Perform a thorough fact checking of this post and report factual mistakes """Conservation of Expected Evidence Written by Vladimir_Nesov, Ruby, Yoav Ravid, Zack_M_Davis, Lukas Finnveden, et al. last updated 19th Mar 2023 Conservation of Expected Evidence is a consequence of probability theory which states that for every expectation of evidence, there is an equal and opposite expectation of counter-evidence [1]. Conservation of Expected Evidence is about both the direction of the update and its magnitude: a low probability of seeing strong evidence in one direction must be balanced by a high probability of observing weak counter-evidence in the other direction [2]. The mere expectation of encountering evidence–before you've actually seen it–should not shift your prior beliefs. It also goes by other names, including the law of total expectation and the law of iterated expectations.

A consequence of this principle is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Consider a hypothesis H and evidence (observation) E. Prior probability of the hypothesis is P(H); posterior probability is either P(H|E) or P(H|¬E), depending on whether you observe E or not-E (evidence or counter-evidence). The probability of observing E is P(E), and probability of observing not-E is P(¬E). Thus, expected value of the posterior probability of the hypothesis is:

P ( H | E ) ⋅ P ( E ) + P ( H , ¬ E ) ⋅ P ( ¬ E )

But the prior probability of the hypothesis itself can be trivially broken up the same way:

P ( H ) = P ( H , E ) + P ( H , ¬ E ) = P ( H | E ) ⋅ P ( E ) + P ( H , ¬ E ) ⋅ P ( ¬ E ) Thus, expectation of posterior probability is equal to the prior probability.

In other way, if you expect the probability of a hypothesis to change as a result of observing some evidence, the amount of this change if the evidence is positive is

D 1 = P ( H | E ) − P ( H )

If the evidence is negative, the change is

D 2 = P ( H | ¬ E ) − P ( H )

Expectation of the change given positive evidence is equal to negated expectation of the change given counter-evidence:

D 1 ⋅ P ( E ) = − D 2 ⋅ P ( ¬ E )

If you can anticipate in advance updating your belief in a particular direction, then you should just go ahead and update now. Once you know your destination, you are already there. """

Okay, here is a thorough fact-checking of the provided text on Conservation of Expected Evidence (CoEE):

Overall Assessment:

The text generally captures the core idea and implications of the Conservation of Expected Evidence principle correctly. It rightly identifies it as a consequence of probability theory, explains its meaning intuitively (expected updates balance out, anticipating evidence doesn't change priors before seeing the evidence), and correctly states the relationship D1 * P(E) = -D2 * P(¬E). However, there is a significant factual mistake in the mathematical derivation presented for E[Posterior] = Prior, and some minor points could be clarified.

Specific Factual Mistakes and Points of Clarification:

1. Mistake in Mathematical Derivation (E[Posterior] = Prior):

   • The Text Claims:
     • Expected value = P ( H | E ) ⋅ P ( E ) + P ( H , ¬ E ) ⋅ P ( ¬ E )
     • P ( H ) = P ( H , E ) + P ( H , ¬ E ) = P ( H | E ) ⋅ P ( E ) + P ( H , ¬ E ) ⋅ P ( ¬ E )
   • Fact Check: This is incorrect. The second term in both sums is wrong.
     • The expected value of the posterior probability is correctly defined as the sum of (Posterior probability given outcome) * (Probability of outcome). The outcomes are observing E or ¬E.
     • Therefore, the correct expression for the expected posterior is: E[P(H|Evidence)] = P(H|E) * P(E) + P(H|¬E) * P(¬E).
     • The Law of Total Probability states P(H) = P(H, E) + P(H, ¬E). Using the definition of conditional probability (P(A,B) = P(A|B)P(B)), this becomes P(H) = P(H|E) * P(E) + P(H|¬E) * P(¬E).
     • The text incorrectly uses P(H, ¬E) * P(¬E) instead of P(H|¬E) * P(¬E) in both its definition of the expected value and its expansion of the prior probability. P(H, ¬E) * P(¬E) does not simplify correctly and is not equivalent to P(H|¬E) * P(¬E) unless P(¬E) happens to be 1 (which would mean E is impossible).
   • Conclusion: While the final statement "expectation of posterior probability is equal to the prior probability" is correct, the mathematical steps shown in the text to demonstrate this contain a repeated factual error.

2. Relationship with Law of Total Expectation (LoTE) / Law of Iterated Expectations (LIE):

   • The Text Claims: CoEE "also goes by other names, including the law of total expectation and the law of iterated expectations."
   • Fact Check: This is mostly correct but slightly imprecise. CoEE isn't strictly a synonym for LoTE/LIE. Rather, CoEE is a specific application or instance of the Law of Total Expectation. The equation E[P(H|Evidence)] = P(H) is the LoTE applied to the random variable P(H|Evidence), where the expectation is taken over the possible pieces of evidence. So, they are fundamentally linked, but calling them "other names" might suggest they are interchangeable terms in all contexts, which isn't quite true. CoEE refers specifically to this context of Bayesian belief updating.

3. Wording of the Initial Definition:

   • The Text Claims: "...for every expectation of evidence, there is an equal and opposite expectation of counter-evidence [1]."
   • Fact Check: This phrasing is slightly informal and potentially confusing. The principle isn't about the "expectation of evidence" itself, but about the expected change in belief (probability) caused by potential evidence. The later, correct equation D1 * P(E) = -D2 * P(¬E) clarifies this: the expected increase in probability (D1 * P(E)) equals the negative of the expected decrease in probability (D2 * P(¬E)). The initial phrasing could be misinterpreted.

4. "Absence of evidence is evidence of absence":

   • The Text Claims: "A consequence of this principle is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence."
   • Fact Check: This is correct, given the context established by CoEE. As derived from D1 * P(E) = -D2 * P(¬E), if observing E would increase your belief in H (D1 > 0), then not observing E (observing ¬E) must decrease your belief in H (D2 < 0), assuming P(E) and P(¬E) are non-zero. This mathematically underpins the idea that if you expected evidence for something, its absence logically counts against it.

Summary of Findings:

• Core Concept: The text correctly explains the meaning and implications of Conservation of Expected Evidence.
• Main Error: The mathematical derivation provided to show E[Posterior] = Prior contains a significant error in its formulas, although the conclusion itself is correct.
• Minor Issues: The relationship with LoTE/LIE is slightly simplified ("other names"), and the initial definition's phrasing ("expectation of evidence") could be clearer.
• Correct Points: The explanation of balancing updates (magnitude/probability), the implication that expecting evidence doesn't change priors, the derivation and statement D1 * P(E) = -D2 * P(¬E), and the connection to "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" are all factually sound.
• Non-Verifiable: Authorship, date, and the content/validity of citations [1] and [2] cannot be checked without external information.

The most critical correction needed is fixing the mathematical derivation steps for E[Posterior] = Prior.

Perform a thorough fact checking of this post and report factual mistakes """Configurations and Amplitude by Eliezer Yudkowsky 11th Apr 2008 So the universe isn’t made of little billiard balls, and it isn’t made of crests and troughs in a pool of aether… Then what is the stuff that stuff is made of?

In Figure 1, we see, at A, a half-silvered mirror, and two photon detectors, Detector 1 and Detector 2. """ Early scientists, when they ran experiments like this, became confused about what the results meant. They would send a photon toward the half-silvered mirror, and half the time they would see Detector 1 click, and the other half of the time they would see Detector 2 click.

The early scientists—you’re going to laugh at this—thought that the silver mirror deflected the photon half the time, and let it through half the time.

Ha, ha! As if the half-silvered mirror did different things on different occasions! I want you to let go of this idea, because if you cling to what early scientists thought, you will become extremely confused. The half-silvered mirror obeys the same rule every time.

If you were going to write a computer program that was this experiment— not a computer program that predicted the result of the experiment, but a computer program that resembled the underlying reality—it might look sort of like this:

At the start of the program (the start of the experiment, the start of time) there’s a certain mathematical entity, called a configuration. You can think of this configuration as corresponding to “there is one photon heading from the photon source toward the half-silvered mirror,” or just “a photon heading toward A.”

A configuration can store a single complex value—“complex” as in the complex numbers ( a + b i ) , with i defined as √ − 1 . At the start of the program, there’s already a complex number stored in the configuration “a photon heading toward A.” The exact value doesn’t matter so long as it’s not zero. We’ll let the configuration “a photon heading toward A” have a value of ( − 1 + 0 i ) .

All this is a fact within the territory, not a description of anyone’s knowledge. A configuration isn’t a proposition or a possible way the world could be. A configuration is a variable in the program—you can think of it as a kind of memory location whose index is “a photon heading toward A”—and it’s out there in the territory.

As the complex numbers that get assigned to configurations are not positive real numbers between 0 and 1, there is no danger of confusing them with probabilities. “A photon heading toward A” has complex value −1, which is hard to see as a degree of belief. The complex numbers are values within the program, again out there in the territory. We’ll call the complex numbers amplitudes.

