On November 2nd, 2023, an MIT AFSA debate took place. The proposition was: “Resolved, that STEM is systemically racist.” A video recording of the debate is available here.
Thanks for having the debate and for writing such a thoughtful piece. Nothing is more pernicious in American society that this Leftist insistence on groups over individuals. I recall vividly a panel discussion on lack of (skin color, though they didn’t say that) diversity in the alternative asset management (hedge funds) industry. San Francisco 2017, I think.
Anyway, five people on the dais - one being a black man who ran a hedge fund. When it came to him, he said, “In my fraternity, I was the only one of my brothers who took an economics class.” He went on to say that if you don’t take into account self-selection and INDIVIDUAL preferences, statistics alone can appear “racist.” But as he related, no one in the economics department tried to stop him from graduating with Masters and Bachelors degrees in Economics.
This constant drip drip drip erosion of individual responsibility is the DELIBERATE goal of the Marxist Left - losers to a half-man who cannot compete to succeed so want to destroy Western Civilization rather than hardening up, putting on some big boy pants and living in the real world.
This comment reeks of petty tribalism, which should have no place under a post that aims (and succeeds) to address and realign real people's real concerns about an important topic.
Calling people names is not going to help you in whatever culture war you think you are nobly participating in. This debate needs more levelheadedness, data, and mutual understanding. Not *this*, which has never solved anything for anyones satisfaction.
WHAT are you talking about? What "petty tribalism?" Are you responding to someone else's comment?
What "important topic?" The bullshit lie that America - the freest damned country the world has ever seen - is "actually" some non-thing called "systemically racist?"
Really, O He Calling For More Levelheadedness, what in the fuck do you think you are talking about? Bring on that mutual understanding to replace ""this,"" whatever "this" supposedly, is.
I'm saying if you're truly worried about people calling America systemically racist when it's not, you would come to the logical conclusion that calling them "evil lazy Marxist bullshitters" is not the best way to convince anyone of anything. And you are as tribalistic as those Marxists if you think the optimal solution to this is to come up with new names to shout louder towards each other. You're free to go ahead and keep on doing that while adults are having these debates, but don't fool yourself into thinking your attitude helps getting rid of these Marxist delusions. Great job "owning" them though, keep doing that a little bit louder and you'll save the Western civilization.
Last I checked choosing to become a Marxist has nothing to do with "race."
I am not "coming up with new names to shout louder." I am correctly identifying a group of people who have self-selected themselves into positions in our universities and - increasingly - wider societal institutions with the goal of destroying our system of free people making free choices to replace it with the heavy hand of the totalitarian state run - of course - by them, not anyone who disagrees with them.
I have been "shouting" at the exact same level for decades, back from when I spent two years studying with real live convinced Marxists at the University of Chicago, before you were a bad idea in your daddy's mind. I am not getting any louder. I am however getting less tolerant of obnoxious children.
Aside from YOU doing nothing but calling ME names (e.g. implying I am a child as opposed to you, the supposed "adult"), do you have anything of interest to add to the conversation? Maybe you should take a break from data science and analytics to learn how to debate properly, or at the least speak to people properly.
Let me refresh your memory, as you seem focused on this idea that I am a child coming up with new names to yell at the Leftists (not a race) who are trying to ruin this nation: The topic is whether the observable outcome distributions of STEM attainment graphed against "race" is due to a macro force called "systemic racism" or if it's just the chance distribution of outcomes based on individual choices, however each individual may or may not be conditioned by various subcultures which may be identified in our society.
Last chance to make an actual point germane to this topic, before I stop wasting my time and mute you.
You're still trying very hard to classify the world into us (freedom enjoyers) vs. them (enemies of civilization) that you don't see that I agree and side with the author on this debate (and you do too I presume). That's exactly why I think your approach is not helping your cause. You can see that the author had a full on debate with those enemies of civilization and showed the (dare I say) adult "restraint" and respect to not call anyone names, becuase it's obvious to anyone serious that that's not the way to change anything.
And obv Marxism has nothing to do with race, that's why what you're doing can be accurately described as name calling.
