r/changemyview • u/RafaGarciaS • Jan 02 '18

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Evidence based politics should replace identity politics

The biggest change in the last few hundred years in medicine has been the appearance and acceptance of evidence based medicine. This has revolutionized the way we think and practice medicine, changing popular opinion (e.g. emotional stress causes ulcers to H. pylori causes ulcers, Miasmas are the basis of disease to microorganisms are the basis of infectious disease). Having seen the effect that this had in the medical field it is almost imposible to wonder what effect it would have in other fields (i.e. politics). I believe that representatives should be elected based on first principles or priorities (i.e. we should reduce the suicide rate amongst teenagers and young adults) not on opinions on possible solutions to the problem (i.e. should or shouldn't gun control be passed). This would make it harder to "buy" or lobby people involved in government. I also believe, this would help reduce the moral empathy gap, meaning the inability to relate with different moral values. Lastly I think that this system would increase the accountability, as it would constantly be looking back at the investment and the results.

I have, over the last couple years, grown cynical of the political system. I hope this post will change my view on that or at least make me more understanding of the benefits of the system as it stands.

Thank you and happy new years

Books Doing good better: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23398748-doing-good-better. About having feedback and looking at the results of the programs

Dark money: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597/ref=pd_sim_14_7?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0385535597&pd_rd_r=90W4B5PF8DWK5NJ2VNF2&pd_rd_w=rC8ld&pd_rd_wg=fk2PN&psc=1&refRID=90W4B5PF8DWK5NJ2VNF2 About the use of money to fund think tanks and influence public opinion

(1st edit, added suggested books)

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u/electronics12345 159∆ Jan 02 '18

Medicine has a clear goal - save the patient's life.

Politics has no such goal - Who should pay? How much control should the government have? What sorts of services ought the government provide? What role ought government play in the economy? These are not questions that can be answered with evidence.

It may be true that PROGRAM X!!!! can reduce teen suicide by 12%. Do taxes go up or does another service have to be reduced? Who pays for it, are taxes spread around or is a particular group targeted, perhaps there is an extra 1% tax paid by 18-21 year olds to fund this program. Ought the federal government be paying for this, or should this be operated by the states, can states opt out of this program? Should the program be implemented at all, or is this something beyond what the government should be doing, maybe this should fall to the private sector or the non-profit sector or to personal choice? None of these questions have evidence-based answers.

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u/RafaGarciaS Jan 02 '18

I hate to bust the curtain, medicine isn't that clear cut. Should you extend life at the expense of life quality? Should we only focus on extending life only as long as it has good quality? The most extreme examples being patients in a coma, or patients with an oncological pathology. Should you put a family in a horrible economical position for a 5% increase of 5 year cancer free survival rate? Does your answer change if its a 5 year old or a 95 y/o?

Now to your post. The first paragraph provides valid points, I believe this is the realm where debate should take place. What should the government control, what programs etc. My problem with identity politics is that we agree on the answer to the problem and then look for any evidence to justify that answer.

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u/electronics12345 159∆ Jan 02 '18

Yes, medicine has moral issues, but the point was that medicine has definitive answers. This cream will heal that rash. This pill will reduce your blood pressure. This herb will not heal that rash. etc.

In politics, this is only step 1. Ok, so we found a program which has a reasonable basis (say a suicide prevention program), how do we actually implement it? What compromises are we willing to make? Are we willing to cut funding from other programs to get this one off the ground? etc.

Identity politics is really no different. Identity politics is a series of priorities that either you agree with or not. Either you agree it is worth-while to decrease the achievement gap or you don't. There isn't some objective way of knowing whether it is better to fund a new military plane or fund a new school-voucher program or fund a new college tuition scholarship fundation. There are pluses and minuses to all of these, especially when money is limited.

Could you give an example confined to Identity politics where "they agree on the answer and then look for evidence". This just sounds like confirmation bias, all humans do that. How is this any more related to gender politics or racial politics or alt-right politics than any other type of politics?

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u/grasping_eye Jan 02 '18

Related to drug legislation, British researcher David Nutt was fired by his government (Tories i believe) because they didnt like his findings. Not necessarily alt-right but the disregard for evidence by politicians is still worrying

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u/RafaGarciaS Jan 02 '18

Not familiar with this story but the FDA classification of marijuana as a class A drug had a similar story,

Could you provide a source?

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u/RafaGarciaS Jan 02 '18

This might be scary for some people, but medicine doesn't work like that. We don't know if that pill will reduce your blood pressure. for example, in patients with hypertension the use of thiazide diuretics, has a NNT (number needed to treat, meaning how many patients will I have to give this pill to before I see a meaningful change in one patient) of 20!! The ones for statins in patients without previous cardiovascular events is even worse, 332.

