172 posts tagged with bias.
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According to whom...?
The Media Bias Chart (interactive, static, and app versions), from Ad Fontes Media, graphs the political bias vs reliability of media articles. [more inside]
A thousand sceptic hands won't keep us from the things we plan
Eight studies document what may be a fundamental and universal bias in human imagination: people think things could be better. When we ask people how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better (Study 1). The bias doesn't depend on the wording of the question (Studies 2 and 3). It arises in people's everyday thoughts (Study 4). It is unrelated to people's anxiety, depression, and neuroticism (Study 5). A sample of Polish people responding in English show the same bias (Study 6), as do a sample of Chinese people responding in Mandarin (Study 7). People imagine how things could be better even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse (Study 8). Overall, it seems, human imagination has a bias: when people imagine how things could be, they imagine how things could be better. from Things could be better [PsyArXiv Preprints]
On Ageism
Are you ageist? Take a 10-minute implicit bias test and find out. Work against ageism. It's good for you, it's good for society. [more inside]
A Cautionary Tale
Yet within the sport, and even for the larger world, the Giants remain a cautionary tale: a high-profile example of what can happen when prejudice derails a talented organization or team, when discord and distrust become everyday elements in a workplace. Instead of dominating the big leagues with their core of talented Latino and African-American players, the Giants were perennial also-rans for most of the 1960s. from Giant Missteps
The Songwriters Remain the Same
Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence ... How often has a top 5 hit been written only by women in the last 10 years? It’s likely rarer than you think.
Humans are Biased, Generative AI is Even Worse
"Stable Diffusion generates images using artificial intelligence, in response to written prompts. Like many AI models, what it creates may seem plausible on its face but is actually a distortion of reality. An analysis of more than 5,000 images created with Stable Diffusion found that it takes racial and gender disparities to extremes — worse than those found in the real world." An analysis by Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass for Bloomberg Technology + Equality, with striking visualizations. [more inside]
This is my idea of fun / Playin' video games
Gender biases in fictional dialogue are well documented in many media. In film, television and books, female characters tend to talk less than male characters, talk to each other less than male characters talk to each other, and have a more limited range of things to say. Identifying these biases is an important step towards addressing them. However, there is a lack of solid data for video games, now one of the major mass media which has the ability to shape conceptions of gender and gender roles. We present the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded corpus of video game dialogue, which makes it possible for the first time to measure and monitor gender representation in video game dialogue. It demonstrates that there is half as much dialogue from female characters as from male characters. Some of this is due to a lack of female characters, but there are also biases in who female characters speak to, and what they say. [Gender bias in video game dialogue] [more inside]
Spewing bullshit at the speed of AI
Yes, this is another ChatGTP post, but it's about creating chatbots that parrot Fox news, or perhaps the official propaganda of the Chinese government. The issue is not theoretical, at least two already exist, as reported by the NYT (gift link). [more inside]
He responded, “Your cost of compliance is not my problem.”
But Benford says the first complaint that put the couple on the city’s radar came from a white neighbor in 2003. “That lady would ask me to come help her move things, or fix something,” Benford says. “She’d ask for rides to and from the bus stop. Come to find out she was reporting us to the city the entire time.” Radley Balko for Nashville Scene with an extensive investigation into the explosion of Metro Code violation reports largely targeting Black and low-income home owners in the city. [more inside]
scientific enterprise is biased even if scientific method is impartial
Responses to 10 common criticisms of anti-racism action in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine.
Criticism #4: “I only hire/award/cite based on merit. I do not need to consider race." It should be noted that the concept of “meritocracy” was introduced as satire by novelist Michael Dunlop Young, who believed that a society structured as a meritocracy would appear equitable, but ultimately serve to reinforce and perpetuate preexisting inequality. [more inside]
Criticism #4: “I only hire/award/cite based on merit. I do not need to consider race." It should be noted that the concept of “meritocracy” was introduced as satire by novelist Michael Dunlop Young, who believed that a society structured as a meritocracy would appear equitable, but ultimately serve to reinforce and perpetuate preexisting inequality. [more inside]
These are good shapes, nice shapes.
Parable of the Polygons: A Playable Post on the Shape of Society These little cuties are 50% Triangles, 50% Squares, and 100% slightly shapist. But only slightly! In fact, every polygon prefers being in a diverse crowd. You can only move them if they're unhappy with their immediate neighborhood. They've got one, simple rule: “I wanna move if less than 1/3 of my neighbors are like me.” Harmless, right? Every polygon would be happy with a mixed neighborhood. Surely their small bias can't affect the larger shape society that much? Well... [more inside]
It's not a Hallmark Holiday!