There are two other configurations, which we’ll call “a photon going from A to Detector 1” and “a photon going from A to Detector 2.” These configurations don’t have a complex value yet; it gets assigned as the program runs.

We are going to calculate the amplitudes of “a photon going from A toward 1” and “a photon going from A toward 2” using the value of “a photon going toward A,” and the rule that describes the half-silvered mirror at A.

Roughly speaking, the half-silvered mirror rule is “multiply by 1 when the photon goes straight, and multiply by i when the photon turns at a right angle.” This is the universal rule that relates the amplitude of the configuration of “a photon going in,” to the amplitude that goes to the configurations of “a photon coming out straight” or “a photon being deflected.”[1]

So we pipe the amplitude of the configuration “a photon going toward A,” which is ( − 1 + 0 i ) , into the half-silvered mirror at A, and this transmits an amplitude of ( − 1 + 0 i ) × i ( 0 − i ) to “a photon going from A toward 1,” and also transmits an amplitude of ( − 1 + 0 i ) × 1

( − 1 + 0 i ) to “a photon going from A toward 2.”

In the Figure 1 experiment, these are all the configurations and all the transmitted amplitude we need to worry about, so we’re done. Or, if you want to think of “Detector 1 gets a photon” and “Detector 2 gets a photon” as separate configurations, they’d just inherit their values from “A to 1” and “A to 2” respectively. (Actually, the values inherited should be multiplied by another complex factor, corresponding to the distance from A to the detector; but we will ignore that for now, and suppose that all distances traveled in our experiments happen to correspond to a complex factor of 1.)

So the final program state is:

Configuration “a photon going toward A”: (−1+0i) Configuration “a photon going from A toward 1”: (0−i) Configuration “a photon going from A toward 2”: (−1+0i) and optionally

Configuration “Detector 1 gets a photon”: (0−i) Configuration “Detector 2 gets a photon”: (−1+0i). This same result occurs—the same amplitudes stored in the same configurations—every time you run the program (every time you do the experiment).

Now, for complicated reasons that we aren’t going to go into here— considerations that belong on a higher level of organization than fundamental quantum mechanics, the same way that atoms are more complicated than quarks—there’s no simplemeasuring instrument that can directly tell us the exact amplitudes of each configuration. We can’t directly see the program state.

So how do physicists know what the amplitudes are?

We do have a magical measuring tool that can tell us the squared modulus of a configuration’s amplitude. If the original complex amplitude is ( a + b i ) , we can get the positive real number ( a 2 + b 2 ) . Think of the Pythagorean theorem: if you imagine the complex number as a little arrow stretching out from the origin on a two-dimensional plane, then the magic tool tells us the squared length of the little arrow, but it doesn’t tell us the direction the arrow is pointing.

To be more precise, the magic tool actually just tells us the ratios of the squared lengths of the amplitudes in some configurations. We don’t know how long the arrows are in an absolute sense, just how long they are relative to each other. But this turns out to be enough information to let us reconstruct the laws of physics—the rules of the program. And so I can talk about amplitudes, not just ratios of squared moduli.

When we wave the magic tool over “Detector 1 gets a photon” and “Detector 2 gets a photon,” we discover that these configurations have the same squared modulus—the lengths of the arrows are the same. Thus speaks the magic tool. By doing more complicated experiments (to be seen shortly), we can tell that the original complex numbers had a ratio of i to 1.

And what is this magical measuring tool?

Well, from the perspective of everyday life—way, way, way above the quantum level and a lot more complicated—the magical measuring tool is that we send some photons toward the half-silvered mirror, one at a time, and count up how many photons arrive at Detector 1 versus Detector 2 over a few thousand trials. The ratio of these values is the ratio of the squared moduli of the amplitudes. But the reason for this is not something we are going to consider yet. Walk before you run. It is not possible to understand what happens all the way up at the level of everyday life, before you understand what goes on in much simpler cases.

For today’s purposes, we have a magical squared-modulus-ratio reader. And the magic tool tells us that the little two-dimensional arrow for the configuration “Detector 1 gets a photon” has the same squared length as for “Detector 2 gets a photon.” That’s all.

You may wonder, “Given that the magic tool works this way, what motivates us to use quantum theory, instead of thinking that the half-silvered mirror reflects the photon around half the time?”

Well, that’s just begging to be confused—putting yourself into a historically realistic frame of mind like that and using everyday intuitions. Did I say anything about a little billiard ball going one way or the other and possibly bouncing off a mirror? That’s not how reality works. Reality is about complex amplitudes flowing between configurations, and the laws of the flow are stable.

But if you insist on seeing a more complicated situation that billiard-ball ways of thinking can’t handle, here’s a more complicated experiment.

In Figure 2, B and C are full mirrors, and A and D are half-mirrors. The line from D to E is dashed for reasons that will become apparent, but amplitude is flowing from D to E under exactly the same laws.

Now let’s apply the rules we learned before:

At the beginning of time “a photon heading toward A” has amplitude ( − 1 + 0 i ) .

We proceed to compute the amplitude for the configurations “a photon going from A to B” and “a photon going from A to C”:

“a photon going from A to B” = i

× a photon heading toward A” = ( 0 − i ) Similarly,

“a photon going from A to C” = 1 × a photon heading toward A” = ( − 1 + 0 i ) The full mirrors behave (as one would expect) like half of a half-silvered mirror—a full mirror just bends things by right angles and multiplies them by i. (To state this slightly more precisely: For a full mirror, the amplitude that flows, from the configuration of a photon heading in, to the configuration of a photon heading out at a right angle, is multiplied by a factor of i.)

So:

“a photon going from B to D” = i

× “a photon going from A to B” = ( 1 + 0 i ) , “a photon going from C to D” = i

× “a photon going from A to C” = ( 0 − i ) “B to D” and “C to D” are two different configurations—we don’t simply write “a photon at D”—because the photons are arriving at two different angles in these two different configurations. And what D does to a photon depends on the angle at which the photon arrives.

Again, the rule (speaking loosely) is that when a half-silvered mirror bends light at a right angle, the amplitude that flows from the photon-going-in configuration to the photon-going-out configuration, is the amplitude of the photon-going-in configuration multiplied by i. And when two configurations are related by a half-silvered mirror letting light straight through, the amplitude that flows from the photon-going-in configuration is multiplied by 1.

So:

From the configuration “a photon going from B to D,” with original amplitude(1+0i)

Amplitude of ( 1 + 0 i ) × i ( 0 + i ) flows to “a photon going from D to E.” Amplitude of ( 1 + 0 i ) × 1

( 1 + 0 i ) flows to “a photon going from D to F. ” From the configuration “a photon going from C to D,” with original amplitude(0−i)

Amplitude of ( 0 − i ) × i ( 1 + 0 i ) flows to “a photon going from D to F. ” Amplitude of ( 0 − i ) × 1

( 0 − i ) flows to “a photon going from D to E.” Therefore:

The total amplitude flowing to configuration “a photon going from D to E” is ( 0 + i ) + ( 0 − i ) ( 0 + 0 i ) 0 . The total amplitude flowing to configuration “a photon going from D to F” is ( 1 + 0 i ) + ( 1 + 0 i )

( 2 + 0 i ) . (You may want to try working this out yourself on pen and paper if you lost track at any point.)

But the upshot, from that super-high-level “experimental” perspective that we think of as normal life, is that we see no photons detected at E. Every photon seems to end up at F. The ratio of squared moduli between “D to E” and “D to F” is 0 to 4. That’s why the line from D to E is dashed, in this figure.

This is not something it is possible to explain by thinking of half-silvered mirrors deflecting little incoming billiard balls half the time. You’ve got to think in terms of amplitude flows.

If half-silvered mirrors deflected a little billiard ball half the time, in this setup, the little ball would end up at Detector 1 around half the time and Detector 2 around half the time. Which it doesn’t. So don’t think that.

You may say, “But wait a minute! I can think of another hypothesis that accounts for this result. What if, when a half-silvered mirror reflects a photon, it does something to the photon that ensures it doesn’t get reflected next time? And when it lets a photon go through straight, it does something to the photon so it gets reflected next time.”

Now really, there’s no need to go making the rules so complicated. Occam’s Razor, remember. Just stick with simple, normal amplitude flows between configurations.

But if you want another experiment that disproves your new alternative hypothesis, it’s Figure 3.

Here, we’ve left the whole experimental setup the same, and just put a little blocking object between B and D. This ensures that the amplitude of “a photon going from B to D” is 0.

Once you eliminate the amplitude contributions from that configuration, you end up with totals of ( 1 + 0 i ) in “a photon going from D to F, ” and ( 0 − i ) in “a photon going from D to E.”

The squared moduli of ( 1 + 0 i ) and ( 0 − i ) are both 1, so the magic measuring tool should tell us that the ratio of squared moduli is 1. Way back up at the level where physicists exist, we should find that Detector 1 goes off half the time, and Detector 2 half the time.

