Detailed Abstractions

Yesterday, DA posted an article on the Economist’s debate over language (here) with the following [emphasis added]:

Irregardless, she goes forward to talk about more interesting research, including ethnic bias, gender specific nouns, and even points to a study which attempts to show Hebrew-Arabic bilinguals speakers seem to show more favorable attitudes towards Jews when tested in Hebrew than Arabic.  (I find that claim dubious, but without more access to the research, I’ll leave that point for now.)

My initial concerns with this research were how it was conducted and what assumptions were made.  After some searching, I’m unable to retrieve the actual study, but did find some underlying issues worth nothing.

The study Ms. Boroditsky cites above, used a test known as Implicit Association Test (IAT) (here via Association for Psychological Science – APS):

The study used a computer test known as the Implicit Association Test, which is often used to study bias….

The question at hand then, is whether IAT can actually show true bias.  The way it works (APS continued):

…Words flash on the computer screen, and subjects have to categorize them by pressing two keys on the keyboard as quickly as possible. It’s a nearly automatic task, with no time to think about the answers. The trick is, the subjects are classifying two different kinds of words: words describing positive and negative traits and, in this case, names – Arab names like Ahmed and Samir and Jewish names like Avi and Ronen. For example, they might be told to press “M” when they saw an Arab name or a word with a good meaning, or “X” when they saw a Jewish name and a word with a bad meaning. In this example, if people automatically associate “good” words with Arabs and “bad” with Jews, they’ll be able to do the classifications faster than if their automatic association between the words is the other way around. In different sections of the test, different sets of words are paired….

 The idea being that a quick test might help to show hidden biases, even for those who are actively attempting to prevent such displays.

Intuitively however, this test seems unlikely to prove bias for a few reasons. 

The first of which is our knowledge that human’s subconscious isn’t conscious.  By its very definition, we don’t know what it is and we still have little idea of how, or even whether, these hidden thoughts interact with our conscious mind or thinking.

The second is our knowledge of overall human development.   Take a child raised and consistently indoctrinated with racist ideals.  While not simple, some of these children do grow up and by themselves learn the truth:  hating others based upon their race, religion, or other superficial factors, is not just stupid, but also marks one of the lowest or immoral thoughts.

But take this person… Any guesses on how this person might do on this test, even if they now live a life of a non-biased person?  Speculation  for sure; but I think ultimately logical.

Which dovetails to the third basic critique, brought to us by basic ideas in critical thinking. 

Nominally, one of the things a critical thinker must do in order to minimize bad decisions, is to understand their own biases.

& in this case, I don’t mean to limit this to racial biases brought about through family or societal pressures, but consider the word bias as more encompassing to include any consistent mode of thinking which negatively affects decisions.

From that point of view, the biases one should look for in critical thinking outside personal life, (more…)

For more than 20 years now, with legislation leading back almost 40 years, the United States government has been pushing the idea that every citizen should have a home.

Based upon several studies showing high correlations with positive societal behavior for homeowners, politicians, leaders, non-profits, lots of people pushed for easier access to affordable housing.  In a Federal Reserve report published in 1999, they state:

A number of recent studies attempt to measure whether there are nontraditional benefits to homeownership, such as increases in the success of children (Green and White [5]), citizenship (DiPasquale and Glaeser [3]), and a variety of family outcomes and attitudes (Rossi and Weber [11])….

This is only 1/2 the story of course.  What these studies, our politicians, our leaders, & the rest of them  can’t conclude from this data is whether home ownership actually affects any of these additional traits.  The study itself hints at this:

…Because of the preferential tax treatment accorded homeowners, particularly low-income homeowners, and the large degree of wealth accumulated in housing, these authors argue that it is important to know the full range of homeownership benefits and costs. However, given the difficulty of credibly assigning causality to housing externalities, it is not surprising that such factors have been previously ignored.

In one such paper, Green and White [5] find a strong statistical correlation between homeownership and the likelihood of dropping out of school or becoming pregnant. Yet a reasonable interpretation of their result is that of omitted variable bias. Clearly, homeowners are different from renters along a variety of dimensions. As a result, those factors that are latent in their work, such as parental skills, interest in the educational process, wealth, and family stability, potentially bias upward any homeownership effect….

In other studies, they show correlations between home ownership & wealth accumulation, to help give more force to the “everyone needs a home” meme (study dated 2004):

For many years the federal government has promoted homeownership as an important goal for low-income families. A primary motivation of this policy goal is the concept that owner-occupied housing can be an important means of wealth accumulation, particularly for those lower-income and minority families that are able to purchase homes….

They as well admit the difficulty with this assessment:

…However, very little has been done in the housing literature to determine the importance of housing and non-housing sources of wealth accumulation. This determination has been difficult to address for three reasons. First, detailed wealth information on families is seldom available on a consistent basis. Second, such information on wealth is even less likely to be available over time so that changes in wealth can be observed. Third, the process of housing wealth accumulation is dynamic. Housing wealth accumulation depends critically on how soon a family that is renting becomes a homeowner, whether or not the family graduates to more highly valued owned units over time, or becomes a renter again and never regains homeownership….

With the current practice of press & political standards however, you might be hard pressed to find any evidence that assigning non-traditional benefits to home ownership is anything but an unqualified good.  The majority of reports dealing with low income housing stimulus are positive  (here & here).

In some cases, overly emotional logic is used (here):

After business dried up in May, Jodi Morris’ employer, an insurance agent, stopped sending paychecks.

Since then, the 43-year-old single mother has had to sell almost all of her furniture – her kitchen table and chairs, bed frames, dresser and armoire, and living room set – to pay the bills.  Morris and her 7-year-old daughter, Karly, now sleep on mattresses on the floor of their two-bedroom Ahwatukee apartment. And with no table, the two eat dinner on their cream-colored couch.

An eviction notice that arrived this month threatened to put Morris and Karly out on the street.  But Morris could be the first Phoenix resident to receive a lifeline from the federal government that seeks to rescue those on the verge of homelessness….

& without exception, our government is not immune.  The US government is right now, before the housing crisis even fully contracts (I wrote about it here), spending money to help low income families purchase homes.

Even before the housing crisis though, economists, experts, non-profits, were asking whether home ownership should be considered an unqualified good.  Unfortunately, reports questioning these basic assumptions are a very low percentage compared to the constant noise.

In some cases, even questioning the wisdom of subsidizing low income home ownership has resulted in kill the messenger attacks from non-profit groups, community leads, and even Democratic leadership, by leveling charges of racism.  With a simple misdirection trick, questioning the basic assumptions is anti-low income & since low-income households are generally minorities, questioning these assumptions must be due to institutional racism.   Politicians and leaders everywhere have a grand ole time setting up straw men in a fields of hay while standing by with gasoline and matches, but we should expect more.  We should expect to be able to ask all relevant questions we can and to get answers to as many questions as possible.  Lastly, we should let the data lead to its natural conclusion.

Assuming we truly want the best answers we can get and the best progress we can have, we must be willing to ask tough questions and live with the answers reality presents.

Anything less is little better than just allowing random superficial rhetoric to control policy.  It’s almost like we never moved away from the world Richard Feynman spoke about in 1974:

…But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.