Re:Lifesaving advice from a black woman held at gunpoint by ...
by weberc2 on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:19AM
(#14751852)
Something like that. I guess I don't think bias is as responsible or pervasive as we're lead to believe. Frequently when we look at a disparity, I find myself thinking "Why didn't they check if X, Y, or Z were responsible instead of bias?". One example is the gender wage gap; we now know that women make less than men because they elect into different careers, because they have different priorities. Different groups have different distributions of any given behavior, and not all behaviors have the same outcome. This is all just a hunch, so I won't defend it too much; it just seems more plausible to me than the current "everyone is subconsciously biased against one racial group" theory.
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Re:Lifesaving advice from a black woman held at gunpoint by ...
by mercer on Thursday July 13, 2017 @10:37AM
(#14761582)
I sort of see what you're getting at, but considering there's been a clear systemic bias against women and black people in our very recent past, and considering that it took a lot of effort (even a civil war, sort of, in the case of black people) to reduce these biases, I find it entirely reasonable to assume that they're still there, to a degree, and that we'll have to expend quite a bit of effort to reduce them further.
Re:Lifesaving advice from a black woman held at gunpoint by ...
by weberc2 on Saturday July 15, 2017 @10:10AM
(#14776670)
Those were conscious biases though. Most people in our society try very hard to avoid even unconscious bias, often by being consciously biased against minority groups (this might range from small acts of kindness toward a minority group to nonprofits that serve minority groups to corporate inclusivity policies to government programs and affirmative action policies). Given all that, I have a hard time believing bias plays a large role in explaining disparities.