MetaFilter posts tagged with bias

America's 10 Worst Prisons

zarq — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:15:31 -0800

"'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.' So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment." Mother Jones is profiling "America's 10 Worst Prisons." Facilities were chosen for the list based on "...three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates." The List 1: ADX (federal supermax: "A federal isolation facility that's "pretty close" to hell.") 2: Allan B. Polunsky Unit (Texas: "'The hardest place to do time in Texas'—and then you die.") 3: Tent City Jail (Phoenix: Feds say notorious facility has a 'pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos.') 4: Orleans Parish (Louisiana: "'A violent and dangerous institution,' says the Justice Department.") 5: LA County Jail (Los Angeles: "And you thought the Rodney King beating was bad?") 6: Pelican Bay (California: "Where a Christmas card might land you in the hole.") 7: Julia Tutwiler (Alabama: "Prisoners fear 'that it's not safe to take a shower, that it's not safe to go to sleep...that you can be manipulated into sexual favors, it's really horrific.'") 8: Reeves Country Detention Complex (Texas: "An overcrowded, understaffed lockup—with health care bad enough to spark riots.") 9: Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (Mississippi: "'A picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.'") 10: Riker's Island (New York City: "New York City lockup has a "deeply entrenched" pattern of violence by guards, lawsuit claims.") The piece will conclude tomorrow with a list of "Dishonorable Mentions." Accompanying Articles (Some are older pieces covering the same topic) * Maps: Solitary Confinement, State by State: "An exclusive review of how state prisons use isolation to discipline inmates and weed out gang members." * God's Own Warden: "If you ever find yourself inside Louisiana's Angola prison, Burl Cain will make sure you find Jesus—or regret ever crossing his path." * The Silent Treatment: "Imagine serving decades in prison for a crime your sibling framed you for. Now imagine doing it while profoundly deaf." * Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons: "We throw thousands of men in the hole for the books they read, the company they keep, the beliefs they hold. Here's why." (Previously on Mefi) * Life in the Hole: Inside a Solitary Cell: "A guided tour of the seven-by-eleven-foot space where inmates spend 23 hours a day."

Criticism of Criticism of Criticism

Toekneesan — Sun, 05 May 2013 05:32:52 -0800

"One can almost hear the anticipatory echoes of something like Yelp in the context of José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930). The multitude, he wrote, once “scattered about the world in small groups,” now appears “as an agglomeration.” It has “suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society. Before, if it existed, it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character.” The disgruntled diner, now able to make or break a restaurant through sheer collective will. Against this leveling of critical power, the old guard fulminates. Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet, recently harrumphed that “anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they’re talking about.”"—Star Wars, by Tom Vanderbilt, in The Wilson Quarterly H.L. Mencken's essay, Criticism of Criticism of Criticism

"There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!"

Wordshore — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 02:09:22 -0800

Daily Telegraph: Why the world isn't running out of oil: "Moreover, as well as bountiful oilfields in North America, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other producers in the Middle East, there are massive, barely tapped reserves in South America, Africa and the Arctic: not billions of barrels’ worth, but trillions. So the planet is not about to run out of oil. On the contrary, according to a Harvard University report published last year, we are heading for a glut. The 75-page study, by oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, was based on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world, and it predicted a 20 per cent increase in global oil production by 2020." "The Yastreb rig on Sakhalin Island, just off the east coast of Russia, has set numerous industry records and, last August, its operators announced they’d drilled the world’s longest extended-reach well, plunging eight miles into the Earth." "In the past 10 years Shell has developed a technology called mono-diameter which will allow it to drop one steel casing through another, and then expand it to the same dimensions. In theory, this will facilitate the drilling of much deeper wells, although engineers still have to work out how to stop the steel melting at such depths." "...so-called 'seismic vessels' trail between 10 and 20 cables, each up to nine miles long, probing sonically for oil and gas deposits." "'What is going on out there is the marine equivalent of the space programme,' Robert Bryce, an American author and journalist specialising in energy issues, tells me. 'And all of it is privately funded.' ... In total, upstream energy companies (the ones involved in exploration and drilling) spent £800bn ($1.25tn) last year." Recently on MetaFilter: The Huge Lights in North Dakota and Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend... Guardian: Petition to halt oil exploration in Ecuadorean Amazon gets 1m signatures.

