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LW Women- Crowdsourced research on Cognitive biases and gender
In the last LW Women post, it was mentioned, and I agree, that a two-way conversation is more productive, and presents varied viewpoints better than a one-way lecture. To that end, I am making this post an experiment in crowdsourcing research to LW. Instead of writing this topic up myself (more talking AT you), I want to see what happens if instead I leave a good prompt, along with some paths (search terms, journal articles) to start down for discussion. What information will a collectivist research project yield? In other words, instead of reading what I write below as the article, pretend you are helping to collaborate on an article.
The next post in the series will go back to LW Women's submissions.
Recommended Rules (because last LW Women post reached 1000+ comments, and we want to keep that as navigable as possible)
When possible, make/use parent comments when you are discussing a specific bias, so that multiple studies or lines of reasoning on the same bias can be grouped together.
When you post a summary of a study, make sure to read it first and give a decent rundown. If a study says "X sometimes, Y sometimes," do not just say "This study proves X!"
Put meta discussion HERE (e.g.- What do you think about crowdsourcing research on LW? What do you think about the LW Women series, etc.)
Prompt
What cognitive biases might effect various gender stereotypes and how people think about gender? Below are some starting points. The links are to the wikipedia articles. This list isn't the be-all, end-all. It's just somewhere to get started. Use it to get ideas, or not.
Fundamental Attribution Error- aka Correspondence Bias- Tendency to draw inferences about a person's unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.
Actor-Observer Bias - People are more likely to see their own behavior as affected by the situation they are in, or the sequence of occurrences that have happened to them throughout their day. But, they see other people’s actions as solely a product of their overall personality, and they do not afford them the chance to explain their behavior as exclusively a result of a situational effect.
Just World Fallacy- human actions eventually yield morally fair and fitting consequences
System Justification- People have a motivation to defend and justify the status quo, even when it may be disadvantageous to certain people... they are motivated to see the status quo (or prevailing social, economic, and political norms) as good, legitimate, and desirable.
Availability Heuristic- people make judgments about the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples
List of Biases- help yourself to a bias!
Example Response
Below is an example response I wrote about the Ultimate Attribution Error and Availability Heuristic. I didn't use any studies. Do better than me! (Update: I decided I should also include an example of a study write-up, so made a comment with one HERE . Please DON'T just give a link and a single sentence!)
The first post on the LW Women series involved trying to minimize the inferential gap by sharing anecdotes of what it's like growing up as a "geek girl". When reading these submissions, I was struck by how it might seem like the Fundamental Attribution Bias (aka Correspondence Bias) is at play, but for whole groups. Turns out this is A Thing, and it's called Ultimate Attribution Error.
For example, say a woman mentions that she's bad with computers. From *her* perspective, she sees the situation as the cause of this: "Of course I'm not as good with computers! When I went to learn in a programming class, it was full of guys who stared at me the whole time and I was too uncomfortable to pay attention!" When women see other women with the same responses, they can empathize with the situational causes.
However, when men see women complaining about new technology, they are more likely to attribute these to factors about the women's personalities: "she's not good at computers."
We don't view *lack* of a negative as a factor in our personalities. For example, one is likely to realize that the reason they did badly in school is because their parents had a low socio-economic status and so they lacked opportunities. One *might* realize that one of the reasons they are good in school is because their parents have a high socio-economic status which gives them certain advantages and opportunities. But one is *unlikely* to realize that NOT having low socioeconomic parents is why you did NOT do badly in school.
Images from: PhD Comics and xkcd
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Comments (111)
Don't forget outgroup homogeneity bias. (Also, actor-observer should probably be grouped together with correspondence bias.)
Group-serving biases in general may be a problem. Consider narratives of the form, "All $GENDER_A are like such-and-so; most $GENDER_B are like this-and-that, but my friends aren't like that at all, we're awesome-and-nice."
Strawman. If you want an accurate description of the position, replace "all" with "most".
Generalizing from one example seems relevant here, Yvain even explicitly discusses gender.
About the xkcd comic: I am not actually convinced that IS how it works.
The actual evidence is that beliefs about group differences tend to be highly accurate and proportional, see http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/socialperception.html
Do you know where one could find the original research that book draws on, hopefully ungated?
You mean an entire book's worth of citations, probably at least into the hundreds based on the summaries of chapters?
I suspect there's no one convenient location for them at all, gated or ungated...
This is true, but links to a number of key studies would certainly be better than nothing. I'd like to follow up on the claims of the book, but I'm not about to spring for the cost of the hardcover.
