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American Grant Writing: Race Matters
PHPNerd writes "You might expect that science, particularly American science, would be color-blind. Though fewer people from some of the country's ethnic minorities are scientists than the proportions of those minorities in the population suggest should be the case, once someone has got bench space in a laboratory, he might reasonably expect to be treated on merit and nothing else. Unfortunately, a study just published in Science suggests that is not true. The study looked at the pattern of research grants awarded by the NIH and found that race matters a lot. Moreover, Asian and Hispanic scientists do just as well as white ones. Black scientists, however, fare badly."
The word 'race' has racist connotations and as a scientific concept is obsolete, 'ethnic group' should be used instead.
TFA says that they assume the peers are assuming race from "black sounding" names or historically black universities.
Why would any of these factor in during the peer review process? I would certainly hope that scientists understand what "double-blind" means & apply it to the review process. It doesn't matter what the person's name is or what university they went to or work at now. All that SHOULD matter is the quality of the science that is presented, therefore that is all that should be on the report that is peer-reviewed.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
It could simply be Affirmative Action catching up with a population. These sorts of studies always attempt to correct for "achievement" somehow, but two PhDs from Harvard may not be equally talented if one were to receive the position through some sort of AA. Sometimes things like this simply aren't measure
The original blurb:
Black scientists, however, fair badly.
It might not be fair how blacks fare, but I'm certain, they're not getting faired
Their results show that the chance of a black scientist receiving a grant was 17%. For Asians, Hispanics and whites the number was between 26% and 29%.
For all we know, this statistic is just due to random chance.
As much as everyone loves to play the race card, you can not deny this IS a possibility.
I'm also not denying that it's a possibility that it is indeed the truth, though. -shrug-
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
A fine, though debatable point: the study in Science does not suggest that grant applications are not treated on merit. In fact, racial identity is not known by the grant reviewers on study section. Further, the article mentioned that previous studies at top schools did not show this bias. One possibility (which I do not necessarily advocate) that was not discussed by the article, is that their 'controls' for institutional quality, quality of educational institutions attended, etc., are not ideal for use as a control. For many years, both undergraduate and graduate programs in the biomedical field have used different standards of admittance for blacks and whites/Asians. A less qualified black person can take the place of a more qualified white person. I'm not saying this is bad - it's simply a fact, and it shouldn't' be ignored. This can also take place in hiring decisions. Thus, a black person can have a CV which appears identical to a white person's CV, but the merit required to achieve it can be substantially less. The opposite would happen if quotas were enforced in the NBA - Doug Gottlieb might make a team, but he'd never get mentioned with Bird or Nowitzki as a great player, and the overall quality of the league might go down. It's interesting that the study found different conclusions for blacks and Latinos.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
I wonder what the results would be if they controlled for people who benefitted from affirmative action policies that let them into schools with lower grades and test scores.
They've already noted this with law degrees: http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/morel/04/disaffirmation.html
It seems plausible to posit that regardless of ethnic or racial background, people who are held to lower standards might not fare so well in real life competition.
Doesn't focusing on differences (like this study) just perpetuate racism?
Who pays for such a "study" anyways?
Massive discrimination, in grant reviewing and in every other area, is as old as science itself.
I read about a study in which the authors took the exact same papers under the exact same completely fictional student names and submitted them in massive round-robin cycles to all the applicable journals. Sometimes, they put Harvard, UNC, or Vanderbilt down as the university source and sometimes WSU, East Carolina, or Buttfucksville University of the Holy Trinity.
I'll let you just imagine how acceptance rates came out.
All science funding and publishing is bullshit. Black scientists may get extra fucked over, but no one is treated fairly outside of the Ivy League and maybe another 20 top R1 schools.
This is unconvincing. Here's the deal:
It is well known that U.S. born black people going through college in the US get breaks not afforded to everyone else. We have even seen egregious examples of passes that should have been fails and even examples of plagiarism that has gone unaddressed and unpunished when done by black people. We know all too well how the system seeks "fairness and balance" by giving advantage to the "disadvantaged." But what happens after graduation?
