Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Sunday, 16 December 2018

Relative comparisons make fighting racism seem harder than it really is

I somehow didn't connect this to racism when the press release came out.

My guess would be it cuts both ways. Genuine racists may get worse when their perceived "problems" diminish : removing the foreigners (or minoritites or whatever group is supposed to be a problem) won't make them more content, but will actually make them think things are worse than before. Conversely, if racism itself diminishes, then those trying to fight racism won't perceive this either, and suddenly the song Baby It's Cold Outside becomes worse than the Holocaust.

The idea that concepts depend on their reference class isn’t new. A short basketball player is tall and a poor American is rich. One might have thought, however, that a blue dot is a blue dot. Blue can be defined by wavelength so unlike a relative concept like short or rich there is some objective reality behind blue even if the boundaries are vague. Nevertheless, in a thought-provoking new paper in Science the all-star team of Levari, Gilbert, Wilson, Sievers, Amodio and Wheatley show that what we identify as blue expands as the prevalence of blue decreases.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html

1 comment:

  1. When running out of targets, you expand the definition of target. This is transversal to society, and you can easily see it at work in both politics and science.

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Whose cloud is it anyway ?

I really don't understand the most militant climate activists who are also opposed to geoengineering . Or rather, I think I understand t...