Very happy that me and @lastpositivist's paper, "Risk Aversion and Elite-Group Ignorance", has been accepted at PPR. Here's a link to a preprint, and a brief thread: davidbkinney.com/Risk_Aversion_… 1/8
In his 2007 paper "White Ignorance" Charles Mills famously diagnoses a problem in the epistemic lives of many white agents, primarily in the US: they are ignorant of their relative privilege within racist social structures, and this ignorance is caused by those structures. 2/8
One can understand this as part of a more general pattern of what we call "elite-group ignorance": agents are ignorant of some group-based privilege that they hold, because of that group-based privilege. 3/8
We show that on Lara Buchak's influential axiomatization of risk-averse decision theory, this kind of ignorance can be rational, provided that an agent has a seemingly benign level of risk aversion. 4/8
We take this to have an important political upshot, namely that purely psychological interventions (diversity and inclusion trainings, etc.), may not succeed in eliminating elite-group ignorance, since said ignorance may be caused by something as deep-seeded as risk aversion. 5/8
So it may be little use getting privileged agents to "wake up" to their privilege and do something about it. Instead, it may be far more effective to intervene directly on material inequalities through the redistribution of resources. 6/8
The paper sits somewhere between mathematical philosophy, political philosophy, cog sci, and social science. I want to do more work like this. I can't stress how much I learned from collaborating with Liam. 7/8
Many people to thank for comments on drafts, but of those on twitter I believe it's just @kevin_dorst and @thyacinth. Thank you! 8/8.
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