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Old 08-12-2018, 08:26 PM   #2270
sebastian_dangerfield
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Re: icymi above

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop View Post
In tort cases, contributory negligence is used to reduce an award of damages. A plaintiff who has been harmed $100K and who is deemed to be 10% at fault will recover $90K from a defendant deemed 90% at fault. As I bet you know, in some states and the District of Columbia, a plaintiff who has been harmed, say, $5M, say because a bus driver recklessly ran a red light and hit her, might recover nothing because the bus company's lawyer convinces a jury that she was 1% at fault, unjust as that seems.

When we talk about issues of systemic bias and oppression, and about what society might do to achieve a more perfect union, we don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how much of the inequality we see is the direct and proximate cause of bias and oppression. Beyond any reasonable dispute, the people who devote themselves to discussing how much the victims of oppression brought it on themselves are opponents of doing anything, on the margin, to ameliorate past harms, and are often working to reverse things that society has done to reward the content of people's characters rather than the color of their skins. Even assuming the best of intentions and perfect execution, I have to ask whether there would be any benefit to society from trying to use "science" to "assess" a marginalized group's "responsibility" for their own situation. What sounds like an intellectual exercise has the practical effect of saying to someone who got hit by bus, "sorry, you should have been more careful, you're out of luck."
This is an argument against engaging in research on certain topics. It doesn't address the issue of whether such research could be done.

But it does get to the point Klein hinted at -- that people like Harris should be careful about what sorts of inquiries they make. I don't know why he didn't say it as plainly as you have here, but my suspicion is he's uncomfortable, as am I, with stating, "Some studies, some data, some analyses, are better left undone, unexamined." That may be what caused me to accuse Klein of attempting censorship. It's not really censorship to say certain inquiries can embolden bad policies and should be avoided. But any open minded person recoils a little bit at the suggestion we should avoid certain questions and investigations. Or allow social or policy concerns to control how they're done.

I think we'll see a lot more controversy over research in the future. Our technological capacities increase at multiples over our abilities to consider the policy and potential social impacts of what they uncover. An endless number of potentially impolitic questions are going to be raised an answered over our lifetimes.
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