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

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting. I'm familiar with the contributors (Eliezer Yudkowsky enjoys an enormous reputation among believers in the immanent transformation of humanity by the Singularity, Robin Hanson similarly has a great deal of respect in that community -- his ideas linking market economics directly to intelligence gathering etc appeal to the largely Libertarian politics of that crowd, as it enables them to convince themselves that allegiance to market principles makes them smarter). Very clever for certain types of clever, but with terrible intellectual blind spots, which is very typical of that sort of crowd.

Racism/sexism etc are of course, both social justice issues and cognitive dysfunctions. The difficult part is that you generally can't full address the social justice issues without really addressing the cognitive problems created by them.

I think you miss a third case in your analysis of the factual basis of prejudice -- the case where there is a real basis for a particular prejudice, but prejudice means that the basis is not just hidden, but the actual situation drastically misunderstood. I'm distinguishing this from your first case because I think there is a difference between the causes being misunderstood, and the situation itself being misunderstood. I'm thinking here of a lot of the bias I have seen against Aboriginal people where, for example, prejudices about Aboriginal handling of money have a basis in ignorance of a completely different set of cultural rules for doing so. I'm trying to distinguish between the case you describe where the biased observer can see the current situation, but does not see or credit the causes that led to the situation, and the situation where the biased observer is unable to comprehend the current situation due to ignorance.

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

I was...intrigued by that post because the comments seemed to have almost nothing to do with the contents of the actual post. It looked to me like the fundamental problem of the article was moving from notions of feminist epistemology to notions of what women are like, which are two things that don't really link together that well at all.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Wonderful lovely post--and you put your finger on some ideas I could not articulate!

(One of the commenters on the post who supported the feminist poster came over to my journal to talk about how "bias" in their world means something entirely different than in my world--but, still, what s/he said would, I think, fit into your first point--i.e. if I'm reading the comment corretly (and it's a quick read because I have to go to work), their search for "the truth" has nothing to do with these other issues which are so important to us. I think many of us are reacting the same way you are: how can they claim to be doing what they're doing and just dismiss the points you make above?

That's so.....irrational of them!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

It becomes even funnier in the discussion in mswyrr's journal (I read about it in her journal first) when the OP came over to explain to her that he really just wanted concrete suggestions about attracting more women, not long essays, and then when she gave him a short list, he dismissed it as a personal wish list, and told her that she clearly was not a "typical woman" because she'd read academic feminism. That's when I realized: he does not want feminists, or academic women, or academic feminists.

Apparently (as she noted): he wants cheerleaders!

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I read "Overcoming Bias" for a while until I realised how intensely masturbatory it all was. And the commenters are worse than the posters. strangedave is right about the peculiar hold they have on the silly Singularitarians.

Anyway, I had a couple of things to add, but I've nixed them because I wasn't getting my point across. I didn't enjoy reading the OP -- which I thought was lazy rubbish -- but I also didn't particularly enjoy reading the blogged feminist responses, which felt a lot like rarefied troll-feeding to me, mixed with lazy snap judgements of another hue about the OP.

A lot of commentary about prejudice seems pretty, well, obvious. Not that I don't still enjoy your posts on it. I did enjoy the Mill and Woolf quotations on mswyrr's response.

[alias_sqbr]

his ideas linking market economics directly to intelligence gathering etc appeal to the largely Libertarian politics of that crowd, as it enables them to convince themselves that allegiance to market principles makes them smarter

Heh. I hadn't noticed any of that in my reading of the site, but am not at all surprised :)

Racism/sexism etc are of course, both social justice issues and cognitive dysfunctions. The difficult part is that you generally can't full address the social justice issues without really addressing the cognitive problems created by them.

Yes! And I think that's something a lot of people who like to see themselves as fighting racism miss.

I'm trying to distinguish between the case you describe where the biased observer can see the current situation, but does not see or credit the causes that led to the situation, and the situation where the biased observer is unable to comprehend the current situation due to ignorance.