I'll admit to being skeptical that "the actual evidence is that beliefs about group differences tend to be highly accurate and proportional." I suspect that this is true in certain domains, and not in others. My priors for any book of the sort being referenced, which draws on legitimate research to paint a grand narrative in opposition to the general impression of a field suggest that
*It's very likely that the common wisdom of the field is wrong, or at least not on as steady ground as one might otherwise believe.
*It's also very likely that the book leaves out countervailing evidence which doesn't fit the grand narrative, and the reality is messier, and less easily resolved with a single clear vision, than the author would have readers believe.
Your general impression is about a hyper-politicized topic. 'Most stereotypes are accurate' is exactly the sort of technical claim which goes against political sacred cows I would expect researchers in a field to not play up and the few counter-examples get a great deal of press as proof of certain sacred cows. I see this all the time in intelligence-related stuff: a study claiming IQ gains or that IQ is not correlated with something gets publicized, while the studies showing the opposite get ignored or misinterpreted; hence you run into people who think that the general impression of the field is that IQ has been debunked, while it's never been in better shape and tied to more things and closer to being nailed down into specific aspects of the brain and genes.
I see the same thing all the time as well, but I'm also used to seeing people drawing grand narratives based on an opposition to biased research which are, themselves, biased research. The fact that there are political reasons for scientists to downplay any research which indicates the accuracy of stereotypes is not sufficient to disabuse my skepticism in this case.
ETA: There's plenty of intellectual status to be sought in meta-contrarianism. That being the case, I think one should be wary of adjusting too much on the knowledge that there are strong political biases favoring the position a person is arguing against.
How can something tend to be highly accurate?
ETA: Well, someone didn't like that, but didn't say why. Let me pose a more pointed question then. What distinction is being drawn between "tends to be highly accurate" and "is generally somewhat accurate"? If it takes me ten throws to score a treble 20 at the dartboard, am I "tending to be highly accurate"? If I score 70% in an exam, am I "tending to ace the exam"?
Perhaps the cited book answers this question. I have just checked it out from my library.
You're looking at the wrong problem and numbers.
If you score 70% in an exam, you are not very accurate.
If that was the only exam on which you scored 70%, and in all your other exams (of which there were more than ten) you had scores better than 95%, then you tend to be highly accurate, even though on that exam you were not accurate.
In other words, the claim by kaetl is that on average, some particular belief about group difference will probably be very accurate, because most of them are, but there are some that are not accurate at all. Which is why they tend to be highly accurate, but they're not always highly accurate (or even accurate at all).
Pedantry:
You mean "exam" here, I think.
You're right though.
Oh, yeah. Thanks for the heads-up! (edited grandparent)
I'd be curious to see your thoughts on the book if you feel like posting them.
Let's say you have written 5 exams and I know the scores of 3 of them. 70% 75% 73%. If I want to describe your performance I makes sense to say: "You tend to score between 70%-75% on exams.
Whenever you draw conclusions from cognitive science experiments to reality it's useful to use language that doesn't signal that you are 100% certain even if the experiments found highly accurate results, meaning they had very low p values,
So should one say, not "tend to be highly accurate", but "probably tend to be highly accurate"? Or "may probably tend to be highly accurate"?
At some point you have to stop nesting dubifiers, and I think the right point is at the outset: one is enough.
Given that people are in generally massively overconfident in the conclusions that they draw, I advocate to use more dubifiers rather than less.
Hmm, how does this take on the research square with group-dependent actions that can't really be "accurate"? E.g. cars being more expensive when you're black?
That seems like it could be accurate. If the salesmen selling the cars to blacks are losing sales (net commissions) due to quoting higher prices at black customers, then they're not being accurate.
Possibly relevant:
"Gender Bias 101 for Mathematicians".
A few quotes (but really, read the whole thing) —
...
Izabella Laba is great. She is in the unenviable position of being one of a tiny number of women in the math blogosphere, and I'm impressed she can keep writing stuff like this without wanting to strangle everyone.
Regarding the more specific issue of gender bias in academia, I seem to recall reading about a study where it was found that senior mathematicians writing recommendation letters for male junior mathematicians tended to praise their mathematical work, but when writing recommendation letters for female junior mathematicians tended to praise their personalities.
The trouble with that study (and just about any other study of outcome equality) is that there's no control for the possibility of actual inequality in the inputs. By the time someone is at the "receiving recommendations from senior mathematicians" stage they've been exposed to at least a decade or two of a potentially gender-biased environment. There's nothing in the experiment here which distinguishes the hypothesis "senior mathematicians write biased recommendations" from "junior mathematicians received biased educations" or "young children receive biased levels of encouragement from family" or even plain "girls aren't good at math".
