How Would You Prove Bias, Steve?

In this month’s Subscriber Thread I wrote about feedback. Specifically, how valuable it is to receive high-quality feedback (a.k.a; signal), and how debilitating it can be to receive low-quality feedback (a.k.a; noise).

In my article, How To Be Notracist, I mentioned Sandra Sellers, formerly a professor at Georgetown University, who was caught on camera lamenting with a colleague about the fact that a number of her black students were ending up at the bottom of her class.

I pointed out that while there are several possible reasons for this, some of which might be Sellers’ fault, firing her simply for noticing the problem doesn’t seem likely to be the best course of action for anybody involved.

Eve, one of my “noisiest” readers, has been a regular fixture in my comments for the past 6 months or so. With the sole agenda, it seems, of proving that I’m a racist or a misogynist or a transphobe. And even though she hasn’t been able to find evidence of my bigotry, she refuses to absorb this feedback.

She begins with a quote from the article.

---

Eve:

So, what did Georgetown do? Did they create supplementary programs to help students who were struggling? Did they adjust their admissions policy to ensure they only admitted students who could keep up? Did they ask Sellers if she had any thoughts on how to fix the problem in the classroom?

Why didn’t you check?

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/admissions-aid/early-outreach-initiative/

You could have. But you chose not to.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/05/after-controversies-georgetown-law-students-call-culture-shift/

Why don’t you think the students understand their own needs? She did not talk about pursuing help for her students. That is why the right wing media jumped on her comments.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critics-hit-georgetown-law-professor-calling-supreme-court-actively-rogue-rot-legal-academia

---

---

Steve QJ:

You could have.

And I did. I wonder if you actually read the links you litter my comments with.

Note, the first link is to a community outreach program designed "to increase the diversity of the law school applicant pool." This does not address any of the issues I point out in the section you highlighted.

The second is the students making exactly the same point I'm making in the article. That Georgetown isn't doing enough to support the minority students at the university. Note, this is the students speaking, not the faculty. I do think the students understand their own needs.

But thanks to your legendary lack of reading comprehension, you haven't realised that the article you linked focuses almost exclusively on anti-semitism at the school.

And where it does mention Sellers, the student interviewed misrepresents her comments (Sellers at no point suggests that black students aren't capable of performing well), and the college, again, does none of the things I suggest. Instead, it added "additional voluntary nondiscrimination training for faculty, plans to spread awareness of the school’s bias reporting system," all of which is meaningless with regards to helping black students perform better unless you think that this woman who feels bad that some of her black students are performing badly is simultaneously making them perform badly.

And adds funding to an existing program that is only available to first years, is not even available to all the first years who apply, and obviously isn't doing its job, otherwise Sellers' students wouldn't have been struggling often enough to cause the comments in the first place.

Again, you repeatedly come off looking foolish in these conversations because you're in such a rush to "win" whatever the hell that even means to you, that you don't take the time to figure out what you're talking about.

You don't care about the students affected by these issues. Because if you did, you'd at least have taken the time to read the articles. This is just some weird game to you.

---

Eve:

Instead, it added "additional voluntary nondiscrimination training for faculty, plans to spread awareness of the school’s bias reporting system," all of which is meaningless with regards to helping black students perform better unless you think that this woman who feels bad that some of her black students are performing badly is simultaneously making them perform badly.

Now that’s the question. Why were they performing badly? Was it them? Or her?

---

Steve QJ:

Again, if you think she was feeling bad and complaining to another a teacher about a problem that she was deliberately causing, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Even if you want to argue that it was unconscious bias that was making her grade her black students more harshly (contradicted by the fact that she says some of her black students are really good) surely the school should have at least made some minimal effort to figure out if the problem was bias or something else before just firing her.

Again, the issue is whether the priority was/is helping the black students or being performatively "antiracist." And especially given that they suspended her colleague simply for not objecting loudly enough to her comments, I know what my money is on.

---

Eve:

I’m not saying it was deliberate. That’s kind of why bigotry is so pernicious. A lot of people just adopt bigoted norms without realizing it. At least, that’s the charitable view.

When someone is racist, are they always racist with intent?

---

Steve QJ:

At least, that’s the charitable view.

I'm not sure I've ever seen you take the "charitable view."

But yes, I already addressed the possibility that the black students were struggling due to her unconscious bias in my reply.

If that were the case, if there were even the slightest effort to prove that were true, and if she refused to take action, firing her might have been the right move. That's not what happened.

---

Eve:

If that were the case, if there were even the slightest effort to prove that were true, and if she refused to take action, firing her might have been the right move. That's not what happened.

Ok. How do you know that’s not what happened?

Because that is what I think happened.

“Refused to take action” is too strong though. There’s too little evidence one way or the other. So I’m really just looking at the facts when I say she complained about her students on zoom, accidentally, with racial language. And that’s it. There’s no evidence she ever sought help for any struggling students. There’s ample evidence that students have built those kinds of services for themselves.

I think she was actually resigned to watching students fail, but I can’t see into her head.

---

Steve QJ:

How do you know that’s not what happened?

I know it's not what happened right from the very first clause of the paragraph you highlighted:

There wasn't even the slightest effort to prove that the problem was her unconscious bias.

Again, the Black Students Law Association actually specifically demanded that there be no investigation.

But without an investigation, how do we know it's bias? Unconscious or otherwise? There's NO evidence one way or the other. That's my point. She wasn't complaining about her students, she was complaining about a problem. There's an important difference between the two. And without evidence, there's no reason to believe firing her fixes the problem.

---

Eve:

There wasn't even the slightest effort to prove that the problem was her unconscious bias.

How would you prove bias, Steve?

---

Steve QJ:

This is one of the many reasons I find talking to you so frustrating. You ask questions before you've even given the slightest thought to them yourself.

You prove bias by having a third party check over her grading for the past few semesters. Perhaps you randomise the assignments so the person doing the evaluation doesn't know who the students are or what their race is. Do the evaluators agree with Sellers' grading? Is there a consistent pattern of grading black students more harshly? Now you have something you can work with.

Or, alternatively, you can make Sellers grade her students' work blind. Remove all information about the students from their work, so she grades it purely on its merits. Do the black students’ grades suddenly improve? This is actually a sensible way to grade work regardless, and might be a sensible policy for all schools to adopt.

---

On the rare(-ish) occasions when I get irritated with my readers, they often assume it’s because I don't like to be disagreed with. Which, to be fair, is a reasonable assumption. But hand on heart, I can honestly say that this isn’t the case. The highest-quality feedback I receive is usually from people who disagree with me.

After all, where’s the fun in being opinionated if everybody shares your opinion?

What I find irritating is the low-quality feedback that accompanies agenda-driven arguments. Arguments that assume anything that deviates from the doctrine of “anti-racism” or the tenets of gender ideology or simply the talking points from one’s political echo chamber, must be evil.

By definition, agenda-driven arguments aren’t well thought through. They aren’t designed to make things better. They aren’t troubled by petty constraints like intellectual honesty or basic integrity or objective reality. Which is why they rely so heavily on Kafka traps and word games and moral purity tests.

Feedback is important. Because even if it doesn’t change our minds, it encourages us to think a little more carefully than we otherwise would. These “signals” from outside our echo chambers make us better thinkers. Unfortunately, sometimes a little noise sneaks in with them.