above factors can be isolated, singly or in combination, as causes of any of the typically large achievement gains."

"Because of the small samples and apparently non-normal distributions, little confidence should be placed in any of the mean results presented earlier. I have little confidence that we know much about how desegregation affects reading "on the average" and, across the few studies examined, I find the variability in effect sizes more striking and less well understood than any measure of central tendency."

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My take is that if desegregation has any impact on achievement, it is small and drowned out by other factors.

From my reading of a lot of the literature, this was not exactly the case. The gap in teacher quality and facilities was part of the rationale, but not the whole thing. If the gap had just been in facilities or teacher quality, the courts and leadership would have just ordered improving the facilities in the black schools, which would have been politically a lot easier.

The primary theory for desegregation, was that segregated schools inherently lead to stigmatization and that stigmatization lead to lower self-esteem and lower achievement.

Here, for instance is from the conclusions of a committee from the state Board of Education in Massachusetts back in the 1960s ( https://archive.org/details/reportonracialim00unit ): "The experience of Negroes in the United States, from the destruction of their familial and cultural ties in the days of slavery to the demoralizing surroundings of the Negro ghetto and the predominantly Negro school, tends to transmit to each generation of Negro children a lack of self-esteem and a low level of aspiration, which are perpetuated and reinforced by the segregated environment of the public school...children attending racially imbalanced schools are aware of their segregated environment and, from that environment, draw conclusions about their place in American life ..."

From the same document, they site an academic sociologist about the problem of segregated schools: "Teachers expect less of the students, the students expect less of themselves, they are traumatized by the sense of rejection which stems from the segregation, hence academic performance cannot be achieved."

You can find similar quotes in the Brown decision, or the sociological work upon which Brown was based (The Carnegie Corporation's book An American Dilemma).

Now, I think that clearly this theory is wrong on multiple levels. And the solutions based on these theories did not work on any level. These theories seem to me like "just so" stories created for politically motivated reasons. It is especially interesting that discrimination has been cited as a reason for Asian-American academic overachievement. (The theory is that if you are discriminated against, you are going to work extra hard to achieve in areas where there are objective standards, such as math). I suspect that this is also something of a just-so story and that discrimination probably doesn't have much of an impact either way.

And a large body of sociological research touches on the idea of stigmatization, including of the poor and of racial minorities.

Many school reforms ideas (desegregation, elimination of corporal punishment, reducing emphasis on rote learning, etc) were based on this theory. The Brown versus Board of Education decision cited sociological research along these lines, for example. But the theories were wrong, so the solutions did not work. Professor Raymond Wolters has two exhaustive (if depressing) histories of these reforms and their failures. See The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967-2014 and The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation

It’s one thing, for example, to outlaw housing discrimination based on race. But if real estate agents and would-be home sellers subtly shun minority buyers, the effect can be the same. Professor Gans of Columbia has argued for decades that the stigmatization of poor Americans fuels entrenched, persistent poverty.

Sociologists haven't been ignored -- this was the theory behind Section 8 Vouchers which is a very large program. But again, the theory was wrong and the solutions did not work. See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/america... and http://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html

Nixon did not really do anything that previous presidents hadn't done. Those lines had already been crossed plenty of times. See It Didn't Start With Watergate -- https://archive.org/details/LaskyVictorItDidntStartWithWater... Or read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johson and read about all the blatantly illegal things Johnson did. Also -- the flip side of the Nixon story is that the FBI and perhaps CIA almost certainly got away with breaking the law and illegal wire taps -- https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/death-deep-throat-and-crisis... Should we be comforted if the unelected branches of government can break the law to expose the elected branches?

These statistics are hopelessly confounded by changes to the definition of "deportation" and are not to be viewed as reliable: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/2...

Au contraire. You may be being truly intellectual for the first time. Do you know the motto of the Royal Society, the organization most responsible for the birth of modern science? "Take nobody's word for it." That is the essence of science -- replication and verifying things for yourself. You are not anti-intellectual just because you question the authorities in charge of a particular institution (academia).

What fields are as sturdy as particle physics? Medicine? Biology? Climate change?

IMO, fields where there isn't a quick feedback loop between controlled, real-world experiments and obvious result are almost all unsound. That includes macroeconomics, psychology, long-term nutrition, etc. In these situations, you can always play with the variables to get pretty much any result. Thus academics who either are good at playing politics and PR, or who have a politically convenient message, will rise to the top, not the academics who are rigorous and honest. You can find good academics, but they are rare and usually aren't the famous and acclaimed ones.

So what was the experience like of the non-white kids in a majority white school (or vice versa)? That would vary a lot based on the particular school. I certainly do not argue that all schools would "welcome with open arms" outsiders of a different ethnicity. And especially not Charlestown High and South Boston High -- those neighborhood were quite parochial. When Italians started going to Charlestown High for instance, they were called "Wops" and such and there were fights. I don't have any good information on the experience of any black students attending those schools before forced busing. Most black students taking advantage of open enrollment would have gone elsewhere because Charlestown High and South Boston HIgh were crappy and overcrowded.

