#Roland Fryer

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

I collected a lot of data. We collected millions of observations on everyday use of force that wasn’t lethal. We collected thousands of observations on lethal force.

And it was in this moment, 2016, that I realize people lose their minds when they don’t like the result.

So what my paper showed, you’ll see tomorrow, some of you, was that, yes, we saw some bias in the low level uses the force, everyday pushing up against cars and things like that. People seem to like that result.

But we didn’t find any racial bias in place shootings. Now that was really surprising because I expected to see it. The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year. When I found this surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones and redid it to make sure. They came up with the same exact answer, and I thought it was robust.

And then I went to go give it and my God, all hell broke loose.

It was 104 page dense academic economics paper with 150 page appendix. Okay? It was posted for four minutes when I got my first email. "This is full of shit." "It doesn’t make any sense." And I wrote back: "How'd you read it that fast? That's amazing. You are a genius."

And I had colleagues take me into, to the side and say, "don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career." I said, what are you talking about? I said, what’s wrong with it? Do you believe the first part? Yes. Do you believe the second part? Well, it's... the issue is they just don’t fit together. We like the first one, but you should publish it-- the second one another time. I said, let me ask this. If the second part about the police shootings-- this is a literal conversation. I said to them, if the second part showed bias, do you think I should publish it then? And they said, Yeah, then it would make sense. And I said, I guarantee you, I’ll publish it. We’ll see what happens.

So, it was, it was, I lived under under police protection for about 30 or 40 days. I had a seven day old daughter the time. I remember going and shopping for-- because, you know when you have a newborn, you think you have enough diapers, you don’t. So I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard. It was crazy. It was really, truly crazy.

==

This is why Claudine Gay set out to destroy Roland's career.

However low your opinion of Claudine Gay, it's not low enough.

[irreplaceable-spark]

Do Not Defund: Roland Fryer and Rafael Mangual on Crime and Policing in the 21st Century

Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University. Fryer's research combines economic theory, empirical evidence, and randomized experiments to help design more effective government policies. His work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and congressional testimony. 

Rafael Mangual is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and head of research for its Policing and Public Safety Initiative. He is also the author of a new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most. 

Together, Mangual and Fryer take a close look at what is and is not working in policing and law enforcement, in some cases citing statistics and research they have personally conducted. They also make the case that most people, regardless of race or economic status, want safe neighborhoods and cities and explain why the defund movement is not popular among them.  

[thearbourist]

Roland Fryer on Adversity, Race, and Refusing to Conform

Speaking the truth can be disastrous for your academic career. Lying to appease the ‘acceptable’ narrative costs you your integrity and soul.

[iteratedextras]

Harvard is Harvard.

Claudine Gay was not picked because she was the best black scholar available (or the best black woman). Claudine Gay was not opposed because she is a black woman.

Claudine Gay was picked for Harvard's president because she's an enforcer (e.g. against Roland Fryer, apparently), and she was opposed because she was an enforcer.

Boston University could have picked someone other than Ibram Kendi for their antiracism center. Harvard could have picked someone other than Claudine Gay. (It isn't like they don't have money or prestige.) In both cases, they would have been less vulnerable to someone like Rufo.

In a sense, that's the point.

If you pick someone that's excellent for a political position, people might get the mistaken impression that you value excellence instead of political loyalty.

[mitigatedchaos]

2008 - 2020+

(~1,700 words, 8 minutes)

A summary of events and my ideological development from 2008-2020; most of this will be familiar to long-time readers; this post is mostly for later review in 5-10 years.

[ @lokifreign ]

did it seem sudden in 08?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

10 years ago was 2013. By 2013, the direction of the eventual [identitarian] shift was visible, but it wasn't established that "real" "serious" liberals were going to go along with and indulge it.

[ @lokifreign ]

I had a different view (I'm 51; Clinton cleared up any lingering misunderstandings I entertained about dem/lib); it's interesting - I'd love to read something clear about that time period from that perspective. 08 for me was more about the death of the free internet, but I'd be really interested at seeing that realization from the inside somewhat namean. thanks fr sharin'! 🫀👍 [...] never mind! ^_^ all set

So to clear this up for anyone else...

2000-2008

From the perspective of someone who grew up in the 00's, the Republican Party put a tremendous amount of political investment into the Iraq War, which turned out to be a disaster. The only WMDs were leftover chemical shells, not exactly a "clear and present danger;" I'm not aware of any of them being used in terrorist attacks.

