Full Disclosure

In re the Attorney General’s remarks about the need for us to speak frankly about race, I have a modest suggestion.

I suggest that anyone who wants to offer public opinions in this zone should first do a couple of Implicit Association Tests and publish the results on the internet. Here is one of mine, and here’s another one.

(You might then want to go look at the controversy over these tests, starting with John Tierney here.  Googling “implicit association test” + “malcolm gladwell”  also good.)

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22 Responses to Full Disclosure

  1. IAT’s are good as a tool of self-discovery, or when the subject has never taken one before, but the test, like any other, can be rigged. If you spend some time practicing those tests, you can fake any result you want. If you start judging people by their test results, they will figure out how to get a result that looks good.

    Of course, you can also Photoshop any result you want…

  2. CarLitGuy says:

    Fantastic link, thank you.

    While I believe I am classified as “caucasion”, I’ve always considered myself and my family as “mutts”. Background is history and law. Results:

    The results of your tests are outlined below:

    Your data suggest no difference in your automatic preferences for White people vs. Black people

    Your data suggests a slight automatic preference for Barack Obama over John McCain

    Amusingly, I voted against Obama in substantial part because of Biden. McCain didn’t recieve my vote either – in the interest of full disclosure.

    However, I have nothing to add to the debate because I really don’t understand why this is an issue for some not insignificant portion of the population. In my world, either you have the best person you can afford for the job, or you are throwing your money away. Social inanities like race, sex, height, and weight are immaterial to getting the job done (at least, in my line of work). My opinion differs for jobs with physical performance requirements – I’d object to a 70# person performing fire rescue, just as I’d object to a morbidly obese person performing the same task.

    No, i’m not any fun at parties.

  3. Ivan Karamazov says:

    According to the write-ups about these types of tests, I would be well advised to NOT take it after first perusing the “Crime Stoppers” mug shot section of my local news paper. So what good is it?

  4. Polichinello says:

    Eric Holder is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

  5. CarLitGuy says:

    and it appears I need to spell check my posts. Apologies. Clearly, I am not now, and never was, an English major.

  6. Jeeves says:

    I have a moderate preference for black people??? Presumably (based on another IAT) straight black people. But I strongly preferred McCain over Obama. I’m also strongly right-handed, which I think tells me all I need to know about my outcomes.

  7. Gotchaye says:

    Oh, fun. I’d heard of these things, but hadn’t ever taken any. Not sure what I think of the results, though – I got none to slight bias on a variety of things, and I’m pretty sure that’s not quite right.

  8. Donna B. says:

    I was quite surprised by my result:

    Your Result
    Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American.

    There was one picture of a white guy who looked just plain mean, so maybe this skewed my result a bit. All of the other faces had neutral expressions.

  9. Speaking as someone who goes a year at a time without deleting non-spam comments I’m disappointed at this site for some of the comments it deletes. I just did a refresh here and saw a post that some guy “Carter” posted is gone. Oh the irony for that to happen on a thread about Eric Holder’s call for more open talk about race. Obviously, he doesn’t really mean it. Just as obviously, people are generally scared to discuss race and don’t even want to be near a frank discussion about it.

    I also found Larry Auster’s deleted comment about marriage and Heather Mac Donald (who I greatly admire) pretty mild stuff. Though he stopped commenting on my blog because I didn’t delete commenters who weren’t polite to him. So go figure.

    Meanwhile, I leave up comments that are extremely insulting and hostile to me. I also leave up comments by Jihadists who want to kill us. I think it is important for us all to know what people are thinking.

  10. Donna B. says:

    I am really quite confused about my results. I took the two tests that you gave examples of your own… and my results were opposite, yet I feel we have a similar outlook politically at least. Socially, I have no clue.

    There is no rational way I can explain why I test as having a slight preference for African American and test as having a preference for European American over Asian American.

    This makes no sense to me unless familiarity is taken into account. Yes, I do consider Asian food less American than African American food. There is little difference in food preference between African Americans and southern European Americans – fried chicken, ribs, peas, greens, yams, etc?

    Yet, there’s a huge difference between Euro American and Asian American foods. Raw tuna and balut do not appeal to me. My Asian American relatives love the tuna, but they’re not so fond of balut either. But rice… both cultures like rice. There were no examples of Asian architecture on the test — the foreign examples were British and French. It seemed strange, as I love Asian art, especially Asian textiles.

    Finally, my question is why should the results of this test matter when it comes to speaking frankly about race? I’m not sure I get where you are heading with this post.

  11. Ivan Karamazov says:

    Donna B. :

    Donna B.

    Finally, my question is why should the results of this test matter when it comes to speaking frankly about race? I’m not sure I get where you are heading with this post.

    I’m pretty sure Bradlaugh was being sarcastic, and of course the “tests” are nonsense. That was his point, I think. That and the fact that if Holder took the “tests” and posted the honest results he got, he’d probably have some ‘splainin to do. BTW, Holder looks quite like he is of mixed race, so why doesn’t he just have a conversation with himself and leave the rest of us alone?