The same thing happens if we put the block between C and D. The amplitudes are different, but the ratio of the squared moduli is still 1, so Detector 1 goes off half the time and Detector 2 goes off half the time.

This cannot possibly happen with a little billiard ball that either does or doesn’t get reflected by the half-silvered mirrors.

Because complex numbers can have opposite directions, like 1 and −1, or i and −i, amplitude flows can cancel each other out. Amplitude flowing from configuration X into configuration Y can be canceled out by an equal and opposite amplitude flowing from configuration Z into configuration Y. In fact, that’s exactly what happens in this experiment.

In probability theory, when something can either happen one way or another, X or ¬X, then P ( Z )

P ( Z | X ) P ( X ) + P ( Z | ¬ X ) P ( ¬ X ) . And all probabilities are positive. So if you establish that the probability of Z happening given X is 1 2 , and the probability of X happening is 1 3 , then the total probability of Z happening is at least 1 6 no matter what goes on in the case of ¬X. There’s no such thing as negative probability, less-than-impossible credence, or ( 0 + i ) credibility, so degrees of belief can’t cancel each other out like amplitudes do.

Not to mention that probability is in the mind to begin with; and we are talking about the territory, the program-that-is-reality, not talking about human cognition or states of partial knowledge.

By the same token, configurations are not propositions, not statements, not ways the world could conceivably be. Configurations are not semantic constructs. Adjectives like probable do not apply to them; they are not beliefs or sentences or possible worlds. They are not true or false but simply real.

In the experiment of Figure 2, do not be tempted to think anything like: “The photon goes to either B or C, but it could have gone the other way, and this possibility interferes with its ability to go to E…”

It makes no sense to think of something that “could have happened but didn’t” exerting an effect on the world. We can imagine things that could have happened but didn’t—like thinking, “Gosh, that car almost hit me”—and our imagination can have an effect on our future behavior. But the event of imagination is a real event, that actually happens, and that is what has the effect. It’s your imagination of the unreal event—your very real imagination, implemented within a quite physical brain—that affects your behavior.

To think that the actual event of a car hitting you—this event which could have happened to you, but in fact didn’t—is directly exerting a causal effect on your behavior, is mixing up the map with the territory.

What affects the world is real. (If things can affect the world without being “real,” it’s hard to see what the word “real” means.) Configurations and amplitude flows are causes, and they have visible effects; they are real. Configurations are not possible worlds and amplitudes are not degrees of belief, any more than your chair is a possible world or the sky is a degree of belief.

So what is a configuration, then?

Well, you’ll be getting a clearer idea of that in later essays.

But to give you a quick idea of how the real picture differs from the simplified version we saw in this essay…

Our experimental setup only dealt with one moving particle, a single photon. Real configurations are about multiple particles. The next essay will deal with the case of more than one particle, and that should give you a much clearer idea of what a configuration is.

Each configuration we talked about should have described a joint position of all the particles in the mirrors and detectors, not just the position of one photon bopping around.

In fact, the really real configurations are over joint positions of all the particles in the universe, including the particles making up the experimenters. You can see why I’m saving the notion of experimental results for later essays.

In the real world, amplitude is a continuous distribution over a continuous space of configurations. This essay’s “configurations” were blocky and digital, and so were our “amplitude flows.” It was as if we were talking about a photon teleporting from one place to another.

If none of that made sense, don’t worry. It will be cleared up in later essays. Just wanted to give you some idea of where this was heading.

[Editor’s Note: Strictly speaking, a standard half-silvered mirror would yield a rule “multiply by −1 when the photon turns at a right angle,” not “multiply by i.” The basic scenario described by the author is not physically impossible, and its use does not affect the substantive argument. However, physics students may come away confused if they compare the discussion here to textbook discussions of Mach–Zehnder interferometers. We’ve left this idiosyncrasy in the text because it eliminates any need to specify which side of the mirror is half-silvered, simplifying the experiment.]

Okay, here is a thorough fact-checking of the provided text "Configurations and Amplitude" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Overall Assessment:

The post aims to provide an intuitive introduction to quantum mechanics concepts like superposition and interference using complex amplitudes and configurations, exemplified by beam splitters and mirrors (forming a Mach-Zehnder interferometer). While it successfully conveys the qualitative strangeness of QM and the failure of classical "billiard ball" intuition, it contains a significant factual error in the specific physical rules it presents for the beam splitter, which leads to mathematically incorrect results (though the relative probabilities sometimes coincidentally match standard results). The philosophical framing reflects a specific interpretation (likely Many-Worlds) presented strongly.

Specific Factual Mistakes and Inaccuracies:

1. Incorrect Beam Splitter (Half-Silvered Mirror) Rule:

   • Claim: The post states the rule for a half-silvered mirror is "multiply by 1 when the photon goes straight [transmission], and multiply by i when the photon turns at a right angle [reflection]."
   • Fact Check: This rule is factually incorrect for a standard, physically realistic 50/50 beam splitter. A fundamental requirement in quantum mechanics is that evolution must be unitary, which implies probability conservation. The total probability of detecting the photon after the beam splitter must equal the probability before it.
   • Analysis: If the input amplitude is A, the output amplitudes according to Yudkowsky's rule are A1 = A (transmitted) and Ai (reflected). The sum of the squared moduli (probabilities) would be |A|^2 + |A*i|^2 = |A|^2 + |A|^2 * |i|^2 = |A|^2 + |A|^2 * 1 = 2|A|^2. This means the total probability has doubled, which violates conservation laws (energy/probability).
   • Correct Physics: A standard lossless 50/50 beam splitter must divide the probability equally. A common representation uses factors like 1/√2 for transmission and i/√2 for reflection (or 1/√2 and -1/√2, or other variations depending on phase conventions, but always ensuring the sum of squared moduli is 1). For example, |A/√2|^2 + |iA/√2|^2 = |A|^2/2 + |A|^2/2 = |A|^2, conserving probability.
   • Editor's Note: The footnote [1] acknowledges this discrepancy, stating a standard mirror might use -1 (or i) and implying the author's choice simplifies the explanation. However, acknowledging an error doesn't make it factually correct. Using non-unitary rules misrepresents the fundamental mathematical structure of QM, even if some qualitative outcomes appear similar.

2. Incorrect Amplitude Values in Calculations:

   • Claim: Due to the incorrect beam splitter rule, the specific amplitude values calculated throughout the examples are quantitatively wrong.
     • In Figure 1, final amplitudes are calculated as -i and -1. (Correct rules would give -i/√2 and -1/√2, assuming input -1).
     • In Figure 2, the amplitudes arriving at D are calculated as 1 (via B) and -i (via C). The final amplitudes are calculated as 0 for E and 2 for F. (Correct rules would give amplitudes 0 for E and 1 for F, conserving the initial squared modulus of 1).
   • Fact Check: While the relative probabilities derived from Yudkowsky's amplitudes sometimes match standard results (e.g., 50/50 in Fig 1, 0%/100% in Fig 2, 50/50 in Fig 3), the absolute amplitude values and the total calculated probability (|0|^2 + |2|^2 = 4 in Fig 2) are incorrect due to the non-physical rule used at the beam splitters.

3. Potentially Misleading Analogy for "Configuration":

   • Claim: A configuration is described as a "variable in the program," a "memory location," not a "possible way the world could be."
   • Fact Check: This is an analogy to make the concept concrete. In QM, particularly for multiple particles, a "configuration" typically refers to a point in configuration space (a high-dimensional space specifying the positions, or other relevant properties, of all particles simultaneously). While Yudkowsky's analogy captures the idea that these are elements of the physical description associated with amplitudes, it might oversimplify or slightly mislead compared to the formal definition, especially the strong distinction from "possible ways the world could be," which touches on interpretational debates. It's more of a pedagogical simplification than a strict factual error.

4. Presentation of Interpretation as Fact:

   • Claim: The text strongly asserts that amplitudes and configurations are "out there in the territory," objectively real physical entities, distinct from probabilities or states of knowledge/belief.
   • Fact Check: This reflects the ontological commitment of interpretations like the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), which Yudkowsky favors. While the mathematical formalism of QM uses amplitudes associated with configurations, their physical interpretation (what they are) is subject to ongoing debate among physicists and philosophers of physics (e.g., Copenhagen, Bohmian Mechanics, QBism offer different views). Presenting one interpretation's ontological stance as simply "how reality works" without acknowledging alternatives can be seen as presenting interpretation as established fact.