You were either born yesterday, or are the most hardcore Stalinist if you think evidence-seeking and levelheadedness are Soviet characteristics. Try harder to not blow off your cover comrade.
"Criticizing the *supporter* of an article", while agreeing with the article itself, would be a great reason for sending someone off to gulags in mother Russia indeed. Job well done.
Oh wait. By criticizing me you've also criticized a supporter of this article. So we're both Marxists now. Supreme logic.
"This debate needs more levelheadedness, data, and mutual understanding."
I apologize for sticking my head here into someone else's argument, but your comment seems somewhat naive and/or Pollyannaish to me, because the liberal approach you're calling for has already failed, and liberals have proved to be completely impotent when it comes to fighting illiberal leftists.
Maybe you're just younger than some of us here, or you work in a corner of the intellectual/cultural world that has yet to be conquered by Social Justice, but it's been pretty obvious for awhile that the New Left has seized the means of cultural production and they are far beyond responding to reasoned debate.
And while Marxism isn't about race and we don't live in the Soviet Union, the Crit Theory people have swapped out the means of production for "marginalized identities" and have adopted the same punitive moralistic Manichaeism as the Marxists, where you're either a loyal foot soldier to the Revolution or a class enemy scheduled for re-education, banishment, and/or cancellation. Yesterday's kulak is today's "racist" and/or "far right" extremist.
Liberals constantly demand we fight by Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Social Justice Left fights full MMA style (meaning no holds barred) and this is why so many well-meaning people who oppose their agenda end up mauled with bigotry accusations and other ugly slanders (and unemployed)—people who specifically reject liberalism will never respond to liberal incentives, they will just twist your words to destroy you.
The gloves will have to come off if we're going to take back American intellectual and cultural life from the dreary conformist cult that currently controls it.
Appreciate the reply. Would you agree that the author is being naive and Polyannaish for engaging with opposing views in this debate, and presenting data to explain why they are wrong? People see this article, agree with the author, and appreciate what they've done in this debate, then get angry when someone says "this is more of what we need".
I'd say this kind of levelheaded engagement is the difficult thing to do. And the thing that doesn't work is riling ourselves up in our respective echo chambers. If the gloves-off approach really worked, 4-years of Trump presidency wouldn't have exacerbated this issue tenfold. And what is the mechanism of action here really? What do we think will happen when we stop engaging in conversation and justify our positions with data? How does anything get better in that scenario? What's naive is not thinking these through.
This author could have easily written a much more aggressive, punchline-y Substack article to bash and own Marxist ideologues instead of presenting data or engaging in conversation, I guess we disagree that it's better they did the debate instead.
I think the dilemma we're grappling with here is the paradox of tolerance, or how to deal in a tolerant liberal fashion (if poss) with intolerant actors or movements.
(I would just say first that I don't think Trump counts as any sort of intelligent or coherent response to any of this, Trump is more of a flaming bag of shit that downscale white America hurled at the front door of their upscale white liberal enemies. Though I do somewhat support the DeSantis/Rufo tactic of exposing the DEI apparatchiks as parasitical political operators who should be de-funded and dismantled.)
I come at this from the perspective of the Humanities, where the groupthink and ideological takeover are complete and locked in, and where the only viable plan for anyone opposed to the orthodoxy is going full samizdat, meaning more or less publishing books, making music, making films etc outside the established channels, which have all converted en masse to the Social Justice ideology.
As for STEM etc, I do see and concede your point, reasoned factual debate is always preferable, and could over the course of time move things back in a more liberal direction. But then I think of the last few decades and having witnessed everyone who stands up in any way against the reigning orthodoxy be mauled and slandered (everyone from Steven Pinker to E.O. Wilson to Napoleon Chagnon to Coleman Hughes and Roland Fryer etc etc), with their efforts being ultimately futile and the ideological capture only solidifying.
So if reasoned debate is the best smartest option but reasoned debate has failed to change anything and continues to fail....??
My feeling is as with all prior Leftist takeovers, the Crit Theorists will destroy everything they get their hands on, at some point this will be impossible to brush under the rug, they will somehow be deposed, and whoever comes after them will have to clean up the rubble.