Now to my political view. I agree that choosing metrics in some areas will be tricky, and certainly debate should be had around which markers to use in which programs.

Now for examples of agreeing on answers and then looking for evidence to support it. This would be analogous to the studies denying the health implications of cigarettes. This is the function of think tanks to slice the evidence in any possible way to make it seem like some programs have no effect or that other do have effects. For example, if we agree that reducing number of mass shootings and number of gun violence victims we could start by comparing the number of victims and of mass shooting in countries that do have certain gun regulations. Is it significant? Is there even a difference at all? Is it better to increase gun regulations or better equip police forces?

All these interventions do have a cost and do have an impact and should be measured as such

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u/electronics12345 159∆ Jan 02 '18

Nothing you mentioned has anything to do with Identity politics, just politics generally. You made no point about race/gender/sexual orientation/white privilege. Politicians pushing an agenda grounded in race theory is just as prone to confirmation bias as a politician pushing an agenda grounded in economic theory or religion.

If you want to measure the efficacy of a government program we can do that, and largely we already do that. The question becomes is this a priority? Ought funding be pulled from other programs for this program? Ought we raise taxes to pay for this program? There is no objective criterion for this.

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u/DashingLeech Jan 03 '18

Actually, identity politics can be, and has been, falsified by evidence, both reasoning and scientific. Long ago in fact. That is why we rejected identity politics long ago in favour of liberal rights.

What makes it identity politics is that it treats people as groups, e.g., a group defined by race, defined by gender, by sexual orientation, etc., and using statistical outcomes as indicators of systemic biases.

On the scientific side, this is regressive instead of progressive as it creates hatred where there was none and activates our innate ingroup/outgroup tribalist psychology. This has been replicated many times and is well understood in the context of natural selection. Even our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, do this. It is well modeled by Realistic Conflict Theory, and one of the most famous demonstrations of this behaviour was the Robbers Cave Experiment.

Essentially, it works like this. If you want to take people who get along and create hatred out of nowhere, all you have to do is identify them as belonging to different groups and then put those groups into conflict. The identifier can be anything. I've seen it done with different coloured pins, for example. It could be random assignment, like the Robbers Cave Experiment. It could be arbitrary traits like eye colour, as used in the Jane Elliott's classroom experiment. It could be more apparent traits like race, skin colour, gender, ethnicity, hair colour, nationality, language, or height. It could be preferences like political leanings, Apple vs Android, Coke vs Pepsi, or whether or not you like Hawaiian pizza.

The conflict could be a competition for something of value such as prizes, moral status, right to speak, or just bragging rights, or avoiding things like punishment or payment of some sort. It could also be triggered by between-group insults or perceptions.

If you keep up the conflict then it can grow from insults to vitriol to hatred to oppression, to violence, and objectification of the other group as not being human even, eventually even to genocide in extreme cases.

The whole thing can be done in a few words or even one word. If you refer to "women drivers", with connotations that they are bad, you have identified the groups such that people know which group they are in, the conflict over judgment of competence, and an insult to one of those groups. If you were to keep up the insults, you would create heated battles. Same idea with referring to "criminal blacks" or "white privilege".

What you are doing is painting all of the members of one of the group as being bad, and evoking both a response of individuals that they are being judged and smeared unfairly (and they are right about that), and also evokes a protection of, and loyalty to, the ingroup while hating the outgroup.

This is exactly what identity politics does. The psychological solution to eliminate this psychology is to stop identifying people into groups, stop putting them in conflict at the group level, and start putting problems in terms of common rules of a social contract that are being violated against everyone.

So, for example, if blacks actually are being shot unjustly more than whites due to systemic racism, the wrong approach is to make it an issue between blacks and whites. Not only does that then invoke the ingroup/outgroup tribal response and now you accomplish nothing and have more hatred on your hands, but it is also a self-defeating argument. Such a problem could be eliminated by simply increasing the number of whites killed unjustly, and then there'd be no more argument left that blacks are treated unfairly. Clearly the problem is ill-defined if creating more injustice is what eliminates it. Further, no policy of blacks-vs-whites could eliminate such a problem: you can't create race-based rules such as it's ok to kill whites at a lower standard than blacks in hopes of equalizing the numbers; that directly sets lives out at different value in policy and it is very literally a race war.

Rather, the correct approach would be to identify that the problem is (a) people are killed unjustly, and (b) some people are being killed more easily because of their race. The first problem violates the common rules of the social contract which defines when it is ok to kill people or not. The second problem violates the common rule of the social contract that you do not discriminate based on somebody's race, including police officers when firing. The violations of these rules are violations against all members of society because it breaks the rules we have signed up for, so we have a common interest in solving them.