2008-2012

So going into 2008, Republicans looked epistemically bankrupt. The War probably cost them an entire generation. It was such a colossal fuck-up that one of the early MitigatedChaos essays, back in 2017, was "A Price Paid in National Will," arguing that patriotism is an exhaustible resource. It is basically screaming at the 00's US establishment right for squandering a valuable and precious resource with their dumb war. [1] As it happens, military recruitment is way down.

By contrast, the first-term Obama-era Democratic coalition offered us people like Roland Fryer, a pragmatic-minded black academic who was willing to reach counterintuitive conclusions or try things like just paying students to see if that worked. Combined with things like the lead-crime hypothesis or support for early childhood education, the epistemic grounding was a lot better than what they offered after 2016.

The public position of the Democratic Party 2008-2012 was largely meritocratic colorblind liberal individualism, combined with moderate immigration restrictionism, with only a modest exception for Affirmative Action in universities. They were still pro free speech, valued professionalism, and valued things like consumer rights, and mostly weren't against patriotism.

This was an extremely well-hedged set of positions, adequately handling risks from multiple directions at once - and the follower libs (the "Stage 3s" as post-rationalists would call them) echoed all of it, causing the overall Democratic coalition to seem much, much smarter than they actually are.

Even electing a black President seemed a decent bet, and if there is one thing Obama is really good at, it's projecting a Presidential image.

If you combine this with Transhumanism and an expectation that significant new technologies will overcome long-standing issues in the case that social solutions don't work, kicking in around 2040-2050, as most Rationalists probably would have expected at that time, it covers most of the bases. Get some potential gains from social policy, stalling for time for a few decades, and then if any problems are leftover, mop them up with biotech.

I was also engaged in a phase of gender exploration from around 2009-2012 (in cyberspace). I encountered some of the current gender ideas early. At the time, because they weren't as popular, there was a stronger selection effect.

2013-2017

From around 2012-2013 onwards, we started getting the articles about "manspreading," and "mansplaining," combined with a frame that it was prohibited for men to question this because of "male privilege" including subconscious bias which, by definition, they could not be aware of.

I actually checked in on a Mens Rights forum around this time, and a GamerGate forum later, and contrasted what I actually saw with both media coverage and left/lib representations which were... basically almost all completely different from my direct observations.

I was very doubtful because the epistemic norms of the movement were just awful, and very obviously designed in a way that was prone to abuse.

From around 2014 onwards, those same norms were shifting to the much more dangerous field of race. Obama didn't campaign on it, and more "serious" Democrats instead of like, Gawker, were more focused on things like "Republican obstruction in Congress."

By late 2014 or early 2015, I had given up on defending the Obama Administration in arguments, which I'd been doing since around 2008.

From 2013-2015, I was feeling depressed and anxious. Without realizing what I was doing at first, I began an exercise to rework the basis of my politics by working on a fictional country, rewriting it again and again and again.

The development of some kinds of political writers may require something like this, either working from a distant time, like Moldbug, or trying to work out a simulation of a country repeatedly and gaming things out with others, as Scott Alexander and I both did. This allows something that I call Ideological Stereoscopic Vision - viewing the same issue from two ideological perspectives simultaneously. With this, it's possible to see the functional mechanics of your original ideology, which otherwise just appear to be truths.

I was going leave the Presidential box blank in the 2016 election, but voted for Clinton as a personal favor for a dear friend.

Overall my basic model from 2012 wasn't that bad. I hadn't called to deplatform all the Republicans, for instance, and once Trump won the primary, based on the uncertainty I concluded that it was possible he would win the general election.

However, I had to build a much more sophisticated model to explain the benefits of things like colorblind liberal individualism, and explain why it was being attacked, and how. Until 2014, I hadn't considered it something that even could come under serious attack, since influential people should know better than to let that happen.

2017-2020

Around 2017, I opened the blog MitigatedChaos.

In 2018, Roland Fryer was #metoo'd. An investigation mostly cleared him except to require workplace sensitivity training (proportional, IMO). However, the investigation was apparently overruled by a secret committee, and in 2019 he was suspended for 2 years without pay.

In 2018, Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" was published. This was followed in 2019 by Ibram Kendi's best-selling, pro-"corrective" discrimination, "How to Be an Anti-Racist." (At some point in 2020 or maybe 2021, the Microsoft Windows 10 login screen featured a link to "anti-racist books" with Kendi's book at the top.)

