Brett Weinstein’s Podcast Hosts Roundtable of Black Writers and Intellectuals

Based on the protests raging on the streets, one might mistakenly think that there is only Black viewpoint and that it is represented by the purported political aims of Black Lives Matter.

Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who, on his DarkHorse Podcast, has made a habit of doing deep dives into thorny topics. On this episode, Weinstein hosts a roundtable with seven highly accomplished Black writers and intellectuals. If you like good-natured self-critical discussions where the facts matter and where the participants actively seek to learn from each other, you are going to find this two-hour discussion fascinating. I found myself taking notes throughout and having my faith in humanity restored as this lively discussion unfolded.

Continue ReadingBrett Weinstein’s Podcast Hosts Roundtable of Black Writers and Intellectuals

Blind Orchestra Auditions Alleged to Be Unfair Based Purely on Optics

I'll open this article with a tweet by "The Science Femme, Woman in STEM":

Blind auditions were introduced in order to focus on talent, not what a musician looks like. In his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell celebrates blind auditions:

The world of classical music – particularly in its European home – was until very recently the preserve of white men…But over the past few decades, the classical music world has undergone a revolution…Many musicians thought that conductors were abusing their power and playing favorites. They wanted the audition process to be formalized…Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner, and if the person auditioning cleared his or her throat or made any kind of identifiable sound…they were ushered out and given a new number. And as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women. [pp. 249-250]

Musician and educator James Boldin concurs."The ability of even highly trained musicians to make split-second evaluations of a player’s skill is compromised [by the way they look]."

In the referenced NYT article dated July 15, 2020, writer Anthony Tommasini urges that blind auditions are not fair ("The status quo is not working"), because (he argues) there are not enough Blacks playing for major orchestras. It is stunning that Tommasini makes this allegation of impropriety without offering any statistics showing the extent to which Blacks listen to classical music while growing up, the extent to which they aspire to be classical musicians or the extent to which they apply to and graduate from classical music programs. Why has he failed to tell us the extent to which Blacks aspire to be classical musicians?  These numbers (which I haven't been able to track down) bear strongly on what I think about Tommasini's numberless conclusions.  If Blacks, as a percentage of the population, are less interested in classical music, the small numbers of Blacks in major orchestras might reflect that lack of interest in classical music, not anything nefarious.

Tommasini argues "over the past century of increasingly professionalized training, there has come to be remarkably little difference between players at the top tier."  He is arguing that there is so little difference among the musicians in the top tier that they are all good and there is thus no need for auditions. Apparently, according to Tommasini, orchestras should should simply assemble the musicians that are merely passable, then completely dispense with the meritocracy.

American culture is at an intense impasse. Many of us strongly believe that professions ought to be staffed by those who are best at doing the tasks demanded by the profession. Most of us want the best possible surgeon operating on our children and we want the best pilots flying our airplanes.  Increasingly, however, other people are making arguments that there is something wrong with any profession where the practitioners are not representative of society as a whole. They argue that bad optics constitute a prima facie case of unfairness.  I strongly disagree with the latter viewpoint unless it can be shown that participants are being excluded because because of the way they look.

When I attend classical concerts (I attend about one per year), I notice that the percentage of Asian musicians is much bigger than the general population of the U.S.  I assume that Asians* are "overrepresented" because they have more interest in classical music than the population at large.  This article from 2012 sets forth the numbers offered by Slate:

Asians make up just over 4 percent of the U.S. population, but 7 percent of U.S. orchestra musicians are Asian, and the figure rises to 20 percent for top orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic. At the elite Julliard School for music, one in five undergraduates—and one in three Ph.D. students—is Asian.

I have never seen any evidence that there is a pro-Asian hiring bias by orchestras.  I assume that Asian musicians excel at blind auditions because they make better-sounding classical music according to the people who hire classical musicians.

Why did Tommasini fail to interview those who hire musicians for major orchestras as part of his article?  Is it possible that those who do the hiring would A) argue that even at the highest levels of performance, there are noticeable differences in music quality among professional musicians, and B) they support blind auditions because this allows them to hire solely on the quality of the music?  I wonder even more, why would a person who hires musicians for a professional orchestra consider stepping into the current maelstrom of Wokeness in which Tommasini indulges by stating, on the record, that they hire the best musicians blindly, thereby putting targets on their backs for attacks based on implied or institutional racism? What would those who hire classical musicians have to gain by contributing to this type of article, which declares unfairness without considering extent of interest in classical music by the various demographic groups? Without this information, this type of article written by Tommasini is a cheap shot based upon innumeracy (or worse) and one-sided evidence.

