[VanillaLime]

Is that really what you got from the article? I feel like the author makes a pretty valid point: everyone pattern-matches people at first impression. If you decide to climb on a tower of moral virtue because you think you've consciously decided to stop pattern-matching on the basis of race/gender and thus don't introspect about your (many) other subconscious biases, you're really not doing anyone a favor.

[trowawee]

I was specifically responding to the idea, suggested by Afforess, that "using outrage and shame culture to resolve discrimination can be just as bad as acts of discrimination themselves", which is ridiculous, and which the second paragraph of the article at least somewhat seems to imply.

Obviously, if someone claims they've defeated the biases that everyone falls prey to constantly, they are almost certainly incorrect. But, at least in my experience, I've never seen that; I've seen a lot of people who are cognizant of the studies suggesting everyone's prone to bias who then try to consciously counteract that, I've seen a lot of people reject those studies and their conclusions entirely and claim they and many others can make judgments that are not prone to those biases, and I've seen a lot of people who don't know what studies you're talking about. I haven't seen anybody saying "Everyone is prone to these biases except me," much less the epidemic the article suggests.

[vlehto]

So your argument is: "...said nobody ever."

I haven't heard anybody in real life call black people dumb. So I could claim that racism doesn't really exist.

Personal anecdotes prove nothing. We are both biased. I can't see what harm is done by warning people about this stuff.

[trowawee]

You can literally go on twitter and find somebody spewing racist shit every second of every day. You cannot do the same with "people claiming that everyone is implicitly biased except for them".

[vlehto]

You can literally go on Facebook and find somebody spewing "you're racist". They may or may not think "I'm racist too, but I handle it better." For some reason they usually are careful not to say anything pointing to that direction. We can't know that those people think.

That racist stuff on twitter could be just humor and nothing more. We don't know how those people think either.

The point of the article was "hey people, you might be biased in this way." Now what's wrong with saying that aloud?