#implicit bias

There seems to be a major disconnect about what it means for a conference to have disability representation. I’ve seen a version of this happen a number of times:

• A panel on diversity or social justice has no disability representation. 
  
• No panelist talked about disability as a justice/diversity issue, or even alluded to disability experience.
  
• A disabled person points out the problem to the organizers. 
  
• The organizers say something to the effect of “Actually, one of the panelists has [some disability or other]”.
  

Organizers are sometimes genuinely confused about why this isn’t a solution, and I’m realizing that this is in part because “representation” means at least two different things:

Sometimes representation just means diversity of panelists, ie: 

• There need to be panelists who are disabled (and in many context, there need to be panelists who are *openly* disabled). 
  
• This is important in part because when there are no openly disabled people on a panel, this is often a sign of disability discrimination.
  
• (Especially if there are no disabled people on *any* panels at a conference, or there are only disabled panelists on disability-focused panels.)
  
• In some contexts, diversity of panelists is enough.
  

Sometimes representation means literally being a representative of a community or movement: 

• Sometimes it’s not enough to have diverse panelists. Sometimes it’s necessary to have panelists who can represent other disabled people by speaking on behalf of an organized disability community or movement. 
  
• In many contexts, there need to be panelists who can speak from a position of expertise about disability issues.
  
• For instance, if the topic of the panel is intersectional activism or collaborating across movements, you need someone who can represent at least some part of the disability activist community.
  
• Diversity of identity is not enough in this case, because having an identity is not the same as representing an organized advocacy community.
  
• Being disabled does not in and of itself make someone a well-informed representative of the organized disability rights community.
  

Sometimes conferences forget that disability is a justice issue, and neglect to book anyone who can address disability as a justice issue, eg:

• A conference holds a panel on intersectional advocacy called “Showing up for each other: Owning our privilege and leaving no one behind”.
  
• The panel consists of an LGBTQ group, an anti-racist group, an economic justice group, and a feminist group.
  
• None of the panelists are disability rights leaders.
  
• None of the panelists talk about disability rights issues.
  
• None of the panelists even talk about their own disability experiences.
  
• On a panel about intersectionality and showing up for each other, disability issues are completely overlooked. 
  
• Even if one of the panelists happens to have a disability or medical condition, this is still a problem.
  
• (Especially if the organization holding the conference has a consistent pattern of overlooking disability issues.)
  
• In this case, something has gone badly wrong and the conference needs to make an immediate plan for making sure it doesn’t happen again.
  

Sometimes conferences forget that diversity still matters when the topic isn’t disability or general intersectionality:

• Not all disabled activists are disability rights activists.
  
• Some disabled activists are focused primarily on other issues.
  
• Eg: Some disabled activists are leading LGBTQ rights projects; some disabled activists are leading anti-racist organizations.
  
• If disabled activists presenting about disability are the only disabled presenters at your conference, something has probably gone wrong.
  
• If there are no disabled people presenting on any other topics, it’s important to think about what they is and what could be done to fix that.
  

Sometimes conferences forget that the disability community is diverse:

• Many disability rights activists are also marginalized in other ways.
  
• Many disability rights activists are also women, gay, trans, black, poor, Jewish, Muslim, immigrants, several of these, or otherwise multiply marginalized.
  
• Eg: If all of the disability rights activists presenting at a conference are straight white Christian men, something has probably gone wrong.
  
• If the range of disabled presenters at a conference doesn’t reflect the diversity of the disability community, it’s important to think about why that is and what could be done to fix that. 
  

Here’s an example of representation in both the diversity sense and the community representative sense:

• There’s a writing conference or a comic conference or something.
  
• Access needs are met in ways that make it possible for disabled people to go to the conference and present at the conference (without facing insurmountable or humiliating barriers).
  
• General panels about diversity have disabled panelists knowledgable about disability issues.
  
• Panels that are specifically about disability are lead by disabled panelists.
  
• Many panels about topics *other than* disability have panelists with disabilities on them, in numbers that reflect the fact that disability is common.
  
• Some disabled panelists on panels about topics unrelated to disability/diversity talk about disability and some don’t.
  
• (Because not all disabled people are or want to be disability advocates.)
  

Tl;dr Representation on panels means at least two things. Sometimes it means a diverse range of panelists; sometimes it means panelists who literally represent a diverse range of communities. Scroll up for reasons this matters, and what problems can be caused when only one type of representation is considered.

Approximately half of all adults are women. (Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending in part on how gender is constructed in a particular culture.) Despite this, many of us have been socialized to forget that women exist when we’re trying to understand why things happen or how society works. 

This is particularly striking in historical scholarship. Before female historians were common, most history books were written as though only men existed in the past. Historical theories that account for the existence of women are a fairly recent development. The gaping holes in older theories can be really shocking when you’re more accustomed to remembering that many people are women.

Implicit bias against noticing women isn’t just a problem in history, and it’s not just a thing of the past. Even now, many people (of all genders) forget that women exist when they’re thinking about “people”. If you want your theory to make sense, it’s worth explicitly checking yourself for implicit bias. 

Some questions worth asking:

• Am I assuming that everyone is male?
  
• Does my theory account for the existence of women?
  
• Does my theory account for the fact that around half of all adults are women?
  
• Where are the women in my theory? Where are the women in the world I’m imagining?
  
• How might this issue affect men, women, and nonbinary people differently?
  
• How might men, women, and nonbinary people be playing differing roles in this issue?
  