Well, let's just say, I would be reluctant to go to a black doctor and would be more inclined to go to a doctor from India. Does that make me a racist? Hell no it doesn't. It's the fact that there has been a huge and competitive flow of medical students from India and only the best can get through the process due to various numeric limitations put into place by administrations in the name of "fairness, balance and diversity." Meanwhile, in order to keep the numbers of black doctors higher, they have to make allowances quite often. But how does this affect quality? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if you have to lower standards in order to boost numbers, then quality will drop.
Does that mean "black doctors and scientists are of lesser quality" because they are black? NO! Not if you rate them on merit... individually without consideration of race. But when you start considering race, then you will see there will be "fewer black people get grants."
There is a lot more going on behind the scenes than this article addresses. It certainly doesn't offer detailed statistics covering the spread of scores presented by the various applicants.
Racism needs to go away. Every time someone tries to make a point like this, it just goes to show how racist they actually are.
On the other hand black athletes do overwhelmingly better than white ones. Is it because of discrimination in the granting of NFL contracts to black guys over the whites?
Or it could be that genes that favor physical prowess over raw intellectual aptitude are more present in individuals with dark skin than those who are paler? Maybe the corollary is also possible, that the 'bookworm genes' are about 10% more present in people with white skin.
No, that would be politically incorrect - hell, criminal - to utter, ergo, discrimination on basis of race must be the issue here.
Another example of the 'opressed/opressor ideology' and collectivism that is being the downfall of western civilization on display, nothing to see here folks.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
If you want to prove something you already know, you're science-ing wrong, or rather you're not doing science at all.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Please be a troll. If you aren't, I suggest you read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He makes a convincing argument that race has nothing to do with it.
Has anyone looked at the grants to see? Maybe the ones by blacks aren't actually as good.
We know that statistically blacks have lower IQs. Given that there is more genetic difference between different groups of blacks than there is between blacks and whites, it is reasonable to assume that this is due to environmental factors. However, the grant writers grew up in the same environment, the same America as the rest. It is not unreasonable to investigate that some of the grants might not be as good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You should read up on some of the more interesting "penis size" studies. I think there would be similar findings if a similar study of intelligence and other mental capacities were measured across ethnicities.
What I found most interesting that that "most men are 'average sized' regardless of race." It's just that among black men, there is a higher incident of "larger than average" sizes. Similarly, among asians, there is a higher incident of smaller than average sizes. But the fact remains, most men are average regardless of ethnicity.
I fully expect the same of black men with regards to intelligence and mental capacity/capability.
But you know? There is also something to be said about the fact that all non-black people seem to have at least a little neanderthal in them. It has been widely believed that since neanderthals had larger brains that they were actually smarter than the presumed modern humans. They disappeared, but they also mixed with the humans that migrated out of Africa. So is it worth considering that the neanderthal component has served to boost the mental capacity of non-african humans?
Gosh! That sounds exactly the type of thing those very same Germans were trying to say!
Are there genetic differences between races? ABSOLUTELY.
HOWEVER, test scores and all sorts of measurements over the years have shown that socio-economic standing and other factors are WAY more important than race. Race, if a factor, is not a major factor in intelligence- certainly not enough to sway such a big gap.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Explain Einstein then. A jew. Oh, jews don't count. How german of you.
How come asians do well then? Hispanics?
So race only matters to blacks... the peers don't guess the race from Mr Hernandez Lopez? But guess the race of Denzel Washington? I see.
Last time I checked many American blacks have western names, some might resent it but how then can I tell color from it?
I think there is something else going on, something that nobody dares the touch. Me? I am not going to touch it either. Lets just all dance around the elephant in the room.
Oh never mind. How come that is acceptable to claim Jews are smart or asians study hard? But if you dare to even hint that maybe some other cultures (Since jews are not a race but a religion (with many divisions into different cultures)) have negative standouts?
There is a black stand-up comedian who always bitches about race. Then a black man becomes president. His comments? This ain't going change anything and just make it harder for blacks.
With an attitude like that I bet all the black papers are marked down by black peers angry another black man is doing well.
Oh wait, the article forgot that didn't it. There are plenty of peer's who are NOT white racists like me. So are they saying ALL peer reviewers got it in for the black man?
Oh and what about women? Science is old men, how are papers with female names rated?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lots of big words that didn't seem to say anything.
