Tag Archives: bias

We are all blind

The blind men and an elephant

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.

How different is my sight compared to a colour blind or fully blind person?

My wife hears notes one off of perfect pitch, and can name notes played on a piano without a reference note. I have a hard time determining if a note is higher or lower than a reference note. My daughters can hear sounds at frequencies that I can’t, and at decibels lower than I can.

Some people are intuitive about other’s feelings. Some people can feel when it’s going to rain, others can smell rain coming. Still others can list ingredients in a dish simply by smell. Our senses vary considerably, as do our observations of events.

In a way we are all blind, or at least we are limited by our senses. We don’t observe the world objectively. Instead we hold tremendous subjective bias. Our upbringing, our beliefs, our politics, our limited senses obscure the world.

We touch the world like the blind men touch the elephant. Partially, and with tremendous bias.

Try to convince someone that is depressed that they only need to look at life though rose coloured glasses. Convince someone with devout faith that there is no omnipotent God. Convince a conspiracy believing flat earth evangelist that the world is round. Try to convince anyone who sees the world completely differently than you of anything you hold on to steadfastly, when they see the world very differently, and you’ll appreciate how blind we really are.

It’s no wonder that so many people fight over ‘subjective truth’ because they think it’s ‘objective Truth’. Try to convince the tail-holding blind man that an elephant is more like a pillar than like rope. You probably won’t. In his experience, he is not wrong. The pillar and the rope perspectives are both true to the observer.

Our own subjectivity makes it easier to see where others are blind, much harder to see where we ourselves are blind. We are blind to our own blindness.

How different is a life where we touch a single part of an elephant and call that part an elephant compared to a life where we take in all the other perspectives and create a composite view… while being careful not to listen to the blind man standing in elephant dung because his view is simply not as valid. We need to be open to other views, while also being careful of those that throw dung around. Just because we are all blind, doesn’t mean that all of our views are equal.

Copernicus, Newton, Einstein; These men saw more of the elephant than most. They convinced others who could not see like they could see. But in our day-to-day lives we do not meet such people. We don’t discuss such deep topics. We mull around in the dark, sharing small parts of the elephant we are aware of, and believing we see the entire animal. Blind to our own blindness.

The wrong focus in the news

I’m becoming more and more disappointed with news reporting. Journalism has become a way to tell a predetermined story, with the focus being to exaggerate a narrative that is negative. Here are two examples:

1. TV – A report on the AstraZeneca vaccine in Canada. A large amount of the vaccine is is about to expire, but because of the fear of blood clots, which is extremely low, officials are acting slow in deciding what to do with this supply of vaccines. In the report, they mention that the blood clot risk for the second shot is significantly lower than than the low risk with the first shot. Then they interview a woman who had her first AstraZeneca shot and is cautious and doubtful about having the second shot. She becomes the story. Not two people with different views, one saying yes, and one saying no… just the cautious perspective.

2. Newspaper – This is a message from our local paper to our Valedictorian:

The Tri-City News is reaching out to SD43 valedictorians about what it’s like to graduate during Year 2 of the pandemic.

Can you please write two paragraphs — no longer than 150 words in total — about your Grade 12 experience, and describe what it’s like for you and your fellow grads to transition without any official ceremony?

Congratulations valedictorians, please write to us and tell us the reasons why you are disappointed with your last year of school.

What an awful thing to ask!

In both of these news stories the focus of the story is one that stirs emotions, not to benefit anyone, simply to prey on the emotions of the audience. I’m seeing this time and again. The question isn’t ‘what is the story here?’, the story is ‘what will get the most watches, clicks, likes, and shares… at the expense of good reporting.

I find myself wondering, is real journalism dead? I hope not. But I don’t know the way forward? It seems to me that this kind of negative reporting hits a chord that less biased news does not… and in a very competitive market for people’s attention, stirring negative emotions makes for better views. What’s the way forward from here?

