[SypheDMar]

This thread is an actual thread with a very discussable topic. Just because it serves several functions does not mean that it is a joke/test/experiment on people. I would think that most threads serve more purpose than just to simply give a link.

The aforementioned incident was an event that happened on HLP that caused several bad things to happen, like one member leaving and battuta wanting to leave and a few good things, like me learning about what feminism is and also learning about myself.

[Dilmah G]

If you search for 'battuta, goober, feminism' you should be able to find it. I don't recall many of the specifics anymore, but I'd be interested to give it another read if anyone finds the link to it. I would advise whoever stumbles upon my handful of posts on that thread to disregard them - I was a bit younger and had little idea of what I was talking about.

[Lorric]

If you search for 'battuta, goober, feminism' you should be able to find it. I don't recall many of the specifics anymore, but I'd be interested to give it another read if anyone finds the link to it. I would advise whoever stumbles upon my handful of posts on that thread to disregard them - I was a bit younger and had little idea of what I was talking about.

No luck.

[SypheDMar]

... I would advise whoever stumbles upon my handful of posts on that thread to disregard them - I was a bit younger and had little idea of what I was talking about.

See! HLP has progressed since 2010!

e: *poof*

[General Battuta]

Do we really need to dig that up? The damage is done.

[SypheDMar]

I think that its existence is good for HLP because it is something that some of us can look back to and reflect on. I think that one thread is a great contribution to HLP's feminism and diversity, even if it had a negative effect. I'll remove the link since you don't want it, though.

[Dilmah G]

Oh goodness me, I am SO embarrassed reading my old posts. But I think if you juxtapose it with this thread, SDM's point is more easily illustrated. And yes, I do like to think the rest of the community and I have matured at least a tiny bit since that thread.

[Lorric]

... I would advise whoever stumbles upon my handful of posts on that thread to disregard them - I was a bit younger and had little idea of what I was talking about.

See! HLP has progressed since 2010!

e: *poof*

I wonder what it was spawned from. I'll have a proper look at it sometime.

[jr2]

Gender inequality goes both ways, though, just like racial inequality et al: if you start putting in quotas for how many female workers you must have, for example, then you are to a certain extent having a bias against men, as you are no longer looking for the best candidate to fill the position, male or female.

Say you have 20 male employees, 10 female.  You need 5 new people. Out of the applicants, the 5 best happen to be 3 males and 2 females.

...now are you going to get rid of your "gender inequality" and nix the three men, or are you going to be actually unbiased against anyone and hire the best candidates, regardless of whatever else they are?

[Dilmah G]

Sure, but overall you still have across the board skewing in favour of men (CEO listings of the top 100 companies, etc) if you're referring to the Corporate sphere like I think you are. Not that I'm endorsing quotas in any way, because I think they're a crap means to an end, but I think that that wasn't a great example to use when you have issues like the lack of attention given to male rape survivors and so on, to borrow an example from Ozymandias.

[General Battuta]

Quotas aren't great, but the problem - as we've identified it in the science of this stuff - is that when you create a system that's gender blind or race blind, bias creeps in without the awareness or endorsement of the system's participants. We all hold implicit attitudes we're not even aware of, and they skew our decisions.

There are also structural factors which skew the input to these systems. Both processes lead to pretty seriously biased outcomes.

If you want to know creepy things about yourself, take an IAT.

[Dilmah G]

I see, but surely proper education would help to dismantle that bias, wouldn't it? Or are quotas really the least bad option we have to eliminate the effects of both it and these structural factors? I guess that if things were reasonably normally distributed that quotas wouldn't matter anyway.

I also don't mean to be a pain, but is there any literature on this that's accessible from the interwebz? I've had many debates with a friend of mine who is a pseudo-MRA who falls more into the anti-feminist camp than anything else, who believes exactly that once a system is gender-blind that the system is equitable for all genders; some literature to educate us both would not go astray.