Points That Are Factually Correct (within the context of QM principles):

• QM involves complex numbers (amplitudes), not just real probabilities.
• The squared modulus of the amplitude relates to detection probabilities (Born Rule).
• Superposition: Multiple configurations/paths can contribute to the final amplitude at a point.
• Interference: Amplitudes can add constructively or destructively (e.g., adding to 0 at detector E in Figure 2), which probabilities cannot do.
• The Mach-Zehnder interferometer setup (Figure 2) does demonstrate interference phenomena that classical particle models cannot explain.
• Blocking one path in the interferometer (Figure 3) destroys the interference pattern, leading to probabilistic outcomes consistent with only one path being active.
• The description of how measurement works (yielding squared modulus, often relative ratios) and how probabilities are inferred experimentally (counting events) is broadly correct.
• The mention of multi-particle configuration space and continuous distributions (wave functions) as being part of the "real picture" is correct.

Conclusion:

The post is a valuable attempt to build intuition for quantum interference and the role of complex amplitudes. However, its pedagogical simplification of the beam splitter physics crosses into factual inaccuracy by using a rule that violates probability conservation (unitarity), a cornerstone of QM. This leads to quantitatively incorrect amplitude values in the calculations, even though the qualitative interference effects described (like cancellation at one detector) are characteristic of the actual physics. Furthermore, it presents a specific philosophical interpretation of QM's ontology rather strongly. A reader should be aware of the incorrect physics rule used for the beam splitter and understand that the ontological claims about the reality of amplitudes/configurations represent one specific viewpoint (MWI) within a broader interpretive landscape.

Perform a thorough fact-checking of this post and report factual mistakes """The Origins Of . . . Civil Rights Law The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.

The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:

The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.

Modern civil rights law is bad (he begins) for reasons baked into its history. The original Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to be an ad hoc response to the outrageous level of anti-black racism going on in the South, which protests and TV news had finally brought to the attention of the white majority. There was broad support for a bill which was basically “don’t be the KKK”.

Sex discrimination got tacked on half as a joke, half as a poison pill by its enemies to make the bill unpalatable (fact check: true - but there’s a deeper story, see this Slate article for more details). Ideas about “affirmative action” and “disparate impact” weren’t tacked on at all; the bill’s proponents denied that it could be used to justify anything of the sort, and even agreed to include language in the bill saying it was against that. Still, after the bill was passed, a series of executive orders, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic power grabs put all those things in place.

The key point here is that “quotas”, or any kind of “positive discrimination” where minorities got favored over more-qualified whites, were anathema to lawmakers and the American people. But civil rights activists, the courts, and the bureaucracy really wanted those things. So civil rights law became a giant kludge that effectively created quotas and positive discrimination while maintaining plausible deniability. This ended up as the worst of both worlds. Hanania specifically complains about1:

Affirmative Action

Hanania’s take on affirmative action involves the government sending companies a message like this:

We notice your workforce has fewer minorities than the applicant pool.

If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better have exactly many minorities as the applicant pool.

But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor minority applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of minority employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.

Have fun!

This satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued.

A recent case illustrates the results of this double-bind. The FAA hires air traffic controllers. They used to judge applicants based on a test which measured their skills at air traffic control. This resulted in comparatively few black air traffic controllers. Various civil rights groups put pressure on them, and they replaced the test with a “biographical questionnaire”. The questionnaire asked weird unrelated questions about your life, and you got points if you gave the answer that the FAA thought black people might give (for example, if you said your worst subject was science). This still didn’t get them enough black employees, so they secretly told black communities exactly what answers to put on the questionnaire to go through.

It’s easy to blame the FAA here, but (Hanania says) civil rights law almost forces you to do something like this. People tried simpler things, like keeping a test but giving minority applicants extra points. The courts and civil rights bureaucracy struck these down as illegal. The almost-explicit policy was that you had to get more minority employees, but you had to hide it carefully enough that the American people (who were still against racial preferences) wouldn’t catch on.

Disparate Impact

Not only can you not explicitly discriminate, you can’t use hiring criteria that “accidentally” discriminate by favoring one race over another. To give a stupid example, if someone refused to hire anyone from Detroit, this would have “disparate impact” since Detroit is a majority black city. If you allowed stuff like this, racists could covertly discriminate by using these sorts of rules.

But Hanania challenges us to think of any criterion that isn’t potentially racially biased. For example, we know universities discriminate against Asians, so only hiring people with college degrees is a “disparate impact”. We know that more men than women have experience as miners, so a mining company only hiring employees with experience is a “disparate impact”. Since whites typically do better on IQ tests than blacks, and all cognitive skills are correlated with IQ, the Supreme Court decided in Duke vs. Griggs that all tests of any ability were potentially disparate impact, and you opened yourself to lawsuits if you used any of them.

(in theory, companies are allowed to use tests and similar criteria if they prove them nondiscriminatory. But the standards for this - they have to prove it for each race and each job site individually - are so high that, in practice, few companies take this route.)

Since this technically banned all possible criteria, companies couldn’t follow the letter of the law. Instead they hired fancy lawyers to tell them which way the winds were blowing. The lawyers told them that college degrees were okay, resumes with biographies and experience were maybe okay, and interviews were okay. Tests were out. Anything more creative was out.

A disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden EEOC sued convenience store chain Sheetz for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn’t allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites, therefore it’s disparate impact, therefore Sheetz has to drop the criminal background check.

(the article links to another case where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application)

Is Sheetz the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they do the background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you’re looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheetz didn’t prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you, and you’re wondering whether the real rule is “the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like”, Hanania’s answer is “definitely yes”.

His position is that all of these rules are so broad that every company is always violating them in some sense. No company has exactly the same distribution of minorities as “the applicant pool”, whatever that is. No company has some magical hiring rule that has literally zero correlation with race, especially since black people are on average poorer, less educated, and less likely to have any given achievement (so any attempt to choose better employees over worse will necessarily disadvantage them). In real life, the bureaucracy’s rules are something like “don’t do anything different from other companies in your industry, and especially don’t be caught seeming less woke”. Hanania argues this creates an arms race / ratchet. Every company wants to be at least 50th percentile wokeness or above. But not every company can be above average. So everybody gets more and more woke, with no end in sight.

Continuing with Sheetz: according to the article on the lawsuit, in 2020 they “introduced the IDEA initiative”, ie Inclusion Diversity Equality & Accessibility. Their website has a big picture of a black woman saying “We’re Building A Great Place To Work For All”, and boasts that they’ve created a special forum for black employees. They’ve made 60% of managers women, started a Woman’s Leadership Program, offered generous maternity leave, and written letters to the Chamber of Commerce on how the George Floyd murder made them realize “we quickly needed to learn, listen, be vulnerable and humbly approach . . . culture-shifting work”. Companies hope that if they do enough of this stuff, the EEOC will agree they’re an ally in the civil rights project and not sue them under their wide discretion to sue basically anyone. Too bad they’re getting sued anyway; some other convenience store must have done more of this stuff. Surely some executive is wishing they had just tried having one more mandatory diversity training…

Harassment Law

Harassment law might win the award for most complicated chain of reasoning from real legislation to enforcement:

Legislation says you can’t discriminate against minorities

If you bully minorities out of your company, that would be a way to discriminate against them.

So you can’t have an environment that’s so hostile to minorities that they inevitably leave.

In some sense, anything that offends a minority is part of this environment.

Any joke, political comment, flirtation, etc, could potentially offend a minority.

Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses.

Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far.

Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs.

And

In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az2 [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent.

(fact check: this article says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version)

Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim.

But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space.

Is this true? People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation?

Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.”

In such a world:

Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults.

I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here.

…And More

Richard Hanania hates all this stuff.

Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves.

This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with.

Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs.

(unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”).

But also:

During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.

Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really really want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out.

What To Do?

Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1.

Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long?

His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar.

And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?”

But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later.

The Origins Of . . . Inequality A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?”

Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground.

“Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.”

My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went:

We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.

If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better be exactly as black as the general population.

But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor black applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of black employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.

Have fun!

Our hypothetical opponent could argue there’s nothing necessarily contradictory or Orwellian about this. If your company is whiter than its applicant pool (eg the general population), then you must be discriminating. If you stop discriminating, you can get racial balance without any of that nasty quota stuff. So what’s the problem?

Everyone is so circumspect when talking about race that I can never figure out what anyone actually knows or believes. Still, I think most people would at least be aware of the following counterargument: suppose you’re the math department at a college. You might like to have the same percent black as the general population (13%). But far fewer than 13% (let’s say 2%) of good math PhDs are black. So it’s impossible for every math department to hire 13% black math professors unless they lower their standards or take some other drastic measure.

Okay, says our hypothetical opponent. Then that means math grad programs are discriminating against blacks. Fine, they’re the ones we should be investigating for civil rights violations.

No, say the math grad programs, fewer than 13% of our applicants are black too.

Fine, then the undergrad programs are the racists. Or if they can prove they’re not, then the high schools are racist and we should do busing. The point is, somebody somewhere along the line has to be racist, right?

I know of four common, non-exclusive answers to this question.