People full of shit, both liberal and conservative, most of the time.

Blasdelb — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:17:26 -0800

False memories of fabricated political events [ABSTRACT]. In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news. Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A follow-up study supported the explanation that events are more easily implanted in memory when they are congruent with a person's preexisting attitudes and evaluations, in part because attitude-congruent false events promote feelings of recognition and familiarity, which in turn interfere with source attributions. [FULL TEXT PDF AVAILABLE HERE]

► Over 5,000 subjects were asked if they remembered fabricated political events. ► About half of the sample showed evidence of memory distortion. ► Political preferences appeared to guide the formation of false memories. ► Suggestions that are congruent with prior attitudes and evaluations can produce feelings of familiarity and recognition. ► These can in turn bias source judgments, leading to false memories.

In May of 2010, Slate.com invited its readers to complete a survey about their perspectives on various political events. Those who volunteered read about five unrelated news events with accompanying photographs and were asked about their memories for them. Unbeknownst to the respondents, one of the five events they were asked about was a complete fabrication; it never happened at all. In effect, Slate readers became participants in the largest false memory experiment ever conducted. The survey was posted in the weeks leading up to the publication of Slate's article on research into false memories (Saletan, 2010). Indeed, the idea that Slate's readers might come to remember whole events that never occurred is based on a voluminous literature suggesting just that. Since the mid-1990s, researchers have investigated the ways in which people come to have vividly detailed, emotionally laden memories of entirely false events—what are known as “rich false memories” (see Loftus & Bernstein, 2005). Today, we know quite a lot about the situations that can give rise to rich false memories. A central feature of the memory implantation experiments is the use of highly credible suggestive information. In several early studies (e.g., Hyman and Billings, 1998, Hyman et al., 1995 and Loftus and Pickrell, 1995 [FULL TEXT]), researchers obtained true childhood events from familial informants and asked participants to work at remembering them. A false event invented by the experimenters (with help from the family member) was embedded among the true events, often leading more than a quarter of participants to report false memories. Researchers in another unique study recruited a well-known psychologist and radio personality to help implant false childhood memories in subjects using bogus dream interpretations (Mazzoni, Lombardo, Malvagia, & Loftus, 1999). More recently, a number of studies (e.g., Bernstein et al., 2005 and Sharman and Calacouris, 2010) have led participants to believe that a computer algorithm could, based on their responses to a battery of personality questionnaires, generate a personalized list of “likely” childhood events. Participants were then asked to try to remember events from the list, which consisted mostly of true events drawn from their earlier reports—plus one critical false event. While these studies involved diverse methodologies, they all made use of suggestions that appeared to come from a trusted, or expert source. See also,

The Formation of False Memories [FULL TEXT] For most of this century, experimental psychologists have been interested in how and why memory fails. As Greene2 has aptly noted, memories do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they continually disrupt each other, through a mechanism that we call "interference." Literally thousands of studies have documented how our memories can be disrupted by things that we experienced earlier (proactive interference) or things that we experienced later (retroactive interference). Relatively modern research on interference theory has focused primarily on retroactive interference effects. After receipt of new information that is misleading in some way, people make errors when they report what they saw3. The new, post-event information often becomes incorporated into the recollection, supplementing or altering it, sometimes in dramatic ways. New information invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence. Understanding how we become tricked by revised data about a witnessed event is a central goal of this research. The paradigm for this research is simple. Participants first witness a complex event, such as a simulated violent crime or an automobile accident. Subsequently, half the participants receive new misleading information about the event. The other half do not get any misinformation. Finally, all participants attempt to recall the original event. In a typical example of a study using this paradigm, participants saw a video depicting a killing in a crowded town square. They then received written information about the killing, but some people were misled about what they saw. A critical blue vehicle, for instance, was referred to as being white. When later asked about their memory for the color of the vehicle, those given the phony information tended to adopt it as their memory; they said they saw white4. In these and many other experiments, people who had not received the phony information had much more accurate memories. In some experiments the deficits in memory performance following receipt of misinformation have been dramatic, with performance differences as large as 30 or 40%. This degree of distorted reporting has been found in scores of studies, involving a wide variety of materials. People have recalled nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders, a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, straight hair as curly, stop signs as yield signs, hammers as screwdrivers, and even something as large and conspicuous as a barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all. In short, misleading post-event information can alter a person's recollection in a powerful ways, even leading to the creation of false memories of objects that never in fact existed. False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences [FULL TEXT] We suggested to 228 subjects in two experiments that, as children, they had had negative experiences with a fattening food. An additional 107 subjects received no such suggestion and served as controls. In Experiment 1, a minority of subjects came to believe that they had felt ill after eating strawberry ice cream as children, and these subjects were more likely to indicate not wanting to eat strawberry ice cream now. In contrast, we were unable to obtain these effects when the critical item was a more commonly eaten treat (chocolate chip cookie). In Experiment 2, we replicated and extended the strawberry ice cream results. Two different ways of processing the false suggestion succeeded in planting the false belief and producing avoidance of the food. These findings show that it is possible to convince people that, as children, they experienced a negative event involving a fattening food and that this false belief results in avoidance of that food in adulthood. More broadly, these results indicate that we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health.