I don't know if this makes me an optimist or a pessimist...
Heh. I did a pretty thorough debunking of "Driving Minoritized Students out of STEM" paper that the "STEM is systemically racist" team seems to have made so much of:
Here is the short version though there is much more in the debunking piece:
"It is incapable of demonstrating that anything caused anything else, even though it repeatedly reaches causal conclusions. It is a case study in “you can’t infer cause from correlation.”
This is fantastic. Clear and direct. Your analysis of the translation of performance in K-12 to the proportions seen in STEM today was much needed and is striking. Thanks.
Is basketball racist? Should there be some affirmative action for, eg. people of Chinese, Korean or Japanese origin to be better represented in the NBA and other elite basketball forums? Strangely that these questions are oh so rarely discussed...
It is certainly fucking Heightist. How dare they exclude people who are not 6'8" from making millions on an NBA contract? Where are the protests in the streets?
From the foul line to the basket, basketball should be shorter!
Thank you for your contribution! Your experience of parents influencing your career decision at a younger age is understandable (they are parents, after all!) - for a first-generation minority college student it will be easier to get an approval to become a doctor or a lawyer, rather than, say, a geologist. So the fact that the latter has one of the lowest numbers of minority students in STEM likely goes back to K12 and unfamiliarity with the field, rather than the geology major acceptance process being disproportionately discriminatory.
But if, like you, a person continues to pursue their dream, especially in the modern Western education system, there are no systematic obstacles I have observed. If our fellow STEM faculty feel “guilty “ for being over-represented (as defined by a proportion of a specific ethnicity in the general population), they should voluntarily (or be asked to) forfeit their positions to a minority candidate. This will be the day they will start ripping off the Marxist stickers plastered all over our campus….
Equating HS students by grade point average, howver done, is invalid because schools have different standards. Equating by test score would almost certainly show that the black students were less able than the white, on average.
Thanks for participating in and summarizing the event. I am unable to make sense of the concluding sentence, "In the end, you must ask yourself: do you know any qualified Black scientist today who, because of discrimination—and not lack of merit—could not enter STEM simply because he or she was Black? " Here's my thinking. *Do I know any qualified Black scientist today?* Yes, okay, I have some specific persons in mind. *...who...could not enter STEM?* But they are already in STEM. What is the hypothetical you are trying to pose? Maybe *...who could not have entered STEM* but then if they could not have entered STEM then they wouldn't be a scientist who I could know. Honestly, try as I might, I don't understand the point you are trying to make in that last sentence.
Also, I think the whole point of the *systemic* in "systemic racism" could be the part you describe as "...course racism and past racism in particular might still be responsible for the inequality of opportunity that starts at birth." That is, I think you might be acknowledging that science (which itself might not be racist in its practices - it's debatable) exists in a culture that has racism in it, systemically.
When I read of analyses of disciplinary differences in demographics like sex or race, I wonder why I don't read much about the concepts of segregation of the Nobel prize winner in economics Thomas Schelling. For example, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2005/schelling/biographical/ Have those fallen out of favor or are just being overlooked? Were Schelling's ideas mentioned at MIT during the debate?
The "systemic racism" meme results from usage on the part of social scientists of the intuitive rules of thumb that are called "heuristics" in selection of the set of inferences that will be made by a moodel of a social system that they construct from a larger set of possibilities, On each occasion in which a particular heuristic selects a particular set of inferences for being made by a model, a different heuristic selects a diifferent set of inferences for being made. In this way, the method of heuristics violates the Law of Non-Contradiction (LEM). The LEM is amongst Aristotle's three Laws of Thought.
An available alternative sselects this set of inferences through the use of the principles of reasoning called "entropy minimax." Entropy minimax is the solution to the so-called "Problem of Induction." The problem is of how to select the above referenced set of inferences.
Thanks for having the debate and for writing such a thoughtful piece. Nothing is more pernicious in American society that this Leftist insistence on groups over individuals. I recall vividly a panel discussion on lack of (skin color, though they didn’t say that) diversity in the alternative asset management (hedge funds) industry. San Francisco 2017, I think.