Rose coloured glasses

We’ve all heard the term, “It’s like seeing the world through rose coloured glasses”, but what does that mean? What is it like to see the world through a biased viewpoint that ‘clouds’ other views? Rose coloured glasses suggests a positive outlook, what happens when our ‘glasses’, our viewpoint, is biased in a negative way? What if our view prevents us from seeing things that can benefit us?

This is too hard!

I can’t.

Why do things like this always happen to me?

There is no way out.

These are gloomy statements that can sour our world view and limit our ability to see good possibilities… to view the world through rose coloured glasses, or for that matter, clear glasses.

What lenses do we choose to look through? For most of us the lenses aren’t clear, they don’t bring reality into focus. We carry biases that cloud our vision, our perspective. But we don’t walk around wearing those biases like a pair of coloured glasses on our faces.

Despite the fact that most ideas lie on a spectrum, most viewpoints seem to swing away from central perspectives to polarized views with thick coloured lenses to peer through.

What does this mean? It means that not only do we not share the same viewpoint as others, sometimes we don’t share the same world as others. We literally exist in world so different than someone with an opposing view, that we can’t see the same things.

Imagine a world where everything is either red or green, and you had to choose red or green coloured sunglasses. To the person wearing green glasses there would only be green items and dark/black objects. To the person wearing red glasses there would only be red items and dark/black objects. None of the items seen by these two people would look remotely the same to both of these people. None.

I fear that few people these days are seeing the world through rose coloured glasses, and that whatever the colour being chosen, it is too dark, there is less light coming through, less opportunity to see the world others different than you are seeing. Maybe my inability to see this is an issue of my own lenses being clouded… but I fear that we are building a world that pushes us towards darkened glasses and away from natural light that lets us see things as they really are.

Knowhere News

After a summer of on-and-off attention to the news of our world, and our world-influencing neighbour to the south, I’m back to limiting the fire hose of information flowing my way.

My sister put me on to a weekday news email that gives me all I really need to read, beyond what might be trending on Twitter. The email subscription is to Knowhere News. It’s American focused and self-described as: “We report facts, not opinions, in our free, daily digest and share our sources so you can see for yourself.”

I’ve found few other sources that share news with less bias… that said, while the articles themselves are indeed fact focussed and shared without biased language… I’m still determining the slant with respect to which articles they choose to share.

Still, I really appreciate the links to the sources of their articles. And, in a world where information all seems comes to be from a bipolar dichotomy, it’s nice to get news that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a sports colour commentator routing for the home team.

Related: Ideas in a Spectrum

Trying to find the Truth

I enjoy seeing funny quotes attributed to the wrong people. Like these two examples:

Abe Lincoln fake internte quote

Use-the-Force-Harry-Gandalf

The second one is an assault to the senses of fiction and science fiction fans. When the joke is obvious, there is comedy in the creation of these fake attributions. However, we are living in an era where Truth seems more and more subjective.

What’s scary about this is that I consider myself fairly objective, but I’m finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. What I do know is that newspapers today come with tremendous bias, and something as simple as this chart from two years ago is even more exaggerated now, with papers moving further towards the extremes:

News-Bias-MarketWatch

Here is an example of something that I know little about, and feel that the more I read, the further I am from having a clear understanding of where to put a value on what’s true: Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

The first article I read was from the Washing Post (dated May 17th, 2020): The results are in. Trump’s miracle drug is useless.

Excerpt: THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”

Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.

Next I read an Article from the Washington Times (Dated April 2nd, 2020 – about 6 weeks before the article above): Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey.

Excerpt: Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients.

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

Of the physicians surveyed, 3,308 said they had either ordered a COVID-19 test or been involved in caring for a coronavirus patient, and 2,171 of those responded to the question asking which medications were most effective.

So, the ‘evidence’ presented in the second article came well before the the first article was printed. Which article holds more ‘Truth’?

First, if you had to guess, which of these newspapers is more Left-of-Centre – Liberal and which of these papers is more Right-of-Centre – Conservative?

Let’s have a look at the sources on MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check. (Full disclosure, I have not checked the reliability of this website.)