Some of the biggest names in the art world have reportedly been fooled by a biography of a fake artist created by the author William Boyd and the rock star David Bowie. Last week the glitterati of New York gathered for a launch party of Boyd's biography of the apparently rediscovered American painter Nat Tate. Bowie, a director of 21 Publishing, the company which produced the book, read extracts to the gathering. Critics on the other side of the Atlantic were due to attend the British launch of the memoir on Tuesday. Several British papers, including the Sunday Telegraph, have already run extracts from the book. Excerpts were also published on Bowie's own website. (Previously)

Freedom from....

zarq — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:41:22 -0800

The New York Times asks seven 'experts': Does makeup ultimately damage a woman’s self-esteem, or elevate it? The Essays * Red Lips Can Rule the World by Natasha Scripture, blogger and writer about 'women’s issues and dating mishaps' for the Huffington Post. * Must This Get Political? by Phoebe Baker Hyde, author of "The Beauty Experiment" * Look Your Best, Feel Your Best by Scott Barnes, makeup artist and author of "About Face" and "Face to Face." * A Choice, Not a Requirement by Deborah Rhode, law professor at Stanford and author of "The Beauty Bias." * It’s What You Make of it by Nancy Etcoff, assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and research psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Author of "Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty." * Using Makeup Shows Love for Yourself by Mally Roncal, makeup artist and the founder of Mally Beauty. * Women Should Do What They Want by Thomas Matlack, The Good Men Project Responses * The Last Psychiatrist: No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up * AutoStraddle: Let's Queer The NYT 'Debate' About Women And Makeup * Jenna Saunders at Jezebel: When Is Wearing Makeup A "Choice"? * Wild Beauty: Does Makeup Hurt Self-Esteem? Is The New York Times Sexist for Asking? * Echidne of the Snakes: On Makeup, Gender and the New York Times Also See * The Naked Face Project (Two Women. Sixty Days. No Makeup. No Shaving. No Primping. What Happens Next?) * About-Face (Site provides women and girls with skills to critically examine media messages that affect their positive self-image / Previously on Mefi) * Previously on Mefi: In the Eye of the Beholder, or a Bar of Soap? Covers Dove's Real Beauty ad campaign which was also discussed in Wrinkled and Rankled and The Eye of the Beholder. Dove still offers a website devoted to helping improve the self-esteem of young girls and women, including a Self Esteem Toolkit and Resources

Why Smart People Are Stupid

naju — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:40:06 -0800

Why Smart People Are Stupid (The New Yorker.) A new study suggests that the smarter people are, the more susceptible they are to cognitive bias.

why teaching equality hurts men

flex — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:28:18 -0800

Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men: "It hurts them by making them unconsciously perpetrate biases they’ve been actively taught to despise. It hurts them by making them complicit in the distress of others. It hurts them by shoehorning them into a restrictive definition masculinity from which any and all deviation is harshly punished... It hurts them through a process of indoctrination so subtle and pervasive that they never even knew it was happening, and when you’ve been raised to hate inequality, discovering that you’ve actually been its primary beneficiary is horrifying – like learning that the family fortune comes from blood money." (via nooneyouknow)

"Bias is required to do the work of agonism."

jkolko — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:59:13 -0800

What do Amy and Klara, Exxon Secrets, and MAICgregator have in common? They are all examples of Adversarial Design.

