Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What problems do African-Americans face? An initial investigation using Standpoint Epistemology and Surveys, published by tailcalled on March 12, 2023 on LessWrong.

This post is also available at my substack.

This post started from a bit of a weird place. I was in a Discord chatroom, and someone started complaining that Standpoint Epistemology had been “taken way past its carrying weight”.

I didn’t know much about Standpoint Epistemology, so I asked for various examples and resources about it. The resources she gave me that were written by Standpoint Epistemologists seemed relatively reasonable, and the resources that criticized it seemed to me to either be misrepresenting what Standpoint Epistemologists were saying, or to be criticizing people for something other than excessive Standpoint Epistemology.

At some point I got to the conclusion that in order to evaluate these things, it would really be useful for me to apply some Standpoint Epistemology myself. Specifically, since a lot of the discussion in the Discord server was about black people’s experiences with racism, I thought I should apply Standpoint Epistemology to this. In this post, I want to detail how I went about this, and what my results were, so that others can learn from it, and maybe usefully apply Standpoint Epistemology themselves.

Disclaimer: As you will see, this is not a thorough investigation into what African-Americans want. Rather, it is a brief initial investigation, which suggests places for further investigation and further learning. This is probably more a practical tutorial into how I would apply Standpoint Epistemology than an article on race issues per se.

What is Standpoint Epistemology?

It may be good to think of Standpoint Epistemology as an erisology, i.e. a theory of disagreement. If you observe a disagreement, Standpoint Epistemology provides one possible answer for what that disagreement means and how to handle it.

According to Standpoint Epistemology, people get their opinions and beliefs about the world through their experiences (also called their standpoint). However, a single experience will only reveal part of the world, and so in order to get a more comprehensive perspective, one must combine multiple experiences. In this way the ontology of Standpoint Epistemology heavily resembles rationalist-empiricist epistemologies such as Bayesian Epistemology, which also assert that people get their opinions by accumulating experiences that contain partial information.

One important difference is that whereas rationalists often focus on individual epistemology, such as overcoming biased heuristics or learning to build evidence into theories, Standpoint Epistemology instead focuses on what one can learn from other people’s experiences. There is only one underlying reality, but different people observe different aspects of it. As such, Standpoint Epistemology emphasizes that if someone tells you about something that you haven’t had experience with, you should take this as a learning opportunity, rather than concluding that they must be irrational, biased, or crazy.

This notion that one should listen to and believe what others say does not contradict the mathematical underpinnings of traditional rationalist epistemology such as Bayesian Epistemology. Instead, it can be mathematically proven from the assumptions of Bayesian Epistemology, in a theorem known as Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. However, while Standpoint Epistemology follows from Bayesian Epistemology, I feel like we don’t necessarily see rationalists being as positive towards it as they could be.

In the specific case of racism, one article that the person in the Discord server shared with me as an example of Standpoint Epistemology was The Part about Black Lives Mattering Where White People Shut Up and Listen. This article, take...