Just because poor studies are suggestive of bias doesn't mean that good studies wouldn't be too, though. The best evidence for gender bias in academia I've seen is that double-blind testing also shows gender bias in academia. If this Moss-Racusin et. al. experiment is replicable (and there isn't anything obviously suspicious about it), the results are pretty damning.
Point. Whether or not it was well-designed, I thought it was a good example of how bias can (potentially) manifest in a way that doesn't feel biased from the inside.
Here is a write-up on a pretty highly referenced study:
Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (January 01, 2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1, 33-43. (http://www.ask-force.org/web/Discourse/Monin-Moral-Credentials-Prejudice-2001.pdf)
Abstract: Three experiments supported the hypothesis that people are more willing to express attitudes that could be viewed as prejudiced when their past behavior has established their credentials as non-prejudiced persons.
Study 1:, participants given the opportunity to disagree with blatantly sexist statements were later more willing to favor a man for a stereotypically male job.
Details: Base rate group did not get a survey. Other participants got a survey that asked for opinions on: “SOME women”, or “MOST women”. For example: “Some/Most women are better off at home taking care of the children. “ Participants who got the “Most” survey were therefore able to prove their moral credentials by disagreeing with overtly sexist remarks. Participants were then handed a job description for a stereotypically male job (dealt with construction, foremen, confidence, etc) and asked if they felt the job was more suited for a specific gender.
Result : There was no difference among females in the various groups who all felt the job was slightly more suited for a male, but males who had just gotten to prove their moral credentials by answering “no” to the overtly sexist remarks about “most” women were extremely strong in their preference for a male in that position. “Presumably, the opportunity to disagree with sexist items left the former participants feeling they had demonstrated that they were not sexist, thereby liberating them to respond more honestly on the dependent measure.”
Study 2: participants who first had the opportunity to select a member of a stereotyped group (a woman or an African American) for a category-neutral job were more likely to reject a member of that group for a job stereotypically suited for majority members.
Details : People were asked to choose best candidate of 5 applicants. The fourth candidate was designed to be the obvious best choice (however 17% still chose someone else), and in various conditions was either a white female, a black male, or a white male. The other candidates were all white males. Participants who had an opportunity to show their credentials, via recommending a female or black person, were less likely to find a minority member suitable in a following question. This time, there was no difference between male and female responses to the sexism portion.
Study 3: participants who had established credentials as nonprejudiced persons revealed a greater willingness to express a politically incorrect opinion even when the audience was unaware of their credentials. The general conditions under which people feel licensed to act on illicit motives are discussed.
Details: Same as in Study 2, except this time, for one of the groups, the credentialing task (choosing the best candidate) was administered by one experimenter “then a second experimenter knocked on the door, asking whether there was time left to do his questionnaire. After the first experimenter checked her watch, she agreed to let the second experimenter hand out his task, which was the police force scenario. Participants in this condition were thus led to believe that the person reading their answer to the police force scenario would not be aware of their answer to the consulting firm task.” The self-credentialing effect was almost as strong as the credentialing effect with an audience (the experimenter).
Interesting. So doing your good deed for the day with respect to non-prejudice.
I disagree connotationally with the "good deed" part.
Imagine two planets A and B. On planet A, green and blue people are equally skilled in doing X; but there are many people who for irrational reasons say that greens are better. On planet B, green people are better in doing X, but it is taboo to say so, and this taboo causes laws that blue people must also be employed to do X, which results in economical losses and dead babies.
On both planets saying that green people are better for X than blue people comes with a social cost. I would expect that on both planets people would signal their social skills; and when feeling that they have already signalled enough to be socially safe, they could express their actual preference for a green person getting the job. But only on planet A the social signalling is morally good (as in: harm-minimizing); on planet B it is morally evil.
The mere fact that people feel social pressure to do or say something, and after they did it, the pressure is much weaker, so they can do something else... does not mean that they did something good.
But there may be the same psychological explanation regardless of whether the justifying action was justified.
A possible explanation could be that people are bad at tracking who knows what (perhaps because in an ancient environment everyone knew everything, either firsthand or through gossip). So even if we demonstrate trait A to person X, we may automatically expect that a person Y will get some evidence about it, too.
This is a poor example. That she was previously assulted is a fact about her, not at all a fact about the fact that a guy in the same lift as her has just asked if she wants coffee. It was a fact about another situation, but the only reason it's relevant to her reaction now is because of the way it affected her character. The situation is not the cause at all, or at least not in the way described, and she (if sufficiently reflexive) would agree with this.
Causes are a part of models of what happens. Only a finite number of conditions are modeled as having counterfactual possibilities, and the rest are left fixed as context.