That's a very good point. Like "Jews celebrate a satanist version of Lent they call Passover", or "african women show their ankles, therefore they must be immodest". I guess it's another example of the cognitive disfunction thing: we genuinely can't see that there's any other way to interpret someone's behaviour than by the standards of our society (and then judge them unfairly by those standards anyway)

[alias_sqbr]

Mmm

*nods sagely*

*Hopes noone notices I don't know what feminist epistemology means*

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, exactly: I also haven't got a really good grasp on what they do (I think their "About us" page needs some work) but sexism and racism are particularly nasty examples of bias which cloud rational thought, they've even been proven to act that way with Science, so I have trouble seeing how they wouldn't be relevant.

I was very tempted to ask if he'd read "Blink".

[alias_sqbr]

Mmm, I think once the conversation migrated to lj it was less "Polite reasoned argument with the hopes of convincing people" and more "Argh, let me vent about this idiot" (although still fairly polite and reasoned for all that)

A lot of commentary about prejudice seems pretty, well, obvious

To you, maybe :) A lot of the stuff I post is me getting the base assumptions clear in my head, I'm hopefully working my way up to more complicated ideas.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*thinks* I always have to look it up myself. Off the top of my head, I think epistemology is that branch of philosophy about "ways of knowing," if that makes any sense (it doesn't much to me). How we know, what we know?

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, that's what wikipedia said :)

[mporter.livejournal.com]

"Via ithiliana: an oxford academic who is paid to run 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 not smart enough to understand it/be interested in the topic. "

Robin's not at Oxford, he's at GMU. It is also unlikely that he is paid to blog.

Also, I don't think any of his critics here at LJ have actually understood what he wrote. Try looking at it from the other side: he's then saying that men have showed more interest in overcoming cognitive bias because their social status is more dependent on ranking. That is not a statement about intelligence, it's a statement about motivation.

edited because, wow, that had a ton of errors in it

[mswyrr]

If he thinks that Overcoming Bias stands for the noble quest for Truth by people of intellectual rigor and fitness and then makes the point that something essential to women makes them ill equipped for this sort of work, how can one *not* take that as an insult to women? If he and his pals own the majority rights on Truth, intellectual rigor fitness as their essential nature, what's left for women? Is it anything he'd consider of equal or greater importance than the thing he's dedicated so much time and energy to? Or does his thinking bring with it the assumption that women fit neatly in lesser occupations, like underpaid care work (nursing, teaching, mothering) and that sort of "emotionally rich" thing, and that they should leave the directing and defining of the world to the menfolk?

[mswyrr]

Wow. Excellent analysis! You've really got at the heart of two of the big misconceptions driving various parts of the exchange. Mind if I link to your post?

[alias_sqbr]

Go ahead, the more people who bask in my brilliance the better :)

[alias_sqbr]

Good point: I wasn't really trying to accurately portray or debunk his argument so much as give the context which inspired my post, and so didn't strive very hard at all for accuracy, and was thus unfair to the OP. I will edit the post to better reflect reality.

What do you say to the meat of the post though? (Specifically point one)

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

Feminist epistemology...well, in a general sense, they’re positions that claim that there is a particular, feminine, way of knowing things, or of evaluating things. And that that way is...equivalent to or better than other ways of knowing things. I suppose I’d claim that there’s three general ways of constructing one:
1) You get a set of characteristics, and arbitrarily define them as feminine. This is a bit like the masculine/feminine distinction in language. It doesn’t really mean that much. If you were, for instance, to say that emotion and networking are feminine characteristics in this sense, it means that any emotional or networking people, male or female, are feminine. And understanding things by way of the emotions, or getting special privileges via networking are the feminist epistemology in action.
2) You get a set of characteristics that you say have been historically linked to women, and call them feminine. This is also not strictly linked to gender either, because all it says is that there are historical traits, not essential traits. So you might say that, historically, intuition is a female characteristic, because the gender structure in place demanded that men be rational and women be intuitive, regardless of any inbuilt preferences. And therefore, if intuition reaps special rewards over other methods, a system of knowledge that recognises this should be called a feminist epistemology.
3) You get a set of characteristics and define them as being characteristics that are essential to women. You then say that those bring some kind of benefit. A system built around those is a feminist epistemology.