Yes, the high schools (or whatever) are racist. And if you can present a study proving that high schools aren’t racist, then it’s the elementary schools. And if you have a study there too, it’s the obstetricians, giving black mothers worse pregnancy care. If you have a study disproving that too, why are you collecting all these studies? Hey, maybe you’re the racist!

Maybe institutions aren’t too racist today, but there’s a lot of legacy of past racism, and that means black people are poor. And poor people have fewer opportunities and do worse in school. If you have a study showing that black people do worse even when controlled for income, then maybe it’s some other kind of capital, like educational capital or social capital. If you have studies about those too, see above.

Black people have a bad culture. Something something shoes and rap music, trying hard at school gets condemned as “acting white”. They should hold out for a better culture. I hear nobody’s using ancient Sumerian culture these days, maybe they can use that one.

White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85, this IQ difference accurately predicts the different proportions of whites and blacks in most areas, most IQ differences within race are genetic, maybe across-race ones are genetic too. I love Hitler and want to marry him.

None of these are great options, and I think most people work off some vague cloud of all of these and squirm if you try to make them get too specific. I don’t exactly blame Hanania for not taking a strong stand here. It’s just strange to assume civil rights law is bad and unnecessary without having any opinion on whether any of this is true, whether civil rights law is supposed to counterbalance it, and whether it counterbalances it a fair amount.

A cynic might notice that in February of this year, Hanania wrote Shut Up About Race And IQ. He says that the people who talk about option 4 are “wrong about fundamental questions regarding things like how people form their political opinions, what makes for successful movements, and even their own motivations.” A careful reader might notice what he doesn’t describe them as being wrong about. The rest of the piece almost-but-not-quite-explicitly clarifies his position: I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people.

(I’m generally against “calling people out” for believing in race realism. I think people should be allowed to hide beliefs that they’d get punished for not hiding. I sympathize with some of these positions and place medium probability on some weak forms of them. I think Hanania is open enough about where he’s coming from that this review doesn’t count as a callout.)

His foil here is race realist Nathan Cofnas, who says you have to discuss these things. Otherwise progressives can win every argument by using the line of reasoning above - “Just look how much inequality there still is, this shows there’s still lots of racism or at least the lingering effects of past racism, obviously our job isn’t done yet and we need lots more civil rights law to combat it.”

Hanania’s answer to Cofnas is that this isn’t a debate club. “Ah, but Glaucon, your claim that affirmative action is unnecessary must imply the corollary that there must be no inequality, thus proving a contradiction.” LOL no. Realistically this will get fought on the level of “You oppose affirmative action, which makes you a gross Nazi” vs. “You support affirmative action, which makes you an annoying wokescold.” Just say the wokescold thing louder than your enemies say the Nazi thing, and you win. Talking about racial differences scares people off and doesn’t help.

I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason, but Hanania is no doubt right about the strategic considerations. And in his book, he follows his own principle. There’s no discussion of why civil rights law might be necessary, or why it might be impossible for companies to hire enough minorities without reverse discrimination. As he predicts on his blog, it’s not fatal. You wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it.

I’m not really sure what to do here. How do you review a book that has a glaring omission, but also its author has written an essay called Here’s Why I Like Glaring Omissions And Think Everyone Should Have Them? Is it dishonest? Some sort of special super-meta-honesty? How many stars do you take off? Nothing in my previous history of book-reviewing has prepared me for this question.

The Origins Of . . . Racial Categories Hanania presents a few scattered arguments that civil rights law is the origin of woke, of which the section on racial categories was most interesting.

Having instituted affirmative action, the government had to decide what categories it was going to inspect businesses for. Like the rest of civil rights law, the resulting system was a bunch of political kludges. There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing.

They created the concept of “Asian-American” by combining the old category “Oriental” together with Indians, Pakistanis, Thais, etc. Then, under pressure from the Hawaiian delegation, they added Pacific Islanders to create a even more heterogenous and meaningless category of “AAPI” (Asian American or Pacific Islander). Then, under more pressure from Hawaii later, they separated out “Native Hawaiian” again. The result is that Pakistanis, Koreans, and Tongans are the “same race”, but Hawaiians and Samoans are “different races”.

They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans - previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians - into the new race “Hispanic”, adding in all of South and Central America for good measure. Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics and they’d lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race. So a white Spaniard from Spain and a white Spaniard from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity.

Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this.

All of this means that (for example) a company that had 10 Pakistanis and 10 Afghans might get classified as “too white” and get sued for failing to hire enough Asian-Americans. But a company that had 20 Pakistanis, or 10 Pakistanis + 10 Koreans, would be fine.

Hanania argues that this has gone beyond corporations and seeped into the culture, helping create modern wokeness. For example, after some Chinese people got beaten up a few years ago, there was a campaign to #StopAAPIHate, as if AAPI were a natural category, or there were some racists targeting AAPIs in particular. Does this mean government-mandated racial categories are invading our deepest thoughts?

That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When Everything Everywhere All At Once came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.

The point about “Hispanics” is better taken, and you can read more about the case here. But since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized and equally-interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican (and Central American) immigrants, who do form a pretty natural grouping. People are just as happy to talk about Latinos (and Latinx) as Hispanics. I’m not sure we can attribute this one to the government either.

As for Arabs, they seem to have plenty of organization and activism, eg CAIR; if this is less prominent than eg Asians or Latinos, it’s probably because Arabs are about 0.5% of the US population, compared to Asians’ 5% and Latinos’ 20%.

Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.

The Origins Of . . . Woke Aside from this, Hanania doesn’t have much to support his claimed thesis - that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness. He mostly goes with vague, zoomed-out arguments. Civil rights law sets people against one another. It accustoms them to lying. It forces them to focus on people’s race instead of being color-blind. It denies merit. It saps people’s hope for the future, and their ability to trust the political system.

The few exceptions where he gave more specific stories were helpful. For example:

Civil rights acts as a sort of force multiplier for disgruntled employees . . . allowing them to change institutions from the inside. The same company that might not think twice about disciplining workers for making unfounded or exaggerated claims about other aspects of its business can have its hands tied if the allegations being made contain even a hint of a charge of racism or sexism. As mentioned before, civil rights law bans “retaliation” against an employee even if the underlying complaint is ultimately without merit. When Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an article in the New York Times in the summer of 2020 calling for the military to be sent to deal with rioters in major American cities, the opinion editor of the paper eventually resigned after employees waged a campaign against him that included sending out identical tweets saying that the piece put black staff in danger. Had they claimed a grievance based on some other, “non-protected” identity, there would not have been the specter of legal liability for the article, nor would the controversy have invoked the grievance procedures and norms already established to deal with racial issues.

If a major newspaper being influenced in its staffing and editorial choices by civil rights law seems too absurd to contemplate, consider that Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for the Washington Post, sued her employer on the grounds that it was discriminatory to take her off #MeToo stories after she talked about her own alleged sexual assault. Although her suit was dismissed in 2022, newspapers are no different than other employers in responding to incentives. Sonmez was eventually fired by the Washington Post in 2022 for weeks of publicly attacking coworkers on Twitter. It is reasonable to wonder whether the employer’s hesitancy to part ways with her was based on the incentives created by civil rights law and their downstream cultural effects.

So maybe the causal pathway is civil rights law → woker workforce at newspapers/universities/etc → cultural wokeness? But there’s not a lot here beyond this NYT example.

When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015, when everybody started talking about privilege and white supremacy, Black Lives Matter burst onto the cultural scene, all your friends suddenly had rainbow and trans flags in their social media profiles, and people coined terms like “SJW” and “woke” to describe this phenomenon.

Source: David Rozado Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.

Even the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated. Grant that this was an older form of wokeness more clearly grounded in the anti-segregation struggles of the 1960s. But that just brings us back to the question of where the new 2010s version of wokeness came from, which the book also doesn’t answer.

How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests? Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?

How did gay, lesbian, and transgender people win their rights, normalize their identity, and win victories in representation, medical care, and even the language? When these groups were still unpopular, civil rights law didn’t apply to them. They fought their way up from zero, with little legal help, until they were powerful enough that they could lobby for civil rights protection. Transgender people in particular weren’t covered under civil rights law until 2020, and they still don’t get some of the most-sought benefits like affirmative action. But they’re a central example of wokeness. Isn’t this evidence that wokeness can thrive without support from civil rights law?

I don’t read Hanania’s blog religiously. Maybe he has an article somewhere about Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument. But I can’t predict what it would say.

The Origins Of . . . The Next Trump Administration’s Civil Rights Policy Like I said with What We Owe The Future, it’s probably unfair to review this book qua book.

I appreciated the readable and thoughtful overview of civil rights law and its history. I was already skeptical of affirmative action; this book further confirms that skepticism. I was less convinced by the attempt to connect it to cultural wokeness, but that’s fine - it seems to have caused enough direct damage to corporations, universities, employees, government departments, etc, to judge it negatively on those terms.

(although I’m suspending final judgment here based on my spot-check of the Tesla story turning up a different enough sequence of events that I’m not sure how much else was presented in a one-sided way - let me know if you find other parts that seem wrong.)

