The insidious haze of bias

[sqbr]

Via ithiliana: an academic who runs a blog discussing ways to combat biased thinking argues that women don't seem to like this blog, clearly it must be because they're inherently wired not to understand/be interested in the topic, with the conversation quickly shifting to the way women are biologically predisposed to being less intelligent and scientifically rigorous. (Edited as per request, note that this still isn't an entirely accurate description of his argument)

ithiliana goes into the crazy bad wrongness of it quite well, as does mswyrr here (see the OP make an idiot of himself in the comments!) and has a really nice and interesting argument here, including some great quotes.

But it got me thinking about two insidious ideas I see a lot of places, which have a lot of appeal even for people who should know better (like this guy)


The first is that things like racism/sexism etc are just social justice issues, things you should care about because they're morally right, but that they have nothing to do with anything else. Yet to me, they're more like huge cognitive disfunctions, which distort and invalidate our perceptions and actions to a significant degree in all sorts of areas, and must be addressed for practical and not just moral reasons. How can we figure out the truth if we are unable to acknowledge any arguments which challenge our privilege? How can you write a good book if you are genuinely incapable of seeing women as people? How can you hire the best staff if you automatically dismiss anyone with an ethnic sounding name? How can you really understand history if you always take the side of people with a certain shade of skin or religion? This isn't just a matter of being nice to the disadvantaged, this is an issue of truth. And truth is something I'd like to think everyone wants to have as good a hold of as possible.



The second idea is that "there's no smoke without fire", that any prejudice, however horrible and blown out of proportion, must have some basis in fact. A common one (which is brought up here): so many societies have a strong tradition as viewing women as inferior to men. Thus, while it's not going to be universal or neccesarily that large, there must be some innate inferiority which started this tradition. (As this commenter points out, even if you stick with biological determinism, "men tend to be bastards" explains the data better than "women tend to be stupid")

In my opinion there's two issues here: the first is that even if the prejudice is borne out somewhat in practice (ie women perform worse in some standardised tests, certain ethnic groups have a higher arrest record) it's completely unfair to take it on face value without looking at the complex causes behind it (poorer education, institutionalised poverty etc). And in many cases the "objective" measure a group fails at has (possibly unconscious) bias against that group, ie police are racist and arrest that group more regardless of their behaviour.

But the second issue is that sometimes there's absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever. A horrible example I came across of this a while ago (possibly misremembered) was of the way african women were portrayed as inherently seductive and sexual (and dangerous) in America and the west in general during slavery (and now). This was partly because they tended to wear less clothing than your typical victorian woman, but mainly because like any group with absolute power over another(*) the slave owners raped the women, and the only way to justify this was to think of them as evil seductresses. When you look at their history and culture, the africans were basically as prudish and monogamous as the europeans.

On the whole I think a lot of people like to think they're against racism and sexism etc, but deep down, when push comes to shove, would rather think sexist etc attitudes are true than acknowledge that a large part of the core beliefs of past and present societies are a horrible, unjustified, destructive lie.

EDIT: Since it turned out to be necesary, a bibliography of evidence for the existence of bias (found via google and the Blink website):
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=2002-08203-006
http://www.osborne-conant.org/ladies.htm and http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5903.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2026
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

(*)I was going to say "group of men" here but then remembered the female guards at Abu Graib :/

Comments

[mporter.livejournal.com]

Your rewrite still says he talked about women being "inherently wired" in some way, and he didn't do that at all. In the post he asserted that there is a gender difference in status seeking behavior, without saying anything about causes. He may be entirely agnostic on the issue.

Re your point one, prejudice can be an assumption, but so can equality, and I think there is a lot of heartburn ahead (http://www.gnxp.com/) for people who insist on believing in equality across groups. I'm certainly not saying that every old prejudice will be confirmed. I have in my possession a book from 1948 which talks about how Jewish communists, with their doctrine of equality, are threatening superior white civilization; whereas these days, Jews are often the first example cited of an ethnicity that is smarter than others. The facts about human difference are going to be very complicated, both intrinsically and in their relation to history, geography and culture, and some combination of meritocracy and basic human rights is probably the best policy.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, I guess I'm still being a bit unfair, but it's just a brief satirical synopsis *edits post again*

That's point two. What about point one?

And I do actually agree that it's counterproductive to argue that there are no inherent statistical biological differences between genders/ethnic groups etc, because clearly there are (mostly physiological, but plausibly psychological too, in my ignorant opinion(*)) My point is that any given example of racism/sexism etc cannot be assumed to have any relationship to reality, not that it can be assumed to not have any relationship to reality (don't make me break out the Venn diagrams here)

(*)Although the rest of my opinion is that they are so far outweighed/confounded by all the social conditioning/observer bias etc that while they're a legitimate area for scientific study they're not very useful in these sorts of context.

[mporter.livejournal.com]

"What about point one?"

If you mean the part about this being a question of truth... it's like asking which interferes more with your ability to perceive reality, the assumption of equality or the assumption of inequality? It is easy to find groups of people online (e.g. "race realists", who use that name because they want to talk about racial difference without being called racists) who report their abandonment of some assumption of equality as being the end of denial and the beginning of enlightenment.

As for being prescriptive, "meritocracy and basic human rights" is as far as I'm prepared to go.

[alias_sqbr]

First off: when I use the words sexism and racism etc I am referring to unjustified prejudices. So arguing that some prejudices are justified(*) is beside the point: I'm talking about the ones that aren't.

it's like asking which interferes more with your ability to perceive reality, the assumption of equality or the assumption of inequality?

That's not the relevant question. Even if "the assumption of equality" was this huge problem, that would just mean it was another bias to be avoided. The question is, simply: Do racism and sexism cause significant damaging bias?

And the answer is yes (see bibliography)

Specifically, they seem like the kind of irrational bias the blog supposedly talks about, and thus are something the authors should be educated about and take into account.

Brief bibliography (found via google and the Blink website):
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=2002-08203-006
http://www.osborne-conant.org/ladies.htm and http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5903.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2026

You might also be interested in the Implicit Association Test:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

(*)I'm not agreeing that any of them are, mind you, but as I said, it's beside the point

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if we agree on what equality means: and I do not want to get into endless argument.

When I talk about equality, and the way I see it used, it does not mean everybody is the same/equal in some mathematical sense: of course there are differences.

What we are talking about is the right to equal access, equal opportunity, equal education, not everybody being treated the same.

The example I use in my classes: potty parity.

Have you ever seen the long lines outside women's bathrooms in public places (sports, concerts, etc0>

Turns out women need longer in a stall than men: basic physiological differences PLUS children usually with women PLUS clothing etc.

So to get POTTY PARITY, i.e. equal access to pee, there needs to be something like 1.5 times as many stalls/toilets for women as there do for men.

Equality is not a mathematical concept in the sense of everybody being the "same." Equal access means that people with some physical disabilities need to be accomodated in ways that able bodied people don't. It's a lot more complex than saying "people are all the same and should be treated the same" which is the incorrect summary of the equality argument.

The problem is not saying there are gender differences but assume every female is different from every male in some stereotypical way which I, and others, read him as doing.

There is the additional problem of a lot of those believed/perceived differences being based on absolutely bogus science, especially when race and gender comes into it.