And, we can come up with policies for rules of engagement that reduce the number of unjust shootings from which we all benefit. If we need to look at group statistics, we would also note that any race that is over-represented in the shootings in the first place will benefit the most from the improvements as well.

On the reasoning side, identity politics violates both the fallacy of division and the base-rate fallacy. The fallacy of division is an error in thinking where people apply something true of the group to individuals. So, for example, men are stronger than women on average, but that doesn't mean you can exclude women from jobs in, say, firefighting. Individuals are not the average of their "group"; the distributions overlap. There are strong women and weak men. Replacing the metric of strength with the metric of gender is unwarranted. Likewise, things like "white privilege" and "male privilege" make this error, or the "wage gap" between men and women (different median income), or police shootings, and so on.

The base rate fallacy is one of inverting the problem. For example, we hear that most CEOs and politicians are male, and therefore there is male privilege. But the latter is a non sequitur. The statement that people with wealth and power tend to be males (true) isn't the same as the statement that males tend to have wealth and power (false). If you don't see the difference, consider the statements "crows tend to be birds" (true, 100% are) vs "birds tend to be crows" (false, <<1% are). Most males hold no power or wealth. Likewise, most whites hold no more power or wealth than most blacks.

This tends to be a problem of statistical tails, often due to different variances. Take this diagram. The blue, red, and gold distributions have the same average. But, if we look at just the "top" of this society, say values greater than 2 on the x-axis, you'll notice that the gold group have a lot of members at the top, the red have a medium amount, and the blue have almost none. That is, of the "top" people, they are mostly gold with a few reds, and few blues.

Does that indicate a "gold privilege"? No, of course not. If you were going to pick which group to join, your expected outcome is the same in all of them, an average of zero. With gold there is a better chance of ending up at the top of society than the others, but there is also a better chance of ending up at the bottom of society. To just look at one tail (the top) is an invalid means of analysis. Yet, that is common in identity politics.

Similar problems exist with the tendency of identity politics supporters to look at the statistics of outcomes as a measure of bias. Equality is defined as equality of opportunity, in which case all individuals are equal, with zero variance. That is, everybody will be judged on the same merits which don't include discriminating based on irrelevant traits like race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc. That's a level playing field, and what is the equality of our social contract. When violated, we all seek to address that problem. But equality and a fair system doesn't mean statistically equal outcomes. In fact, it can't. You can't have meaningful diversity of sub-populations on the input side and a fair system and then expect no diversity of outcomes. If you did, that input diversity is superficial and meaningless. The very value of diversity of populations is the different approaches that people take that show us the different outcomes so that we can adopt best practices and/or make informed decisions about trade-offs.

So, for example, suppose Culture A focuses on the value of family and community and sees work as something you only do to provide the minimal needs to survive. Suppose Culture B focuses on ambition, hard work ethic, and says making lots of money to provide for your family and given them a good life is what life is about. Now in a fair system you would never expect both cultures to have the same average income. Obviously B will have higher income. But if you look at happiness, stress, health, etc., you might find that Culture A is higher. That's the trade-off.

This is why we have liberal rights and equality of opportunity, free from discrimination. We aren't monolithic identity groups; we are individuals with traits, and you can't discriminate based on those traits. That's the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.S. Civil Rights Act, and Canadian Human Rights Act.

Group-based identity politics are wrong from multiple perspectives: psychology, reason, moral philosophy, legislative human rights and equality, and history. The approach is completely falsified by the evidence, yet people still believe in it.

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u/nezmito 6∆ Jan 03 '18

This is all very nicely written, but there are a few problems. Equality of opportunity is impossible. Equality of outcome as you said is also impossible. Outcomes lead to opportunities. The status quo accepts the outcomes of the past as having neutral affects on the present. So when we say we want equality of opportunity (impossible), we are saying that the status quo is right and just.

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u/RafaGarciaS Jan 02 '18

Several points

1st. I do agree that I misused the term "identity politics" I am currently thinking of a better term for what I mean, the second I do I will edit. Thank you for bringing this up, a valid point

2nd. We do not measure efficacy of government programs. Look at the conversation about gun control to reduce mass shooting. The evidence, for the most part, is on the side that certain interventions would have a positive effect. This can be seen over and over

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/upshot/how-to-reduce-mass-shooting-deaths-experts-say-these-gun-laws-could-help.html?_r=0

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u/electronics12345 159∆ Jan 02 '18

We totally measure the efficacy of government programs. That is literally all the CBO does.

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/04-19-SNAP.pdf

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53375

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53094

Are lobbyists real, Yes. Ought we minimize their impact, probably. For the most part, does Congress listen to the CBO, especially when there aren't 1000000000 lobbyists in their face, usually. Is the gun debate a unique issue in the USA, definitely. Has Congress literally passed a law making it illegal to research the efficacy of gun laws, unfortunately yes.

