The premise of implicit bias theorizing is that implicit biases causally influence what people say and do.https://twitter.com/hpluckrose/status/1002154721522737153 …
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But you need to understand the causes to know what sorts of causal interventions will produce changes in the behavior. That seems like a plausible assumption across many domains. Example: you won’t reduce the toxins in the drinking water unless you know what causes it.
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Please see the original thread and this one where I have said all I want to say about this. https://twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/998130191561101312 … Obviously, you must be able to investigate this with volunteers & it could be productive. I'll object to attempts to intrude & thought-police in wider life.
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The issue is orthogonal to the identity politics/classic liberal distinction. For example, I can be a classic liberal who thinks implicit bias exists and causally influences behavior and therefore I ought to grade blindly to limit my biases. None of that goes against liberalism.
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Absolutely you can. This is definitely liberal. It does not require any thought policing of anyone else. Please see the rest of the original thread where I said this.
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Suppose I then pass along this idea to colleagues. “Hey, I think it might make sense for you to grade blindly too, since we all have biases.” Has that crossed the line into thought policing? If not, isn’t that pretty similar to what a lot of the focus on implicit bias amounts to?
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Grading blindly is an excellent idea for many reasons. No, taking reasonable practical steps to minimise bias is not what I am talking about in my tweet threads. I think the worrying attitudes I am talking about are pretty clear but if you don't understand them, you don't.
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Fair enough. I’m mostly familiar just with how certain academics talk about implicit bias, but if you tell me there are people on tumblr or whatever who think of it differently, I can’t speak to that—you may be right.
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Yes, this was in response to someone claiming all white people are racist. However, you can look to Medina, DiAngelo, Bailey, Applebaum, Wolf, McIntyre, Ahmed, Boler and many many more feminist & critical race epistemologists for the source of such claims.
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I don't get it. If I am uconsciously ranking applications worse when they have an "ethnic sounding" name, that leads to bad behavior: unfair hiring practices. And I don't see how I'll ever do better without learning about the unconscious bias that's leading to the bad action.
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That's doing and saying things. That can be addressed. Of course, you can point out the empirical evidence of this and demand that people be aware of it & fix it.
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So, you want to insist that we focus on actions while ignoring the springs of those actions, right? Why? One benefit of the implicit bias lit is it opens up people to think, "maybe I'm doing racist things without harboring explicit racist attitudes." That seems a good thing.
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