Logical Takedown of Critical Race Theory (for comments; I am going to use this)

In schools and other institutions that are important to us, we should apply scientific thinking. This is not the same as "following the science" which is not how I was taught science for sure. I was taught that I had to understand.

The "scientific method" is essentially only two steps:

(1) formulate a hypothesis
(2) test the hypothesis to see if the pattern holds

The hypothesis could be anything, after all you're going to test it so don't worry too much about being wrong. But it should exist before the testing. You'll come up with it by some logical or intuitive process. It will be something you wonder about.

The hypothesis must be testable. This means it must be falsifiable. It must be possible to get a negative test result, for a positive result to mean anything.

When I was in grad school, this was contrasted to "data mining" which consists of only one step, essentially the second step above

(2) scour through the data looking for a pattern

without there being a hypothesis in the first place. Thiswas described as a great sin, but by the time I graduated four years later, it had become more respectable because people were making a lot of money on Wall Street with it. Computers were finding patterns in markets and traders could exploit them. The "zen" of such trading was that one should NOT try to apply common sense to the patterns, just use them. You were specifically NOT supposed to try to understand them. They could be true, at least for a while, and that's all you cared about.

Critical Race Theory

CRT essentially says that since some races are doing worse than others, they are being discriminated against, and if not that, then there must be some "residue of discrimination" that's still holding them back.

The "residue of discrimination" argument fails immediately because some races come in here and within a generation are doing fine -- many Asians. Hispanics too. In fact both races often start off better, then decline after a generation or two here. They lose their good habits and disciplines from the old country. But moving on ...

The "discrimination" argument has also failed. In fact we have legal discrimination in favor of blacks and hispanics now, where there is discrimination at all.

They say, there must surely be "structural racism" because otherwise they would not be doing worse! But "structural racism" as discussed now is not a suitable hypothesis, because it is not falsifiable. The attempted proofs all assume the result.

There are alternative hypotheses that stand up better to the data. Some of these are discussed in "The Bell Curve", that book the leftists hate so much.

(There's also phrenology. Size matters -- skull size that is. It was discarded 100 years ago as being a bad thought but never disproved. We might as well assume phrenology as structural racism.)

We're left with data mining: they are in fact doing worse. That is true. But data mining is only appropriate where you don't care about the reason, like a trader will do anything that makes money and he doesn't even need to know why, he'll still take the money.

It is extremely poisonous to insist on throwing away logic here, and out of thin air blaming the dominant population for a bunch of things and demanding reparations. Now there's even a movement saying that math and logic are racist, because "structural racism" cannot stand mathematical and logical analysis.

The people are waking up.