The Gender Pay Gap Bot caused chaos on Twitter yesterday (International Women's Day). Every time a UK business tweeted using the hashtag #IWD2022, the bot retweeted with the organisation's gender pay gap (using data from gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk. Businesses started deleting their tweets, some reposting without the hashtag, others amending their message and others not posting again at all, but other Twitter users were quick to screenshot the tweets and call them out. Here's an interview with the creators, Francesca Lawson and Alastair Fensome, where Lawson says: “I want employers to stop treating International Women’s Day as a Hallmark holiday and start taking responsibility for the inequalities in their organizations”.
We Notice When Something Has Changed
n-text moral judgments
Should I run the blender at 3am in the morning when my family is sleeping?
Ask Delphi lets you try out a computational model for descriptive ethics, i.e., people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations.
Relevant paper.
Ask Delphi lets you try out a computational model for descriptive ethics, i.e., people’s moral judgments on a variety of everyday situations.
Relevant paper.
How one professor changed the culture of mathematics for his students
Later, as a professor, he noticed a pattern. Ardila’s Black, Latino, and women students who went on to Ph.D. programs also told stories of isolation and exclusion…so Ardila…set out to create, in his own classroom, a new kind of math environment.Federico Ardila-Mantilla, SFSU professor, has strived to create a new culture in math. One that is more inclusive from the first day of class (excerpt from “The End of Bias: A Beginning”).
Mind the Gap, Handbook of Clinical Signs in Black and Brown Skin, Update
Mind the Gap, a handbook of clinical signs and symptoms in black and brown skin, is available to be downloaded online at no cost. [more inside]
Feeling Unsure Shouldn’t Make You an Imposter
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. Writing in the Harvard Business Review (limited free articles), Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey examine how and why the idea of imposter syndrome has been approached as an individual pathology rather than a symptom of systemic issues in business culture.
(h/t to Anne Helen Petersen's substack; "imposter syndrome" was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in their study The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. (pdf link)) [more inside]
The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
Being Black in Sociology
Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy. [...] Too many sociologists treat their carefully crafted representations of reality as fact, rather than fact-like.Dr. Robyn Autry on Sociology's Race Problem.
"This is the largest dataset of its kind ever produced."
Newspaper Navigator is a project being carried out by Ben Lee (his announcement on Twitter), Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. It extracts visual content from 16+ million pages of sixty years of public domain digitized American newspapers and helps people learn to search the visual content using machine learning techniques. Read the FAQ to learn more about how its creator tried to manage algorithmic bias. Fun search terms are offered if you're not feeling creative: national park, giraffe, blimp, hats, stunts. The dataset is publicly available, the code is available and here's a white paper about the process of building it.
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
The Overwhelming Racism of COVID Coverage
Western media cannot write western failure. The real story is that ‘developing’ nations have done remarkably better at fighting COVID-19 than the rich and white. The real story starts precisely where the western map ends. Here be dragons. We be dragons.
"So the question becomes: are we using the right information?"
"Maps always project a specific view of reality.... it’s not a bad thing, as such. The more maps there are, the greater the sum total of information becomes – just as a multitude of voices blends into a democracy.
Where does it go wrong? When maps are interpreted as neutral truth. Not one of many representations of reality, but the single definitive model of how the world works. And that is exactly what happens with many maps in the politicised migration debate."
An excellent article on how changing the maps used to portray complex issues can actually change how those complex issues might be perceived.
An excellent article on how changing the maps used to portray complex issues can actually change how those complex issues might be perceived.
Mind the Gap: A Handbook of Clinical Signs in Black and Brown Skin
Malone Mukwende, 20, is a second-year medical student at St George’s, University of London. “On arrival at medical school I noticed the lack of teaching in darker skin. We were often being taught to look for symptoms such as red rashes which I was aware would not appear as described in my own skin,” he told BME Medics. “When flagging this to tutors it was clear that they didn’t know of any other way to describe these conditions on patients of darker skin tones and I knew that I had to make a change to that.” (Atlanta Black Star, July 9, 2020) The result is "Mind the Gap: A Handbook of Clinical Signs in Black and Brown Skin." [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
Ethics in AI
DeepMind researchers propose rebuilding the AI industry on a base of anticolonialism - "The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations Secretary General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation." [more inside]
How Nandini Jammi flipped the script on the founder of Sleeping Giants
"I’m leaving Sleeping Giants, but not because I want to. ... I want to show you how a woman of color almost disappeared from the movement she built, and what you can achieve when you refuse to follow the rules your white male “leader” sets for you," she writes in her Medium post that details how co-founder Matt Rivitz denied her the title of "co-founder", refused to create an email address for her, left her out of meetings, campaigns, and even award ceremonies. At her lowest point, she wanted to quit. But in a stunning strategic move, she took control of her own brand instead. [more inside]
Renata Flores' Quechua covers and original Quechua + trap songs
"¿Qué motiva a una joven de 17 años a cantar en su idioma ancestral? Renata Flores, cantante, compositora y activista del idioma quechua revaloriza y promueve la lengua natal de sus antepasados a través de la música, mezclando sonidos andinos con géneros modernos." Quien Soy (Who I am) is a short Spanish documentary about Renata Flores, who started singing in Quechua covers, first House of the Rising Sun (original; subtitled) and went viral with The Way You Make Me Feel, and now blends other styles like trap and electric/dance to promote Quechua while also bringing attention to issues of femicide and the treatment of rural people. Renata Flores Brought Quechua to YouTube, and Then Everything Changed (Vice) [more inside]
#whitecrimewhitepicture
Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative, information consumption, and perception. Utilizing various media, she deconstructs language and imagery to explore the tension between marginal experiences and dominant histories. Through investigative research, she considers the ways media frameworks construct memory and inform discursive practices around race, politics, and culture. In her current series, Counternarratives, Bell edits New York Times articles, altering headlines, changing images, and redacting text to reveal oppressive patterns in news reportage and society at large. (9 min doc).