Unlike Fryer, both writers seemed uninterested in whether their proposals would actually work, as did their readers.

As someone who had voted for Obama in 2012, I was willing to elect politicians or spend money, even if that money might not necessarily work, but that was assuming those involved were actual academics making a serious attempt with some chance of success, not spiteful unqualified quacks.

Because people throughout society demanded that I take race seriously, in 2019, I conducted an investigation into school funding and whether charter schools would be capable of closing racial outcome gaps. (It's difficult to assess their effectiveness on grades due to selection effects on parents, but they're about as cost-effective as public schools, may produce a modest benefit, and allow parents to at least provide a safe environment for their children. The few online charter schools in my sample had dismal results.)

That was when I learned that the social interventions camp were 90% bluffing, hadn't checked the research, and the amount of good faith I had been giving them since 2014 was unjustified. Each of them assumed that someone else had been doing the actual work (not "doing the work" of reading about bad things that happened to racial groups, but the work of figuring out how to solve things).

That was mostly true in 2010. It certainly wasn't by 2018 - or at least the links between the people doing the work and the actual movement were well broken by that time. The implicit claims of what Social Justice can deliver, and the urgency with which they make their demands, have been wildly disproportionate the entire time.

Going into 2020, I still had hope that serious liberals might be in charge somewhere. But instead of actual reforms which might be useful, we got "Defund the Police," which as the CHAZ and subsequent national stats have demonstrated, is delusional.

After 2020

When it turned out that Biden is just lame, and the great racial awakening wasn't as promised, some of the air went out of it. Biden had the opportunity to end the thing in one swoop by just leaving Trump's executive order in place, but instead confirmed that the Democratic Party is committed to this program of crank race dogma, and in the institutions the supporters are digging trenches.

Mainstream Republicans are aware of the problem and acting now, so what was a rout has stabilized into a war front. The primary mission of the right-wing ideological vanguard from 2017-2022, waking the Republicans up to the scale of the problem, and punching through the window of social acceptability hard enough to get them moving, is now complete. As a vital or artistic movement, they no longer have the same margin of information advantage, and energy is leaving the scene.

Sometime after 2020, I developed the coalitional interest deadlock theory to explain some of what had happened - why did the Democrats double down on such a hateful strategy that's obviously bad for the country? Why not just stick with their epistemically-advantaged position from 2012? One possible answer: because each of their coalition members inhibits any other coalition member's attempts to fix anything, so the only thing to do is find an outgroup to blame and hope no one notices, as no one is willing to negotiate a settlement to free up resources for improvement.

They have little to offer but decline and hatred, for now. Maybe in 10 years, they'll be as different as the 2020 Republicans are from 2000's.

---

[1] A left-anarchist view here would be that such sentiments will always be exploited for wasteful wars of imperialism that enrich a small and well-connected group at the top; there is something to such a view, but the actual 21st-century US wars, and their duration, also seem to have been caused by ideological derangement.

[marketingmla]

Economist Roland Fryer on Adversity, Race, and Refusing to Conform

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Claudine Gay (August 4, 1970) is a political scientist and university administrator. She served as Harvard’s Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and African and African American Studies, and Edgerley Family Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.

From July 1, 2023, until January 2, 2024, she was the 30th president of Harvard University. She became the first Black president of Harvard after having served as the dean of Social Sciences and the dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

She grew up the child of Haitian immigrants; her parents met in New York as students. She is a cousin of writer Roxane Gay.

She spent much of her childhood first in New York, then in Saudi Arabia where her father worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. Her mother was a registered nurse. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, then studied economics at Stanford University, receiving the Anna Laura Myers Prize for best undergraduate thesis in economics. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard, winning the university’s Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science.

She served as an assistant professor, then associate professor in Stanford’s Department of Political Science. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She became Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. She was named the Edgerley Family Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

She is vice president of the Midwest Political Science Association. She convened a review panel that decided to suspend economics professor Roland Fryer for allegedly engaging in sexually inappropriate behavior with one of his assistants and at least four other employees. Since 2017, she has served as a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy.

