On a substantive level, I’m confused about what point you’re making. Are you suggesting that shoe manufacturers are biased against people with wide feet, in the same way that Nancy suggested that clothing manufacturers are biased against fat women? Or are you suggesting that neither situation represents that sort of bias or prejudice, and that alternate explanations should be sought?
Like Nancy, I've never heard of significant general societal prejudice against people with wide feet, so that's part of why I don't understand exactly what parallel you're trying to draw.
Also, with respect to this quote:
And frankly, when the asymmetic bra issue came up, I got pretty scared. Some of the commenters -- and I'm not going to single anyone out -- sound like really angry people in general and I fear that being around them would make their rage spill on to me.
Like HughRistik, I don't share your perception. And with respect to this quote:
They have this entitlement mentality, where everyone has to make clothes that they like. I think it's what motivates a lot of the crime against retailers.
This struck me as pretty close to trolling, since I don't think it's a big inferential step to take that as suggesting that the unnamed "angry" commenters that left you "scared" might end up committing such crimes.
I'm trying to better understand the relationship between incentivization and rationality, and it occurred to me that it is a "folk fact" around here that large financial incentives don't make cognitive biases go away.
However, I can't seem to find any papers that actually say this. It's not easy to google for (I have tried) so I wonder if the Less Wrong collective memory knows how to find the papers?
Is there a pattern to which biases go away with incentivization? Do we have at least 5 examples of biases that go away with incentivization and 5 examples that don't go away with incentivization?
As an incentive, I'll paypal $10 to the commenter whose answer is least biased and most useful.