Anyway, five people on the dais - one being a black man who ran a hedge fund. When it came to him, he said, “In my fraternity, I was the only one of my brothers who took an economics class.” He went on to say that if you don’t take into account self-selection and INDIVIDUAL preferences, statistics alone can appear “racist.” But as he related, no one in the economics department tried to stop him from graduating with Masters and Bachelors degrees in Economics.
This constant drip drip drip erosion of individual responsibility is the DELIBERATE goal of the Marxist Left - losers to a half-man who cannot compete to succeed so want to destroy Western Civilization rather than hardening up, putting on some big boy pants and living in the real world.
This comment reeks of petty tribalism, which should have no place under a post that aims (and succeeds) to address and realign real people's real concerns about an important topic.
Calling people names is not going to help you in whatever culture war you think you are nobly participating in. This debate needs more levelheadedness, data, and mutual understanding. Not *this*, which has never solved anything for anyones satisfaction.
WHAT are you talking about? What "petty tribalism?" Are you responding to someone else's comment?
What "important topic?" The bullshit lie that America - the freest damned country the world has ever seen - is "actually" some non-thing called "systemically racist?"
Really, O He Calling For More Levelheadedness, what in the fuck do you think you are talking about? Bring on that mutual understanding to replace ""this,"" whatever "this" supposedly, is.
I'm saying if you're truly worried about people calling America systemically racist when it's not, you would come to the logical conclusion that calling them "evil lazy Marxist bullshitters" is not the best way to convince anyone of anything. And you are as tribalistic as those Marxists if you think the optimal solution to this is to come up with new names to shout louder towards each other. You're free to go ahead and keep on doing that while adults are having these debates, but don't fool yourself into thinking your attitude helps getting rid of these Marxist delusions. Great job "owning" them though, keep doing that a little bit louder and you'll save the Western civilization.
Last I checked choosing to become a Marxist has nothing to do with "race."
I am not "coming up with new names to shout louder." I am correctly identifying a group of people who have self-selected themselves into positions in our universities and - increasingly - wider societal institutions with the goal of destroying our system of free people making free choices to replace it with the heavy hand of the totalitarian state run - of course - by them, not anyone who disagrees with them.
I have been "shouting" at the exact same level for decades, back from when I spent two years studying with real live convinced Marxists at the University of Chicago, before you were a bad idea in your daddy's mind. I am not getting any louder. I am however getting less tolerant of obnoxious children.
Aside from YOU doing nothing but calling ME names (e.g. implying I am a child as opposed to you, the supposed "adult"), do you have anything of interest to add to the conversation? Maybe you should take a break from data science and analytics to learn how to debate properly, or at the least speak to people properly.
Let me refresh your memory, as you seem focused on this idea that I am a child coming up with new names to yell at the Leftists (not a race) who are trying to ruin this nation: The topic is whether the observable outcome distributions of STEM attainment graphed against "race" is due to a macro force called "systemic racism" or if it's just the chance distribution of outcomes based on individual choices, however each individual may or may not be conditioned by various subcultures which may be identified in our society.
Last chance to make an actual point germane to this topic, before I stop wasting my time and mute you.
You're still trying very hard to classify the world into us (freedom enjoyers) vs. them (enemies of civilization) that you don't see that I agree and side with the author on this debate (and you do too I presume). That's exactly why I think your approach is not helping your cause. You can see that the author had a full on debate with those enemies of civilization and showed the (dare I say) adult "restraint" and respect to not call anyone names, becuase it's obvious to anyone serious that that's not the way to change anything.
And obv Marxism has nothing to do with race, that's why what you're doing can be accurately described as name calling.
Homo Sovieticus?
You were either born yesterday, or are the most hardcore Stalinist if you think evidence-seeking and levelheadedness are Soviet characteristics. Try harder to not blow off your cover comrade.
You're the one criticizing the supporter of this article, commissar. Don't be an obnoxious marxist child. Just confess.