Publish or Perish

jeffburdges — Sun, 13 May 2012 06:39:43 -0800

Are bias and fraud damaging the existing public trust in scientific and medical research? (previously) There is a more precise pair of articles entitled Reforming Science by the Editors in Chief of Infection and Immunity and mBio : Methodological and Cultural Reforms and Structural Reforms.

Right-wingers are simply dumber on average

wilful — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:39:38 -0800

According to this substantial study recently published in Psychological Science, "lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology.". As the Daily Mail summarises, right-wingers are less intelligent than left wingers. The Mail article and attached commentariat amuses the Guardian's Charlie Brooker, who laughs at the resulting "dumbogeddon". Meanwhile George Monbiot wonders who are the real idiots here (and in passing (footnote 4) provides more links to research in the same general vein).

Tacit racism and sexism

painquale — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:10:55 -0800

The Implicit Bias & Philosophy International Research Project brings together philosophers, psychologists, and policy professionals to study unconscious biases against members of stigmatized groups. The recommended reading page collects recent scholarly articles available for download. (Previously)

March of Time

zarq — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:33:39 -0800

From 1935 to 1951, Time Magazine bridged the gap between print & radio news reporting and the new visual medium of film, with March of Time: award-winning newsreel reports that were a combination of objective documentary, dramatized fiction and pro-American, anti-totalitarian propaganda. They “often tackled subjects and themes that audiences weren’t used to seeing — foreign affairs, social trends, public-health issues — and did so with a combination of panache and subterfuge that today seems either absurd or visionary.” (Previous two links have autoplaying video.) By 1937, the short films were being seen by as many as 26 million people every month and may have helped steer public opinion on numerous issues, including (eventually) America’s entry to WWII. Video samples are available at Time.com, the March of Time Facebook page and the entire collection is available online, (free registration required) at HBO Archives. Two pages at the March Towards War site are linked above. The full site thoroughly examines March of Time as a propaganda effort. (Autoplaying video.) Also includes a quiz: Spot the Fake. Some March of Time clips were subject to censorship. Most featured reenactments, faked photos and footage. They are a look into how the editors of Time wanted people to think about the news. More about the series at TCM. In 1938, March of Time produced a sixteen-minute short film entitled “Inside Nazi Germany,” one of the most controversial films ever released into American theaters. (Available in two parts on YouTube: 1, 2.) The CBC documentary series about the history of news media, "Dawn of the Eye," discussed the film and its impact.

"With television you just sit, watch, listen. The thinking is done for you."

Rhaomi — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:44:07 -0800

Gawker's John Cook yesterday published an exclusive report on a trove of documents from the Nixon Presidential Library tracing the development of Fox News to a 1970 internal memo annotated by then-consultant Roger Ailes. Part of a 318-page cache of similar documents, the memo -- "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News" -- called for the creation of a strongly pro-Nixon news outlet operated from the White House which would disseminate partisan news packages free of charge to local affiliates across the country. By coordinating release of these targeted reports with allied politicians and duping opponents into hostile interviews, Ailes hoped to bypass the "prejudices of network news" -- a desire which led him to advocate for some unexpected political policies at the time, from campaign finance reform to anti-poverty efforts. The report comes as Fox is waging an aggressive two-front PR war with perceived ideological enemies -- calling on viewers to file IRS complaints against Media Matters' tax-exempt status for their dogged fact-checking of the network, while on-air hosts launched a campaign to label Jon Stewart "racist" after he called out their record of falsehoods following a critical interview with Chris Wallace (previously).

Mismeasure remeasured

Horace Rumpole — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 09:19:14 -0800

A Mismeasured Mismeaurement of Man. Stephen Jay Gould's classic The Mismeasure of Man argues that 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton inflicted his own racial biases on his data to demonstrate that Caucasians had larger brains than other races. A new paper in the Public Library of Science: Biology debunks Gould's account by remeasuring the same skulls Morton used. Whatever biases Morton may have had, they are not reflected in the data.

