General

Re: The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

Blargg — Sat, 04 May 2013 00:02:19 GMT

I found it an interesting approach to measuring it. Though I have to say, I didn't really get much from the results. I guess I am aware and have no problem with having preferences and biases at the low level they measure.

Re: The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

Jon Irenicus — Fri, 03 May 2013 21:11:34 GMT

The article strikes me as a pretty desperate attempt to find bias everywhere. Who. Cares.

Re: The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

Blargg — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:08:07 GMT

I wasn't sure if by thin they meant the thin side of the bell curve, as in, thinner than normal people, since by fat they clearly meant fatter than normal people. It's an interesting test and I took several of them. A little nerve-wracking getting down which key for which category, especially when they kept switching them.

Re: The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

Caley McKibbin — Wed, 01 May 2013 02:54:07 GMT

I did the IAT for Weight and got

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Thin People compared to Fat People.

That puts me with 25% of others that have done the test. That one is not surprising for me...

Re: The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

Blargg — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:24:49 GMT

Rationality is the hand calculator. Emotions reflect the goals one solves problems with the calculator to reach. It's these values that give any direction to rational thinking, that allow one to assess costs and benefits of various approaches.

Re: The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

vive la insurrection — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:23:03 GMT

At first I thought you were talking about Greek Rationality (i.e Plato, etc) - interesting enough you still kind of are:

Hayek, and even Keynes deal with these types of knowledge issues I think and show how it's "formalism" (Platonism even) is a misplaced faith. I have heard it called "nerd knowledge": the knowledge of the technical and trivial placed in an area where the technical and trivial don't apply. A type of "scientism".

The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

Caley McKibbin — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:45:45 GMT

Catchy headline, right? I thought so.

According to this article there is a tendency for white male geeks to overestimate their own "rationality". It links to Project Implicit, a study of implicit attitudes.

What is an attitude?

An attitude is your evaluation of some concept (person, place, thing, or idea). An explicit attitude is the kind of attitude that you deliberately think about and report. For example, you could tell someone whether or not you like math. That is your explicit attitude. Implicit attitudes are positive and negative evaluations that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control. Even if you say that you like math (your explicit attitude), it is possible that you associate math with negativity without knowing it. In this case, we would say that your implicit attitude toward math is negative.

I will do it later when I have time. Maybe some others here want to try it and tell us the result.

I found this comment quite funny:

Jus to add another facet to the argument, rationality itself, or the notion of “making raional decisions”, is a myth. People who sustain damage to the amigdala, which is often described as the seat of emotion, become emotionally somewhat flat; but more importantly they can completely lose the ability to make decisions. Choosing their clothes in the morning or ordering form a menu become endless torutures of finer and finer hair splitting in an attempt to rationalise a choice that they don’t have the emotional engagement to commit to. This scales up to any commitment ot an opinion, intellectual as well as mundane.