Group Bias & Black Pigeon Speaks

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When you hear that
"Hello everyone" *short sigh*
you know you're in for an interesting 20-40 minutes or so

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 248 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 17 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Black pigeon speaks really is like a recurring scooby doo villain. How does he bring himself to put out these shite videos after being ruthlessly dismantled by Shaun every time?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 172 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/LongBowOolan πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 17 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

I will forever be impressed by shauns ability to read sources

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 95 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 18 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

"New Video 2 minutes ago"
"posted 1 minute ago"

>:c

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 111 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 17 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Not black pigeon speaks againnn

This dude is such a perfect example of the kind of immigrant that calls themself an 'Expat'. Makes me wanna make a video about so called expats.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 62 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 18 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Shaun is just the best isn’t he

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 83 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/alexcstern πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 18 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

There was a brief period of my life when I loved Sargon and was ultimately on track to becoming an alt right shit. I think I watched the Alt-Right dogs trailer video by Hbomberguy and then started watching more stuff and also discovering folding ideas. And that was how I started to realise that maybe I was wrong.

It took something that subtlety challenged my views to prime me to not just blindly reject anything that disagreed with my bias. (Also on a less serious note, I feel like my change in opinion directly correlated with me accepting that I also liked men more)

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 41 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/NameYeff πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 18 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Everyone is (rightfully) gushing over Shaun('s voice) but can we take a moment to appreciate that thumbnail? Because it is a thing of beauty.

I believe these are created by Jen, right? They are always great.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 56 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Heatth πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 18 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