The situation is "the cause", holding her emotional mappings fixed. Her emotional mapping are "the cause", holding the situation fixed. Clearly it's the interaction between her and the situation that causes the outcome.
Of course, we could also say that "the cause" was that she didn't take enough anxiolytics that day. Maybe "the cause" was that the elevator operator wasn't on duty.
The whole situation combined to produce the outcome. It's easy to find multiple factors that would have causally produced a different outcome.
An argument over what was "the cause" is just a conceptual confusion.
The argument is about blame and disapproval. Some people disapprove of a man who asks out a woman for coffee late at night, while alone together in an elevator. Others find nothing to disapprove of in his behavior, and instead find her emotional reactions unfortunate, and something she'd be better off working to change and control.
I'm pulling out the "enclosed spaces" example from the post because: 1) It is a flawed example, and 2) I don't want to derail the conversation into old, already well-trodden ground.
Better examples to replace it with would be appreciated!
There is enough mutual information between these situations that it's not an error to connect them to some extent.
Saying "character" here seems to be victim-blaming (which is a situation-specific way of saying "fundamental attribution error"). She has a map of the world, which has been updated on her experiences.
For it to be "victim blaming" she would have to be a victim. But we're discussing her nervousness. Is she a victim of her nerves? If so, then I'm correct in the grandparent. If not, she's not a victim, so it can't be victim-blaming.
If her behaviour was of rational updating, she'd say "Of course I'm nervous in enclosed spaces with men! I was roofied and sexually assualted at a college party, which caused me to alter my beliefs about the frequency of assults in totally different circumstances!" As she didn't say this, her behaviour is far more similar to that of System-1 aversion. Other people would not feel nervous in the same situation; she'd feel nervous in a great many situations. The issue is with her, not the situation.
Is it this particular example that is the source of your disagreement, or do you disagree with the wider point? If I removed the "enclosed space" example, and only left the "bad at computers" example, would you find the point valid? If so, I'll remove the "enclosed space" example as flawed.
Could you steelman the point and think of any relevant and valid examples of Ultimate Attribution Error?
If the woman said something like "anyone would be nervous in enclosed spaces with men" it would be closer. Unfortunately, this utterance is also clearly false, so this would be more like a case of Ultimate Attribution Success. I guess you could change the example so that the guy was armed, wearing gang tattoos, listening to rap music, etc.
Based on this response, I think we are talking past each other, about completely different things. To clarify my own point: The example was NOT about the woman applying UAE to the man on the elevator. The UAE I was talking about was in the next paragraph:
Nope, we're talking about the same thing. I only make the elevator more threatening in order to make her, situation-based, view more credible. Otherwise, it's clear the she is wrong - it is not the case that anyone would be nervous in such scenarios - and thus that the men judging her later are committing no fallacy.
What makes you think the situation is totally different? You're extracting a different set of signals from the data.
I can't think of a clearer expression of what fundamental attribution error feels like from the inside.
I don't think it's valid to call an observation of a particular person's reaction to a particular type of situation a fundamental attribution error.
The fundamental attribution error is in predicting the reaction in more types of situations than it appears, not in accurately identifying that the reaction appears in the types of situations that it does for that person. That map of the world in her head is her map, and accurately describing that map is not an error of any kind.
You're making an error of the type (a is responsible for c) therefore (b cannot be responsible for c).
Multiple things have to conspire for a person to make any decision - if I had not learned the recipe from my family, I would not have been able to make delicious cranberry jello mold yesterday. And if I had not been in the kitchen looking around for a desert to make for movie night, I also would not have made delicious cranberry jello mold. Laid out in terms of jello mold, it is clearly a mistake to say "That I learned the family recipe is a fact about me, only relevant because of the way it affected me. Me standing in the kitchen preparing for movie night is not the cause of this jello mold at all!"
I'm not making that error because my conclusion is not "b cannot be responsible for c".
My point is that if she was to identify the external situation as the (main, etc.,) cause of her nervousness, her stated reason should refer to the elevator situation. But her reason actually refers to a totally different situation!
If in general it's impossible to decompose the cause of something into external or internal, then the Fundamental Attributation Fallacy is not a fallacy. I don't wish to make so controversial an argument here, so I merely pointed out that if it is possible to decompose in such a way, then her argument is inconsistant with the view on the decomposition she is supposed to have in this instance.
Ah, okay. I thought you were actually defending the fundamental attribution error, when it turned out you were just critiquing her communication. Or at least, that's what I hope. You still seem to be focusing on "the cause" a bit oddly - what are you going to use the cause for?
