Data collecting
This is funny, in a painful sort of way. Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute blog in 2009:
I’ve been marooned in Paris the last three days, waiting for a plane home after the snowstorm mess (“Poor Charles,” you’re all saying). Last night, having been struck by how polyglot Paris has become, I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French (which probably added in a few Brits and other Europeans) versus everyone else.
Oooh super-professional Data Collection there, counting the people you think look like native French, and allowing that you may have accidentally counted a few “Brits and other Europeans” by mistake.
I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians. And on December 22, I don’t think a lot of them were tourists.
Science in action! Highest quality top drawer extremely accurate data collection. I suppose after he counted he then sorted them into columns by intelligence, intelligence of course being determined by his hunches on the matter.
Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear—but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.
End of fascinating scientific anecdote. With more creative spelling it could be a series of Trump tweets.
This is the guy Sam Harris defends against the Eevul Social Justice Warriors.
The problem is, this sort of data collecting will impress a lot of people. I have students who think this is legitimate data collecting. They think if they can look around a room of people and notice things, and that is going to be all that is needed. I get a lot of “uh uh, because I’ve seen someone who…”. Yes, you may have (or you may be making it up), but that doesn’t mean that is a trend, a scientific data point, or anything. But nearly everyone I know thinks “data collection” of this sort is legitimate and compelling.
I just went through Paris too, on the way to southern France, and ‘noticed’ the same thing (though I didn’t read it as ‘non-native French’ since I’m sure most of the people I saw were, actually, native French). So what? There are lots of responses to ‘there appear to be more dark-skinned people in Paris than there were a decade ago’, including ‘is that actually true?’ Am reminded of my experience decades ago sitting in an engineering meeting thinking ‘wow, I’m so happy there are so many women here’, and then realising that besides me there were, like, two other women in a group of dozens. To me that seemed like ‘a lot’.
It’s worse than all that. I recently sampled 50 street vendors as I walked from Trocadero Metro to Eiffel Tower.
10 years later and I can report Paris is now 100% African.
My data is two years old, so hardly reliable. I can say that at that time:
100% of people selling cutout sheet metal Eiffel Towers appeared to be African (but spoke French until the realised I didn’t).
100% of people who tried to scam us using young women as bait were, or at least appeared to be, Gypsies (but spoke French until the realised I didn’t).
100% of rude waiters were French, and refused to speak English under any circumstances.
I can’t tell you what to make of any of that. All I can say is that Paris was the most French place I’ve ever been.
And of course *none* of those “black Africans, Middle Eastern types, or East Asians” could possibly have been French from birth, either in culture or in nationality. Because France *doesn’t* have a centuries-long history of impressing their culture onto dozens of nations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia, to the point even of displacing previous colonisers entirely. And it certainly doesn’t have a history of letting those never-noway-nohow colonised people come to l’Hexagon propre during and after those never-noway-nohow colonies existed. And that isn’t even to mention the French Foreign Legion, which never accepted or assimilated anybody that wasn’t lily-white and French through and through.
Jesus fucking christ.
Y’know, I’ve always wondered if these guys just don’t pay attention to the people around them.
When I went to school 30 years ago, I was the only white British kid in my primary class. My best friend was born in London, but her family arrived with the Windrush programme – where the “Mother Country” was begging people from the colonies to come and help. Another friend was just as pale as me, but her heritage was Eastern European. Most of my classmates were British, but they didn’t fit some racist stereotype of Britishness.
Many of my friends look very different to me. We don’t really think about this unless someone’s being a racist swine. Even I get “But where are you really from?” because I don’t look quite like I belong. I get asked if I’m Eastern European, Russian, Romani (or if the questioner is Romani, if I’m Romanichal), Jewish (I think they mean Ashkenazi), all sorts of strange questions. All this because someone is making assumptions about who belongs where!
Have any of these dudes looked around and *listened* when they’re in London/Paris/Rome/wherever? Because if they engage their brains, they’ll hear people of all heritages and appearances with strong London (or wherever) accents. That’s been the case for at least 80 years!
I have a lazy man’s version of this survey. Do an image search on (Paris street photo). Count the white and non-white people in each photo where they are identifiable.
So far I’m seeing at least 90% white.
The advantage of this method is, of course, less danger of selective perception.
Francis Galton said something about using pinholes in a scrap of paper in his pocked to keep count of ‘data’ the the percentage of attractive women he passed in the street. Why is it so easy to mistake numbers for data? And Murray’s ‘data’ gathering doesn’t even seem to include counting.
‘Oh look, there’s another one.’
Yep, nothing surprising. Deciding to prospect in Seine St Denis is probably equivalent to deciding to do the same at an international airport. Indeed, this is a place most people without economic security would find refuge, i.e. it is what is called a social ghetto. You could conclude that most recent — and to some extant ‘less recent without much economic success’ migrants would end up living at such places, no big deal. Certainly it says a lot as to how migrants are generally treated in France (though certainly migrating is a factor that cannot be erased easily when the starting point is an absolute zero in economic power, and that happened a lot to many migrants in the previous decades), but it does not say anything about general population of the country.
Accounting for bias is a good idea. Indeed, some non-French Europeans might have been counted. But then, probably a lot of French citizens of non-French origin might too, so you would need to account for that in plain fairness since colony citizens were once considered French in recent history. That’s a fair consequence of modern history, and you have to deal with that anyway.
The French census in 2011 found that “456,105 residents of the municipality of Paris, or 20.3 percent, and 2,117,901 residents of the Paris Region (Île-de-France), or 17.9 percent, were born outside France”
So Charles Murray’s purported count of 50% “non-native French” in 2009 was at least double, if not triple, the actual number. Hard to believe that people accuse him of having a racist agenda.
It’s pretty classic confirmation bias though isn’t it. You see what you want to see and interpret in that light.
25 years ago I was in Sydney for work. During a break one of my hosts bought up Asian and middle eastern immigrants as a ‘threat’. They pointed out that all of these immigrants lived in suburbs adjacent to the main rail and road linkages out of Sydney. They interpreted this as these populations positioning themselves to cut Sydney off from outside assistance and hold the rest of the population hostage. My reply was that was an interesting possibility, but that maybe it was because recent immigrants are often financially strained and socially shunned they tended to congregate in the places that more favoured groups avoided, such as dilapidated suburbs adjacent to noisy rail and road links. Could that be a factor? Well, that was the end of that discussion, and in fact all discussion.
And that was 25 years ago…