Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Sunday, February 07, 2016

The Problem With Implicit Bias

Social scientists have come up with a thing called "implicit bias". What it tries to show that you can predict behavior based on the biases of a subject. So if a subject says they think that everyone is the same, implicit bias will "reveal" that they actually don't think so and act in a manner consistent with that bias. This is similar to what we refer to as "revealed preferences".

In revealed preferences we look at what people actually do as opposed to what they say they will do or say the prefer. So for example liberals who claim to highly value diversity are often shown to actually live in very not diverse places. They say they believe in diverse schools, but when their children arrive, they quickly move to neighborhoods with very little diversity or diverse as in "lots of Asians".

But back to implicit bias. What the current SJW thinking [sic] tells us is that people act in accordance to their biases when in fact people often act in opposition to their biases, particularly when life and death are not in consideration.

The finding suggests that while white officers may have an “implicit bias” to associate blacks more quickly with danger, they hesitated longer to react, explained Lois James, lead researcher and assistant professor at the university's College of Nursing.

“That’s the driving message of our paper, implicit biases do not predict how people will behave,” James said.

There it is.