This,
is so dependent on what the “inconvenient fact” is and whether that ‘’‘fact’‘’ is in need of serious unpacking that a broader principle just isn’t possible.
IMHO, any argument of “We need to squelch a small nugget of truth, because if you give bigots an inch, they’ll take a mile” is treading dangerously close to appeal-to-consequences fallacy territory, if not outright stepping into it.
So how should one react to a nugget of truth like ‘The Jews run Hollywood’?
Because that ‘nugget of truth’ requires the unpacking of the history of both Hollywood and Jews to understand that it isn’t true in the way bigots think it is.
It’s a perfect example of Brandolini’s law.
But has anybody in this thread advocated actually suppressing facts in order not to unduly encourage lying bigots? I’m not seeing it.
My experience with this was bringing up disparities in crime rates in a discussion about police shootings. Pretty much everyone accepts that the reason more men than women are shot by the police is that men commit more crime, especially more violent crime, than women. Similarly, disparities in police shootings of black and white Americans could be explained, or partially explained, by different crime rates, rather than as a result of racism on the part of the police - or at least, racism in that specific situation. This is important to what kind of measures might reduce such shootings.
I knew there were racist explanations for differences in crime rates, but there are also non-racist ones, a couple of which I mentioned above. I wasn’t expecting people to take the mere mention of disparities to be endorsement of a racist stereotype, but they did. Apparently if there is a racist explanation for some government statistics, the only acceptable response is to deny that those statistics could possibly be accurate.
I think we’re talking at cross purposes. When I say ‘nugget of truth’, I mean that eg the Nobel thing is true. Not that it means some larger stereotype is true. It obviously is silly to infer from Nobel prize winners that Jews in general are extraordinarily intelligent, lol.
But aren’t you at least a little curious as to why there are so many Jewish Nobel prize winners? I am. I found this website in the first place because I had a lot of random questions I wanted the answers to. But when a question is related to a stereotype in this way, it’s pretty much impossible to talk about it without people thinking you endorse the stereotype.
Maybe that’s nbd in this particular case. But social media has an increasing number of people posting putative facts like this, and implying or outright stating they are evidence for some stereotype or conspiracy theory. At some point, you have to address this, even though it does take a lot more effort to unpack historical causes or look at various possible explanations than to post a fact and wink at a conspiracy theory. If everyone is afraid even to ask because bringing it up means they’ll be assumed to endorse stereotypes, they’ll never find out these causes, and may be left wondering if the racists have a point.
We should never lose sight of the “the bank never makes an error in my favor” dynamic when we see which “nuggets of truth” get offered up – sans context or deep thought – and by whom.
Several have advocated and endorsed not bringing them up and not talking about them, under threat of being accused of bigotry yourself.
So why are you trying to claim that it’s a “nugget of truth” in a stereotype which voices any kind of agreement at all with the stereotype? It isn’t, and it doesn’t. As you yourself say, it’s silly (at best) to claim that it does.
The specific kind of training involved in studying Torah, combined with the cultural emphasis on doing so and the willingness and in fact strong encouragement for adult men to spend their lives in that particular kind of mental work, combined with the types of work that Nobels are generally given for, appears to me to be plenty of explanation.
If that had been the question posed by this thread, I expect it would have gotten entirely different reactions. But the thread is specifically about claiming that such things amount to some sort of agreement with the stereotypes. Which I’m pretty sure that I’ve also pointed out repeatedly in this discussion
It’s a long thread. But it seems to me that claim has been brought up by the people claiming without evidence that they’d be accused of bigotry on these boards for merely discussing a fact, without discussing it specifically by claiming that it backs a stereotype. And that the thread itself is evidence that this isn’t true.
@Lumpy, can you tell us whether you intended your ‘nugget of truth’ to indicate some kind of agreement with the stereotype, please?
You’ve got to be joking. This thread is evidence that it’s very much true. This sort of belief:
is why I deleted my examples of real Twitter memes from my earlier post before clicking ‘reply’: whichever examples I pick, people will make negative assumptions about me based on them.
You act as if this is a novel suggestion. It’s not. It’s been heavily researched and analyzed, and discussed in depth on this board. Statistically, Black Americans, and specifically young Black men, are shot by cops at a far higher rate than the disparities in crime rates.
