#structural bias

[ladymazzy]

Watch "How Science Pretends to be Meritocratic | A Dr. Fatima Video Essay" on YouTube

Just watched this video and I'm a little obsessed

If you've got 40 mins to spare and you want to hear some *extremely* good commentary on the nature of implicit & structural bias in academia, watch this video (this is the scientific community, but it's also relevant to other disciplines & non-academic fields. it's relevant to any field that reckons it's meritocratic)

tldr; science bloke wrote a research paper suggesting formula for hiring researchers that was based on models riddled with biases, the paper was critically discussed on twitter by other scientists (as scientists are wont to do), he then retracted the paper (possibly because it was saying the quiet part out loud, revealing the fallacy of 'meritocratic' hiring...), with a weird unhelpful apology that no-one asked for, and then the science status quo & their fans cried 'Cancel Culture' even though no-one had tried to cancel him...

[resourcesforradicals]

There is a tension sometimes between journalistic and moral narratives. Although of course overall we may try to point out the bad so that the good can triumph, within that ambition there is also this: an event is more newsworthy if it is rare or strange. Other, worse, more important horrors are overlooked because they are common. In the town of Baniyas on 2-3 May, there seems to be little doubt that a pro-regime militia swept through two Sunni neighbourhoods slaughtering large numbers of those they found, shooting and knifing many to death. There are photographs – you can find them online – of piles of corpses of little children, aged from two or three upwards. Altogether there seem to have been scores of them. The nature of this crime cannot be fully revealed, because no newspaper, including this one, would publish such pictures. The media are happy to present a pixilated image of a heart-eater, however.

Why is cannibalism in Syria a bigger story than the routine slaughter of children? bcs of structural mainstream media bias towards unusual events, that's why