Post: #1

Some of you may know of the Harvard's Implicit Association Test (IAT). Its purpose is to show how we all have implicit biases and if we're not careful these biases show up in our behavior. It turns out the test is useless as there's no real connection between bias and behavior: you can have an implicit racial bias but it does not mean you behave as a racist.

This is a big blow for the SJW crowd. The Harvard IAT has been foundational for telling us how we're all racists and we need cultural sensitivity classes. My own school has their freshmen read books on implicit biases, priming them for SJW bullshit theories.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-...cit/238807

Quote:About 70 percent of people who take the race version of the Implicit Association Test show the same tendency — that is, they prefer faces with typically European-American features over those with African-American features. Since it first went online in 1998, millions have visited Harvard’s Project Implicit website, and the results have been cited in thousands of peer-reviewed papers. No other measure has been as influential in the conversation about unconscious bias.

That influence extends well beyond the academy. The findings come up often in discussions of police shootings of black men, and the concept of implicit bias circulated widely after Hillary Clinton mentioned it during the presidential campaign. The test provides scientific grounding for the idea that unacknowledged prejudice often lurks just below society’s surface. "When we relax our active efforts to be egalitarian, our implicit biases can lead to discriminatory behavior," according to the Project Implicit website, "so it is critical to be mindful of this possibility if we want to avoid prejudice and discrimination."

Quote:Hart Blanton was not stunned. For the last decade, Blanton, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, has been arguing that the Implicit Association Test isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In a 2013 meta-analysis of papers, Blanton and his co-authors declared that, despite its frequent characterization as a window into the unconscious, "the IAT provides little insight into who will discriminate against whom, and provides no more insight than explicit measures of bias." (By "explicit measures" they mean simply asking people if they are biased against a particular group.)

Quote:Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard, doesn’t question Blanton’s motives. She does, however, point to the multitude of papers that have made use of the implicit-bias measure, and the relatively few that have questioned its accuracy. In an email, she likened IAT doubters to climate-change deniers. "I’m sure Hart Blanton believes himself to be saving humanity from the dangers of the IAT," she wrote, noting that Blanton has "dedicated so many precious years of his career to improving our work."

Quote:Patrick Forscher, who shares the title of first author of the paper with Calvin Lai, a Harvard postdoc, thinks that there’s been pressure on researchers over the years to make the science of implicit bias sound more definitive and relevant than the evidence justifies. "A lot of people want to know, How do we tackle these disparities?" says Forscher, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "It makes us feel important to say, Aha, we have these measures that can tell us what the problem is, and, not only that, we can tell them how to fix the problem."

That’s essentially Blanton’s argument as well. Public discussion about implicit bias has been based largely on the results from one particular test, and that test, in his view, has been falsely sold as solid science. "They have engaged the public in a way that has wrapped the feeling of science and weight around a lot of ‘cans’ and ‘maybes,’" Blanton says. "Most of your score on this test is noise, and what signal there is, we don’t know what it is or what it means."

Quote:Forscher hopes the discussion will move beyond the long-running, sometimes caustic back-and-forth over the IAT. He wants to focus on understanding the root causes of discrimination in order to combat its pernicious effects. As part of that mission, he’s for several years helped train police officers in Madison about bias. He intends to continue that work while also trying to figure out how best to go about it.

"I see implicit bias as a potential means to an end, something that tells us what to do and some possible remedies for what we see in the world," Forscher says. "So if there’s little evidence to show that changing implicit bias is a useful way of changing those behaviors, my next question is ‘What should we do?’"

Post: #2

Implicit bias is not some groundbreaking phenomenon that requires Harvard minds to explain to the masses. It's human pattern recognition. We unconsciously assess the likelihood of someone (or something) being a threat based on visual characteristics that correlate with its likelihood of being a threat. Race is just one variable in this calculation.

Take a moment to consider which of these two fellas you'd rather live next door to, based solely on their appearance:





In this example, everyone including SJWs would agree that it's rational to be more wary of the tatted white thug, because people who look like him are more likely to harm you than the clean cut, suited up, smiling black man. It's beyond debate.

With that in mind, let's now consider if we pitted the face of an average white 18 year old man vs. an average black 18 year old man. In this case, the only discerning variable is race; which one are you more wary of? Chances are your brain unconsciously realizes that the black teen is more of a threat, which is statistically true. But this time, your brain's unconscious [correct] calculation is considered problematic because it relied on race. That's bullshit.

I'm not endorsing racist treatment of individuals. I absolutely believe in getting to know someone to the best of your ability before making a judgement. But treating the unconscious snap profiling our brains do as some sort of defect when race is part of the equation, is absurd.