That thumbnail is sheer perfectjen.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 39 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/blackfalls πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 18 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies
Captions
Hello everyone. This is a video about group bias. That is, the tendency of humans to form in-groups with people we assume to be like ourselves in some way, and out-groups of people we assume are different. It's also a video examining another video, one by YouTuber Black Pigeon Speaks, titled "Harvard: Diversity plus Proximity equals Republican Voters". That's novel, eh, a video responding to another video. I predict that this response video, which I've just invented right now, will be the hot new trend of 2019. Right, then. Black Pigeon's video. As always, I'd suggest that you go and watch that video first and I'll include a link below for anyone inclined. However for anyone who would not like to hear Black Pigeon speak, which is fair enough to be honest, I'll here summarize his argument. So, Black Pigeon Speaks starts out by recounting the so-called conventional wisdom that says demographic changes will make it harder, if not impossible for Republicans to win elections in the United States, leading to Democratic control of government. However, do not fret, all you Republicans out there. Black Pigeon then introduces a study. Well, actually before he gets to the study he waffles about Bernie Sanders and AOC for a while, even though they have nothing to do with anything he's talking about, but whatever, we will be charitable and not dwell on that. So okay, he then introduces the study, which is "Causal effect of intergroup contact on exclusionary attitudes" by Ryan D. Enos. Black pigeon calls this a new study but it isn't, really - it was released more than four years before Black Pigeon's video talking about it, but again, that's a nitpick. Now Black Pigeon claims that the study shows that, quote, "the liberal resolve of affluent Democrats can be completely and utterly dissolved when racially or ethnically charged issues like neighborhood integration are at stake". He also introduces a book by the author of the study, that being "The Space Between Us", published in 2017. As Black Pigeon is introducing this book, he shows a graphic of a hammer and sickle with an American flag pattern. And...why does he do this? I have no idea; go and watch it. It's got nothing to do with anything he's talking about. It's great! Answers on a postcard, please. Black Pigeon is getting his information from both the study and the book from a New York Times article, entitled "How Much Can Democrats Count on Suburban Liberals?" by Thomas B. Edsel. Now reading out this article forms the basis of Black Pigeon's video script; he just changes the phrasing slightly here and there to make it slightly less obvious he's copying. So let's quote this article directly now and find out about the study in question. And I quote, "Six years ago, Enos looked at nine townships southwest of Boston that were overwhelmingly racially and politically liberal. As such, these communities were a test of the power of demographic change, because these were people who we might think would be unlikely to change their attitudes in the face of immigration." And I disagree here. I'd say you can only trust a liberal as far as you can throw them, but that's just me. "Enos and his colleagues conducted an experiment, which is described in detail in a 2014 paper, "'Causal effect of intergroup contact on exclusionary attitudes', "published by the National Academy of Sciences. "The results are thought-provoking. Enos described the experiment as "'a randomized controlled trial testing the causal effects of repeated intergroup contact, "in which Spanish-speaking confederates were randomly assigned to be inserted for a period of days "into the daily routines of unknowing Anglo-whites living in homogeneous communities in the United States, "thus simulating the conditions of demographic change.' "Under the assumption that people with similar characteristics tend to ride the train at the same time, "I selected pairs of trains that were close together in time, so that the treatment units "(train platforms onto which Spanish- speaking confederates have been inserted) "within each station would have similar passengers. "Within a matched pair of train times at each station, one was randomly assigned to treatment and one to control, "resulting in 18 matched pairs of train times. "This design means that we should expect subjects in the treatment and control conditions "to be, in expectation, identical. "Subjects were exposed to the same Spanish-speaking persons in a location near their homes "for an extended period as would be the situation if immigrants had moved into their neighborhood, "and used the public transportation." And what were the results? Well, "Members of the treatment groups and control groups were surveyed before and after "the two-week-long experiments in an effort to identify the effect of exposure to Spanish-speaking people. "In both surveys, respondents were asked three questions about immigration, "along with other, more general questions. "Treated subjects were far more likely to advocate a reduction in immigration from Mexico "and were far less likely to indicate that illegal immigrants should be allowed to remain in the country." So that seems fairly open-and-shut there. White liberals who were exposed to contact with Spanish-speaking people on their morning train rides were more likely to support a reduction in immigration than those who weren't. Or, "diversity plus proximity equals Republican voters", as Black Pigeon Speaks puts it in his video title. So what do we think about his video? Why was it made, and what points was it trying to make? Well, my impression was that the primary reason it was made was to allay the fears of right-wingers about their exclusionary politics leading to future electoral losses as demographics change over time. As we know, white voters in the States lean Republican, but why is that? Well, I won't go into it too much right now, but a part of the story is that for decades the electoral strategy of the Republicans has been to exploit and deepen racial polarization and use racism, particularly racism against African-Americans and more recently, racism against immigrants coming across the southern border, to get white voters to the polls. And this isn't some conspiracy theory of mine - if you didn't already know that for whatever reason, I'd advise that you go and read about the Southern Strategy. All this stuff is quite out in the open. Now the problem with