Colloquium: "Some Surprising Truths about Bias"
"Some Surprising Truths about Bias"
Abstract: In this talk, I'll argue for three claims about bias that many people find deeply counterintuitive if not obviously false: (i) Externalism about bias: a person can count as biased because of their social environment, even if all of their internal cognitive processes are functioning impeccably; (ii) Rationality requires bias: in some cases, rationality can require a person to be biased, in a pejorative sense of ‘bias,’ and the only way to escape being biased is to be irrational; (iii) Introspection is necessarily unreliable: the empirically well-documented fact that introspection is a highly unreliable way to tell whether we’re biased isn’t a contingent fact about our psychologies. Rather, it’s something that holds of necessity: even God could not have made us highly reliable detectors of our own biases by way of introspection.