Post: #3

Someone mentioned this to me over Christmas and I took the test for shits n giggles.

I raged quit half way through. The whole test was an either/or fallacy. Later on, it would fail you if it "felt" you weren't answering correctly.

Someone seriously needs to shove the reproducibility tests onto the liberal arts and cut the chaff. Unfreaking acceptable.

Post: #4

Gee, who'd have thought the liberal version of Voight-Kampf would turn out to be a big load of bullshit?

Post: #5

Scott Alexander offers an interesting explanation of the IAT phenomenon. It may not be due to racism but rather something else.

Quote: if the IAT isn’t analyzing implicit racial prejudice, why do people so consistently have an easier time associating black people with negative adjectives? I actually have a theory of my own about that. Consider claims like the following:

1. Black people were brutally enslaved for hundreds of years.
2. Black people are almost three times more likely than whites to live below the poverty line.
3. Black people are systematically being murdered by the criminal justice system.
4. Black people are frequent victims of racism and hate crimes.
5. Our society is set up to structurally discriminate against black people.

None of these claims are racist per se; in fact, many of them are anti-racist in intent. But all of them connect black people to negative affect! If your local newspaper says that white people usually have friendly and positive interactions with the police but black people are victimized and killed by police, that is some heavy association of whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings. If you usually see photos of white people in the news under the headline “LOCAL BUSINESS BOUGHT BY GOOGLE”, and photos of blacks in the news under the headline “LEARN HOW OUR RACIST SOCIETY KEPT THIS POOR WOMAN FROM SUCCEEDING” then once again, you’re learning to associate whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings.

This would explain very nicely why people taking the IAT generally associate whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings in a way apparently unrelated to whether they are explicitly prejudiced/racist. It would also explain very nicely why about 50% of blacks associate whites with positive feelings and blacks with negative feelings, which is definitely a thing that happens and which previous explanations of have always sounded unconvincing and ad hoc.

Post: #6

DARK vs LIGHT, BLACK vs WHITE, etc. "Negative" associations with DARKNESS are old as the world itself and BLACKS certainly have deeper connection to DARKER energies simply due to their biology. It's THAT simple.

Post: #7

The hell are you talking about, blacks have a deeper connection to dark energies due to biology?

Post: #8

(01-08-2017 11:16 AM)Teutatis Wrote:  The hell are you talking about, blacks have a deeper connection to dark energies due to biology?

YEEEES.

Post: #9

I think our friend A.S. up there might've been drinking a bit, but yeah.
Humans don't like dark and darkness because that's where predators lurk, and predators tend to eat us.
By virtue of having darker skin, blacks are more readily associated with darkness..

At least, that's the common theory.

Post: #10

(01-08-2017 11:25 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  I think our friend A.S. up there might've been drinking a bit, but yeah.
Humans don't like dark and darkness because that's where predators lurk, and predators tend to eat us.
By virtue of having darker skin, blacks are more readily associated with darkness..

At least, that's the common theory.

It's not a coincidental link and it's not a theory, but a FACT of LIFE.

Post: #11

That might be the theory but this whole thing is stupid, people are simply physically more attracted to and feel more comfortable with people of their kind/race/background, it has nothing to do with some mysterious mystical dark energies that apparently black people are connected to or that people look at black skin and think of the dangers lurking in the darkness, how silly is that.

Post: #12

(01-08-2017 03:55 AM)Delta Wrote:  Take a moment to consider which of these two fellas you'd rather live next door to, based solely on their appearance:

In this hypothetical example, I might even move unnecessarily just to live closer to this guy, dude looks happy as fuck

Post: #13

(01-08-2017 12:07 PM)Teutatis Wrote:  [...] people are simply physically more attracted to and feel more comfortable with people of their kind/race/background, it has nothing to do with some mysterious mystical dark energies that apparently black people are connected to or that people look at black skin and think of the dangers lurking in the darkness, how silly is that.

You are a) CORRECT b) WRONG. People INDEED are more comfortable with those of their kin and I felt it sharply the first time I traveled to Jamaica (NEGRIL) and was suddenly surrounded mostly by blacks. That was when I FELT THROUGH what it COULD be like to be a non-white MINORITY in the STATES or ANYWHERE else.

But. Even blacks feel that a VOODOO MAN FROM HAITI (A PLACE OF VERY CONCENTRATED DARK ENERGY) is VERY DIFFERENT FROM AN ICELANDIC VIKING.

Post: #14

Reminds me of a good book I will recommend. Malcom Gladwell's "Blink" 2005