A Class Divided
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 30 years later. [more inside]
Bias? In my machine learning model? It's more likely than you think.
This approachable blog post from Microsoft Research summarizes this research paper by Swinger, De-Arteaga, et al. [pdf], which demonstrated that commonly used machine learning models contain harmful and offensive racial, ethnic, gender, and religious biases (e.g. associating common Black names with harmful stereotypes while associating common white names with innocuous or positive terms). These biases are harmful in themselves and may also lead to insidious discriminatory effects in software built on these models. [more inside]
Architecture of Oppression: Racism and Bias in Community Planning
There's No Such Thing as a Dangerous Neighborhood. Most serious urban violence is concentrated among less than 1 percent of a city’s population. So why are we still criminalizing whole areas? (Stephen Lurie, CityLab) On the other hand, a study in 2019 (abstract only) shows that growing up in an affluent community brings “compounding privileges” and higher educational attainment—especially for white residents. (Tanvi Misra, CityLab) [more inside]
“bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do”
Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police [Kotaku] “The depiction of police in video games has taken many forms over the years. Officers might appear as antagonists exemplifying corruption and violence, or as benevolent forces doing their best to protect and serve. Recent weeks of protests against police brutality and racism have upended video games’ ability to depict the police as neutral arbiters of justice, which should make game developers reckon with how they will present the police in the future. [...] But given recent events, it is difficult not to reflect back on how Spider-Man and other video games offer a rigidly positive portrayal of police. That uneasiness, born from the game’s utopian depiction of law enforcement, has begun to crystallize for many. Many video games depict police as purely altruistic, not reflecting any of the bitter reality of prejudice and violence. Those that might not have understood that before are now starting to get it, and that might be a problem for future video games.” [more inside]
Book Authors Are Getting Real About How Much They Are Paid
The hashtag #PublishingPaidMe has reignited a conversation about the disparities between how much Black authors and non-Black authors make. [more inside]
"It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field."
"Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith’s paper tried to do. 'Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?' describes a major issue with evolutionary psychology, called the matching problem." [Gizmodo] [more inside]
On subjective data, why datasets should expire, & data sabotage
A Dataset is a Worldview: a slightly expanded version of a talk given by Hannah Davis at the Library of Congress in September 2019.
what planet do you live on?
The Guardian reports that despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights, according to a new Gender Social Norms Index that contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population. [more inside]
How to design AI that eliminates disability bias
How to design AI that eliminates disability bias (Financial Times, Twitter link in case of paywall issues) — "As AI is introduced into gadgets and services, stories of algorithmic discrimination have exposed the tendency of machine learning to magnify the prejudices that skew human decision-making against women and ethnic minorities, which machines were supposed to avoid. Equally rife, but less discussed, are AI's repercussions for those with disabilities." [more inside]
“The truth is more important now than ever.”
Earlier this week, after its first front page headline about Trump's response to the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings sparked a furious backlash, the New York Times amended it for the second edition and executive editor Dean Baquet explained the first headline as more of a technical mistake than a matter of bad judgment, while Trump praised the original headline and Politico's Jack Shafer took issue with the "Twitter multitudes... swinging caltrops and battle axes in protest". But is the furor only about a headline? Or is it an expression of an increasing frustration with the media’s coverage of Trump’s rhetoric, as encapsulated in the words of Beto O’Rourke, "members of the press, WTF?" Is political coverage in the Trump era, as described in a much-retweeted thread by Heidi N. Moore, in a crisis? And if so, what are the solutions? [more inside]
"I intend to be disruptive not with my presence, but with my ideas"
Fifty years ago, at a time when America was divided on questions of war, race, and gender, Alice de Rivera decided that she was fed up with John Jay High School, the local public school in Brooklyn. She was especially strong in math and science, and she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on a city-wide math examination, but her high school was poor in those subjects, where Stuyvesant High School, a nearby specialized public school, excelled in those topic. But it was boys-only. How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools (New Yorker) [more inside]
Death to Livability (Scores)!