Speaking of which :)
Well, when it's right, it's not a fallacy. For example, if someone eats my jello mold and thinks "man, he must know a good recipe," that's successfully identifying an internal cause, which nobody could have any quibble with.
The trouble comes in two ways: the first is when people just do straight-up classification into types. "He's angry because he's a member of the type 'angry people.'" is not a good guess, because people are more complicated than that, but somehow (cough brains are lazy) this guess comes up a lot.
The second kind of trouble is when people think they see an internal cause, and then proceed to ignore external causes. From the wikipedia article: "Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays [...] when the subjects were told that the writer's positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro." Weird, right? These people just ignored information.
In the anecdote at hand, it's totally fine to say "she was nervous? I bet she had a bad experience in the past." I mean, one has to keep in mind that it's less certain than the recipe thing, but that's fine. A "fundamental attribution error" type guess would be "she was nervous? She must be of the type 'nervous people'," which is still a well-formed guess but is made by the human brain more often than it should be. And then the fundamental attribution error par excellence would be to say "she was nervous because she's a member of type 'nervous people,' the situation didn't cause it."
You seem to be confused about "the situation causing her nervousness" and how that relates to the mentioning of her previous experience at a party. I really don't see how
seems like strong evidence for the "cause" (I agree with what buybuydandavis says above about the use of the word in this situation) being the woman in question.
It seems obvious to me that she has beliefs based on her experience at the party that make the elevator situation worrying. This is not a difference in type from, say, one's beliefs about what a gun looks like informing one's nervousness in a situation in which one sees a gun, and I think it would be pretty silly to say that one's external situation was not the "cause" of one's nervousness in that case.
The problem is that her beliefs are inaccurate.
And so it begins...
I objected to a specific example, and even (replying to daenerys) offered a new example that made exactly the same point in such a way as to avoid the criticism. I'm not making any points about gender at all. All the arguments work just as well (or badly) if you reverse the genders. I think you're being unfair.
I often catch myself thinking that a slow timid driver in front of me is "probably a woman". Which is the case probably 80% of the time or more, when I get to check this assumption. I am also surprised when an aggressive driver behind me ends up being a female when I see them swerving past through the parking lane. Does this stereotyping make me sexist? Or just not blind to the realities of local driving? If this is a bias, which one is it?
If you're actually right eighty percent of the time, it merely makes you accurate -- but beware of confirmation and hindsight bias here. I'm not sure I'd trust that kind of impression unless I'd asked someone to take notes for me or set up some kind of automated process; too many chances for things to go wrong otherwise.
When I've found myself being annoyed by slow and timid drivers I don't recall having any particular thoughts about their gender, but I have often thought that they're probably old. Which I also feel is confirmed more often than not -- but I'll be the first to admit that I might harbor some irrationalities regarding the elderly, and I think the priors are probably against me here. But it certainly fits the cultural script!
A self-admitted misogerontist, oh dear.
How so? It would be strange if there were no difference between "driving habits of the elderly" versus the non-elderly. Given how strongly these groups differ in all sorts of biological / sociological / cultural characteristics.
Oh, I'm sure there are some differences in driving habits. The question is whether those differences in habits are large enough to overwhelm the differences in base rate, and I'd expect to see a lot more young to middle-aged people on the road than elderly people -- particularly in the rush-hour traffic where I was putting in most of my driving hours.
I didn't feel that there were disproportionate numbers of slow and timid elderly drivers, after all, I felt that a randomly selected slow, timid driver was probably elderly -- and I'd take a bet that that isn't objectively the case, contrary to my subjective impressions.
Acknowledging a mostly accurate predictor is not a bias. If that makes you "sexist", but also makes you more correct, then so be it. Or are we supposed to erase parts of our map for societal taboo reasons?
Observing that slow timid drivers are female is Bayesian evidence that slow timid drivers tend to be female. Observing that a group of people says things like "slow timid drivers tend to be female" is also Bayesian evidence that this group has misogynist tendencies. You don't have to erase parts of your map, but you also don't have to loudly describe parts of your map to everyone else in the car. This is another reason I agree with Michael Vassar that rationalists should be more comfortable with lying (at least by omission).
I think rationalists should be more comfortable with the idea that not all conversations are truth seeking. However, I don't think we should be holding non-truthseeking discussions on LW* because it poisons the point of this forum. Furthermore, while it is possible to be more or less tactful about truth seeking, truth seeking isn't compatible with what I think your suggesting for this conversation. I think LW as a forum should generally be willing to be truth-seeking even if the discussion and/or truth unpleasant to some people. I also think that when the cost of having a public truth seeking discussion is to high people should just not talk about it on LW, and should make the existence of this filter as well known to participants as is practically possible (see the policy on violence towards identifiable people for a decent example). *I guess joke threads are ok in that they are clearly not about serious discussion.