She is married to Christopher Afendulis and has one child. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[dixiedrudge]

Professor Says “All Hell Broke Loose” When His Study Revealed No Racial Bias In Police Shootings

(It’s the cultural-marxist version of the Jedi mind trick. ‘These are not the results you’re looking for’… – DD) Help Dixie Defeat Big-Tech Censorship! Spread the Word! Like, Share, Re-Post, and Subscribe! There’s a lot more to see at our main page, Dixie Drudge! (Zero Hedge) – Bari Weiss of The Free Press sat down with Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer at the University of Austin last…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Winkfield Twyman Jr.

Published: Dec 27, 2023

I have a tender spot in my heart for race pioneers. My spirits were lifted when L. Douglas Wilder was sworn in as the first Black American governor of a U.S. state—the state of Virginia, of which I am a native son. My mom was dying of cancer at the time, but she wanted me to witness Black History in the making. So on that cold January day in 1990, I left her bedside and bore witness to the coming of a better time in Virginia.

Similarly, on the night of November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the first Black President of the United States of America, I joined family and friends to run into the darkness of the San Diego night, yelling and screaming, whooping and hollering. It was a sacred moment in our American history to be always cherished and never forgotten. That the American electorate would elect a Black person to the highest office in the land was something our grandparents and our grandparents' grandparents could only dream of.

I considered the project of race in America to be finished that November night in San Diego. The election of a Black U.S. president broke the psychological barrier in our minds. There is no higher office than President of the United States of America—in the entire world. For me, the questions of race were all answered. I was done with race.

But too many Americans can't seem to quit race. Fifteen years after President Barack Obama's triumph, some feel it noteworthy to remark that Claudine Gay is the first Black President of Harvard University. Worse, in the face of numerous mounting scandals, many are defending Gay by claiming that the attacks against her are racial in nature.

They are not. They are all well deserved.

The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books—an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773?

And yet, many are coming to her defense. Having finally got their wish of a Black president of Harvard, Harvard seems unwilling to let her go. The racial wagons have circled around Gay, with President of the NAACP alleging that White Supremacy is afoot and Morehouse President David Thomas claiming in a Forbes interview that Gay is a scholar at the "top of her profession... as qualified as any President Harvard has ever had."

This is not only misguided, but deeply ironic. Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?

As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.

What was Professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty.

You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.

Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer's research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay's crusade of discharge but Fryer's lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.

No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don't agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the "first Black" defense.

W. F. Twyman, Jr., Class of 1986 Harvard Law School, is a former law professor. He is also co-author of Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America published by Pitchstone Publishing.

==

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Claudine Gay is as corrupt as they come.

[pedroan2]

Overcoming The Odds with Roland Fryer

[coursera-datamgtviz]

Assignment 1: Getting Your Research Project Started

Introduction

There has been a steady increase in the rate of intermarriage in the U.S. In 2017, 50 years after Loving v. Virginia landmark decision, 1 in 6 newlyweds are married to someone from a different race/ethnicity (Pew Research Center 2017). This trend has risen from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015 accordingly to U.S. Census Bureau data. However, the trends vary considerably by location and metropolitan vs non-metropolitan areas (see Intermarriage across the U.S. by metro area). One explanation could be the demand/supply market conditions (Fryer 2007).

The generational perspectives from Millennials and Zoomers move the general population towards more favorable opinions on interracial marriages. 13% of married Millenials have spouses from a different race/Ethnicity (Pew Research Center 2020). Nevertheless, there have been documented phenomena concerning the issue, especially, from behavior observed in dating apps. These include premiums and discounts for certain groups such as for Asian women and against Asian men and Black women (e.g., OkCupid Race and Attraction, 2009–2014: What's changed in five years?). Within that ecosystem, some platforms have opted to disallow filters based on race, but the net-effects are yet to be fully understood as it could backfire harming certain minorities (Zhou 2022).

This study will use the Outlook on Life Surveys, 2012 (ICPSR 35348) (Robnett and Tate 2015) dataset to explore what aspects of the perception of other groups influence not only the willingness to date outside their own racial/ethnic group but with what intentions (i.e., long-term, sexual, towards marriage, raising kids). My hypothesis is that physical attraction will influence dating intention, but be insufficient for serious relationships, especially for those that would like to marry and raise children.

