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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

> Implicit bias testing and training is pseudoscience at best, especially when you consider that 95% of the professors in that field of study lean left.

This strikes me as kind of like saying that evolution is pseudoscience because 95% of professors in the field are not evangelical Christians, or something.

There may be other reasons to believe that implicit bias is pseudoscience, but "People who believe certain things about it tend to end up with personal worldviews that are consistent with their research" doesn't seem like one.

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You're right, it's not a good reason. I'm just skeptical how social sciences can come to fair conclusions when is almost no representation of the political right in their field. However you might be able to say the same about tech CEOs and underrepresented female gender, so I don't have a good argument here. As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.

> I'm just skeptical how social sciences can come to fair conclusions when is almost no representation of the political right in their field.

By applying empiricism.

The fact that the political right is ideologicslly opposed to doing that in social science fields rather than accepting dogma (an attitude which also applies to an increasing number of areas of the physical sciences) is problematic, to be sure.

If empiricism was the interest of the social sciences, they would abandon all work on implicit bias, for you cannot reliably test for it and there is no evidence that IBT affects one's behaviour in any way other than making them more prejudiced.

I'm not making a claim about what the political right is opposed to.

"If empiricism was the interest of social science, they would abandon all work on $X" is a pretty silly-sounding statement for any value of X.

I do believe that the links in this sibling comment prove you to be a bit too extreme in your opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16128390

Conservatives: "fair" is more important than factual or correctness.

> As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.

Are you trying to mkae some sort of point?

In my argument I was more making the claim that you're going to see more research supporting the left if all your researchers lean left. Also, you could make a much stronger argument that liberals value 'fairness' over factual correctness. Regarding Debian, my point is that I respect someone who supports open source software and code that can be reliably built from source, as it protects our freedoms.

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