I also think this. What did you think I was suggesting instead?
Our disagreement (or possibly my misreading of your position) lies in scope/the definition of discussion. I think that you're objecting to shminux and Kawoomba discussing the topic of true and/or rationality arrived at propositions that are likely to offend some people (or perhaps just that shminux gave an object level example rather than sticking to the meta-level), but are not suggesting that we shouldn't discuss gender politics on LW. While I can kinda see the object vs. meta concern I think that the topic is something that should be allowed, even encouraged if we're going to talk gender at all (for reference I'm unsure wether or not we should be having the general gender discussion on LW).
Edit forgot to add link.
I'm not objecting to them discussing the topic, I'm pointing out the (weak) signaling implications of them discussing the topic. Policy debates should not appear one-sided and so forth.
oic For reference,
is what made it sound like an objection.
I agree; believing p doesn't mean you have to tell everyone that p. However, this is made more difficult when other people in the car go around saying "not p, not p!" a lot.
I suppose you could attempt a meta-level argument against the social norm against saying "p", but this is unlikely to be effective against the worry that just saying "p" is bayesian evidence you're an evil person.
If I asked you to solve "2+2=x" for x and you answered "4", that would be Bayesian evidence that you know how to do simple arithmetic.
It is also Bayesian evidence that you answer "4" whenever asked for number. It is even Bayesian evidence that you only ever say the word "four", period.
See how these are not all equal? When an observation you make is correct, that very much lowers the additional probability that you are a misogynist, compared to if your observation had been incorrect.
You could say "well, why make the observation?" to which I'd reply "Because you're an attentive chap, and you're in a car and observing regularities in your environment. Other people are interesting, and their gender cannot not be seen when looking into other cars."
If I ferried the kind of passengers who would appreciate pointing out a certain interesting geometric pattern of trees by the wayside, I wouldn't want to treat observations about the identity of other drivers and how that predicts their behavior any differently.
edit: Can't we just call the territory/reality misogynist in such cases, and when called out correctly say "I'm sorry reality offends you, ma'am." :-)
We could certainly do that, but I think that would be rather counter to the goal of building a correct map while not incurring avoidable social costs.
I am female, and it's taken me years to come to terms with the fact that reality probably does has a gender bias, and that some intellectual differences between men and women are likely to have a biological basis. It is really unfair and really difficult to deal with the fact that (on average) being born female means one is less likely to be good at certain things.
Saying "I'm sorry reality offends you ma'am" sounds snide to me, and I don't think it would help anyone accept painful truths about gender differences.
Upvoted for "reality probably has a gender bias". :-)
Actually, I think that your analogy is apt. The only difference is that the priors on "someone says "four" whenever asked for a number" and "someone only says the word "four" are really low and the prior for "someone has some misogynist beliefs" is much higher.
(Note that I am definitely not saying that shminux is a misogynist.)
Disagree; part of what is being updated on is the fact that shminux decided to make the observation at all. Also, a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community is not going to know that an observation like shminux's is correct (if indeed it is correct; as another commenter pointed out, there's an obvious possible issue with confirmation bias here). What she might instead do is take the outside view about what kind of attitude towards gender produces observations like shminux's (and then upvotes them six times).
Yes, but a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community does not know that about you, and moreover may not trust that your introspection about this issue is reliable.
The point I'm making is not about what inferences you would draw, it is about what inferences a typical female outside observer would draw.
I'm not calling the territory misogynist. I'm calling shminux's decision to look at and then say that he's looking at a particular part of the territory (weak) Bayesian evidence of misogyny. I would also call your decision to use the phrase "I'm sorry reality offends you, ma'am" (stronger) Bayesian evidence of misogyny.
It looks like we're not in the same boat, I'm not arguing about perceptions of a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community, I'm answering shminux'
What's the goal here? Instrumentally, "how do we give new people of group X the fuzziest feelings when encountering this website?" We're both in agreement on a lot of proposals then, probably.
Or is it "does making this observation - whether internally or externally - constitute a bias?", in which case the answer is "no" in the same sense as it is "no" to "Qiaochu_Yuan's first word in a comment is seemingly always 'Observing' or 'Disagree;'"
edit:
No there is not, he said "which is the case probably 80% of the time or more, when I get to check this assumption." Unless you think he forgets the times his assumption turned out wrong, which is quite uncharitable.
Making this observation constitutes weak evidence of a bias (namely male privilege), and it is easier for a typical female outside observer to see this than for you or shminux.
Yes, I think this, or at least I think it's a hypothesis worth entertaining. This is absolutely a part of confirmation bias.