The major problem with feminist epistemologies, of course, is that those reasons tend to be a bit ambiguous, with even their authors tending to conflate them together, even though the implications for them are very different. A large chunk of them are just ridiculous. Particularly the third kind. (If you’re really keen to crucify them, you’d say that the third kind of arguments are the ones that are used to give a critique along the lines of “the principles of physics are an inherently masculinist lie, disrespectful to women” (Of course, the third kind also happen to be the most useful is you want to out-and-out claim an unchallengeable privilege of some kind for women)) But the third kind is the kind which is being represented in the article in question, which is why it’s not precisely evil as much as...misrepresentative of particular theoretical concerns. Because if it’s the first or second kind of epistemology you’re talking about, the issue would also extend to readers of the blog who are “feminine” men. (And similarly imply that “masculine” women are interested in the topics in question). And if it’s the third kind, then their concerns, while they may be misguided slightly, aren’t really that prejudicial, because whatever you're talking about in that sense is going to be essentialist in some way.

Re: edited because, wow, that had a ton of errors in it

[mporter.livejournal.com]

"ill equipped"

But he doesn't say that at all! Quote: "surely this is more an issue of interests and framing than of ability" (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/02/is_overcoming_b.html#comment-61047238).

[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.

[penchaft.livejournal.com]

I guessed (and got it right, hooray classical education).

[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.

Re: edited because, wow, that had a ton of errors in it

[mswyrr]

Hmmm. Good point. That comment was good. I wish he had taken that thought (framing instead of ability) expanded on it in his post (or perhaps edited his post to qualify it with that pov?) instead of sticking with essentialist arguments as his headliners and main content/argument.

Re: edited because, wow, that had a ton of errors in it

[mswyrr]

Note: it is possible that he's assuming that framing preferences are hard wired, but it's impossible to be sure from that one sentence. Looking at the arguments he chose to promote/suggest, I do wonder, though.

[alias_sqbr]

Ahhhhh. I see. ...I think.

Because if it’s the first or second kind of epistemology you’re talking about, the issue would also extend to readers of the blog who are “feminine” men. (And similarly imply that “masculine” women are interested in the topics in question)

Mmm. Though if you're going for type 2 I guess you could argue that most women are "feminine" and most men "masculine", and thus most readers are men.

I think there is some merit in this sort of thinking, but the problem is that it always seems to boil down to "The male/masculine way to think is this, and the female/feminine way to think is that...and my gender's way is better". I find this annoying from both angles, since I'm a woman with reasonable number of "masculine" traits.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, I had a feeling he was talking arts student at me :)

[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]

One of my theory goddesses is Judith Halberstam (picture from loltheorists on my profile); one of her books is Female Masculinity which takes on just that argument: if in fact gender roles are socially constructeded (I believe they are), then they must be separated from the biological body, and women's participation in the construction of masculinity (her focus) as well as men's participation in the construction of femininity must be studied (she notes that the intersections with class, race, and sexuality also exist). One of her chapters analyzes drag kings (as opposed to drag queens).

One relevant issue is very much that women who don't present/identify with the traditionally assigned feminine traits are stigmatized (ditto, men): as a woman with quite a few masculine traits myself, I find that her work very much speaks to what I've experience and what I'm doing in my scholarship.

(Arguably, theoretically, although individual cases can differ, feminine men (who may be straight, gay, bi, etc.) still have privilege due to biological maleness that masculine women don't have....)

[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.

[alias_sqbr]

One relevant issue is very much that women who don't present/identify with the traditionally assigned feminine traits are stigmatized (ditto, men): as a woman with quite a few masculine traits myself, I find that her work very much speaks to what I've experience and what I'm doing in my scholarship.

(Arguably, theoretically, although individual cases can differ, feminine men (who may be straight, gay, bi, etc.) still have privilege due to biological maleness that masculine women don't have....)

That sounds about right. Though I think there are also different circumstances where being a "masculine" woman gives privilege, I've had lots of guys tell me "You're not stupid and shallow like those other girls" (ie I like "important" manly things)

Is "Female Masculinity" the sort of book a lowly hard science major would be able to get their head around? :)