"Criticizing the *supporter* of an article", while agreeing with the article itself, would be a great reason for sending someone off to gulags in mother Russia indeed. Job well done.
Oh wait. By criticizing me you've also criticized a supporter of this article. So we're both Marxists now. Supreme logic.
Doesn't work, commissar.
"This debate needs more levelheadedness, data, and mutual understanding."
I apologize for sticking my head here into someone else's argument, but your comment seems somewhat naive and/or Pollyannaish to me, because the liberal approach you're calling for has already failed, and liberals have proved to be completely impotent when it comes to fighting illiberal leftists.
Maybe you're just younger than some of us here, or you work in a corner of the intellectual/cultural world that has yet to be conquered by Social Justice, but it's been pretty obvious for awhile that the New Left has seized the means of cultural production and they are far beyond responding to reasoned debate.
And while Marxism isn't about race and we don't live in the Soviet Union, the Crit Theory people have swapped out the means of production for "marginalized identities" and have adopted the same punitive moralistic Manichaeism as the Marxists, where you're either a loyal foot soldier to the Revolution or a class enemy scheduled for re-education, banishment, and/or cancellation. Yesterday's kulak is today's "racist" and/or "far right" extremist.
Liberals constantly demand we fight by Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Social Justice Left fights full MMA style (meaning no holds barred) and this is why so many well-meaning people who oppose their agenda end up mauled with bigotry accusations and other ugly slanders (and unemployed)—people who specifically reject liberalism will never respond to liberal incentives, they will just twist your words to destroy you.
The gloves will have to come off if we're going to take back American intellectual and cultural life from the dreary conformist cult that currently controls it.
Appreciate the reply. Would you agree that the author is being naive and Polyannaish for engaging with opposing views in this debate, and presenting data to explain why they are wrong? People see this article, agree with the author, and appreciate what they've done in this debate, then get angry when someone says "this is more of what we need".
I'd say this kind of levelheaded engagement is the difficult thing to do. And the thing that doesn't work is riling ourselves up in our respective echo chambers. If the gloves-off approach really worked, 4-years of Trump presidency wouldn't have exacerbated this issue tenfold. And what is the mechanism of action here really? What do we think will happen when we stop engaging in conversation and justify our positions with data? How does anything get better in that scenario? What's naive is not thinking these through.
This author could have easily written a much more aggressive, punchline-y Substack article to bash and own Marxist ideologues instead of presenting data or engaging in conversation, I guess we disagree that it's better they did the debate instead.
Great questions!
I think the dilemma we're grappling with here is the paradox of tolerance, or how to deal in a tolerant liberal fashion (if poss) with intolerant actors or movements.
(I would just say first that I don't think Trump counts as any sort of intelligent or coherent response to any of this, Trump is more of a flaming bag of shit that downscale white America hurled at the front door of their upscale white liberal enemies. Though I do somewhat support the DeSantis/Rufo tactic of exposing the DEI apparatchiks as parasitical political operators who should be de-funded and dismantled.)
I come at this from the perspective of the Humanities, where the groupthink and ideological takeover are complete and locked in, and where the only viable plan for anyone opposed to the orthodoxy is going full samizdat, meaning more or less publishing books, making music, making films etc outside the established channels, which have all converted en masse to the Social Justice ideology.
As for STEM etc, I do see and concede your point, reasoned factual debate is always preferable, and could over the course of time move things back in a more liberal direction. But then I think of the last few decades and having witnessed everyone who stands up in any way against the reigning orthodoxy be mauled and slandered (everyone from Steven Pinker to E.O. Wilson to Napoleon Chagnon to Coleman Hughes and Roland Fryer etc etc), with their efforts being ultimately futile and the ideological capture only solidifying.
So if reasoned debate is the best smartest option but reasoned debate has failed to change anything and continues to fail....??
My feeling is as with all prior Leftist takeovers, the Crit Theorists will destroy everything they get their hands on, at some point this will be impossible to brush under the rug, they will somehow be deposed, and whoever comes after them will have to clean up the rubble.
I don't know if this makes me an optimist or a pessimist...