Read the thread title! it explicitly says so.
Not to mention the multiple people saying they can’t imagine any reason to bring up such things other than bigotry. It’s pretty damn obvious what conclusions they are going to draw if you do.
Except for all the times unarmed, non-criminal Blacks were shot and, often, killed and all the times White active shooter were arrested without being shot at never mind suffocated by a choke hold.
Got a cite for anybody in this thread advocating actually suppressing facts, though? As opposed to merely not propagating oversimplified so-called “nugget of truth” interpretations of facts?
I’ll have a better idea of what you’re talking about if you’ll actually quote or link to some of those several posts you’re referencing.
Given the claim that even official crime statistics are distorted by racism and selective policing, I’m not sure there’s any source that would be considered unimpeachable.
It’s not about unimpeachability, it’s that those statics do not say what some claim they mean.
The number of Jews in Hollywood in no way supports ‘The Jews run Hollywood’ and crime statics don’t support ‘Blacks are criminals’.
I think there are even more salient structural factors to account for here. AFAICT, the vast majority of Jewish Nobel Prize winners came from quite secular family and educational environments where they would not have been trained in Torah study.
In fact, the medieval-to-modern strict Orthodox Jewish culture of lifelong intensive Torah study for men has been very little involved with cutting-edge scientific innovation, again AFAICT. Jews who have been notable in science have overwhelmingly been interacting with more diverse cultural contexts, whether in medieval majority-Muslim and/or Christian societies (al-Samaw`al, Abraham bar Hiyya, etc.) or modern secular ones.
So why are Jews so overrepresented among Nobel Prize winners, making up about one-quarter of all recipients (and over a third of all US recipients) despite constituting only about 2% of the population? Well, here we start getting into “why are South Asian-American students so good at winning spelling bees?” territory. It’s not so much that their brains are somehow mysteriously wired for spelling success, it’s that the subculture of highly educated successful South Asian immigrants in the US who valued academic success spawned a sub-subculture of doing spelling bees as a popular extracurricular activity.
(Like, Canadians aren’t naturally physically better at ice hockey than all other humans, it’s just that Canadians tend to live in an environment that facilitates the playing of ice hockey and a culture that really valorizes skill at ice hockey, so naturally they’re going to channel more of the talented members of their population in the ice-hockey direction.)
So, why is it that modern (mostly European-American) Jews have been so successful at channeling talented members of their population in the outstanding-scientific-research direction? Well, in the first place, note that over two-thirds of all Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Americans. Are Americans naturally smarter or better at scientific research than other people? Nah, mostly it’s been that the 20th-century US was richer and much less war-torn than a lot of the other wealthy developed countries where advanced scientific research was being pursued. And we siphoned off a lot of the European intelligentsia fleeing oppressive regimes, as well.
How did Jews get so overrepresented in American academia, especially scientific research? It’s a long and complicated story, but part of it is the aforesaid siphoning off of European refugees, namely the ones fleeing antisemitic persecution. And part of it was the comparative accessibility of academia for Jews. Although many US universities had “Jewish quotas” in hiring until after the widespread repudiation of antisemitic ideology post-WWII, those were less restrictive (and more quickly dismantled) than the social exclusion that hedged about many other career paths, such as politics.
Anyway, this could be a whole thesis and I’m sure many such have been written; but the TL;DR is that I think the explanation of Jewish Nobel Laureate overrepresentation is way more complex, and socially contingent, than just “culture of Torah study”, much less “naturally superior yiddishe kop”.
American Jews of the early-to-mid-20th Century were also largely ESL speakers or the children of ESL speakers, which likely had some role in steering them toward the sciences and away from more language-centered fields of study. (See also: South and East Asian immigrants a generation or two later.)
True, good point.
In general, it’s extremely suspicious if someone can’t or won’t concede the slightest weakness in their side, or in the population they defend, or in the argument they put forth. It is usually a sign of arguing in bad faith rather than having no flaws.
Most people who argue in good faith will concede that their plan is not perfect, and that it has at least 1% or 5% flaw or weakness. They will argue, perfectly correctly, that it’s not a 30% or 50% flaw as their opponents may claim, but they won’t claim that it’s perfect. And, so, if someone can’t even acknowledge a nugget of truth that goes against their side, it’s probably a bad-faith stance.