On Bias

An image of unbalanced scales, from Roger Culos via wikimedia commons, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

In the first week or so of a semester where I teach research writing, I have to persuade my students to approach their own project with an open mind: my plan for the class is that students concoct a research question and then answer it after the halfway point in the semester. It’s important that they refuse to answer the question until they’ve gone through the research process and gathered the information necessary to arrive at a conclusion supported by actual research, instead of simply what they decide the answer is.

I try to make the case that there are reasons for this: you can’t arrive at new information without letting go of preconceptions. You might believe something now that you later come to question, so why not build something new on a strong foundation? A question with a single potential answer, after all, makes it difficult to fill the word count.

When I ask students to rephrase the instructions in their own words, though, many of them gravitate to the same thing: they think it’s important to avoid bias, and they think this is how you achieve that.

I want to say something controversial, dear reader.

Regardless of whether a student agrees with my worldview, I want them to be biased at the end of their research process. I want them to have strong opinions about a subject and to be skeptical of uninformed pronouncements about it. Think about it: if you’ve been researching a subject for eight or ten weeks, using academic resources and doing primary research – that is, research out in the field – on a subject, shouldn’t you have a strong, informed opinion?

In the end, shouldn’t you be biased?

The Roman legionary votes no.

I admit, normally, we don’t characterize this as bias: we characterize it as expertise. We might think that someone who has unreasonably strong opinions on something is biased, and we might think that someone who has unreasonably strong but informed opinions is actually an expert on the subject.

At this point, I would like to submit to you that many – not all, not most, but many – can’t really see the difference between the two conditions. It’s the apparently unreasonable investment, not the investment-without-knowledge, that is the problem. In the mind of these students, it is only when the condition has been baptized with the approval of pre-acknowledged experts that the mantle of expertise is extended to them.

In this way, the condition of “being an expert” comes to resemble a kind of priesthood – indeed, it’s not uncommon to hear discussion of a “cult of the expert,” usually in certain, fairly limited contexts: the article I linked to there, from the Guardian, discusses it in the context of central bankers and political apparatchiki.

However, I’m employed as a college professor. Sure, I’m only an adjunct, but one could call me a journeyman expert in certain contexts, at the very least (technically, my profession still uses the old medieval guild system, and I’m acknowledged a master in those terms, just not qualified to teach; the modern system inverts the order a bit due to the demands of productivity). In certain matters related to a narrow band of English-language usage and rhetoric, the history of Anglo-American cultural products, and a small amount of philosophy as it applies to literary criticism, I am acknowledges as a passingly good expert. After all, I have the paperwork.

But the pronouncements I make about the things that fall into my narrow range of expertise are not characterized as biased, even when they are – I hope only occasionally – wrong. My certified expertise acts as a fig leaf, and it takes a lot of evidence to get something I say within my metier declared a “biased” opinion.

I think the problem here is how we place value on whether something is biased or not. To hear my students tell it, they would rather be told that their work is incorrect than that it is biased. Perhaps this comes from the idea that something that is marked biased is inherently also incorrect – it’s a way of being incorrect that has nothing to do with your abilities and everything to do with who you are as a person.

Guilt is often constructed as an event that changes you forever — like a tree struck by lightning. This birch tree was struck by lightning and all lost its bark as a result. Uploaded to wikimedia commons by Georg Buzin and used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

In short, it seems to me that the problem here is one of essentialist reasoning. A person is declared biased and, like some kind of transubstantiatory miracle, they have been changed from a normal person into a biased one, someone whose answers are forever marked by a preference for one type of answer over another.

It could simply be that expertise simply obscures biases: people care about bias when it rises to a certain level of obvious, but it’s fine if it’s only in matters that might be characterized as inside baseball. So maybe I’m going to be called “biased,” but perhaps a central banker wouldn’t get labeled the same way. They’re just calling balls and strikes, after all.

The issue here might be what is meant by “biased.” I dislike when my students pull out dictionary definitions, but it seems to me that it might be material here. According to Merriam-Webster, the relevant definition is, “an inclination of temperament or outlook. Especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment: prejudice.” Later in the same definition, we find, “systematic error introduced into sampling or testing by selecting or encouraging one outcome or answer over others.” Wiktionary, the dictionary attached to Wikipedia, gives, “(countable, uncountable) Inclination towards something. Synonyms: predisposition, partiality, prejudice, preference, predilection.” I’d give you the OED, but it’s paywalled, which says something.