relying on the white vote, however, is that the white vote is shrinking. Not, I should say, because the number of white people is shrinking, if you're the sort of person who cares about that sort of thing, because it isn't. The number of white people is increasing, but the white vote as a percentage of the whole is shrinking, and those people who are being demonized by the Republican Party aren't too likely to be keen on voting for them, in the near future, anyway. The Republican strategists basically traded short-term electoral victories for long-term demographic catastrophe, is the worry among a lot of racists out there. Anyway, so here to address this worry is Black Pigeon Speaks, who has found a study that apparently shows white liberals will become Republicans as they're exposed to the effects of immigration, thus avoiding the coming democratic communist supermajority, or whatever it's supposed to be. Now, I should add here that I don't believe in the coming democratic communist supermajority, as nice as that sounds. Under capitalism, there's a lot of pressure and incentive for things to happen a certain way, and if I had to guess, I'd say if the Republicans did prove completely unable to get elected, those same things would still happen, but via the Democrats instead. Wealth will find a conduit to power as long as one exists, so they say. But that's all besides the point, I suppose. Now, there's a couple of problems with the narrative presented by Black Pigeon, aren't there? Firstly, if coming into contact with diversity is supposed to make white people into Republicans, then we'd expect that white people inhabiting large, diverse cities would be more likely to vote Republican than rural white people in white communities, who rarely come into contact with diversity, and that's not the case. You know, from that perspective, we could argue that living in diverse areas means one is more likely to be a Democrat, not a Republican. So oh no, a contradiction - How are we going to resolve these apparently conflicting results of exposure to diversity? Well, I was curious about this, so I went and read the study mentioned in the article, and also ordered and read the book by the author of the study, "The Space Between Us", which was very interesting. Here's a picture of my copy of the book with my very helpful research assistant there. Now folks, would you believe it if I told you that Black Pigeon speaks wasn't completely honest about the results of the train study? That's a brief pause for gasps there. A crucial part of the story has been left out, and it's this. The train study actually had two different time controls. and I'll quote here from a section of the book entitled "What is the effect of repeat contact?" "I had randomized the subjects in the treatment group into being surveyed at two different points in time: "either three or ten working days (two weeks) after the treatment began. "This second RCT allowed for different doses of repeat contact. "After three days, attitudes towards people from Mexico became more exclusionary "than they had been before the treatment. "Those surveyed after ten days still favored more exclusionary policies, "but less so than the group that had been surveyed after three days. "This shows that the initial urge to keep out a group of people after seeing them may have softened. "In the waning days of the experiments, our confederates themselves "reported things that made it sound as if people were coming around to them. "For example, 'people have started to recognize us and smile to us'. "They mentioned that a passenger who spoke to them said, "'The longer you see the same person every day, the more confident you feel to greet and say hi to them.' "These interactions suggest something about the effects of contact "on the group-based bias caused by social geography. "Namely, that the initial exclusionary reaction has diminished with contact. "It's possible that given enough time, say a month or a year, "the aversion will wear off and my confederates will be welcomed into the community. "As I address in Chapter Nine, perhaps this ameliorating effect of contact is what we have seen "in some areas of the United States, such as California, where the vir-" virulent, I always struggle with that... "where the virulent anti-immigrant politics of the 1990s gave way to an embrace of immigrants. "Perhaps Arizona or Boston, when the time comes, will move along this arc of inter-group interactions "from clash to indifference." So there we go, folks - an initial exclusionary reaction that diminishes with repeat contact. That is what the author of the study says that the results of the study suggest. Now, Black Pigeon Speaks completely avoids mentioning the diminished reaction among the group being surveyed over the longer time period, and as such misrepresents the findings of the study. It's classic cherry-picking there. Now then, it would be very easy to just leave off here, you know, giving the impression that this initial shock leading to integration outcome is the natural and inevitable result of two different groups meeting. And while that is often the case, sometimes it is not, and the integration can happen at varying rates depending on various factors. So as tempting as it would be to simply point out the lie in Black Pigeon's video and then swish my cape and vanish into the night, I think there's a fair bit more to say here. Although I'm no expert here, by the way. I've read one book about it (this one), but this is YouTube, so, you know, land of the blind and all that. So then, when I was reading The Space Between Us, I was surprised to encounter an idea that I'd never heard before, but that seems relatively obvious after I'd read it. An area can be very racially diverse, but also still heavily segregated. Now, the book includes this map of Chicago as an example, and also includes this other map, which is a random reordering of the population of Chicago, as a comparison there. So even if someone lives in a city that is very diverse on paper, they might inhabit a section of the city, a neighborhood or suburb for example, that is not diverse at all. People don't experience the entirety of whatever city they live in, do they. They live and work in only a small part of it usually. So what's the significance of that? Well, understanding all that, it's not really as much of a shock as Black Pigeon makes it out to be that white liberals living in a mostly white area would react with shock when exposed to an out-group. You know, frankly, I consider it more of a shock that they started to get over it in only two weeks, but that's just me. And I'd like to consider the impulse to point to this study