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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

the question of the status quo is itself politicised. One side (progressive sphere) says people who don't belong to the normed group (cis-white-hetero-male in US/EUR) are inherently treated worse, either consciously or unconsciously (bias), and conscious effort has to be made to overcome this. Another (classical liberal sphere) says that exclusionary behaviour are the exception and most people abide by the golden rule, and that bias is small or insignificant enough to be inconsequential. There are other interpretations but I understand these are the two canonical ones. If you belong to the former you may feel the need to be conscious of your behaviours to make sure you don't perpetrate feelings of "othering". If you belong to the latter you likely feel that you don't need to treat people differently based on intrinsic characteristics. This is really the defining ideological split of current politics, IMO.

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It is important to note that this isn't merely a matter of opinion. One can study the effect/presence of unconscious bias objectively and quantitatively. These studies have large error bars but they use conventional and accepted statistics.

To the extent it is politicized, it's politicized the way evolution and climate change are: groups who are politically opposed have opinions about the consequences of these studies. One or the other group sometimes finds empirical reality to be in conflict with the arguments they wish to make in support of their preferred policies.

note that I didn't suggest that the classical liberal side deny the existence of subconscious bias. Just the scale of the impact of said bias, and what can realistically be done about it (or, perhaps, the cost of attempting to correct it). There are probably people who deny the existence of bias and you're right in that they don't express a reasonable opinion.

Taken at face value, your statement seems to imply that if there is any research devoted to a topic using "conventional and accepted statistics", then no one can have an opinion on it.

I don't think you're taking it at face value. Note the word "merely".

There are typically many arguments for and against a particular policy, many costs and benefits. These costs and benefits don't hit everyone equally, which explains most of the difference in political opinion. One category of argument in the political debate is to claim that particular costs or benefits are illusory or of a different scale. The empirical evidence can show that this is false. This does not eliminate the debate. One would hope it would then proceed on different arguments, because denying empirical reality makes any resolution other than physical domination of one party by the other impossible. But even if it does, costs and benefits still fall unequally on the participants, meaning the political division remains. This difference in opinion is normal and legitimate.

[ETA I do not think it is pure coincidence that the group that believes it is more likely to win a contest of physical dominance is the one more likely to deny the validity of empirical evidence.]

As far as I can tell, unconscious bias has fallen victim to the replication crisis.

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

The article seems to focus on the Implicit Association Test. Other studies have used devices like identical job applications with different names.

Is there a meta-study of Cochrane quality on this subject? Because, you know, replication crisis.

>cis-white-hetero-male in US/EUR) are inherently treated worse, either consciously or unconsciously (bias)

This is hard for me to wrap my head around, because in almost any social or work environment I've ever been in, cis-white-hetero-males make up a small subset of the population.

Per sibling comment, the question of whether discrimination happens, consciously or unconsciously, is one amenable to factual analysis and is not a political question. What is political is whether anything should be done about it.

> exclusionary behaviour are the exception and most people abide by the golden rule

So the question for this has to be: when do you think the date was at which "most people" started to do this? Was it a mass conversion at the enactment of the US Civil Rights Act, or a much slower battle?

personally, I think the majority of people have acted like this (or perhaps more "live and let live") by default for a long time. However, basic morality is not the only operator of people's behaviour, and other operators can override morality such as economic exploitation, group conflict, education, stereotypical perception of other groups, and so on. Basically, it's a really complicated series of systemic issues that leads to things like racial inequality. Fundamentally I don't think people hate groups because they look different (beyond a small amount of subconscious in-group/out-group bias), they hate because of fear, conflict, they dehumanise to exploit, they misunderstand, basically just the whole gamut of human flaws driven by systemic issues in the economy, in justice, in culture and other systems we operate within. The idea that we can fix these problems by curing the symptom rather than the disease seems illogical to me.

or TL;DR: bias is mostly a learned behaviour, with probably some inherent subconscious bias from our evolutionary roots.

> the majority of people have acted like this (or perhaps more "live and let live") by default for a long time

The majority of people where at what times?

Does it actually matter why people hate, only that they do?

Your argument seems to be that all racism etc is systemic and structural, and therefore there's no individual responsibility?

> The majority of people where at what times?

Do you expect me to be an expert on the moral history of every group on earth? I'm not going to specify in exact detail, but my point is that I think people naturally default to ambivalence and have to learn (or be taught) to mistreat specific groups of people.

> Does it actually matter why people hate, only that they do?

Yes, it matters if you want to do anything about it.

> Your argument seems to be that all racism etc is systemic and structural, and therefore there's no individual responsibility?

Yep, pretty much. Or at least, most racism. Individuals are responsible for forming the opinions but to make any real difference you need to take away the reason they formed the opinion.

If you want to reduce oppression at scale, you need to address the systemic issue. Do you think a racist hates some set of people arbitrarily? Or do you think he might have a (obviously invalid) reason to hate them, such as feeling they are a threat, are inferior, can be exploited, are ridiculous and so on? Dig down into those reasons and I believe you will find a systemic root most of the time. Obviously that person shouldn't hold those views, but how are you going to address the problem? Attempt to force everyone with a bad opinion to change that opinion? Or do you address the reason they acquired the perception in the first place, meaning that the next generation has less reason to discriminate? I think the latter is more viable.

Your bringing up the "golden rule" is interesting, as I there are various situations where i have felt discriminated against and in retrospect the golden rule was to blame.

If I'm in a room full of (in my case) people much posher than me, and they all treat everyone in the room as they wish to be treated, that can easily create an oppressive atmosphere. Also, if I try treating them as I wish to be treated, and can easily be seen as a troublemaker.

Now I try to treat people as they wish to be treated (within reason).

I think that's partly because the golden rule is a moral rule, not a communication one. It describes a mindset that promotes empathy, but doesn't make affordances for communication differences such as social/economic status, culture and so on.

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