• Are all of my examples men? Are any of my examples women?
  
• If I add some examples involving women, does the issue start looking different?
  

Tl;dr Women exist and make up around half of the population, but we’re often socialized to mentally edit them out. When you’re trying to figure out a theory about how society works, make sure your theory accounts for the existence of women.

Sometimes camps, schools, and other programs for kids think “mother” when they should be thinking “parent or guardian”. In addition to being sexist, this kind of bias can cause a number of other problems.

When programs for kids think of “mother” and “parent” as synonyms, they often end up forgetting that other parents and guardians exist. When they think of “mother” and “primary caregiver” as synonyms, they often fail to contact the appropriate adult. 

For instance: 

• Susan, an eight year old, just fell off the jungle gym and needs to be taken to the hospital.
  
• Susan’s teacher, Ruby, calls 911. 
  
• Ruby thinks “I need to call Susan’s mother to let her know that Ruby was just taken to Hypothetical Hospital”.
  
• Susan’s mother, Melissa isn’t reachable during the day because she works in a secure building without access to a phone.
  
• Susan’s father, Christopher, *is* reachable. He works from home, and always has his phone with him.
  
• Although Susan’s emergency contact form has a note saying to call Christopher first, it doesn’t occur to Ruby to do so, because she’s thinking “I need to call Susan’s mother”, and looking at the “mother” line of the form.
  
• Ruby keeps trying to reach Melissa. 
  
• It takes an hour before it occurs to anyone to call Susan’s *father*.
  

Or:

• David is a twelve year old who has food allergies. He also has a mother, Miriam, and a father, Fred.
  
• Katie, who runs the kitchen at Camp Hypothetical, has some questions about what he can and can’t eat, and whether the plan for an upcoming camp out will work for him.
  
• Katie tries calling Miriam, David’s mother. She doesn’t reply. Katie tries again and again, over the course of several days.
  
• It doesn’t occur to her to try calling David’s *father*, even though she knows he has one — because she thinks of mothers as the parents who keep track of that kind of information.

When you’re working with kids, it’s really important not to treat “mother” and “primary caregiver” as synonyms, and to remember that:

• Not all children have mothers.
  
• Not all mothers are primary caregivers.
  
• Not all children who have mothers live with their mothers.
  
• Not all mothers should be given information about their children.
  
• Fathers are parents.
  
• Nonbinary parents are parents.
  
• When a kid has more than one parent, it’s often best to contact both/all parents (especially if contacting the first parent doesn’t work.)
  
• Some kids are raised by people other than their parents (eg: grandparents, a sibling, foster parents).
  

Tl;dr If you’re working with kids and you need to contact their parent or guardian, don’t assume that their mother is the right person to contact. Look at the instructions on their emergency/parent contact form, and follow those instructions. And if you try calling a kid’s mother and don’t get a response, check to see whether they have another parent you should try calling.

Narrow wage gap?  How about learn more skills and become more valuable to your employer?

Manslation: Do something that benefits women? How about we have women try everything they can to get ahead, belittle and insult them every time regardless of what they do or say*, and then keep implicitly assuming that women and their contributions are less valuable no matter what?

*Don’t ask for a raise? It’s your fault you didn’t get one. Ask for a raise? Whoa there, what makes you think you deserve that? Seems a little presumptuous. Go for the promotion? It’s cute that you tried, but I think that guy Chad we just hired right out of college seems like a better fit. Don’t go for the promotion? You’re just lazy.

afutureworththinkingabout:

Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk ’“Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems,’ given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, back in May 2019. (Cite as: Williams, Damien P. ’“Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”: Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems;’ talk given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; May 2019)

Now, I’ve got a chapter coming out about this, soon, which I can provide as a preprint draft if you ask, and can be cited as “Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design,” appearing in Philosophy And Engineering: Reimagining Technology And Social Progress. Guru Madhavan, Zachary Pirtle, and David Tomblin, eds. Forthcoming from Springer, 2019. But I wanted to get the words I said in this talk up onto some platforms where people can read them, as soon as possible, for a couple of reasons.

First, the Current Occupants of the Oval Office have very recently taken the policy position that algorithms can’t be racist, something which they’ve done in direct response to things like Google’s Hate Speech-Detecting AI being biased against black people, and Amazon claiming that its facial recognition can identify fear, without ever accounting for, i dunno, cultural and individual differences in fear expression?

[Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.]

All these things taken together are what made me finally go ahead and get the transcript of that talk done, and posted, because these are events and policy decisions about which I a) have been speaking and writing for years, and b) have specific inputs and recommendations about, and which are, c) frankly wrongheaded, and outright hateful.

And I want to spend time on it because I think what doesn’t get through in many of our discussions is that it’s not just about how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Algorithmic instances get trained, but the processes for how and the cultural environments in which HUMANS are increasingly taught/shown/environmentally encouraged/socialized to think is the “right way” to build and train said systems.

That includes classes and instruction, it includes the institutional culture of the companies, it includes the policy landscape in which decisions about funding and get made, because that drives how people have to talk and write and think about the work they’re doing, and that constrains what they will even attempt to do or even understand.

All of this is cumulative, accreting into institutional epistemologies of algorithm creation. It is a structural and institutionalproblem.

So here are the Slides:


TheAudio: …
[Direct Link to Mp3]

And the Transcript is here below the cut:

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Read the rest of Audio, Transcripts, and Slides from “Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice”atA Future Worth Thinking About