Are there second class "Residents"? re: classic avatars.

[ChinRey]

---

sirhc DeSantis wrote:

We ended up referring to them as the 'Easily Led Idiot Trainee' set.

---

LOL. I'm beginning to suspect that in this particular case it may have been done on purpose though. Maybe they couldn't come up with a reliable enough method within the "Casual Internet Entertainment" framework so they used the old infotainment trick, making a fake one deliberately rigged to give roughly the same result as known serious tests.

[Madelaine McMasters]

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

[Pamela Galli]

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

---

I am learning to take any kind of scientific research with a grain of salt. Anything can get published.

[sirhc DeSantis]

Sound approach. I blame 'nutrition' fads and cosmetics 'claims'. The first I learned about when trying to research reliable sources during my vegan years (and that before the explosion of online dross), the second because I know little about the subject,  mostly because I could not care less. Closest I get to it is using a blade to shave, the fact I keep it under a crystal pyramid is merely erm...research. Honest.

[ChinRey]

Hmmm... To quote that article:

"The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such."

And Harvard still keeps the thing up on their web site?

It took the experts 20 years to figure it out, I needed five minutes. Does that give me the right to feel superior?

(No, it doesn't of course. The obvious and fatal flaws I pointed out were specific to that particular test, not to IAT in general. Since it turns out the racism bias test at Harvard actually was intended as a serious test, it was obviously made by incompetent people and easy to kill by anybody who actually thinks things through. But those flaws would be easy to fix and they are not inherent to IAT. So for all I know, IAT may still be a usable tool when done properly.)

[ChadUnfroyd]

It is difficult to test for something when obfuscating euphemisms have to be circumnavigated. There is actually no such thing as "race" - other than the human race - but political correctness demands that references to skin colour, religion, sex, shape or size of ass, nose or eyelids and other differentiating factors that have become stereotypically associated with cultural (or otherwise) groups are aggregated in a nonsensical taxonomical classification. I will stick to being stupidist, even if it means being called racist, sexist or discriminatory, the last of which used to be a good thing.

[Kelli May]

---

ChadUnfroyd wrote:

It is difficult to test for something when obfuscating euphemisms have to be circumnavigated. There is actually no such thing as "race" - other than the human race - but political correctness demands that references to skin colour, religion, sex, shape or size of ass, nose or eyelids and other differentiating factors that have become stereotypically associated with cultural (or otherwise) groups are aggregated in a nonsensical taxonomical classification. I will stick to being stupidist, even if it means being called racist, sexist or

discriminatory, the last of which used to be a good thing.

---

I agree. It's good to discriminate, in the literal sense of the word. When you make a choice based on value, you discriminate. People have become so focused on the word discriminate, they forget that it's unfair discrimination that's the problem.