Robin Hanson: “Overcoming Bias”
The tech elite people in the O’Reilly Open Source Conference audience, listening to economic theorist Robin Hanson, would certainly be largely unable to imagine that the content in his talk about bias in the world of business is easily obtained by students of the finest Black studies.
In fact, as Dr. Hanson points out in his talk, once a properly assimilated person becomes aware of my bias—that I actually studied Black history—this “smart” person knows to permanently underestimate and devalue everything I say for the rest of my life. Even Dr. Hanson himself would have to overcome centuries of imperial conditioning to resist my bias. But he warns his audience that, in this age of intellectual property, bias is growing worse and it has an effect on the general purpose decision-making of business leaders and followers. My most famous example of corporate bias outside of the “confines” of obvious Black history is the Bill-Gates bias against the vision of the Internet currently owned by Google. This is the business leader who wrote a book called The Road Ahead and failed to seriously prioritize the World Wide Web.
What makes the egocentric, angry, Black man crippled is the assumption that white bias against him is an isolated flaw that does not have an effect on the rest of the erroneous white man’s life. This is not the case. Being biased such that one is systematically incorrect makes one simply incorrect. Dr. Hanson asks why don’t “we” keep a track record to measure who is correct over time and then systematically value those people. Dr. Hanson may have caused one or two in the technical, O’Reilly audience to discover by accident the importance of history—and also, for me, the Imperial importance of the revision of history.
For me, Dr. Hanson reinforced my Black bias. This moves me to these:
- Imperial systems do not need to continually renew correctness because Imperial incorrectness can be compensated for by exploiting a mega-surplus of resources. It follows that values such truth and justice are by design unnecessary in world of continual war. When markets plan for continual growth they are also planning for war. War is the white-supreme predictor of earnings. “We” got hot war. “We” got cold war. “We” even have war for children.
- Being correct had divine value in the ancient world, namely the Old Kingdom of Africa, because these peoples were in direct contact with nature. And nature is very “unforgiving” about being consistently incorrect. The “innovation” of imperial consciousness is to see a place to “live” outside of nature. The full-scale, worldwide implementation of this “innovation”—celebrated in thousands of ways by mainstream scholars as the beginning of the “most important” civilization—actually marked the end of civilization itself.