There was a voluntary busing program in Boston called Project Exodus in the mid 1960s whereby up to 600 black students were bused to mostly white schools. There was a survey of parents, that found ( https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0... ) : "Other findings indicate that the mothers think that grades have improved, the amount of homework the children have to do has increased, their children have more white friends, that there is not a lot of prejudice or discrimination encountered at the new schools. With respect to this last distribution, only seven (or 10%) of the respondents felt that their children encountered a lot of prejudice, fifteen percent thought their children encountered some, while 70 percent thought their children encountered litttle or no prejudice or discrimination"

This is asserted in episode 562, but no evidence was cited. I did a deep dive on this myself, reading numerous studies and various books, and in my opinion any link between integration and academic achievement is minimal at best. Read the two books by Raymond Wolters, and then compare with the American Life episodes, and make your own judgement about which side has the more accurate narrative.

It's the same thing.

Compare again to greed or selfishness. An excess of selfishness, avarice, is pathological. But having zero regard for self-interest, being altruistic to the extent of self-denial, is also bad. A modest amount of selfishness is natural and healthy.

Traits are healthy when then form a productive, evolutionary stable strategy. If I am ultra-altruistic, that is not stable because those who are more selfish will win out and become dominant. If people are predatory, that is bad because it leads to everyone bringing each other down. If people are modestly selfish, while engaging in reciprocal altruism, and a tit-for-tat (or maybe tit-for-two-tats) strategy against defectors, that is a healthy, productive, and stable strategy.

The same goes with tribalism. Tribalism can generally be defined as forming a tight bond with a group in order to perform coordinated action. If you avoid any form of tribalism as a strategy, then a group that acts tribally will dominate you. Avoiding tribalism is not an ESS. If you are tribal and predate on other tribes, that is also bad, it makes everyone worse off. The healthy strategy is for a tribe to look after its own interest, engage in reciprocal altruism with other tribes, and a tit-for-tat (or maybe tit-for-two-tats) strategy against other tribes that break the peace.

Oh come on. I clarified that people can be tribal in different ways -- by national identity, by religion, by polis, by clan, etc. You cannot get rid of people being tribal. You can change the type of tribalism (although that is not easy), but you cannot get rid of it. Since tribalism exists, you have peace when borders are clear, and you have war when borders between tribes are unclear, or when one tribe is actively preying upon another.

The Cold War was violent to the extent that boundaries were not clear. There were lots of fighting over third world countries that weren't clearly owned by either sphere (hence the very definition of the word "third world"). There was global conflict between the USSR and USA because both felt the other was predatory, both thought the other was trying to actively extend its territory. That is not a good equilibrium, that is not a good state of affairs.

Also, conversations are better when you make an effort to read with a little bit of charity. By "boundaries are clear" I do not mean that people should never associate with each other. The US and Canada have a clear boundary, with clear rules for coming across the boundary. That doesn't mean we never associate with Canadians. And if a Canadian commits a crime upon an American, they will be arrested by an armed American and suitably punished. And vice versa. That's a stable, good equilibrium.

Another huge problem with your article, demonstrated here, is that you never once acknowledge a time before 1977....Really, no big problems before desegregation? I know you know this isn't true, why write it?

If we just consider problems of racial animosity in Boston, on a scale of 1 to 10, they were maybe at 3 before forced integration and at 8 afterwards. That is my sense from reading the historical accounts. See the example of the black Southie school teacher who did not notice problems before the forced busing.

Obviously racial problems and disparities across the country go much further back. I intend to write more on that. Follow my blog if you are interested. But this post was already at 15,000 words so I just wanted to focus on the direct before and after impacts of busing in Boston.

Forced integration, while obviously not perfect, was necessary to start solving some big problems, even if it caused some new problems of its own.

No, in Boston, it failed in every single way. And there is no reason to think mass forced integration is necessary or even net helpful with regards to fixing problems of racial disparities.

Did you read my post? https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston I'm talking mostly about Boston, though I've found the same things when researching other northern cities. I'm not sure about the American south, I haven't studied it enough to either confirm or question the conventional wisdom.

In Boston, there was surely some racial animosity and shit talking before forced busing became a big issue. But it didn't seem to be that bad -- for example there is that quote in my post of the black school teacher who said she never had problems at Southie High before the busing. The busing made relations much worse, and the images we have of people being cartoonishly racist only came after forced busing.

none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.

In the northern cities, mass desegregation failed in every single way. It did not improve race relations, it did not make black people better off, it did not result in more integration. Read my post.

My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it.

What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland.

One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism.

And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be.

I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolch... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-q... [4] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-ev...

What makes you think it is the most informed coverage? These episodes only give you one side of the argument. If you want the other side try reading The Long Crusade and/or The Burden of Brown by Professor Raymond Wolters. I also myself wrote a long blog post about integration/desegregation as it happened in Boston, a post based on very credible academic histories, which gives a very different take than the NPR/PBS take: https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston

And there just went an hour of my time :-) Good collection of posts.

There are two problems with this. One, mixing people together often results in the two groups fighting over scarce resources (whether that be spots on the football team, dates to the prom, playing rights at the local basketball court, or well-paying union or government jobs). The battle for scarce resources actually greatly increases class or race based animosity. Second, there are very real differences in behavioral patterns between groups. If you bring in a low class population that is playing loud music until 12AM and letting their kids make mischief around the neighborhood, again, that is going to greatly increase classism.

See for instance the books "Boston Against Busing" or "Philly War Zone: Growing Up in a Racial Battleground" which describes the conflicts that happened when integration was a big thing in the late 60s and early 1970s.

I also wrote a blog post myself on how I changed my mind about the usefulness of Section 8 vouchers and using integration as a solution to class and racial divides: http://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html