The etymology refers to terminology from pottery by way of textiles, deriving from a french term that referred to oblique angles and slants – which gives a sense for what it means, really. How the bias of the uninformed novice might be different from the bias of the certified expert. What we really mean is that it’s an opinion that curves away from the norm in such a way as to pull or guide other people away from that norm.

What bothers my students about bias, it seems to me, what makes accusations of that so terrifying to them, is that to be biased is to step out of line, and possibly, to be asked to account for why they did that. The real problem, I think, is that this ultimately hinders the emergence of new experts into a field: if you’re unwilling to stake a claim, how can you lay a foundation and start building?

Lawrence Summers (no relation) in 2012. Summers is one of the people responsible for preventing regulation of the bond market before 2008. He wasn’t suitably exorcised from the halls of power and used his access to argue for artificially engineering a recession to beat inflation by driving up unemployment. Pure technocrat but, notably, he is not considered biased for saying any of this. Used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Part of the problem with expertise in this context is that – for many fields that are more technical or niche, experts determine the norm. In fields like finance, where a small cadre holds the power, those individuals are technocrats: experts that have hegemonic power beyond their field.

When it comes to many of these issues that we’re looking at here, the issue is less some abstracted idea of bias, and more the fact that there is no “privileged frame of reference.” There’s no solid ground to anchor yourself to so that you can squat and squint and call your balls and strikes. Bias, in short, is about diverging from the norms, many of which are set by the experts.

Now, you may be doing a bit of squinting of your own and say that I’m promoting conspiracy theories, but I’d like to point you to the Stafford Beer quote I’ve butchered a number of times, “The purpose of a system is what it does” (rendered, on this blog, as “a thing is what it does”). The way that we tend to arrange knowledge in America – and I believe, in other, associated countries – is a system that produces this effect. I do not believe that anyone necessarily designed this system from the ground up with this end result in mind, but I do believe that this problem hasn’t been addressed, which raises the question of why it hasn’t yet been changed. I don’t think that there’s a sinister conspiracy seeking to limit expertise to a privileged few, but I will say that it feels like there’s no rush to fix this particular problem – it’s deprioritized.

You know, in writing this piece, a new thought has occurred to me, but — oh, sunk cost fallacy, we’re really in it now! — I’m not willing to erase what I’ve written thus far, so hear me out for a moment: if we envision intellectual discourse as a kind of game, then students might see the difference between their biased peer and a “genuine expert” as the difference between the spoilsport and a referee. Neither one is genuinely “inside” the magic circle of the game, but one is unconcerned with that magic circle – spouting bullshit, in the technical sense, meaning a “statement . . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” (pg. 10)

The problem is that this views people as static individuals, and that there is a set and fixed hierarchy of beings, that there is one inarguable rule book for life, and not meta-games of referees playing their own game of attempting to impose different sets of rules upon the people playing the first-level game.

And who wouldn’t want to be the referee? After all, the referee always wins. Image is George W.S. Trow, who coined that adage in his book Within the Context of No Context.

Perhaps the biased student writer isn’t a spoilsport, but simply a referee-in-waiting, trying to assert the primacy of their vision. Ignoring the content of the subject about which they are biased, it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should necessarily be dismissed out of hand. It needs adjustment, certainly, but the impulse may not be wholly bad.

And stepping outside the magic circle of the classroom, looking at biased commentators and speakers in thinkers, they are ruining the game of popular discourse, but mostly because they’re attempting to initiate a new discourse-game.

Which means that the anti-bias stance taken in many corners of the discourse is, at root, an attempt to defend status quo.

However, we should not rush headlong into an embrace of bias – that simply leads to the absurd world that is painted as a caricature of moral relativism. Instead, it becomes necessary to think: what magic circle is this biased commentator attempting to draw upon the world? What are they trying to create as a new default position? Is it tenable?

In short: while the ends don’t justify the means, strictly speaking it might be a good idea to look, in this case, at what ends are being pursued. In this case, it might behoove us to think about the result that this system is trying to get.

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