[perihelion]

Just tried one of those IAT's from Harvard's website.  It indicated I have a moderate association between Blacks Americans and Weapons.  I must say, though, I don't think this is accurate at all.  I think it had more to do with my reflexes getting "trained" by the first set of testing, and then getting confused and a bit slower when the last phase of testing reversed which groups were paired.

Considering where I live right now, surrounded by a bunch of gun-toting rednecks, I associate weapons with Americans, period.  Race has little-to-nothing to do with it.

I may give a few others a shot, but I'm not all that impressed by this IAT thing, so far.  If this is an actual bias I possess, I'd like to see some other way of corroborating it.

[Dilmah G]

Just gave the gender and career one a shot. Mild association in the wrong direction, which is better than I thought I'd get, admittedly.

[redsniper]

I took one of those tests for some class in college (the same one actually. I apparently associate black people with violence. ). The thing of it is, it tests you subconscious or unconscious or something like that, revealing ingrained biases you might not have known you had. Which is not to say "zomg you're a horrible racist," everyone has these prejudices and biases that seep in from the culture around you, and if you're aware of it, you can better counteract it with your conscious mind. And it seems you already have in this regard since you say you associate weapons with all Americans.

[General Battuta]

All the IAT is meant to tell you is that you have associations you're probably not aware of. Like most psychological measures, when we use it in science we look at large groups of people with controlled between-subject manipulation, so we counterbalance things like the order effect perihelion pointed out. (I'm dubious of the ability of an online IAT to be all that accurate anyway, given the latency involved.)

And like all psychological measures, we're still trying to decide exactly what behavioral outcomes it predicts or associates with. The reason I think it's valuable, and encourage people to take it, is because it gets them thinking about the systems in their mind that associate and stereotype without conscious endorsement or control.

[General Battuta]

Although most Americans will show an association between black people and weapons, and this translates into a very robust tendency to shoot black people in simulated shoot/don't shoot decisions, even when unarmed. That's what I did my undergrad thesis on and what I'm currently working my PhD on.

[SypheDMar]

Well, that's really sad.

[Mr. Vega]

Hey Nuke? You're a perfect demonstration of my biggest pet peeve in the universe: people who think they're legitimately wise or sophisticated because they're cynical and pessimistic. Oh, so all you saw from this article was that people are dicks to each other? That all you took? Then why bother with all the pretense of thought in your responses? You should have just said "I think people are dicks and I will reduce everything I learn to this belief of mine, so carry on everyone. I don't care." Well, not that exact wording, because then you'd sound like a man entirely fueled by mental laziness, but I think you get the gist of it.

We're going to keep caring about things like morality, equality, stripping away the prejudices that we've built in our heads to see what's really there, trying to live lives that are actually "interesting" and "worthwhile", just as you're going to keep sitting on your chair using your brain for absolutely nothing except for convincing yourself that your disdain of everything somehow makes you superior. So please, please just do what you keep advising us to do: don't bother. Or at least just shut up for a while.

[Lorric]

Hey Nuke? You're a perfect demonstration of my biggest pet peeve in the universe: people who think they're legitimately wise or sophisticated because they're cynical and pessimistic. Oh, so all you saw from this article was that people are dicks to each other? That all you took? Then why bother with all the pretense of thought in your responses? You should have just said "I think people are dicks and I will reduce everything I learn to this belief of mine, so carry on everyone. I don't care." Well, not that exact wording, because then you'd sound like a man entirely fueled by mental laziness, but I think you get the gist of it.

We're going to keep caring about things like morality, equality, stripping away the prejudices that we've built in our heads to see what's really there, trying to live lives that are actually "interesting" and "worthwhile", just as you're going to keep sitting on your chair using your brain for absolutely nothing except for convincing yourself that your disdain of everything somehow makes you superior. So please, please just do what you keep advising us to do: don't bother. Or at least just shut up for a while.

Yeah, you pick up where I left off. It's tiring dealing with all those negative vibes, you can take over for me