Variables to consider

Codebook available at the ICSPR [site](https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/RCMD/studies/35348/variables)

Sampling weights

Survey weights (W1_WEIGHT1, W1_WEIGHT2, W1_WEIGHT3, W2_WEIGHT1, W2_WEIGHT2, W2_WEIGHT3)

Demographics

Age (PPAGE)

Gender (PPGENDER)

Race/Ethnicity (PPETHM)

Living situation

Household composition

Other adults (PPT18OV), children (PPT25, PPT612), marital / relationship status (PPMARIT, W1_E1), having children (W1_P17, W1_P17A)

Location of residency (PPSTATEN)

Employment (PPWORK)

Income (PPINCIMP)

Education (PPEDUC)

Perceptions

View of interracial relationship / marriages (W2_QG_1)

Dating history and preferences

Variables related to past relationships and encounters and intention/willingness (W1_E3, W1_E4, W1_E5_1:W1_E5_7, W1_E61_A:W1_E64_D, W1_E7, W1_E8, W1_E9_a:W1_E9_d)

Perception of different groups

Variables related to how the respondent perceives potential partners of their own or other racial/ethnic groups (W2_QF1A:W2_QF1D, W2_QF2A:W2_QF2D, W2_QF3A:W2_QF3D, W2_QF4A:W2_QF4D, W2_QF5A:W2_QF5D, W2_QF6A:W2_QF6D, W2_QF7A:W2_QF7D, W2_QF10A:W2_QF10D)

Works cited:

Fryer, Roland G. 2007. “Guess Who’s Been Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriage over the 20th Century.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (2): 71–90. DOI: 10.3886/ICPSR35348.V1.

Pew Research Center. 2017. "Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia". https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/18/in-u-s-metro-areas-huge-variation-in-intermarriage-rates/

Pew Research Center. 2020. "As Millennials Near 40, They’re Approaching Family Life Differently Than Previous Generations". https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/27/as-millennials-near-40-theyre-approaching-family-life-differently-than-previous-generations/

Robnett, Belinda, and Katherine Tate. 2015. “Outlook on Life Surveys, 2012: Version 1.” ICPSR - Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. DOI: 10.3886/ICPSR35348.V1.

Zhou, Zhiqiu Benson. 2022. “Compulsory Interracial Intimacy: Why Does Removing the Ethnicity Filter on Dating Apps Not Benefit Racial Minorities?” Media, Culture & Society 44 (5): 1034–43. DOI: 10.1177/01634437221104712.

[mitigatedchaos]

Recently on another website, a documentary came up on Harvard Professor Roland Fryer.

I was curious about the program he mentioned, the Harlem Children's Zone, so I looked it up and found a Brookings report from 2010, although it mainly discusses whether the attendant social programs integrated with the HCZ are necessary for the HCZ's reported effects.

If you're a Millennial, the difference between the first term of the Obama Administration, 2008-2012, and the 2013-2014 identitarian turn, isn't just your imagination. One of the things revealed by the Brookings report is the context of the time. In 2010, programs like HCZ were part of the agenda of the Obama Administration, and of interest to liberal institutions like Brookings.

If the documentary is accurate, an investigation determining that Fryer did not actually sexually proposition anyone, but advising sending him for sensitivity training over a few flirtation-tinged jokes, followed by that recommendation being overruled by a secretive committee imposing a much harsher punishment to remove a potential rival, is characteristic of 2010 vs 2014.

Unfortunately, I was not able to determine if the Harlem Children's Zone could produce the results Fryer discussed on a reliable basis - little has been said about it in the 10 years since 2012. More information about it is available on Wikipedia.

What is he up to now? Again, by Wikipedia,

In 2021, Harvard allowed Fryer to return to teaching and research, although he remained barred from supervising graduate students for at least another 2 years.

We also find a mention of another interesting study:

His work on the racial achievement gap in the US led to a stint as Chief Equality Officer for New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which role Fryer implemented a pilot program rewarding low-income students with money for earning high test scores.

I like how this man thinks. It's plausible; let's just go study it directly.

How did that go? From CNBC in 2017,

In a 2012 paper that appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Fryer spent $6.3 million on a study that found offering students money for standardized test grades doesn’t work.

In this research, Fryer paid New York City students for performance on a series of interim exams; in Chicago he paid ninth graders every five weeks for solid core grades; in Dallas he paid second graders $2 per every book read; and in the District of Columbia he paid students for attendance and other positive behaviors.

As it turns out, incentives for grades or scores had little effect, Fryer found. Instead, paying kids to read had a statistically significant effect on comprehension, vocabulary and language skills.

Other researchers found an improvement on some shorter tests in 2017, the main subject of the CNBC article.