Cast Iron Brains—one of only three good podcasts in the English-speaking world—is back with another barely focused rant about the perils of living in the modern age. This week we’re yapping about making stuff, the NFL’s practice of “race-norming” cognitive decline tests, and some various weirdnesses coming out of Yale. That might not sound like much, but there’s plenty to dig into.
Has something we said, or failed to say, made you FEEL something? You can tell us all about it on Facebook or Twitter, or you can send us an email here. Enjoy! Also, head over to the website for a show note with links relevant to today’s discussion.
Show Rundown:
06:00 — Making stuff vs. buying stuff
18:02 — NFL concussion payouts based on “race-norming” of cognitive function tests
01:01:56 — Yale hosted a talk by a visiting psychiatrist entitled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” and we discuss
This is mancala. It’s very inexpensive.
The Guardian: NFL families seek to end “race-norming” in $1 billion concussion settlement
UPDATE: As predicted during the show, the NFL has (appropriately) already moved to end this practice.
Scientific American: Pupil Size Is a Marker of Intelligence
Study: Glaucoma research finds that pupil size and iris thickness vary by race
An example of the sort of overlapping bell curves we’re on about.
NEJM: Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms
Lemonade, which is an insurance company, did a blog a while back that somehow factors into our conversation: AI Can Vanquish Bias — Algorithms we can’t understand can make insurance fairer
Here’s the relevant section:
Let’s say I am Jewish (I am), and that part of my tradition involves lighting a bunch of candles throughout the year (it does). In our home we light candles every Friday night, every holiday eve, and we’ll burn through about two hundred candles over the 8 nights of Hanukkah. It would not be surprising if I, and others like me, represented a higher risk of fire than the national average. So, if the AI charges Jews, on average, more than non-Jews for fire insurance, is that unfairly discriminatory?
It depends.
It would definitely be a problem if being Jewish, per se, resulted in higher premiums whether or not you’re the candle-lighting kind of Jew. Not all Jews are avid candle lighters, and an algorithm that treats all Jews like the ‘average Jew,’ would be despicable. That, though, is a Phase 2 problem.
A Phase 3 algorithm that identifies people’s proclivity for candle lighting, and charges them more for the risk that this penchant actually represents, is entirely fair. The fact that such a fondness for candles is unevenly distributed in the population, and more highly concentrated among Jews, means that, on average, Jews will pay more. It does not mean that people are charged more for being Jewish.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this distinction. All cows have four legs, but not all things with four legs are cows.
The upshot is that the mere fact that an algorithm charges Jews – or women, or black people – more on average does not render it unfairly discriminatory. Phase 3 doesn’t do averages. In common with Dr. Martin Luther King, we dream of living in a world where we are judged by the content of our character. We want to be assessed as individuals, not by reference to our racial, gender, or religious markers. If the AI is treating us all this way, as humans, then it is being fair. If I’m charged more for my candle-lighting habit, that’s as it should be, even if the behavior I’m being charged for is disproportionately common among Jews. The AI is responding to my fondness for candles (which is a real risk factor), not to my tribal affiliation (which is not).
From Bari Weiss’ Substack: “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind”
Here’s an interesting bit from Katie Herzog’s interview with the psychiatrist who gave this lecture:
Like white people having a high level of guilt or not eating bread. That’s true for some people, for sure. But I eat bread.
You asked me before, what is the unconscious? I think the unconscious is coming out right now between you and I. This idea that I’m the one that's generalizing is, I think, a defensive reaction to my talking about whiteness. You feel put on the spot and so I'm the one that's generalizing.
So you don’t think that you are generalizing?
This idea that I’m the one generalizing is actually defensive. Do I really believe on some level that every single white person is racist? No. Clearly. I have one percent left of that friend group. [In the lecture, Dr. Khilanani explains she has cut most of her white friends out of her life.] So no, I don’t. At the same time, I'm saying how it functions psychologically when someone says “You can’t say that,” and “Not all of us,” what you’re saying subconsciously is “I’m the exception to what you just said and you made me feel like I'm a racist and I don't experience myself that way. I do not want to experience myself as a racist and I'm going to turn the tables on you and say you're the racist because you're generalizing and that’s what a racist does."
The above is not the only crazy shit that’s been happening at Yale lately. Here’s the New York Times on the latest completely absurd student-led revolt against a high-profile professor: Gripped by ‘Dinner Party-gate,’ Yale Law Confronts a Venomous Divide — A dispute centering on the celebrity professor Amy Chua exposes a culture pitting student against student, professor against professor.
Somehow or another, we also briefly discussed red heads and anesthesia.
The New York Times: Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis — An organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important.
Finally, yes, the Pentagon’s GAY BOMB thing was quite real.
The little conversation included in the last three minutes of the podcast was part of a longer 20 or so interminable minutes that I excised from this episode, for your benefit. It’s the sort of topic that will only keep recurring in our conversations, so whatever you’re being deprived of, rest assured, there will be plenty more of it to follow.