Heh. I did a pretty thorough debunking of "Driving Minoritized Students out of STEM" paper that the "STEM is systemically racist" team seems to have made so much of:
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/driving-minoritized-students-out
Here is the short version though there is much more in the debunking piece:
"It is incapable of demonstrating that anything caused anything else, even though it repeatedly reaches causal conclusions. It is a case study in “you can’t infer cause from correlation.”
"a Williams College professor previously part of the Math Department, but now in the Humanities Department"
lol
Good piece - cheers!
This is fantastic. Clear and direct. Your analysis of the translation of performance in K-12 to the proportions seen in STEM today was much needed and is striking. Thanks.
Is basketball racist? Should there be some affirmative action for, eg. people of Chinese, Korean or Japanese origin to be better represented in the NBA and other elite basketball forums? Strangely that these questions are oh so rarely discussed...
It is certainly fucking Heightist. How dare they exclude people who are not 6'8" from making millions on an NBA contract? Where are the protests in the streets?
From the foul line to the basket, basketball should be shorter!
(Working protest chant. Feel free to improve it.)
Thank you for your contribution! Your experience of parents influencing your career decision at a younger age is understandable (they are parents, after all!) - for a first-generation minority college student it will be easier to get an approval to become a doctor or a lawyer, rather than, say, a geologist. So the fact that the latter has one of the lowest numbers of minority students in STEM likely goes back to K12 and unfamiliarity with the field, rather than the geology major acceptance process being disproportionately discriminatory.
But if, like you, a person continues to pursue their dream, especially in the modern Western education system, there are no systematic obstacles I have observed. If our fellow STEM faculty feel “guilty “ for being over-represented (as defined by a proportion of a specific ethnicity in the general population), they should voluntarily (or be asked to) forfeit their positions to a minority candidate. This will be the day they will start ripping off the Marxist stickers plastered all over our campus….
Equating HS students by grade point average, howver done, is invalid because schools have different standards. Equating by test score would almost certainly show that the black students were less able than the white, on average.
Hi Luana,
Thanks for participating in and summarizing the event. I am unable to make sense of the concluding sentence, "In the end, you must ask yourself: do you know any qualified Black scientist today who, because of discrimination—and not lack of merit—could not enter STEM simply because he or she was Black? " Here's my thinking. *Do I know any qualified Black scientist today?* Yes, okay, I have some specific persons in mind. *...who...could not enter STEM?* But they are already in STEM. What is the hypothetical you are trying to pose? Maybe *...who could not have entered STEM* but then if they could not have entered STEM then they wouldn't be a scientist who I could know. Honestly, try as I might, I don't understand the point you are trying to make in that last sentence.
Also, I think the whole point of the *systemic* in "systemic racism" could be the part you describe as "...course racism and past racism in particular might still be responsible for the inequality of opportunity that starts at birth." That is, I think you might be acknowledging that science (which itself might not be racist in its practices - it's debatable) exists in a culture that has racism in it, systemically.
When I read of analyses of disciplinary differences in demographics like sex or race, I wonder why I don't read much about the concepts of segregation of the Nobel prize winner in economics Thomas Schelling. For example, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2005/schelling/biographical/ Have those fallen out of favor or are just being overlooked? Were Schelling's ideas mentioned at MIT during the debate?
The concluding sentence asks whether race is a barrier to qualified people entering STEM today.
That meaning is obvious to me.
The "systemic racism" meme results from usage on the part of social scientists of the intuitive rules of thumb that are called "heuristics" in selection of the set of inferences that will be made by a moodel of a social system that they construct from a larger set of possibilities, On each occasion in which a particular heuristic selects a particular set of inferences for being made by a model, a different heuristic selects a diifferent set of inferences for being made. In this way, the method of heuristics violates the Law of Non-Contradiction (LEM). The LEM is amongst Aristotle's three Laws of Thought.
An available alternative sselects this set of inferences through the use of the principles of reasoning called "entropy minimax." Entropy minimax is the solution to the so-called "Problem of Induction." The problem is of how to select the above referenced set of inferences.