as if to say "Aha, see, group bias does exist." This is a line of argument I see racists try to take occasionally - "racism is just another term for a natural and logical in-group preference", they say. Now, to that I would argue that the human tendency to form in-groups and prefer them to out-groups does not justify racial bias; it actually undermines it. And you're gonna have to stick with me here. First, consider the Spanish-speaking people that were part of the train study. Some of the white people who used the same stations and trains as those people showed an increased bias against immigrants. However - and I think this is rather important - those Spanish-speaking people weren't doing anything wrong. They were just riding the trains around, the same as the other passengers, you know? Could we argue that the heightened group bias of the white passengers was therefore illogical because it was being triggered by completely innocuous behavior? Now the obvious response to that line of thinking is that even though those particular Spanish-speaking people on the trains weren't doing anything wrong, their presence could have conjured in the minds of the white passengers various negative things associated with immigrants, say, crime, gangs, drugs and whatever else. For an example of the sorts of negative things one might hear about immigrants into the United States, let's hear from Black Pigeon Speaks. And this is from his video titled "The Ameri- Mex Future of the United States": [Black Pigeon] "The browning of America and the reduction of whites to a minority status, "as we are told by elected officials, academia and, most importantly, the media, is a cause to celebrate. "When the U.S. demographically resembles Mexico, Brazil or Colombia, "It can finally enjoy a utopian future that is promised by those that preach social justice. "America assimilated the Irish and the Italians, "so becoming a majority brown nation will be just the same and nothing will change. "The only problem is, according to many including Samuel P. Huntington, "Mexicans and other Latinos are not assimilating. "They are in fact forming their own cultural, political, and linguistic enclaves across the country. "From Los Angeles to Miami, Latinos are rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built America. "Entire swaths of the population now have divided loyalties, dual nationalities and transnational identities, "and this is cause for concern for the future cultural and even territorial integrity of the United States. "The greatest risk and largest challenge for the US and its traditional identity is from the massive, "neverending tidal wave of people "washing into the country from Latin America and specifically, Mexico." So that's the same old shit, really. They're coming over here, they're not integrating, not learning the language, out-breeding us and so on. I particularly like the discarded doll's head with the worm in the eye socket there. That's, er.. *laughs* very subtle imagery. So anyway, someone might argue that there's enough negative press about immigrants out there that we can't fairly dismiss the bias being shown in the train experiments as entirely illogical. So what we really need here is another experiment, one that tests whether this group bias exists for groups about which people cannot possibly have any prior preconceptions. And would you believe it, such a study was described in detail in The Space Between Us. And I'll quote here from the section, "Creating a Neighborhood". "We brought groups of up to 20 subjects together in a lecture hall, "and our research assistants showed them a PowerPoint presentation of images "and asked them to choose adjectives describing those images from a list, "which they recorded on a sheet of paper. We deceived the subjects--" aha, "claiming that their reactions to these images revealed a perceptual type. "But this perceptual type had actually already been randomly assigned by us "prior to the beginning of the experiment. "We called these perceptual types "type H" and "type Y", and those were our minimal groups. "Our intention was that the subjects would see the perceptual type to which they were assigned "as their in-group and the other as the out-group. "Of course, we never told them these distinctions were important. "Rather, we just let the power of categorization take over to affect behavior. "We then manipulated spatial geography so that the distorting power of groups was amplified. "After we had administered the test of perceptual type, "the research assistants brought all the subjects into a waiting room, "telling them that the lecture hall had to be prepared for the next experiment. "It was in this waiting room that we created our neighborhood, "segregated or integrated, and thus the experimental treatment of segregation was administered. "In one condition, randomly assigned, the subjects would be segregated, "with members of each perceptual type on different sides of the room. "In the other condition, they would be integrated randomly with respect "to perceptual type across the room. "The room had rows of chairs, so it really did look like a waiting room you might see at the dentist's office, "or at the Department of Motor Vehicles. "On the desks, we placed folders with further instructions. "Each folder was assigned to one of the participants, "which allowed us to unobtrusively arrange them to sit in certain locations. "The folders came in two colors, representing the two perceptual types, so that the participants could see "whether all the type H's sat on one side of the room and all the type Y's on the other "or whether they were integrated. "The subjects were asked to wait there for five minutes without speaking or using their phones. "After five minutes, we sent each subject to a separate room for data collection. "The separate rooms were important because we wanted to ensure that the subjects "answered our questions in private, so as not to be biased by social desirability. "In the rooms, they answered two sets of questions on the laptop we provided: "their perceptions of directly observable physical attributes of the two groups, "and their perceptions of social attributes of the two groups. "They were asked to give their best guesses about the levels of these attributes. "The physical attributes were height, weight and age. "The social attributes were income and politics: "how liberal or conservative was the average member of each group. "After the participants reported their answers, the experiment was over. "We repeated this entire process until we had tested over 200 subjects in total. "The results of this unusual experiment? "After only five minutes of sitting