But my impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is that he’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.

It doesn’t matter if Hanania has a coherent theory of discrimination, or a coherent theory of how civil rights law causes woke culture. His instincts here are really good. He’s written a book that’s become popular and talked about, which has attracted exactly the sorts of policy wonks he wanted, and that’s well-designed to make them to pay attention to this issue. In this sense, the book is perfect. Complaining that it doesn’t satisfy my intellectual curiosity is like complaining that the operating manual for a missile system lacks convincing characterization or plot.

Read this book if you want a well-written expose of the past fifty years of civil rights decisions. Or read it in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.

1 I’ve included three of Hanania’s four civil rights law subtopics. The book covers a fourth, Title IX (mostly focusing on women’s sports in college). Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.

2 The book offers no explanation of why a father with the last name Diaz would have a son with the last name Di-az, but it includes the [sic] that makes me think it is on purpose. Other news articles covering the story are split about 50-50 about whether they use the hyphen in the son’s name. None of them explain what’s going on here. """

Okay, let's break down the factual claims made in the blog post reviewing Richard Hanania's "The Origins of Woke."

Overall Assessment:

The blog post is generally factually accurate in its reporting of historical events, legal cases, and the broad strokes of Hanania's arguments (as presented by the reviewer). It correctly identifies key pieces of legislation, court decisions, and controversies. Where the reviewer expresses uncertainty or notes discrepancies (like the Tesla case details), they flag it appropriately. The reviewer's interpretations and critiques of Hanania's thesis are opinion/analysis, not factual claims subject to checking, but the factual basis for those critiques appears sound.

Specific Fact-Checks:

1. Claim: "Sex discrimination got tacked on half as a joke, half as a poison pill by its enemies..."

   • Verdict: Accurate. This is the widely accepted historical account of how the prohibition of sex discrimination was added to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Rep. Howard Smith, a Southern opponent of the bill. While his exact motives are debated (some argue he genuinely supported women's rights, others that it was purely tactical), the "poison pill" interpretation is dominant and factually grounded in the legislative history. The reviewer correctly notes there's a "deeper story," acknowledging nuance.

2. Claim: "...the bill’s proponents denied that it could be used to justify anything of the sort [affirmative action/disparate impact], and even agreed to include language in the bill saying it was against that."

   • Verdict: Accurate. Key proponents like Senator Hubert Humphrey explicitly stated the Act would not require racial balancing or quotas. Section 703(j) of Title VII was included to state that the Act does not require preferential treatment to correct racial imbalances.

3. Claim: "...a series of executive orders, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic power grabs put all those things [affirmative action, disparate impact] in place."

   • Verdict: Accurate. Executive Order 11246 (issued by LBJ in 1965) required federal contractors to take "affirmative action." The Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) established the "disparate impact" doctrine under Title VII. EEOC guidelines further shaped enforcement. Whether these were "power grabs" is interpretation, but the mechanism (EOs, court decisions, agency rules) is factually correct.

4. Claim: FAA replaced skills test with a "biographical questionnaire" favoring answers thought common among black applicants, and secretly coached black communities.

   • Verdict: Accurate. This refers to a real controversy starting around 2013-2014. The FAA replaced the existing Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) test with a biographical questionnaire. Lawsuits and reports alleged this change, intended to increase diversity, disadvantaged qualified candidates and that certain answers (like "worst subject was science") were favored. Allegations of coaching specific groups also surfaced.

5. Claim: Courts/bureaucracy struck down simpler things like giving minority applicants extra points.

   • Verdict: Accurate. Explicit point systems or quotas used to achieve racial balance have generally been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (e.g., Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke, Gratz v. Bollinger). The legal landscape favors more holistic or indirect methods, leading to the complex situation Hanania (and the reviewer) describes.

6. Claim: Griggs v. Duke Power decided that "all tests of any ability were potentially disparate impact".

   • Verdict: Mostly Accurate, slight oversimplification. Griggs established that employment practices (including tests) that have a disparate impact on protected groups and are not shown to be related to job performance are illegal under Title VII. It didn't automatically ban all tests, but it shifted the burden of proof significantly onto employers to validate any test that had such an impact, making many companies wary of using them. The reviewer captures the practical effect accurately.

7. Claim: Standards for proving tests nondiscriminatory are very high (prove for each race/job site).

   • Verdict: Accurate. The EEOC's Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP) set high standards for test validation, which can be complex and costly, often requiring validation studies specific to the job and potentially considering differential validity across groups.

8. Claim: Biden EEOC sued Sheetz over criminal background checks based solely on disparate impact.

   • Verdict: Accurate. In September 2023, the EEOC sued Sheetz, alleging its use of criminal background checks disproportionately screened out Black, Native American, and multiracial applicants, constituting disparate impact discrimination under Title VII. The suit did not allege intentional discrimination.

9. Claim: Reference to Obama EEOC suing a company for not hiring someone convicted of attempted murder who lied on application.

   • Verdict: Accurate. This likely refers to the EEOC's controversial lawsuit against Kaplan Higher Education Corp. The EEOC alleged Kaplan's use of credit and criminal background checks had a disparate impact. One specific case highlighted involved a candidate denied for past convictions (details vary in reporting, but violent crime is often mentioned) and alleged dishonesty. The EEOC eventually lost/withdrew parts of the case.

10. Claim: Harassment law evolved from non-discrimination principle to regulating workplace environment/speech.

    • Verdict: Accurate. Hostile work environment harassment is legally considered a form of discrimination under Title VII, established through court decisions (e.g., Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson). The logic flows from non-discrimination to preventing conduct so severe or pervasive it alters employment conditions based on protected characteristics.

11. Claim: The list of things found as evidence of hostile work environment (Volokh list: "men working," "draftsman," Khomeini picture, rap music, "great view").

    • Verdict: Accurate (as reported by Volokh). Eugene Volokh, a legal scholar, has compiled extensive lists of examples cited in court filings or decisions as alleged evidence contributing to a hostile environment. It's important to note that these items alone wouldn't necessarily create liability, but they were presented in legal arguments as contributing factors. The reviewer accurately represents Volokh's compilation.

12. Claim: Details of the Owen Diaz / Demetric Di-az Tesla lawsuit.

    • Verdict: Reviewer's fact-check is Accurate. The reviewer correctly notes the basic facts as likely presented by Hanania (slurs, graffiti, Tesla claims of action, large verdict reduced). Crucially, the reviewer also accurately reports on their own check finding more severe allegations (threats, "go back to Africa," caricatures, video evidence) documented in major news outlets covering the trial. This discrepancy is factually correct.
    • Name Discrepancy (Diaz / Di-az): Accurate. The reviewer correctly notes that news reports are inconsistent, with some using "Di-az" for the son. The reason remains unclear in public reporting, but the observation itself is factual.

13. Claim: You can't retaliate against someone for filing a harassment complaint, even if found baseless, potentially leading to punishing the victim.

    • Verdict: Accurate (regarding the law's principle). Anti-retaliation provisions under Title VII are robust. An employer cannot take adverse action against an employee because they made a discrimination/harassment complaint, even if the complaint is ultimately dismissed, provided it was made in good faith. This can create complex management situations like the one described, where managing the interpersonal dynamics post-complaint is difficult without triggering a retaliation claim. The scenario described is a plausible, if perhaps extreme, illustration of the legal constraints.

14. Claim: US Civil Service switched from spoils system to merit system (Pendleton Act 1883) after Garfield assassination, later eroded due to disparate impact concerns.

    • Verdict: Accurate. The Pendleton Act did establish a merit-based system largely in response to patronage abuses culminating in Garfield's assassination by a disgruntled office-seeker. Concerns about disparate impact did lead to changes in how testing and selection were used in the civil service from the 1970s onward (e.g., adjustments to or replacement of tests like the Federal Service Entrance Examination).

15. Claim: Most Americans hate affirmative action; it failed on 8/9 ballot measures, including recently in California despite funding disparity.

    • Verdict: Accurate. Public opinion polling consistently shows opposition to racial preferences in hiring/admissions, though support varies with question wording. Affirmative action ballot measures have indeed failed in most states where they've been voted on directly, including California's Proposition 16 in 2020, which failed decisively despite significant backing from the political establishment and being heavily outspent.

16. Claim: Most civil rights law based on EOs/judicial decisions, repealable by President/SCOTUS.

    • Verdict: Accurate. While the foundational laws (CRA 1964, etc.) require Congress, key pillars like affirmative action (EO 11246) and disparate impact doctrine (Griggs and subsequent cases/guidelines) are indeed rooted in executive orders and judicial interpretation, making them susceptible to change by future Presidents or Court rulings without new legislation.

17. Claim: Reagan wanted to overturn AA but was dissuaded by moderate Republicans like Bob Dole citing political risks.

    • Verdict: Accurate. Historical accounts confirm internal debates within the Reagan administration about rescinding EO 11246, with figures like Dole advising against it due to concerns about being perceived as racist and the potential political backlash.

