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by yellowapple
4041 days ago
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I guess that makes more sense, though I'd argue that not having the necessary information to make those biases could result in ideas actually being judged in a vacuum (how can you be biased against someone if your subconscious is incapable of knowing whether that someone is subject to its biases?). This is part of the reason why the "hacker" subculture (if the Jargon File is anything to go by) claims itself to be more egalitarian than other STEM-oriented subcultures; since a lot of collaboration is entirely text-based, it doesn't invoke gender/racial biases (or at least does so far less often). Basically, in the scenario you've described, if the "meeting" is instead a discussion on, say, an IRC channel, then as long as the participants are anonymous, there shouldn't be any reason for bias to occur (and even when they aren't anonymous, I'd hypothesize that - due to the lack of stimuli reinforcing those biases, like visual confirmation of race or gender - bias will be significantly diminished). |
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Potentially, yes. It certainly can happen, but it can also go horribly wrong for a whole variety of reasons.
In online discussions, people's ideas tend to be judged based on how well the person proposing them conforms to the norms of the group. Which is part of the reason most online communities tend to develop a kind of hive mind - everyone who sticks around shares the same opinions as the group, because the group chases off anyone who dissents, either by making the environment unwelcoming, or outright harassing people.
It's part of the reason the hacker subculture isn't as egalitarian as it likes to believe. Even if everyone's anonymous (or at least using a pseudonym), it's still composed almost entirely of nerdy, reasonably well off straight white guys, mostly from the US. The reason for that is a reflection of external social forces which don't exactly exist inside hacker subculture, but strongly influenced who was able to participate in it. That creates an extremely homogenous group, which is reflected in the way hacker culture developed.
It's not deliberate, but it can feel like a hostile environment to outsiders. Which can make outsiders avoid it like the plague. Since there are no outsiders, members of the group never hear their perspective, nor do they ever realize that there's a problem, because they assume that they're being egalitarian.
That's not universal, and it's much less common in groups that have always been diverse from the very beginning. If you have a group with significant numbers of women, for example, they will tend to object (much more loudly than in real life) when someone says something sexist. The group culture that develops tends to be one that does not tolerate sexism.
In that kind of environment, you tend to be able to have discussions where everyone is listened to, and their ideas judged on merit, for precisely the reasons you suggest. It's all text based, and there's no stimuli to re-enforce your biases that you carried with you from the outside world.
However, that can only be done if you don't allow the group's culture to become a reflection of the outside world's culture. Which is what happens if you just ignore it.