Would I be a misogynist (or a gynophile) if I pointed out that (for cultural and other reasons) many women fare better in social situations? Would you dispute any such difference, or would you assume some sort of hidden agenda whenever such a difference is stated?
Miso this, miso that, miserere more like.
Given the differences (on average) between gender groups, for nearly any given topic it would be highly unexpected for the distribution to be strictly uniform. Same applies for different age groups.
Is me saying that 'bad'?
(I would have a similarly strong reaction if discussions about, say, foresting strategies, were overlain with highly charged political terms.)
Weak evidence of misogyny. Emphasis on the weak.
What?
Essentially, gender discussions are constructed to penalize half of the discussion. That's pretty much exactly why I file gender discussion as a strictly political issue; it's built on an us-versus-them dynamic.
Male privilege? Wait what?
I'd be delighted if someone could explain to me how it's even in the hypothesis that schminux could be considering himself privileged or having some sort of advantage for making or that lets him make the observation "slow/cautious drivers are 80%/mostly female".
Sure the selection of that particular observation and gender as the category of all things seems odd and is evidence of something about the observer's thoughts on gender, with a slight tinge of evidence that the observer might have more negative opinions specifically on the female gender because the observation is made against them, but... privilege? Wha...? Where does the above lead to male privilege?
I feel like this whole thread also somewhat derailed. I notice schminux originally didn't say he makes the observation aloud, only that he observes and thinks. Now the claim is apparently that he says this in public and that typical outside female observers immediately run this through misogyny filters and take it as evidence of gender bias? I'd be tempted to first think that the typical female observer is clearly the more biased and in-the-wrong one here, not to mention that schminux probably wasn't talking about announcing statistical gender differences in public as The Truth to all Unbelievers so that typical unspecific gender observers can spin it however they want. A question was made with a tentative, low-confidence claim, to LessWrong. Not the Daily Opinions Column.
Also, base rate your typical observers. To the typical male observer, this conversation isn't what we're all doing here. To the typical male observer, "LOLOLOL YALL ARE CRAZY BITCHEZ STOP BEIN FAGS IMA GO GET A BEER"... but is that the kind of people we're looking for? The kind that go "lololol bitchez" or "such a bunch of jerks, all patriarchy-infested egocentric pretenders" at the first sight of any discussion on LessWrong that is even partially about gender differences?
Sure. Take the outside view. Male commenters on the internet have some distribution of attitudes towards gender. Some of those attitudes are more or less likely to lead to comments like "most slow drivers are female." One of those attitudes (simplifying considerably) is having and being unaware of male privilege, call it M. A comment C on the internet is Bayesian evidence for M if and only if M-commenters are more likely to make comments like C than non-M commenters. My claim is that a comment like shminux's is more likely to come from someone who has and is unaware of their male privilege than from someone who is at least aware of their male privilege.
In this particular case, you have inside view reasons to believe that shminux's statement was generated via some other process than the one I'm suggesting that shminux's statement provides weak evidence for (emphasis on the weak). There's no contradiction here.
Forget what I said about the typical outside female observer. The point of that device was to 1) enforce outside view and 2) make gender issues more salient.
He did say it in public. It's right here on LessWrong.
Okay. That makes it much clearer.
It's now obvious to me that the outside viewer does see P(M|C) > P(M|¬C), and why.
However, what schminux gave is not C, but R(C) + Q, and to any attentive reader I assume that P(M|R(C)+Q+C) < P(M|¬C) < P(M) < P(M|C); where R(C) is a meta-observation about one's own (past?) observations/comments C¹ , and Q is a question about the evidence carried by C and R(C).
Any external reader who misses this is, as far as I can tell, simply wrong. They were most likely themselves taken by confirmation bias or some other undesirable effect.
Confirmation bias among self-proclaimed feminists is actually something I have a rather high prior for, since they train themselves to see gender bias everywhere in many cases.
"Why make that observation?" is a bad question. Whether or not you have a reason that morally justifies you to make that observation has little to do with the issue of whether making that observation and telling other people about it, correlates with having misogynist tendencies.
You can measure misogynist tendencies with an implicit association tests. Misogynist tendencies are something real that you can measure in the lab. The test doesn't care about whether you can provide some intellectual justification for your observations.
So by that definition it's perfectly possible for lack of "misogynist tendencies" to constitute a bias.
Just change 'timid' to 'careful', and suddenly it's a whole lot less sexist.
Every statement of the template "[This sex] is more [X]" also has a contrapositive "[The other sex] is less [X]".
Incorrect. It's just sexist in a different way. Just because sexism is more acceptable doesn't make it less sexist.