Here is the bias of the Washington Post:

Washington Post MediaBiasFactCheck

Compared to the bias of the Washington Times:

Washington Times MediaBiasFactCheck

Take a moment to read the final, bolded comments that I clipped from this fact check website about each paper. They would suggest the Post being more reliable than the Times because of a lack of fact checking at the Times. That said, the source for the survey linked to in the Times article checked out when I looked into it. The same source, Sermo, is now toting Remdesivir use more than Hydroxychloroquine, and even then stating that, “Remdesivir Seen as Only Moderately Effective”.

I don’t have the time or mental energy to go fact-checking every article I read, but I do find myself evaluating the source of the information a lot more. However, quite honestly, even when I do that it has now become blatantly easy to read the bias of the reporter woven into almost every news article that’s based on a ‘hot’ topic. How can you look to the news for objectivity when that objectivity is blatantly disregarded?

I’ve now started reading headlines with the following ‘BS Filter’ as a lens: “Does this article headline anger me, or try to anger me? If the answer is ‘yes’, I either ignore the article, or I open it with my ‘BS detectors’ fully engaged. Click bait articles tend not to be focused on sharing any kind of ‘Truth’.

In this day and age of abundant information, I thought Truth would rise above the BS, but that hasn’t been the case. Neil Postman said,

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

It seems that there is an information war on both our capacities to think, and our capacities to seek the Truth.

Blind to My Privilege

Part 1. “You silenced my voice.”

It was the summer of 2006 and I was spending five weeks in Eugene, Oregon, completing my Master’s degree. I was there with a cohort of teachers from Coquitlam, BC, Canada, and we had many classes together. A colleague Christine and I had every class together, including a Statistics class we had where there was also a larger cohort of new Oregon teachers who were much younger than us.

These early to mid-20 year olds were in a program where students did a masters right after their teaching practicum. I think at the time the US ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy demanded teachers have so much additional education within the first few years of teaching, beyond their teaching degree, that moving to your masters level before starting teaching made more sense than starting teaching then adding credentials while you taught.

It was the last week of school, in this Stats class, that I learned a valuable lesson about my privilege. The class was being taught by the Teaching Assistant, who we knew because she was also our program faculty advisor. The lesson centered around research done in a school. The data was tracked by race among other variables. I don’t remember why, almost 14 years later, but the data was interesting and the fact that race mattered was relevant to the lesson.

After the lesson one of us, Christine or I, had a question and since we were living one floor apart in the same complex and walked to and from class together, we waited together to speak to the Teaching Assistant. In front of us, a younger, female, (*I assume) Chinese-descent American student was talking to the Teaching Assistant. This student was saying that she thought it was not appropriate to bring up race in the example given in class. I don’t remember if Christine or I interjected first, but we joined the conversation. We didn’t see things the same way as this student. We couldn’t figure out what we were missing? After that conversation was over we finished up with the Teaching Assistant and headed for the door. Before leaving the class, the Chinese American student came up to us and said, “You silenced my voice.”

We asked for clarification, and she explained that she had an issue around race that she was trying to address with the teaching assistant and we interjected and silenced her. We dismissed her concerns and she felt hurt that we had done this to her.

We apologized.

We insisted it wasn’t intentional. She told us this wasn’t about our intentions, it was about how we made her feel. She had a concern, and we dismissed it, we silenced her.

We apologized again.

The walk home was solemn. Christine and I felt awful. We both shed more than one tear. We tried to rationalize our participation in the conversation, but no matter the reason, we could only see that we caused hurt. Our words had power, and that power usurped the power from someone who felt less privileged than us. Our reasons didn’t matter. We were two older, white people who were dismissing the ideas of a younger minority.

Part 2. Rationalizing my blindness

I will preface this rationale with an important clarification: This is not a justification of any kind, it is in fact evidence of my blindness to my own privilege.

My family: My wife describes me as ‘a Chinese Jew from Barbados’. My grandmother on my dad’s side is full Chinese. I have many cousins and second cousins who are full, half, and quarter Chinese. Those that are mixed have mostly white, but also black, and East Indian parents.