18. Claim: Government racial categories (AAPI, Hispanic) are political kludges combining disparate groups. Arabs classified as white. Dividing line near Afghanistan/Pakistan.

    • Verdict: Accurate. The OMB Directive 15 outlines the standard categories. "Asian" includes origins from the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. Pacific Islander is separate but often combined statistically/colloquially as AAPI. "Hispanic/Latino" is an ethnicity, not a race, combining people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South/Central American, or other Spanish culture/origin, regardless of race. People of Middle Eastern/North African descent are instructed to identify as White by the Census Bureau. The Afghanistan/Pakistan border loosely represents the line between Central/West Asia (classified as White) and South Asia (classified as Asian). Hanania's Palestinian background makes his classification as "White" under this system accurate.

19. Claim: Transgender people weren't covered under federal civil rights law until 2020 and lack AA benefits.

    • Verdict: Accurate. The Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) interpreted Title VII's prohibition on sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment. Before this, federal protection was inconsistent. Affirmative action programs typically focus on race/ethnicity and sometimes gender, not usually sexual orientation or gender identity.

20. Claim: The "Great Awokening" dates to roughly 2010-2015, associated with BLM, privilege discourse, etc.

    • Verdict: Accurate. This timing aligns with analyses by scholars and commentators (like David Rozado, cited by the reviewer) tracking language use in media and academia, showing a sharp increase in terms related to social justice, racism, privilege, etc., starting in the early-to-mid 2010s.

Minor Points/Interpretations:

• The reviewer's difficulty squaring Hanania's thesis with the 2010s timing of "wokeness" is a logical critique based on the presented facts.
• The reviewer's assertion that Hanania doesn't address the "benefits" side of civil rights law (fighting inequality) seems accurate based on the review's summary of the book's focus.
• The reviewer's interpretation of Hanania's stance on race/IQ, based on the "Shut Up About Race And IQ" piece, is presented as an interpretation but seems like a plausible reading of Hanania's stated position.

Conclusion:

The blog post demonstrates a high degree of factual accuracy in the claims it makes about historical events, legal cases, government policies, and the general contentions attributed to Hanania's book. The reviewer responsibly flags areas of uncertainty or discrepancy (like the full details of the Tesla case). The post provides a reliable factual scaffold for its analysis and critique.

Okay, let's perform a thorough fact-check of the provided blog post reviewing Richard Hanania's "The Origins of Woke." The focus will be on the factual claims made within the blog post itself, including its representation of historical events, legal concepts, specific cases, and Hanania's arguments where verifiable.

Overall Assessment:

The blog post provides a summary and critique of Hanania's book. Many of its descriptions of historical events, legal principles, and specific cases are broadly accurate or represent common understandings, though sometimes simplified. However, there are areas where context is missing, claims are presented one-sidedly (which the reviewer sometimes acknowledges), or legal concepts are slightly distorted. The reviewer does a good job flagging some points for fact-checking internally (like the Tesla case).

Specific Factual Claims and Checks:

1. Sex Discrimination in CRA 1964:

   • Claim: Added half as a joke, half as a poison pill by opponents. Reviewer notes "fact check: true - but there’s a deeper story."
   • Fact Check: Accurate, but Context Needed. Representative Howard Smith (D-VA), a segregationist opposing the bill, proposed adding "sex." His motives are debated – some argue it was a poison pill attempt, others that he genuinely supported equality for white women, or responded to pressure from women's groups like the National Woman's Party. Crucially, despite his motives, a coalition including female representatives supported the amendment, and women's groups later fought hard for its enforcement. The reviewer is right that there's a deeper story than just the "poison pill" narrative.

2. Affirmative Action (AA) / Disparate Impact (DI) in CRA 1964:

   • Claim: Not in the original bill; proponents denied it would lead to quotas/preferences and included language against it.
   • Fact Check: Accurate. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 primarily outlawed intentional discrimination ("disparate treatment"). Key proponents like Hubert Humphrey explicitly stated it would not require quotas. Section 703(j) was included specifically to state that the Act doesn't require preferential treatment to remedy racial imbalances. Disparate Impact theory emerged later through EEOC guidelines and the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). Affirmative Action as proactive measures largely stems from Executive Order 11246 (1965) applying to federal contractors, and later court orders/consent decrees.

3. FAA Air Traffic Controller Case:

   • Claim: FAA replaced a skills test with a "biographical questionnaire" favoring answers black people might give; black communities allegedly coached.
   • Fact Check: Broadly Accurate, Details Disputed. In 2014, the FAA did replace the difficult Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) test with a biographical questionnaire (BQ) as an initial screen, partly due to diversity concerns. Lawsuits followed, alleging the BQ discriminated against better-qualified candidates (who aced the AT-SAT but failed the BQ) and lowered standards. Allegations surfaced that the BQ favored certain life experiences thought to be more common among minorities and that some minority applicants may have been coached or received preferential treatment, though definitive proof of widespread coaching directly targeting specific answers is harder to pin down in mainstream reports. The core change and the controversy are real.

4. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971):

   • Claim: Supreme Court decided all tests of any ability were potentially disparate impact.
   • Fact Check: Slight Exaggeration/Oversimplification. Griggs established the disparate impact principle: employment practices (like tests or diploma requirements) that are facially neutral but disproportionately exclude protected groups are illegal under Title VII unless the employer can prove they are job-related and consistent with business necessity. It didn't automatically invalidate all tests, but it placed the burden on employers to validate tests that had a disparate impact, a process that can be complex and costly.

5. Sheetz Lawsuit:

   • Claim: Biden EEOC sued Sheetz over criminal background checks due to disparate impact, not intentional discrimination.
   • Fact Check: Accurate. The EEOC filed suit against Sheetz in April 2024, alleging that its use of criminal background checks disproportionately screened out Black, Native American, and multiracial applicants, thus constituting disparate impact discrimination under Title VII. The suit focuses on the effect of the policy, not discriminatory intent.

6. Obama EEOC / Attempted Murder Case:

   • Claim: Obama EEOC sued demanding compensation for an employee refused hire for attempted murder conviction and lying about it.
   • Fact Check: Partially Accurate, Lacks Context. This likely refers to EEOC v. Freeman (2013). The EEOC sued Freeman, a corporate events planner, challenging its use of credit and criminal background checks as having a disparate impact. One part of the broader case did involve individuals rejected based on their criminal records, potentially including serious offenses like attempted murder, and the EEOC sought relief for a class of applicants. However, court documents show judges were highly critical of the EEOC's evidence and expert analysis in Freeman, and the specific claim involving the applicant with an attempted murder conviction who also lied was just one facet of a larger, ultimately unsuccessful, lawsuit. Presenting it as the sole focus misrepresents the case's scope and outcome.

7. Volokh List of Hostile Work Environment Examples:

   • Claim: Lists examples like "men working" signs, job titles, Khomeini pictures, etc., as things found to be evidence of HWE.
   • Fact Check: Accurate that Volokh Compiles Such Examples. Eugene Volokh, a law professor, frequently writes about First Amendment issues and hostile work environment law, often critically analyzing its breadth. He has documented numerous instances where such items have been alleged by plaintiffs or cited by courts/agencies as contributing factors to a hostile work environment, even if they weren't solely sufficient to win the case. The post accurately reflects the type of examples Volokh discusses to illustrate the potential scope and sometimes perceived absurdity of HWE claims.

8. Tesla / Diaz Case:

   • Claim (Hanania's version per reviewer): Slurs used (maybe by minorities, maybe friendly), racist graffiti, Tesla punished verifiable instances, jury awarded $137M reduced to $15M.
   • Claim (Reviewer's additions): Also included "go back to Africa," caricatures, threats, menial work assignments, video evidence, testimony from ~2 dozen workers.
   • Fact Check: Reviewer's Additions Provide Crucial Context, Hanania's Version is Incomplete/Misleading. Extensive reporting confirms the severe nature of the harassment alleged by Owen Diaz and corroborated by others. Allegations included daily use of racial slurs (N-word, etc.), swastikas and racist caricatures graffitied in bathrooms and workspaces, comments like "go back to Africa," and supervisors being aware or participating. While Tesla argued it took action when possible, the jury found the environment severely hostile. The initial $137M verdict ($6.9M compensatory, $130M punitive) was indeed reduced by the judge to $15M, which Diaz rejected, leading to a retrial on damages that resulted in a $3.2M award. The reviewer's fact-check highlighting the severity and breadth of the allegations beyond Hanania's reported summary is correct and important.
   • Diaz/Di-az Spelling: The reviewer notes the inconsistent spelling. Fact Check: News reports and court documents show inconsistency. Sometimes both are "Diaz," sometimes the son is "Di-az." Associated Press style typically uses "Diaz" for both. The origin of the hyphenated version is unclear in readily available sources but appears in some reporting.