A critical moment in statistics

grouse — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:56:19 -0800

Statistical hypothesis testing with a p-value of less than 0.05 is often used as a gold standard in science, and is required by peer reviewers and journals when stating results. Some statisticians argue that this indicates a cult of significance testing using a frequentist statistical framework that is counterintuitive and misunderstood by many scientists. Biostatisticians have argued that the (over)use of p-vaues come from "the mistaken idea that a single number can capture both the long-run outcomes of an experiment and the evidential meaning of a single result" and identify several other problems with significance testing. XKCD demonstrates how misunderstandings of the nature of the p-value, failure to adjust for multiple comparisons, and the file drawer problem result in likely spurious conclusions being published in the scientific literature and then being distorted further in the popular press. You can simulate a similar situation yourself. John Ioannidis uses problems with significance testing and other statistical concerns to argue, controversially, that "most published research findings are false." Will the use of Bayes factors replace classical hypothesis testing and p-values? Will something else?

The New Jim Crow

TheGoodBlood — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:16:41 -0800

“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.” That's what "Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation. Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness More Black Men Now in Prison System than Were Enslaved." [...] “What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.” Alexander in a Bill Moyers interview with Bryan Stevenson. Alexander at Washington Journal

Schiller's List

pla — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:16:20 -0800

The US House of Representatives has voted to cut all federal NPR funding. To take effect, this would still need to make it through the senate, which most likely would not succeed. For a view from the other side of the media-aisle, Fox News has their own take on the vote.

Is Science Saturated with Sexism?

Tanizaki — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 13:10:53 -0800

In “Understanding Current Causes of Women’s Underrepresentation in Science,” Cornell professors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams provide a thorough analysis and discussion of 20 years of data. Their conclusion: When it comes to job interviews, hiring, funding, and publishing, women are treated as well as men and sometimes better. As Williams told Nature, “There are constant and unsupportable allegations that women suffer discrimination in these arenas, and we show conclusively that women do not.” Put another way, the gender-bias empress has no clothes.

Is the Academic World Biased Against Conservatives?

modernnomad — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 06:26:12 -0800

Some Social Scientists Claim Pervasive Bias in the Academe Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

“Tell the class what the minority perspective on this is.”

prefpara — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 13:54:35 -0800

Microaggressions. This blog seeks to provide a visual representation of the everyday of “microaggressions.” Each event, observation and experience posted is not necessarily particularly striking in and of themselves. Often, they are never meant to hurt - acts done with little conscious awareness of their meanings and effects. Instead, their slow accumulation during a childhood and over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.

Philosophers all have long, gray beards!

meese — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:00:38 -0800

Professional philosophers have long known that there are far fewer women in philosophy than there are men. (Some quick info.) Recently, this issue has taken center-stage in the philosophy blogosphere. First, a new study suggests that gender plays a role in what intuitions one has to philosophical thought experiments, such as the Gettier cases about knowledge, and The Trolley Problem related to ethics (via). Second, a new blog, What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?, has exploded in popularity as it shows the good, the bad, and the downright ugly involved in being a woman in the profession. The "via" and "exploded" links are particularly included for the discussion in the comments there.

Religious Search Engines Yield Tailored Results

Man with Lantern — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:25:11 -0800

As reported on NPR's All Tech Considered ("Tech" and "Religion"?) on 9/13. "In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet" by using religion-based search engines. And folks are worried that Goohoo results might be biased? (SNPRL - Single Nat'l Public Radio Link) One would have to think that things like "science", "evolution", or "big floppy tits" would come up empty using one of these.

How Facts Backfire

jhandey — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:24:49 -0800

Why having the facts sometimes isn't enough, and what that means for politics and society.

Metafilter: 56% Conservative Readership

furiousxgeorge — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:42:45 -0800

Slate has introduced a tool to analyze the news sites you read online. The tool is based on a paper that studied ideological isolation in news consumption online and off. It analyzes your history to determine which sites you read and looks at readership data to determine how much of an echo chamber, if any, your choice of news sources creates. You can see for yourself, but the conclusion is that "Many people go to sites whose readers don't share their politics. To use their terminology, they found a low degree of "media isolation" among Web surfers compared with the political isolation most Americans experience in their daily lives. Stacked against the networks in which we work, live, and socialize, the network we increasingly use to get our news—which is to say, the one you are using right now—is relatively integrated."

Objectivity Killed the News Star

AugieAugustus — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:43:30 -0800

"The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility." "The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News" by Chris Hedges.