I choose my own music based on sound. I rarely know what the instrumentalists look like when I listen to new music on internet "radio."  I like what I like and I could care less what the musicians look like. Blind auditions sound like a good idea for me because I do it all the time when I hear new music and then make an intuitive judgment as to whether I like that music.

I believe that the NYT needs to be avoid assuming that there is something wrong just because membership in a profession doesn't reflect the population at large. This argument, which is increasingly putting the focus on every profession, and which claims that every profession and college class must be representative is growing into an obsession these days. Where else should we apply it?  Is there something wrong when those who are gospel choir singers, professional football and basketball players, jazz musicians and hip hop musicians lack the proportion of whites (or Asians) that one finds in the general population?  The logic applied by the NYT article is the same logic that would conclude that police officers are sexist because 73% of people arrested in the U.S. are men. Men are arrested more often because then commit more crimes than women.  Why aren't there more men teaching kindergarten?  Why are there not more women car mechanics?  Why are only 43% of college students men? It is not surprising that demographics of every group don't represent the U.S. population at large.

I applaud organizations that take a special interest in offering education and training to Blacks who aspire to become professional classical musicians. It would be great if everyone who is interested in classical music had the opportunity to be exposed to that genre along with opportunities to perform and excel.

*I don't like to use the term Asians, in that it awkwardly and crudely lumps together people from many different countries.  But this is the term used by the Slate article.  I also consider it destructive to lump people into the cartoonish categories of "black" and "white."  See also here.  I need to also make it clear that while I think racial categorization of any type of pernicious, I am aware that bigotry exists in many places--many people do categorize others in these ways and discriminate against them based on these categories. Wherever bigotry exists, it should be vigorously prosecuted and socially condemned.

Continue ReadingBlind Orchestra Auditions Alleged to Be Unfair Based Purely on Optics

Hear No Facts, See No Facts.

At the Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes that many of the most vocal players in our re-energized race debates are incentivized to maintain conflict rather than seeking solutions. I have seen what Ali has seen about the the resistance to facts and statistics when these things are inconvenient to the narrative of choice by those supporting the Black Lives Matter political agenda (which is separate and distinct from the idea that Black lives do, of course, matter). Whenever there is such a disconnect between narrative and evidence, that is a big red ultra-suspicious flag.

Here are a few dozen other issues and facts courtesy of Sam Harris (Making Sense Podcast Transcript: "Can We Pull Back From the Brink") that the reform movement not only ignores, but intensely refuses to consider. Why doesn't BLM's website take a careful look at available statistics regarding policing on its website?  If it did, BLM would find significant support for the claim that police harass Blacks more often than non-Blacks, but they would not find evidence that police use lethal force against Blacks disproportionately.

If the people insisting on reform refuse to first discuss the facts on the ground--a vigorous exploration the facts, pro and con--why should the rest of us--the country at large--trust that movement?

Here is an excerpt from Ali's WSJ article:

Although I am a black African—an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of lockdowns.

Yet when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up.

The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing it’s simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to discredit its author.

I have no objection to the statement “black lives matter.” But the movement that uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven discussion of the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is the haste with which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves before it. There will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere. Without them, honest deliberation, mutual learning and the American problem-solving ethic are dead.

Continue ReadingHear No Facts, See No Facts.

A Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”

Say what?

Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:

  • White people are self-reliant;
  • White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
  • White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
  • White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
  • White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
  • The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
  • White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
  • White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.

Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.

Unfortunately the source of these words and ideas is a webpage of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a Smithsonian museum supported by U.S. taxpayers. Here is separate image of the “Whiteness” infographic. 

How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas?  How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?

I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of "race" from which the possibility or racism sprouts.  In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC's "Whiteness" page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.

Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The "Whiteness" page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.

It is demonstrably false that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That's because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC "Whiteness" webpage. Skin color doesn't  dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window of black versus white  uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology and phrenology, which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.

Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website ("work before play" and "rational thinking") are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.

NMAAHC's suggestion that we bifurcate people into "white" and "black" is based on an enormous falsehood. There is no meaningful way to distinguish who is white and who is black, because we are all varying degrees of brown, we are all from Africa (and see here) and we are all interrelated.Trying to determine who is more closely related to whom by physical appearance is often counter-intuitive:

By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.

Nor is there any meaningful basis for declaring that there is any unified "white culture" or a unified "Black culture." No people of any color all think the same. Not even close. No person has been authorized by all whites or all Blacks to speak on their behalf.  Not even close. "Race" is a stunningly unscientific concept.

There is more genetic diversity within a “race” than between "races.". Further, "there is no homogeneous African race" and "there is more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents combined" (see graphic under this title here) . As reported by National Geographic in an article titled, "There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label,"

[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

Continue ReadingA Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People