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Cambridge makes new volumes in its Elements series freely available for a couple of weeks following publication. My own “Innateness…
Matthew Ratcliffe. 2023. Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience. MIT Press (open access with no time limit) https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5524/Grief-WorldsA-Study-of-Emotional-Experience “Experiences…
Free Robot Labour: Marx, Automation, and the Future of AI by Jamie Terence Kelly https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-26782-5 Palgrave Macmillan, 2026 Permanently Open…
Nietzsche’s Ecce homo, Notebooks and Letters: 1888-1889. Translation by Daniel Fidel Ferrer. ©2023 Daniel Fidel Ferrer. All rights reserved. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs…
I only just learned of Barry’s passing, and I’m enormously saddened at the news. I wrote my PhD on his…
I am reading 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗴𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 with mixed feelings. It is, in various ways, moderate and careful, and it certainly…
I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that
A new study finds no such effect. If it is accurate, that is hopeful: it may mean that norms, including the implicit ones, are changing in positive ways. Comments are open for any readers who know more about this latest study and its soundness.
They seemed to want to control for socio-economic signals, but my bet is that what they ended up doing was failing to signal African American racial status (though the Hispanic signals were probably good enough). Here's the relevant claim:
"Unlike in Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), we did not use distinctly African American–sounding first names because these names are associated with relatively low socio-economic status among African Americans (Fryer and Levitt 2004), and we wanted to avoid confounding employers’ perceptions of race and socio-economic status. A trade-off is that the surnames in our experiment may not indicate racial background to employers as strongly as the distinctly African American–sounding names in their study."
Again, it doesn't just seem like a trade-off to me; instead, it seems like it probably straight-up failed to do the relevant signaling. Though, again, the results with respect to Hispanic names are interesting.
"Americans think they don't have a class system, but they do – it's just that they call it race." – an expat friend of mine. I suspect the two are so thoroughly confounded in practice as to be hard to disentangle experimentally.
Perhaps the smart thing would be to identify subsets of typically 'Black' *and 'White'* names perceived to have lower-class associations, then run the resume exercise again and test for all four combinations.
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