Exactly what the Chinese government says about Uighur reeducation centers. They only want to help them to understand the unconscious mental processes that feed,...

We have been teaching people about unconscious bias for years without these theatrics.

But what have we been teaching them?

"there is no good evidence that people are unaware of their biases. While people do often express surprise at the score they get on the Implicit Association Test, that often reflects the labels that are used to express the degree of bias rather than the presence of some difference in attitudes toward different groups"

-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/ulterior-motives/201...

The IAT is only one measure. https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...

I mention the IAT specifically b/c it can be used in "teaching people about unconscious bias" as a coercive tool to prove to people that they are racist i.e in the context of OP: "to help people who don't believe they are racists".

I have no problem with teaching accurate information wrt bias; but on the other hand, that metric doesn't impel people to label themselves racist, which seems to be a goal.

The IAT is pseudoscience.

The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]

> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.

The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]

> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]

[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21/

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...

[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

How well has that worked?

Pretty much every civil rights victory that has been achieved had been done through appeal to universal principles.

People in America really don’t understand what the alternative is like. Academic theater seems workable, or at least harmless at best so long as we’re standing on solid bedrock. But that’s a framework that exists so long as you maintain it. What society really looks like absent this framework is what happened in Iraq after in 2005. The first time people voted, they did so strictly along ethnic lines and then tried to annihilate each other. Or in my home country where we went to war to separate ourselves from people who had the same skin color and same religion, but spoke a different language.

The United States is the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world. For example, while Muslim immigrants to the US achieved economic parity within a generation or two, in countries like France they’re facing multi-generational poverty. We are not perfect. While we have successfully integrated (socially and economically) wave after wave of immigrants. We are doing it again right now—income mobility among Hispanic people is similar to white such that within a few generations incomes for these groups converge. Our persistent failure has been our inability to fix the legacy of our shameful history of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. But nobody else has figured out how to do that either. In countries like the UK, the Black-white income gap is just as large as in the US. The gap in maternal mortality rates is even larger. And in most of the rest of Europe, it’s not even legal to keep statistics about these disparities.

Maybe some professors have figured out a better replacement for our universal values that will work better—one that replaced a broad, shared commitment to equality with individual white people admitting complicity in perpetuating systemic racism. But they probably didn’t.

I believe you are conflating quiet with success.

The United States is currently undergoing a massive upheaval in multiple major cities about its willingness to sweep racial discrimination under the rug and call it "success." It's an unstable equilibrium; it works until it doesn't.

How is that not the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they confess to racism?

I believe the fact some people perceive it to be is the root of, perhaps, quite a bit of consternation on the issue.

But I see it is the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they understand type theory. We teach people things they need to know so that they know them, because knowledge is useful. We're certainly not calling the question of "having education seminars" into question, are we?

But the 'knowledge is useful' stance presupposes that these classes have value, that what they're teaching is actually true or useful. That's precisely what many of us don't believe.

Suppose we were discussing a risk management seminar which you had reason to believe was teaching a flawed methodology, one likely to cause serious harm if widely adopted. Would you be similarly sanguine in that case?

> That's precisely what many of us don't believe.

With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.

I've known too many tech-savvy folk who think humans can be reduced and deconstructed like a computer, declare humanities research bunk because it doesn't fit their mental model, and get profoundly surprised when their mental model doesn't fit actual human behavior. The psychologists and sociologists have a better track record on modeling and predicting human behavior.

> With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.

This isn't a good heuristic, without some way of judging the entire field. Would you defer to expert career scientologists about E-meters? Would it help if they published papers on the topic and held conferences and you picked only the best-cited ones from that process? Why not?

I think the relevant question is: If they were completely wrong about how the world actually works, would this have had any negative consequences for them?

This would lead you to some degree of skepticism of risk management professionals, too. If the risks are small and frequent (like estimating how many car crashes per month) then you can trust that people & methods that are badly wrong will have been weeded out. But when the risks are of rare events (like, say, housing market crashes, or nuclear war) then professionals can pass an entire career without being tested against reality. So you should be wary that the most prominent voices are chosen for reasons other than actually predicting the risk.

And career sociologists, of course, aren't heavily rewarded for accurate predictions.

With respect, these careerists subscribe to journals that will literally publish translations of Mein Kampf so long as a few buzzwords are exchanged. On a less sensationalist but more quantifiable note, 70% of the research comprising the field can't be replicated. I think my scepticism is warranted.

Even still, my Bayesian priors suggest that techies get worse than chance results on second-guessing them.

Psychology and sociology departments are radicalized echo chambers. No one in he street has any of the imaginary problems they concoct.

Morgan Freeman (black) has said it years ago: "Stop talking about it".

Having to publicly humiliate yourself is pure Maoism. How can you compare it to learning type theory?

It's only public humiliation if people perceive it to be public humiliation.

what's humiliating about having the same problem that basically everyone does?

That's a funny stance given the context in which the material was introduced: as evidence that powerful people are racist "by their own admission". Doesn't sound like the no-big-deal definition of racism they might have thought they were confessing to.

It also suggests it's up to session-organisers to decide what justifiably humiliates a person.

Humiliation is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see them as humiliated. They don't appear to think they are humiliated.

Perhaps it's just not humiliating.

> They don't appear to think they are humiliated

How do you know? It doesn't sound like the kind of session where honest (dissenting) exchange is encouraged.

We don't have a lot of signal on what kind of session it is. It's not the conclusion I'd jump to from one Free Beacon screenshot.

Do you think multiple people would naturally volunteer to say those things in a regular session?

I don't have nearly enough insight into the inner workings of the minds of Northwestern University Law School administrators to guess.

Most people (luckily) perceive racism to be a bad thing. Being forced to publicly confess to being something you should be ashamed of is the definition of humiliation.

If it's true and uncomfortable it's still true.

My point is that public humiliation is much more likely to create resentment than to remove unconscious bias.

> understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended.

I wonder how scientific this understanding is

UCSF has a useful overview on the topic.

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscio...

Quite biased. At least the Wikipedia page includes a Criticism section. Also, as with most psychology, the prior should be that all these studies are a result of p-hacking and publication bias (i.e. that the effect is actually noise).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Crit...

Also pretty obvious biased cherry picking on that page. Counterexample:

Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481

I don't see how the provided counterexample is a counterexample. It appears to indicate unconscious bias favoring women in STEM faculty positions for hiring.

No evidence is given about whether the bias is unconscious.

I believe it can be inferred that it's not conscious, because if women were actually being hired intentionally at a 2 to 1 ratio, that would be an obvious violation of law against gender discrimination.

Doing "X" intentionally would be illegal, therefore it could be inferred that whoever did "X" wasn't doing it consciously.

>The trainings I'm familiar with have the opposite intent

The person who ties you to a stake and burns you alive to cleanse the devil from you can sincerely intend to save your soul, but what they are doing is still horrible. Intent is vastly overrated.