Fundamental Attribution Error

Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It is going to be interesting to see if the currently metastasizing DEI mania eventually collapses as its illiberal and destructive features become impossible to excuse or ignore. I assume it will eventually end up in history’s junk yard, and the sooner the better, but equally bad ideas have survived to cause decades of societal chaos.

The post about the diversity officer declaring “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people” to be blights on efforts to build a just society (and then quickly disavowing her language as soon as she was called on it) provoked—is still provoking–many excellent comments, including the Comment of the Day by Extradimensional Cephalopod below. He (It? I don’t know EC’s preferred pronouns) shamed me by pointing out that the woke concept of “privilege” is a manifestation of the fundamental attribution error, which I haven’t discussed here for a long time. His Comment of the Day also provoked the Comment of the Day on a Comment Destined to Become a Comment of the Day by JutGory, who wrote,

Extradimensional Cephalopod: “(I keep unsuccessfully searching for a quote I remember where someone describes their “privilege” as a right that they want everyone to have, e.g. the right to have no reason to fear the police.)” Attribute it to me if you like; that is one of my critiques of the notion of privilege. In some instances, privilege is not part of an unearned advantage; it is part of an unwarranted disadvantage. I am not privileged by being treated the way everyone should be treated; someone else is “under-privileged” by not being treated the way one should be.

“Under-privileged”?

“Unprivileged”?

“Demoted”?

“Debased”?

We don’t really have a commensurate term to describe that.So, people use privilege to describe any advantage that one person may have over another. Actually, common with leftists, we talk about groups, not individuals, and then ascribe a quality of the group to the individual. This is kind of an example of the logical fallacy of division. But, the problem is that individuals have, as comments above have noted, many qualities, some of which are more advantageous or disadvantageous than others (almost as if individuals are somehow unique). It is because of this that they had to come up with notions of “intersectionality” because it turns out that “privilege” is a concept that is inadequate when it comes to describing the world. (But, hey, Ptolemy needed epicycles and the equant to make sense of the universe.)

“Privilege” does not exist. “Privilege” is an attempt to describe phenomena and create a generalization about it.

Here is EC’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”:

Continue reading →

The Fundamental Attribution Error And The Gender Pay Gap: When We Say “Women Need To Learn To Negotiate,” We Meant “Learn To Negotiate WELL”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

GenderGapIt isn’t 23 cents less than every dollar earned by men in the same jobs, as the President dishonestly claimed in the State of the Union address, but women’s compensation is not yet equal to what men earn. Part of the reason is the choices women make regarding child-bearing and career timing; part is indeed bias. Some of it is also attributable to the fact that women are less aggressive and perhaps less skilled in negotiation. They often get lower salaries because, unlike their male counterparts, they don’t ask for higher ones.

Now comes “W,” who writes into an academic blog to show that women are penalized for daring to negotiate. She claims she was offered a tenure-track philosophy position at Nazareth College, a liberal arts school in Rochester, N.Y.  She replied, she says, by emailing the selection committee:

“As you know, I am very enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Nazareth. Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier: 1) An increase of my starting salary to $65,000, which is more in line with what assistant professors in philosophy have been getting in the last few years. 2) An official semester of maternity leave. 3) A pre-tenure sabbatical at some point during the bottom half of my tenure clock. 4) No more than three new class preps per year for the first three years. 5) A start date of academic year 2015 so I can complete my postdoc.

I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others. Let me know what you think.”

Let me pause here to point out that this is a terrible response, incompetent negotiation, and career self-sabotage. First, you do not negotiate in a potential employer-employee setting through e-mail. You talk. Then you can gauge how you are being received. She should have asked for an appointment. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Actor Morgan Freeman

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Ah, God...you disappoint me.

As long as shameless, irresponsible race-baiters keep attributing opposition to President Obama’s presidency to bigotry, I’ll keep naming them Ethics Dunces.

The latest in this disgraceful parade is distinguished African-American actor Morgan Freeman, who told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview that the Tea Party and the Republican Party antipathy to the President is motivated by racism, saying…

“Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? ‘Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here’…It is a racist thing…it just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. “Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.’ You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.” Continue reading →