  12. rob says:

    Several things occurred to me:

    – He advocates discussion of the issues, while doing absolutely nothing to begin that conversation. He may as well have said, “you need to talk more about the problems of elephants,” and then said absolutely nothing about what those problems are. If anything, he’s providing an example of the cowardice he describes by dodging his own bullet. The hypocrisy of it doesn’t undermine what he is saying, but it is no way to begin a productive conversation.
    – References to February as “an artificial device” and being the “perfect vehicle” to start the discussion. He could’ve said this much more succinctly with “Fake it ’til you make it,” which is what he is advocating as a solution.
    – My public school education covered the socio-political climate of the 19th century, the civil rights movement, and various other similar events, so I’m not sure what he is talking about as far as education goes.

  13. Thrasymachus says:

    I came up as having a strong automatic preference for European Americans. Of which I am one. White people rule! Woohoo!

    But really, why should I apologize for strongly prefering European Americans? Most black guys do. (Ba-dump.)

    The AG asked for a discussion on race and this my contribution. I’m pretty sure he wanted people like me to keep their mouths shut though.

  14. Mr. F. Le Mur says:

    “Implicit Association Tests”

    I thought these parlor games, er, tests, were just a joke from a “King of the Hill” episode.

  15. Gary McGath says:

    Interesting stuff, though I’m not sure if it proves anything except that I can recognize landmarks. The result of the test I picked was: “Your data suggest little or no association between Asian American and European American with American and Foreign.”

    Several people here would doubtless share my complaint that the choices for “political affiliation” range from liberal to conservative. At least it let me leave that blank.

  16. drank says:

    Is there any evidence that games like this correlate with actual discrimination in the real world? There’s a big difference between an 0.1s difference in response time when looking at two photos, and deciding not to hire a person because of his race.

  17. Donna B. says:

    Thanks Ivan Karamazov. Now I feel a bit silly about not getting the sarcasm! Oh well…

  18. Anthony says:

    I don’t understand what Bradlaugh’s point is here. Could he expand on why he thinks these sorts of tests are useful in regards to a discussion on race? (I’m sure they could be in a variety of ways interesting, but I’m not clear what angle he is taking.)

  19. Pingback: Secular Right » SR Sets the Pace

  20. Randall Parker writes:

    “I also found Larry Auster’s deleted comment about marriage and Heather Mac Donald (who I greatly admire) pretty mild stuff. Though he stopped commenting on my blog because I didn’t delete commenters who weren’t polite to him. So go figure.”

    As Randall Parker well knows, and as I stated clearly at the time in the extended exchange at his blog (here), the reason I stopped commenting at his blog was that every time I commented there I became the object of personal attacks. The last time was an anti-Semitic attack. After I said that the case against Lewis Libby was an outrage and that he should be pardoned, a commenter wrote:

    “Auster is a jew [sic], of course he thinks Libby is innocent. Bush, on the other hand, is just doing what his masters tell him to.”

    Mr. Parker then politely explained to the commenter why his reasoning was faulty, but Parker did not object to the commenter’s anti-Semitism. He didn’t say that he wouldn’t allow commenters to refer to other commenters at his site as “jews.” To refer to a person a “jew,” lower case, is to dehumanize that person. Parker had no problem with that.

    I never called on Parker to delete commenters. I objected to the fact that he didn’t tell the anti-Semitic commenter that anti-Semitic statements, particularly about other commenters at Parker’s own blog, were not welcome.

    But how does Parker describe the situation? That “Auster stopped commenting on my blog because I didn’t delete commenters who weren’t polite to him.”

    I’m sickened that Randall Parker, who used to respect me and frequently quoted me, would so misrepresent what happened, and in a way that amounts to a smear, portraying me as a tyrant who demands that commenters should be excluded and their comments deleted merely for not being “polite” to me.

    But sadly, this is standard behavior in the paleocon world. Paleocons equate Israel with Nazis and side with those seeking to destroy Israel, and they say that this is just “criticism” of Israel. A commenter made a disgusting anti-Semitic remark about me, and Parker characterizes this as a commenter not being “polite” to me.

  21. Sage says:

    Bruce, if you think the situation of American Jews is at all analagous to the situation of Palestinian Arabs in Israel, then you’re obviously not reachable on the issue. It’s not a “double standard” to treat different things differently, it’s what justice demands.

    Now, whether population transfer is a viable solution to the military and demographic problems Israel faces is certainly open to serious doubt. But it’s not a completely insane idea, given the seriousness of the situation and its implications for Israel’s future, and it evinces no double standard to consider it a serious option while placing the “Jewish question,” whatever that is in an American context, in a very different category.

  22. Grant Canyon says:

    “Now, whether population transfer is a viable solution to the military and demographic problems Israel faces is certainly open to serious doubt. But it’s not a completely insane idea, given the seriousness of the situation and its implications for Israel’s future,”

    At the risk of sidetracking the thread, in my opinion, it is not viable idea and while not _completely_ insane, it is pretty crazy. Putting aside for a moment that such forced deportations are war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is doubtful that such a thing could even remotely be politically practical. Aside from logistics, it would put the entire world up in arms, and would probably be enough to end the political cover that the US gives Israel.

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