I've been working in IT for over 15 years...I have seen blacks in the companies I work at treated unfairly time and time again. The sad truth is the blacks who do well at companies are forced to act a certain way - all the successful ones I know are generally more friendly and jovial than the average white worker, and if some racist crank in some other part of the company says something offbeat about them, they just laugh it off. I see the same situation over and over. The racist crank is usually a middle-aged white guy, whose bonafides the young but educated and talented troops question, but were hired into the startup by the young top management because I guess they (or VC) wants what looks like adult supervision around, which I guess is middle-aged white guys who are perceived to be incompetent. This is probably not helped by the bizarre (often sexually-tinged) racist statements or assumptions you hear through the grapevine that they made - not just about the black and non-white employees, but other non-whites.
Another case I've seen more than once is a black co-worker in my IT group, and a young (late 20s, 30s) white junior manager over us, or perhaps the white junior manager is in a parallel group but has some sway on our group. Whatever the black teammate does, the white manager just seems to have it in for them for no reason. One of these managers I was myself friends with, he had no problems whatsoever going into vivid detail about how he hated Muslims. He also really disliked the black guy in my group, but never really gave a reason why, even when I subtly asked him why he didn't when we were alone drinking a beer at a bar. I didn't really get a real answer. Any IT worker who wants to go into management I have some suspicion of where there head is at anyhow.
I've seen other scenarios where I just didn't know, like someone passed over for promotion at a certain point. What factors went into this? I DON'T count this as definite racism as I don't know what factors went into the decisions, and they may have been completely legitimate. The point is, things work on open and hidden levels, and maybe even unconscious levels. In other words, my point with promotions is, there may be cases of race being a factor that I have not listed, as I don't know whether or not they were.
These are scenarios I saw myself where the racism was fairly obvious. But people are smart nowadays to not be too obvious. It makes me think of what Reagan and Bush aide Lee Atwater said about campaigning politically on race:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it."
This is what happens. The middle-aged incompetent white managers brought into the startups were dumb enough to say racist things out loud. The junior white managers who were on the black guys case for no reason are more subtle, even if one will privately talk about how he hates Muslims (not mentioning blacks though). Then there's people passed over for promotion, where I don't even know what factors went into them - maybe it is a legitimate reason. Things get more and more abstract.
When I was a teenager, there were local black kids interested in computers and computer networks who were as talented and some even more talented than the average white kids who did. While many of their white counterparts easily climbed up the ladder of things, through the educational institutions and then the corporate institutions, of course never having any trouble with local police institutions in the meantime, this just didn't seem to happen for them.
People come home from work, sit down exhausted and turn on sitcoms. Movie produce
I don't disagree. I think it is culture that unforunately holds many African American blacks back. There is absolutely no reason they can't be as successfull at attaining degrees and careers.
Bill Cosby is someone I respect in this regards- he is always campaigning for blacks to drop the "rap-gangsta" social regime. It doesn't mean "conforming to whitie", it means remove the cultural negativity.
If you look at the successfull blacks at any corporation- they don't wear loose baggy pants and lots "of bling".
HOWEVER- the blacks submitting papers for peer review are not going to be part of the sub-culture that belittles itself with stupidity. That they are not getting grants must mean some kind of racial bias. UNLESS they start their grant requst with "Yo! Gimme some Bling for this here paper"- something I HIGHLY DOUBT. I'm the last person to call the race card... but this time it seems completely justified.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
... and two thousand years before Germans almost took over the world, it was the Romans. Which raises the question: During the Roman Empire, why were Germans still barbarians? And During the twentieth century, why were the Germans so competent, while the Italians were the ones who constantly got themselves into trouble? I have a hard time believing that genetics somehow shifted from one group of people to the other. Maybe it has to do with culture.
Look at race car drivers- almost no female drivers- yet there is no reason why women should not be as good as men
Except for the well-documented differences in depth perception, which is critical for things like judging when to brake before an upcoming turn.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The way to make racism like this go away is:
EVERYONE has to stop judging people on irrelevant factors.
This means that government and academia has to stop having lower standards for people in oppressed groups.
It also means people like you have to stop assuming that the person in front of you was a beneficiary of those lower standards just because they are a member of an oppressed group.
Your reasoning above is correct statistically, but may be doing an injustice to the individual standing in front of you - an injustice that has the same effect as the racism that started the whole mess.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.