Tuesday, June 26, 2018

 

Conscious BS


David French:
In fact, not only is the IAT a poor predictor of behavior, the test itself is highly unreliable. As Heather Mac Donald noted last fall in the Wall Street Journal, "A person's IAT score can vary significantly each time he takes the test, undercutting its reliability as a psychological instrument."

Again, you don't say. I've taken the test several times, and apparently my own subconscious varies between woke and bigoted depending on the time of day or the placement of the images.

Yet an immense corporate, bureaucratic, and academic industry has been constructed around the concept of "implicit" or "unconscious" bias. It’s supposed to explain why disparate racial outcomes continue in spite of the fact that measures of explicit racism continue to decrease. It's supposed to answer why police still pull the trigger and shoot unarmed black men.

It does no such thing, of course. Instead, the unconscious-bias industry is a font of bad ideas. It diminishes personal responsibility, renders well-meaning, guilt-stricken Americans vulnerable to baseless ideological re-education, and empowers a corporate and academic elite that is by this point inexcusably rebuking Americans for made-up sins. Moreover, there is something inherently ominous about a corporation (much less the government) attempting not just to correct its employees' behavior but to reform their minds.

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