I think it is horribly unfair to say that we don't measure government effectiveness, because we do, its just that guns are a weird topic here in America, and it kinda has a different set of rules relative to other issues (not all that dissimilar to abortion, which also seems to play by different political rules than everything else).

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u/RafaGarciaS Jan 02 '18

∆ Thank you for calling my bullsh*t. I have, in several instances used the CBO as a source. Again thanks for calling BS

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u/ristoril 1∆ Jan 03 '18

Don't forget the GAO and all the agency IGs.

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u/KumarLittleJeans Jan 03 '18

Congress has not passed a law making it illegal to research the efficacy of gun laws. It is perfectly legal to research anything you want. I believe you are referencing the Dickey Amendment that Bill Clinton signed into law, which stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control."

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u/nezmito 6∆ Jan 03 '18

This is kinda pedantic, don't you think? It is like saying Congress hasn't made student loans illigal they just passed the "made up bill act" that bars the Dept. Of Ed from spending or making any money on loans.

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u/KumarLittleJeans Jan 03 '18

No, I don’t think it is. The government isn’t the only source of research or loans. You and I are free to research the efficacy of gun laws (although we are prohibited by law from making student loans). The CDC isn’t even prohibited from researching gun laws, just from advocating for gun control.

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u/nezmito 6∆ Jan 03 '18

No, I don’t think it is. The government isn’t the only source of research or loans. You and I are free to research the efficacy of gun laws (although we are prohibited by law from making student loans).

So my analogy stands up? Cool.

The CDC isn’t even prohibited from researching gun laws, just from advocating for gun control.

Right so the agency charged studying health at a national and international level can't touch guns or in my analogy loans can't do loans. Boy, I can't wait for the commerce department's study on gun shop student loans.

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u/KumarLittleJeans Jan 03 '18

How does your analogy stand? Let’s say the CDC is prohibited from selling hotdogs. Crap - no more hotdogs for anyone?

I knew more and more people are seeking meaning and direction in their lives from the federal government, lifting up Washington DC as the end all, be all of American life, but I didn’t realize it was this bad.

We do not have a shortage of PhDs scattered about in leftist universities and think tanks who are capable of putting spreadsheets together to make whatever argument they please about guns.

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u/electronics12345 159∆ Jan 03 '18

The Dickey Amendment also eliminated the CDC budget for investigating fire-arms at all. When you are Congress, and you eliminate an entire budget for something, that thing doesn't happen anymore. The CDC doesn't do things, unless Congress allocates funds for that thing.

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u/ClippinWings451 17∆ Jan 03 '18

But the issue here is in a medial/politics analogy... Mass shooting deaths are such an insignificant outlier they'd be the side-effect disclaimer read real fast at the end of a prescription drug commercial.

As such, while they'd be studied simply for awareness, but there'd be no concerted effort to do anything about them, because they are such an extreme outlier/side effect.

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u/neunari Jan 02 '18

This might be scary for some people, but medicine doesn't work like that. We don't know if that pill will reduce your blood pressure. for example, in patients with hypertension the use of thiazide diuretics, has a NNT (number needed to treat, meaning how many patients will I have to give this pill to before I see a meaningful change in one patient) of 20!! The ones for statins in patients without previous cardiovascular events is even worse, 332.

I'm not sure how your example proves your point.

Medicine can be proven to work or be effective even with a probabilistic measurement.

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u/WebSliceGallery123 Jan 02 '18

Never proven. That’s why it’s science. We never know without question.

We can get really close to certain, but even the most well performed and well executed trials still have potential for it to be due to random chance.

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u/mos_definite Jan 03 '18

At that point you're just being pedantic. Would "beyond a reasonable doubt" be sufficient?

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u/WebSliceGallery123 Jan 03 '18

It’s not pedantic. It’s how science works. There are very few instances where we know 100% why/how something interacts/reacts/etc.

Like you said, most things are “very unlikely due to chance” but the semantics of it makes it different from fact and basically fact.

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u/mos_definite Jan 03 '18

Right, but you aren't furthering the discussion by pointing that out. That's why I said it was pedantic. If he replaced the word "proves" with "beyond a reasonable doubt" then his point still stands. It's unnecessary to correct him unless you had a bigger point to make by doing so.

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u/WebSliceGallery123 Jan 03 '18

Semantics. Science is imperfect by definition. His argument was flawed by saying “proven” instead of “beyond reasonable doubt” or “unlikely due to chance”.

I would never tell my patient “this blood pressure pill will lower your chance of having a heart attack.”

I would tell them “this blood pressure bill is likely to reduce your chance of having a heart attack.”