I think you got attacked for this posting because it seems to assume that racial biases do in fact significantly disadvantage certain racial groups, like blacks. That is questionable. It can’t, for example, simply be inferred from unequal results.

If however you were just throwing out a hypothetical then fair enough.

So then why don’t black applicants pay for internships so that they can prove themselves as reliable and productive? If “proving oneself” is a viable signal, this is the obvious solution.

The trouble with this view is that in reality, once your black employees have proven themselves, other companies will go to great lengths to poach them. The “racism” employers engage in is based on fear of hiring an incompetent employee who who will be abnormally costly if not impossible to get rid of.

Now I don’t know how stable ‘rational racism’ is, but it’s not trivial to undermine, as long as signalling remains noisy.

I feel like you’re being lawyerly here, not scientific. Like you’re representing team whitey, and it’s your job to craft arguments in favor of team whitey, rather than to try to create the best models of our reality.

Coordination, competition, and signaling between agents and varying scaled levels or organizations and systems, game theoretic solutions, I think this is part of the language of understanding race and other identity populations in the context of social reality.

If you’re telling me three white guys never disciminated against a black guy post-1950 without an articulated plan -that seems silly. I’m sure that scenario has happened with a variety of trait populations and directions. So how high can these types of coordinations scale up? I have no idea -but I’m interested in what experts and empirical inquiry have to say about this.

And I find lawyerly approaches annoying

I have blogged about the physiology behind racism and bigotry.

http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2010/03/physiology-behind-xenophobia.html

For two people to communicate, they must exchange mental concepts. To do this, the first person must translate the mental concept into the data-stream of language. The neuroanatomy that is used to do this is what I call a “theory of mind”. The data-stream of language, gestures, facial expressions, body language, tone, eye movement is transmitted, received by the second person and then up-converted back into mental concepts by the second person’s “theory of mind”. Fundamentally the only things that can be communicated are mental concepts, and it requires consilience in the two theories of mind for that communication to happen.

My hypothesis of what causes xenophobia is that when two people try to communicate, if their two “theories of mind” are not sufficiently consilient, then the error rate goes up. I think that when two people meet, they do in effect a Turing Test, to see if the other person is “close enough” to being “like me” to trust. If the error rate is too high, then no, the person cannot be trusted and xenophobia is triggered via the uncanny valley effect.

The initial feeling of xenophobia is a feeling and is morally neutral. If two people with non-matching “theories of mind” attempt to communicate, over time they begin to learn more about the other, and they each modify their “theory of mind” unconsciously so that they begin to understand the other. Eventually the feelings of xenophobia go away because the other can be fully understood.

This is not what bigots and racists do, they avoid the other, and so never learn about the other, never allow their “theory of mind” to recalibrate itself so as to understand the other and so the feelings of xenophobia remain and instead they make up quite nonsensical and false ideas to justify the feelings of antipathy they have for the other. I give a number of examples in my blog. There was a good exampel of that here, pretending that blacks from sub Saharan Africa are more closely related to chimps than Europeans are. That is complete nonsense. There are multiple speciation events between the last common ancestor of chimps and humans.

Suggesting that sub Saharan Africans are more closely related to chimps than Europeans are is complete nonsense and is a lie made with no information or data that it is correct (because it is factually not correct). Because the justification is incorrect, we know the hatred of blacks cannot be due to the false justification, we know the hatred must have come first and then the lie was made up to justify the hatred.

This is the problem of racism and bigotry. The bigots feel that the objects of their bigotry are not fully human, and so they must come up with rationalizations to justify their feelings. In the limit, the objects of xenophobia are just that, objects and not humans. As non-human objects they don’t have the properties of “real humans”, “real humans” that are “like me” and so they don’t desserve to be treated like “real humans”.

The problem of racism is that bigots are unable to perceive the objects of their bigotry as human. The fault lies in the bigot.

Yeah, I know, a good social scientist can accurately predict the future, if he dosent care about losing his job.

Even without coercion, large groups tend towards groupthink. The group tends to be less sane than the individual, tends to lose touch with reality, a problem that tends to set in when the group is seventeen or more. Add coercion to this problem, and the group will be totally bonkers.

Maybe blacks as a population are in a heritably genetic way less intelligent and there is also discriminatory coordination against blacks.

Coordination tends to be visible. Even conspiracies that are piously denied by the participants have to have centralized authority if they are large conspiracies with large effects, and this centralized authority invariably sticks out like dogs balls. Big conspiracies exist, but big competently run secret conspiracies do not exist. The last visible instance of centralized authority sticking it to blacks was baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, whose authority ultimately derived from the federal government – he made himself baseball Commissioner as settlement of federal case against the team owners.

In the 1950s, laws were passed commanding equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, and big bureaucracy created to find instances of unequal opportunity and punish them. Every single prosecution of this bureaucracy was based on evidence of unequal outcomes, not unequal opportunity. Although many loud claims were made of unequal opportunity, no evidence of unequal opportunity was ever presented in court and subjected to cross examination, except evidence relating to times decades previous when unequal opportunity was enforced by Jim Crow.laws.

From this absence of evidence, despite vigorous search for evidence, and frequent loud announcements that such evidence had been discovered, we should conclude that in the 1950s, blacks did have equal opportunity, everywhere, all the time.