You know, I was actually wondering that myself, and I've been thinking about it often since I posted that. But it certainly feels a lot less sexist to me. Something about that word 'timid' just bugged me. Maybe it's just that it hits a bit close to home; I'm a woman, and I don't drive, but I am a timid/cautious bicycle-rider...
It's less offensive; that's not the same as less sexist. The short-winded explanation of why is that it's pretty much the same as saying men are incautious.
I think it depends on how you're defining sexist. In particular the later version seems less likely to be read as offensive by the average women.
Sexism isn't that which is offensive to women.
You may not use sexism as synonymous with offensive to women, but whether or not something is offensive to women is a significant part of how many people decide to apply the label sexist. Thus, there are reasonable definitions of sexist such that something that is less offensive to the average women is less sexist that an otherwise comparable statement.
That is connotative begging and I will have no part in it, nor grant any leniency to it. It's accidental fraud at best, dark arts at worst.
I can find no google hits for this term so it would be helpful if you can explain what you mean. Meanwhile, I see no problem with pointing out that you're trying to impose a normative definition that is not representative of how I routinely see the term used IRL.
It's not a term, although I guess I can see where the confusion might arise.
Begging the question is assuming the thing you ought to be proving; I was using begging to refer shorthand to this fallacy. Using "sexist" to describe things that are offensive to women is begging the question for the connotation that is applied by the use of the word; it doesn't particularly matter if that's how the word is frequently used, if frequently used in that way, it's frequently used in a dishonest and dark-artsy manner.
The connotations of the word sexism are driven by its meaning, not its use. If we want to use sexism to refer to things which are merely offensive to women, and not discriminatory against women, then sure, we can do that. But we cannot then pretend that the word has the same gravitas; it ceases to be usefully indicative of any sort of injustice, intellectual or otherwise, and becomes instead a signal for personal preference, a considerable drop in connotative power.
Ok, that (kinda) clarifies things.
I was not making doing so. I was making a statement about how the word sexist is actually used, and to a lesser extent how it is practical to use sexist ( in my experience when people say they they're concerned about offending women and/social consequences that are strongly correlated with offending women). I thought this was clear from the post and the general context of how LW usually handles discussions about language. Furthermore, I don't believe that your op or first response make it remotely clear that you have any justification beyond attempting connotation begging of your own to enforce a narrow normative definition of a broadly used term. I typed this much because I unilaterally ending conversations when the participants don't yet understand each other to be rude. However, now that (I think) we understand what the other is saying I don't think this conversation is worth continuing, and my lack of counterargument should not be taken as agreement(or disagreement) with what (I think) you are claiming.
What good might it do you to have an accurate opinion about the gender of slow and timid drivers?
I can't think of any.
Forming accurate opinions is a useful habit toi have in general.
What's your exact question? Do you want to know whether behaving like that will increase the chances that you will act sexist in other situations?
Or do you want to know whether the label of being sexist applies to you based on your behavior in that instance?
No, just a good Bayesian.
-a (sadly deleted) @NeinQuarterly tweet.
How is this relevant to my comment?
Implying a (false?) dichotomy between Bayesian and sexism, perhaps? I'm confused too.
Not seeing the relevance either.
We should all strive to use the best and most accurate stereotypes and avoid inaccurate ones. A stereotype after all is a just a heuristic applied to humans.
How well do you know that's 80%? If you would now commit to writing down the next 100 results of such guesses, how confident (what p value) would you be that between 70 and 90 times it's a woman?
Why?
You might be remembering the times you are correct more clearly than the times you are wrong.
I thought about it, but I think I remember being surprised better than being right. But who knows, I did not keep count.
I think there's a specific phenomenon that occurs when the consequences of something not-well-understood are so awful that System Justification and Just World Bias immediately kick in really hard and interfere with any actual understanding of the process. So the moment you ask "What if X doesn't really cause awful consequence Y?" then your whole community reacts with a weird combination of "What if you're wrong and Y happens to you? That is so unthinkable! Better not risk it!" and "Well why don't you TRY doing X and find out if you're so smart? But don't come crying to us when Y happens to you!"
The obvious gender-related scenario I'm thinking about is rape, but it's also a large chunk of the premise of Guns, Germs and Steel. It happens to humans! So it would be great to have a name for this thing if it doesn't have one already.
Meta discussion
Retracted.
I downvoted for being off-topic, which is how cognitive biases affect gender perceptions and relations, NOT how bad women get treated in Muslim countries (an important topic, but does not belong in this thread.)
I also added the word "cognitive" to the prompt to make it more obvious that the topic is cognitive biases and not religious biases.