When I described the minority student who we silenced, I described her as “(*I assume) Chinese-descent American student“. It’s an assumption because I didn’t ask. What informed my guess was that she didn’t look like another kind of Asian, she looked like family. She had the look of one of my mixed cousins who are mostly Chinese. She wasn’t ‘other’, she was ‘like me and my family’.

That said, I don’t look a lot like that part of the family. Despite my 1/2 Chinese father and my predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish roots, I have a look that Italians mistake for Greek, and Greeks mistake for Italian. I am neither. I’m used to not fitting into any box. In fact, whenever I have to fill out a survey that asked my race, I never check ‘white’. I always choose ‘Other’.

So when I saw this student, I saw family, someone like me. She didn’t see a likeness. She didn’t even see an ‘other’. She saw a white guy… An older white guy and an older white woman, both taking away her minority voice, on the topic of race in a classroom.

My context: I was in a school of higher learning. I was in the last week of a 2-year program where I was invited on a regular basis to challenge the thinking of others. I was comfortable in this role with the Teaching Assistant, (our program advisor), and with Christine. With Christine the metaphorical gloves were always off. We fully engaged in challenging each other’s ideas.

Many a day leading up to that last week Christine and I, both educational nerds, would continue our classroom conversations all the way home. Often, we would arrive at the complex, where we would head our separate ways, but we would remain there for 10, 15, even 30 minutes continuing the conversation.

We saw discourse and disagreement as learning opportunities. We were comfortable with this. We were comfortable doing this with our advisor. But this other student was not part of our community where this was the norm. Besides that, the topic had a very specific charge for her, and we were totally ignorant to it. We were also blind and ignorant to the very different charge that our discourse had.

Part 3. I silenced her voice

I will reiterate: My rationalization above is not a justification of any kind, it is in fact evidence of my blindness to my own privilege. I lacked awareness of my privilege. I could not see it. But my lack of awareness does not negate my privilege.

It does not matter that I did not see her as a minority. It matters that she was one in her eyes.

It does not matter that I thought I was joining a learning conversation. It matters that by joining the conversation, I took away her ability to address a concern with her teacher.

It does not matter that it was not our intention to silence her. It matters that our interruption led to us diminishing her voice.

I am glad that she spoke up. I’m sorry because an apology didn’t feel like enough. I’m also sorry because I have to wonder, when have I done something similar and the person felt they couldn’t speak up?

I know how hard it is, I’ve heard slurs that impact my heritage, and I’ve had to choose when to and when not to say something. But even there I speak from a place of privilege. Those slurs were not directed at me, a person who looks like an ‘other’ to the slur. I don’t live in a sphere where I have to think about my race, and how others will perceive me on a regular basis.

Even in my years that I lived in Barbados and later in China, where I was an obvious minority, I was still in a privileged minority. I didn’t always feel that way, but my experiences that were positive far exceeded the negative. That is not the case for everyone.

If I’m in a conversation where someone will feel silenced, it likely will be me being the imposer, rather than the silenced. Even now, in my current job, I’m further put into that imposing position as a principal talking to students.

Part 4. Accountability

When I made the mistake of silencing this student’s voice I was blind to my privilege and did not see my error. I apologized. I cried. I learned a valuable lesson. I am more aware now of how my privilege can be unintentionally imposed on others.

This experience made me more aware of race and its impact on minorities. I’m bothered that while my heritage is mixed I don’t need to identify with any race, and other people need to; that my privilege gives me a pass that others don’t get.

But that pass does not excuse me from anything. In fact it makes me more responsible to recognize my privilege and to be aware that it can affect others. Being more aware and responsible doesn’t fix everything. I will still have blind spots. If we could see into our own blind spots, they wouldn’t actually be blind.

I will make mistakes. Some of those mistakes will be shared with me and I need to be accountable for how my words and deeds affect others. When the effect is negative, rationalizations are not what is needed, apologies and reparations are.

To ignore my privilege is to be doubly privileged. This is hurtful and arrogant.

If I am blind to my own privilege, it should not be because I have shut my eyes. It should only be because I was not aware… and when I am made aware, I need to be responsive and hold myself accountable. This can’t happen unless I recognize my own privilege.