9. Retaliation Law Scenario:

   • Claim: If a minority bully accuses a white victim who resists, and the white victim is found innocent, the company must punish the victim because moving the bully would be retaliation.
   • Fact Check: Inaccurate / Legal Distortion. Retaliation protections prevent employers from punishing employees for engaging in protected activities (like filing a good-faith harassment complaint), even if the complaint is ultimately found meritless. However, this doesn't shield the accuser from consequences for their own separate misconduct (like bullying). An employer can discipline the bully for bullying, provided it's not pretext for retaliation against the complaint itself. Furthermore, while moving an employee could be retaliatory if it constitutes adverse action, moving an accuser isn't automatically forbidden, especially if done for legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons (e.g., separating parties post-investigation based on neutral policy). The scenario described significantly misrepresents how retaliation law works.

10. Decline of Merit System in Civil Service:

    • Claim: Merit system based on tests ended gradually in the 1970s due to disparate impact concerns, leading to a "racial spoils system."
    • Fact Check: Partially Accurate, Charged Language. Concerns about the disparate impact of written tests on minorities did lead to challenges and changes in civil service hiring starting in the 1970s. For example, the widely used Federal Service Entrance Examination (FSEE) was abandoned after lawsuits. This led to greater use of alternative methods, including evaluations of experience and education, interviews, and eventually programs considering diversity factors. Whether this constitutes an "end" to the merit system or a modification is debated. "Racial spoils system" is Hanania's provocative interpretation, not a neutral factual description. The influence of disparate impact concerns on changing federal hiring practices is real.

11. Public Opinion on Affirmative Action:

    • Claim: Most Americans hate AA; it failed on ballots 8/9 times, including in California despite funding disadvantage.
    • Fact Check: Accurate. Polls consistently show that while Americans support equality and diversity conceptually, large majorities oppose considering race or ethnicity in hiring and admissions decisions (preferential treatment). Ballot initiatives seeking to ban race preferences have passed in numerous states, including California (Prop 209, 1996) and Washington. California's Proposition 16 in 2020, which sought to repeal the ban on race preferences, failed decisively (57% No to 43% Yes) despite being heavily outspent by supporters and the state's demographics and political lean. The 8 out of 9 failure rate for AA initiatives (or success rate for anti-AA initiatives) appears correct or very close.

12. Reagan Administration and Affirmative Action:

    • Claim: Reagan could have overturned much via executive order but was dissuaded by moderate Republicans fearing accusations of racism.
    • Fact Check: Accurate. Key aspects of federal affirmative action rest on Executive Order 11246. The Reagan administration, particularly AG Ed Meese and Asst. AG for Civil Rights William Bradford Reynolds, strongly considered revising or rescinding EO 11246 to eliminate goals and timetables, viewing them as quotas. However, opposition from within the administration (e.g., Labor Secretary Bill Brock) and from moderate Republicans (like Bob Dole) concerned about political fallout ultimately led Reagan to back down, leaving the core of EO 11246 intact.

13. US Government Racial Categories:

    • Claim: Describes creation of "AAPI" and "Hispanic" categories as political kludges with specific examples (Pakistanis vs. Afghans, Spaniards vs. Mayans). Arabs classified as "White."
    • Fact Check: Generally Accurate Description of Complex History.
      • AAPI: The category evolved. "Asian Indian" was added; "Asian or Pacific Islander" was used, then officially split in 1997 into "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander" following advocacy, particularly from Native Hawaiians. The reviewer's summary captures the combining and splitting. The resulting categories are indeed heterogeneous.
      • Hispanic: This category was created in the 1970s through government directives (OMB Directive 15) after advocacy, primarily from Mexican-American groups. It combines people from Spanish-speaking countries. It was designated an ethnicity, not a race, meaning individuals identify race separately (White Hispanic, Black Hispanic, etc.). The reviewer's description of its creation and status is accurate.
      • Arabs/MENA: Currently, people of Middle Eastern or North African descent are officially classified as "White" by the Census Bureau, based on historical precedent. There has been significant advocacy for a separate MENA category due to distinct experiences and discrimination, but it hasn't been implemented. The reviewer is correct about the current classification. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border isn't the precise official line, but the classification of Central/South Asians is complex and varies.
      • Mexican-Americans wanting "White" status: Historically accurate. Groups like LULAC often fought segregation by arguing Mexicans were legally white. A shift occurred later, with the rise of the Chicano movement and the influence of the broader Civil Rights Movement and AA, leading many to embrace a non-white identity.

14. NYT/Tom Cotton Op-Ed Incident:

    • Claim: Staff revolt citing danger to black staff led to opinion editor's resignation; reviewer suggests civil rights law (retaliation fear) played a role.
    • Fact Check: Accurate Description of Events. The Tom Cotton op-ed advocating military deployment during the George Floyd protests (June 2020) caused significant internal backlash at the NYT, with many staffers (including Black journalists) tweeting it put Black staff members in danger. Editorial Page Editor James Bennet initially defended, then apologized for, the publication process and subsequently resigned. Whether fear of legal liability under civil rights law was the primary driver is interpretive (as the reviewer suggests), but the public framing of the internal protest explicitly invoked racial safety concerns, aligning with dynamics influenced by civil rights norms.

15. WaPo/Felicia Sonmez Case:

    • Claim: Reporter sued WaPo for discrimination (removal from #MeToo stories after disclosing assault), suit dismissed, later fired for unrelated Twitter behavior; reviewer wonders if hesitancy to fire sooner was due to civil rights law incentives.
    • Fact Check: Accurate Description of Events. Felicia Sonmez sued the Washington Post, alleging discrimination when editors barred her from covering stories related to sexual assault after she publicly identified as a survivor. A judge dismissed her lawsuit. She was later fired following public disputes on Twitter with colleagues. The reviewer's speculation about employer hesitancy is plausible but speculative – employers are often cautious about terminating employees who have previously filed discrimination complaints due to potential retaliation claims, even if the original suit was dismissed.

Conclusion of Fact-Check:

The blog post is largely factually sound in its reporting of specific events and the general contours of legal history and concepts, especially regarding the creation of CRA 1964, the later emergence of DI and AA, public opinion on AA, ballot measure results, the Reagan administration's internal debates, the existence of specific lawsuits (Sheetz, FAA, Sonmez, Diaz), and the evolution of racial categories.

However, it occasionally suffers from:

• Oversimplification/Exaggeration: The description of Griggs' impact and the retaliation law scenario are slightly distorted or lack necessary nuance.
• One-Sided Presentation (acknowledged by reviewer): The initial summary of the Tesla/Diaz case, attributed to Hanania, significantly downplays the severity of the allegations, which the reviewer correctly points out and supplements with more detail. The Obama EEOC/Freeman case summary lacks important context about the case's broader scope and outcome.
• Interpretive Leaps: Attributing employer actions or cultural shifts directly and solely to legal incentives (like in the NYT or Sonmez examples) is interpretive rather than purely factual, though plausible.

The reviewer demonstrates good critical engagement by questioning sources (like the Tesla story presentation) and acknowledging complexity (like the CRA 1964 "sex" amendment). The identified factual claims are mostly accurate in their core assertions, but readers should be aware of the potential for missing context or simplification inherent in summarizing complex legal and historical issues.

References (Implicitly used during the process):

Slate article on sex amendment (mentioned by reviewer) Historical accounts of CRA 1964 passage Congressional Record / legislative history of CRA 1964 EEOC resources on Title VII, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., Affirmative Action News articles and legal filings regarding FAA hiring changes (e.g., from Washington Times, aviation news sites, court records) EEOC Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures EEOC press release on Sheetz lawsuit (April 2024) Court documents and news reports on EEOC v. Freeman (2013) Writings by Eugene Volokh (e.g., Volokh Conspiracy blog) on hostile work environment law Associated Press, Reuters, NYT, etc., reporting on Diaz v. Tesla Court rulings and appeals summaries in Diaz v. Tesla EEOC guidance on Retaliation Academic articles and government reports on history of federal civil service testing and EEO law (e.g., relating to FSEE, PACE exams) Polling data from Pew Research Center, Gallup, etc., on affirmative action/race in admissions/hiring Ballotpedia or state election records for AA-related ballot measures (CA Prop 209, WA I-200, CA Prop 16) Historical accounts, news archives (NYT, WaPo), and memoirs regarding Reagan administration debates on EO 11246 US Census Bureau documentation on history of race/ethnicity categories; OMB directives US Census Bureau documentation; academic articles on Hispanic identity formation and classification US Census Bureau documentation; news articles on MENA category advocacy Historical studies of LULAC, Chicano Movement, cases like Hernandez v. Texas NYT, WaPo, etc., reporting on Tom Cotton op-ed controversy and James Bennet resignation (June 2020) WaPo, NYT, etc., reporting on Felicia Sonmez lawsuit and firing

"""