in a certain spatial arrangement "with groups that were completely fabricated, "our subjects thought that the heights, weights and ages of people in their in-group were more similar to their own "than the heights, weights and ages of people in their out-group were to their own. "They also thought that the people in their in-group were more socially similar to them "in terms of politics and income than people in the out group were. "As other researchers have found, the simple act of categorizing had collapsed the difference within groups "and increased the difference across groups. "But here's the key: "this perceived difference between the outgroup and ingroup was even larger when the groups were segregated "than it was when they were integrated. "Think of it - five minutes of segregation was enough to change people's perceptions about other human beings." So we see from that experiment that group-based biases exist, even for completely fabricated and randomly assigned categories that people just heard about. Now, other prior studies have shown this before, but the twist that The Space Between Us introduces is the extra test for the effect of segregation upon the extent of these group biases. If you're segregated from the out group, you're more likely to exhibit this bias. For example, if you're a white person living in a white suburb, well, you get the picture. What this book makes clear over and over again is that these biases are not exclusively racial - you know, they can be geographical, religious - think about the changing importance of which Christian denomination people say they follow, for instance. And in one interesting chapter in the book, group experiments are carried out in Jerusalem. Now I was expecting, as you might, that those group experiments will be testing relations between Israel and Palestine. But no, the book instead concerns itself with the divisions between non-religious or moderately religious Jews, and what are described as ultra-orthodox Jews. And of course, those same group divisions were found. This is why I believe the human tendency to form in- groups actually undermines the legitimacy of racial bias. Because we do the exact same thing even if we're randomly sorted into meaningless groups like H and Y, for example. The Space Between Us is concerned with how we can create harmonious societies, while acknowledging that people form illogical groups and have illogical biases. You can call those biases natural, but what does natural mean there? You know, living naked in the woods is natural in one regard, and most of us don't do that. Is that unnatural? Are hospitals natural? I don't know. You know, if the human tendency to form Illogical biases is natural, then I propose that the human ability to recognize and overcome those biases is also natural. You know, we needn't submit to irrationality just because we imagine it to be closer to a natural state of being. Now it's about time for me to wrap up here, but I'd like to return to Black Pigeon Speaks for a moment. I've avoided talking about the end of his video so far, but I think I should address it before I go. I showed a clip of Black Pigeon a little while ago from a different video bemoaning how Mexican immigrants into the United States aren't integrating, aren't learning the language and so on. And to quote him there, "the greatest risk and largest challenge for the US and its traditional identity "is from the massive, never-ending tidal wave of people washing into the country from Latin America". Now with that quote in mind, let's watch a clip from the end of his "diversity plus proximity equals Republican voters" video. [Black Pigeon Speaks] "Something else to consider when thinking of those that prognosticate a blue America "is that Latino Americans are increasingly identifying themselves as white. "Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, "about 7% of Hispanics changed their self description from some other race to white. "At the same time, according to the Census Bureau, "three-fourths of white population growth in 21st century America has been driven by individuals "who declared themselves white and of Hispanic origin. "If increasing numbers of Hispanics identify as white and their descendants "are defined as white in government statistics, "there may be a white majority in the US throughout the 21st century. "It is also possible that as Latinos assimilate and intermarry, "they will move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, "following a trail blazed in the past by many white ethnic voters of European descent "including Irish Americans and Italian Americans." [Shaun] Now then, you might be wondering: What the fuck? You know, what are immigrants to Black Pigeon Speaks? One minute, they're a vast horde of barbarians flowing across the border and taking over, and the next minute they're all assimilating and intermarrying and voting Republican and identifying as white. How can they be both? You know, are they gonna integrate or not? It seems like Black Pigeon Speaks' answer is dependent upon the particular argument he's having at the time. It seems like as long as you're owning the libs, you can basically swap out any of your beliefs on the fly. Thanks a lot for watching, everyone. Some news, we're coming up on 200,000 subscribers over here at... Shaun. I never could think of a good name. How exciting though. All of you should do me a favor and tell a friend about the channel, and then we'll hit 400,000 subscribers. Do that, in fact, please. I want to catch HBomb up and it doesn't look like it's happening by itself anytime soon, unfortunately, so I'm gonna have to resort to begging. Thanks, as always to all of my patrons over on Patreon. I'm gonna go with Pay-treon today. There was a bit of a credits kerfuffle last video. Hopefully everything is sorted this time. If not, let me know and I'll fix it eventually. I'll put links to my Twitter and CuriousCat accounts below if you'd like to give me a follow or ask me a question. I'll also include a link to our Twitch channel. I get quite a lot of messages on Twitch expressing surprise that I'm on there, so I thought I'd mention it here. Me and Jen and Pete stream on Twitch on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays and sometimes other days too. So, there you go. Now you know. Okay folks, that's it from me. I'll see you next time.
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Channel: undefined
Views: 507,331
Rating: 4.8116455 out of 5
Keywords: shaun, shaun jen, black pigeon speaks
Id: rHigKlDn1nE
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)
Published: Sun Feb 17 2019
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