The problem with "most livable" city rankings is they all look pretty similar, from Monocle's top 25 and Mercer Mobility Exchange's top 10 for 2019, or Economist Intelligence Unit top 50 for 2018 (via Business Insider) -- they're very white, and very western. City rankings are a window onto the projected tastes of a highly specific elite... it’s hard not to wonder why these rankings tend to tap wealthy, smaller cities when larger, less wealthy ones may be making more radical, transformative improvements in life quality. (Citylab) [more inside]
Out of Mind
The Hidden Heroines of Chaos - "Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory. Their previously untold story illustrates the changing status of computation in science." [more inside]
census, eugenics, computers
"A racial category for Chinese was added after railroad companies began importing cheap, exploitable laborers from China. Categories for “mulatto” came after the abolition of slavery caused a panic about the dangers of racial mixing. Questions about mental health and race were first added at the behest of a Southern senator right before the outbreak of Civil War. The results seemed to show that free blacks living in Northern states were on average 11 times more likely to be insane than Southern blacks living in slavery. Such questionable statistics were taken up by Southern politicians to bolster racist theories and argue against abolition." [A longread on Hollerith, eugenics in the US, Nazi Germany and more]
“The system keeps perpetuating the same faulty norms about us.”
Are Philly court reporters accurate with black dialect? Study: Not really.
For a forthcoming study in the journal Language, researchers evaluated how well Philadelphia court reporters transcribe dialect. The team, which includes University of Pennsylvania linguists, a New York University sociologist, and a co-founder of Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, tested 27 court reporters for both accuracy and comprehension. Roughly 40 percent of the sentences the court reporters transcribed had something wrong. Sixty-seven percent of attempts at paraphrasing weren’t accurate. And 11 percent of transcriptions were called gibberish.[more inside]
Medical Male-practice in the Manstitute of Medicine
I Needed A Hysterectomy At Age 31. Doctors Fought Me Every Step Of The Way. Ace Ratcliff describes six years of unnecessary pain, suffering and medical bills in pursuit of a hysterectomy. "I ran into roadblocks from the start. Doctors refused to take me seriously when I requested a surgical hysterectomy... And nothing I said could change my doctors’ minds, not the stories about my frequently dislocating hips, my mom’s complicated pregnancies or the increased rate of miscarriage and preterm labor for EDS patients." [more inside]
Implicit Attitudes Can Change Over the Long Term
“We provide the first report of long-term change in both implicit and explicit attitudes – measured from the same individual – towards multiple social groups,” says psychological scientist Tessa E. S. Charlesworth of Harvard University, first author on the study. “This research is important because it shows that, contrary to previous assumptions that implicit attitudes were stable features of the mind or society, implicit attitudes appear, in fact, to be capable of long-term durable change.” [more inside]
Recent reviews of reviews
Aaron Bady (Popula, 12/20/2018), "Milkman: I Have Not Finished This Very Good Novel (Though I Probably Will)": "Why would I get mad at [Dwight Garner] for the structural impossibility of the genre he's paid to write in?" Nicola Griffith (nicolagriffith.com, 4/2/2018), "How Ableism Affects a Book Review": "So Lucky's first review ... epitomises the bias faced by novels about disabled characters written by disabled authors and it's time this bias was called out." Mark Brown (The Guardian, 10/7/2018), "Kate Atkinson calls authors reviewing their peers a 'callous art'": "Atkinson called Dee's review bizarre. 'He was making a whole article out of me not being Rachel Cusk.'" [more inside]
The Anti-Defamation League's reading list for children
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has compiled a list of books more than 750 books, filterable by topic, that address a wide range of social justice issues, including ableism, bullying, LGBTQ issues, anti-semitism, race and religion. On its website, the organization says: "Books have the potential to create lasting impressions. They have the power to instill empathy, affirm children’s sense of self, teach about others, transport to new places and inspire actions on behalf of social justice." Here are few highlights picked by Lifehacker's Offspring sub-site.
Algorithms define our lives
Backwards in high heels isn't enough
Medical university rigged exams against women:
Informed sources say Tokyo Medical University has for years rigged entrance exams to limit its intake of women students, slashing their scores by well over 10 percent across-the-board.[more inside]