What are some of the biases you’re thinking of here? And are there any groups of people that you think are especially good at correcting for these biases?
The longer answer to this question: I am not sure how to give a productive answer to this question. In the classic “cognitive bias” literature, people tend to immediately accept that the biases exist once they learn about them (…as long as you don’t point them out right at the moment they are engaged in them). That is not the case for these issues.
I had to think carefully about how to answer because (when speaking to the aforementioned “randomly selected people who went to prestigious universities”, as well as when speaking to EAs) such issues can be controversial and trigger defensiveness. These topics are political and cannot be de-politicized, I don’t think there is any bias I can simply state that isn’t going to be upvoted by those who agree and dismissed as a controversial political opinion by those who don’t already agree, which isn’t helpful.
It’s analogous to if you walked into a random town hall and proclaimed “There’s a lot of anthropomorphic bias going on in this community, for example look at all the religiosity” or “There’s a lot of species-ism going on in this community, look at all the meat eating”. You would not necessarily make any progress on getting people to understand. The only people who would understand are those who know exactly what you mean and already agree with you. In some circles, the level of understanding would be such that people would get it. In others, such statements would produce minor defensiveness and hostility. The level of “understanding” vs “defensiveness and hostility” in the EA community regarding these issues is similar to that of randomly selected prestigious university students (that is, much more understanding than the population average, but less than ideal). As with “anthropomorphic bias” and as with “speciesism”, there are some communities where certain concepts are implicitly understood by most people and need no explanation, and some communities where they aren’t. It comes down to what someone’s point of view is.
Acquiring an accurate point of view, and moving a community towards an accurate point of view, is a long process of truth seeking. It is a process of un-learning a lot of things that you very implicitly hold true. It wouldn’t work to just list biases. If I start listing out things like (unfortunately poorly named) “privilege-blindness” and (unfortunately poorly named) “white-fragility” I doubt it’s not going to have any positive effect other than to make people who already agree nod to themselves, while other people roll their eyes, and other people google the terms and then roll their eyes. Criticizing things such that something actually goes through is pretty hard.
The productive process involves talking to individual people, hearing their stories, having first-hand exposure to things, reading a variety of writings on the topic and evaluating them. I think a lot of people think of these issues as “identity political topics” or “topics that affect those less fortunate” or “poorly formed arguments to be dismissed”. I think progress occurs when we frame-shift towards thinking of them as “practical every day issues that affect our lives”, and “how can I better articulate these real issues to myself and others” and “these issues are important factors in generating global inequality and suffering, an issue which affects us all”.
Something which might be a useful contribution from someone familiar with the topic would be to write about it in EA-friendly terms. Practical every day issues don’t have to be expressed in “poorly formed arguments”. If the material could be expressed in well formed arguments (or in arguments which the EA community can recognise as well formed), I think it would gain a lot more traction in the community.
The longer answer to this question: I am not sure how to give a productive answer to this question. In the classic “cognitive bias” literature, people tend to immediately accept that the biases exist once they learn about them (…as long as you don’t point them out right at the moment they are engaged in them). That is not the case for these issues.
I had to think carefully about how to answer because (when speaking to the aforementioned “randomly selected people who went to prestigious universities”, as well as when speaking to EAs) such issues can be controversial and trigger defensiveness. These topics are political and cannot be de-politicized, I don’t think there is any bias I can simply state that isn’t going to be upvoted by those who agree and dismissed as a controversial political opinion by those who don’t already agree, which isn’t helpful.
It’s analogous to if you walked into a random town hall and proclaimed “There’s a lot of anthropomorphic bias going on in this community, for example look at all the religiosity” or “There’s a lot of species-ism going on in this community, look at all the meat eating”. You would not necessarily make any progress on getting people to understand. The only people who would understand are those who know exactly what you mean and already agree with you. In some circles, the level of understanding would be such that people would get it. In others, such statements would produce minor defensiveness and hostility. The level of “understanding” vs “defensiveness and hostility” in the EA community regarding these issues is similar to that of randomly selected prestigious university students (that is, much more understanding than the population average, but less than ideal). As with “anthropomorphic bias” and as with “speciesism”, there are some communities where certain concepts are implicitly understood by most people and need no explanation, and some communities where they aren’t. It comes down to what someone’s point of view is.
Acquiring an accurate point of view, and moving a community towards an accurate point of view, is a long process of truth seeking. It is a process of un-learning a lot of things that you very implicitly hold true. It wouldn’t work to just list biases. If I start listing out things like (unfortunately poorly named) “privilege-blindness” and (unfortunately poorly named) “white-fragility” I doubt it’s not going to have any positive effect other than to make people who already agree nod to themselves, while other people roll their eyes, and other people google the terms and then roll their eyes. Criticizing things such that something actually goes through is pretty hard.
The productive process involves talking to individual people, hearing their stories, having first-hand exposure to things, reading a variety of writings on the topic and evaluating them. I think a lot of people think of these issues as “identity political topics” or “topics that affect those less fortunate” or “poorly formed arguments to be dismissed”. I think progress occurs when we frame-shift towards thinking of them as “practical every day issues that affect our lives”, and “how can I better articulate these real issues to myself and others” and “these issues are important factors in generating global inequality and suffering, an issue which affects us all”.
Something which might be a useful contribution from someone familiar with the topic would be to write about it in EA-friendly terms. Practical every day issues don’t have to be expressed in “poorly formed arguments”. If the material could be expressed in well formed arguments (or in arguments which the EA community can recognise as well formed), I think it would gain a lot more traction in the community.