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How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

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Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#81

Post by freepor »

growlist wrote: post #31
tenpies wrote: post #8

Is it not the same for the current wave of anti-bias/discrimination/racism training? There is zero evidence that it has any effect. What few brave researchers have risked their careers exploring the effectiveness of the training have found that it does basically nothing. None of that stops companies from paying millions for it and good luck to the employee or executive that even dares suggest that perhaps there's bet…

Exactly! I had 'unconcious bias' training at work, one of the learning outcomes of which was to understand the 'scientific basis' for unconcious bias. After reviewing the material and finding myself somewhat dubious of its claims, I - as a good scientist working in a technical role in a technical company - went off to research for myself. Turns out the supposed scientific basis is deeply flawed. And yet, this trainin…

You have to forgive the diversity training industry a little as they are being hired to convince people of a fact that is known to be wrong. If you look at the most successful tech companies in history, they are all built by teams that are >90% white and Asian men, and as they grow hire more white and Asian women. Yet we’re supposed to believe that we can do even better through different methods, and become even more successful than Apple and Amazon etc.

If virtually all NBA players were eating eggs for breakfast, and someone hired you to convince young basketball players that the key to success was instead to eat cheese, wouldn’t you need to rely on anecdata and pseudoscience?

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#82

Post by NPMaxwell »

tomp wrote: post #73
MadWombat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myers-Briggs is just about as unscientific as it gets. Neither Myers nor Myers-Briggs (her daughter) had any formal education in psychology or any serious experience. Their personality types are based on Jung's ideas that are over a 100 years old and have been long since discredited. There are no studies that confirm that MBTI type is predictive of anything. There are studies that seem to confirm that the dichotomies…

Thanks for the clarification. I actually had the Big Five in mind - somehow I confused that and MB. Even there, I don't really have any idea if Big Five is "true" (stable and/or predictive) or not, I'm really just listening to Jordan Peterson here. I'll edit the post above.

Before you invest in the Big Five, you'll want to check on how much it can change your posterior odds, and compare that to results of investing time and money into other approaches.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#83

Post by coliveira »

netsharc wrote: post #4
achow wrote: post #2

Couldn't help but check that it is rated 4.6/5 (113 reviews) in Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Surrounded-Idiots-Behavior-Effectivel... Excerpt from one of the top review.. The book really helps you to understand why 'blues' ask 100 questions, want to problem solve all the time, always ask for more information, and can be cold and distant instead of being emotional creatures. Yellows on the other hand are always day…

AKA confirmation bias: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-279... Fascinating how it's the same thing "mediums" use to say there's some person speaking to them from beyond the grave, with a message for someone whose name begin with M...

This is also very similar to the horoscope.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#84

Post by thestephen »

bjourne wrote: post #77
growlist wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! I had 'unconcious bias' training at work, one of the learning outcomes of which was to understand the 'scientific basis' for unconcious bias. After reviewing the material and finding myself somewhat dubious of its claims, I - as a good scientist working in a technical role in a technical company - went off to research for myself. Turns out the supposed scientific basis is deeply flawed. And yet, this trainin…

Let me ask you something: Is unconscious bias training the worst example of bullshit you have experienced in your professional life or the thing that has aggravated you the most? Does that tell you anything about your unconscious biases? The point of the training is for companies to absolve themselves of culpability. If you act like a jerk after unconscious bias training you are on your own and the company hopes that…

> Is unconscious bias training the worst example of bullshit you have experienced in your professional life or the thing that has aggravated you the most?

I can't see the parent making this claim at all; are you sure that your interpretation is in good faith?

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#85

Post by alfromspace »

vertex-four wrote: post #25
tenpies wrote: post #8

Is it not the same for the current wave of anti-bias/discrimination/racism training? There is zero evidence that it has any effect. What few brave researchers have risked their careers exploring the effectiveness of the training have found that it does basically nothing. None of that stops companies from paying millions for it and good luck to the employee or executive that even dares suggest that perhaps there's bet…

The problem is that the people suggesting the better ways are usually... promoting rather unpalatable ideas. Often either that there is no discrimination in the workplace ever and so we should stop talking about it, or that discrimination in the workplace is in fact normal and healthy. I'd love to see a way of creating healthy, non-discriminatory workplaces, especially in industries that are usually pretty terrible.

A more honest framing is that the issue is disagreement over what discrimination means, not that it can't exist or is good. Probably the most contentious issue is representation itself. Can a group of people be overrepresented or underrepresented in an organization without the organization being discriminatory? James Damore made the case that it's probable. And what happened to him shows that it isn't about "unpalatable ideas", it's about avoiding even having the discussion.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#87

Post by [deleted] »

mrkwse wrote: post #11

I applied to Volvo when looking for graduate schemes in my final year of university and recall having to complete a personality test there. I'm not sure whether or not that particular test corresponded to the referenced 'method', however it was a series of very arbitrary statements that one had to either agree or disagree with. None of them seemed particularly useful for determining my aptitude as a software engineer…

[deleted]

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#88

Post by abnry »

lemagedurage wrote: post #33

How come dividing personality into introverted and extroverted (1 dimension) is generally accepted, but dividing personality into more dimensions (disc has 2, mbti has 4, big five has 5, etc), people tend to feel uneasy (e. g. "I am more than just this")? All traps aside (confirmation bias, overdoing it), I do believe these categorizations do make sense as a way to learn about behavior, especially for the general pub…

Categorizations in general are fine, but most people assume too much of them. The best way to think of personality is as the average class of behaviors across most circumstances.

Suppose I show you a video of someone quite talkative, monopolizing the conversation for an hour, gesturing a lot with their hands. Sounds like an extroverted person? What if I told you this was a video of an introvert giving a polished presentation? The circumstances make a big difference in how people act.

The problem is many people misapply a categorization as this behavior all the time, not this class of behaviors most of the time. So skeptical people obviously bristle at this suggestion. Furthermore, the generalizations often don't stop there, and many people usually extrapolate far more ridiculous ideas: "You're an X, so that means you aren't good at Y."

I also agree that these categorizations make sense and that something like Meyers Briggs is a 0th order approximation to something that really exists. The fact that many people declare it pseudoscience annoys me because it at least tries to be useful (although something like the Big 5 linguistic approach is a better model).

Personally, I think the most fruitful way to engage people on the topic of personality is to discuss very specific and narrow traits (like talkativeness or gesticulation). I think you are more likely to get a meaningful conversation. People of course want to know correlations, but those are tricky and you need to be slow to generalize.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#89

Post by Symmetry »

Vomzor wrote: post #28
tenpies wrote: post #8

Is it not the same for the current wave of anti-bias/discrimination/racism training? There is zero evidence that it has any effect. What few brave researchers have risked their careers exploring the effectiveness of the training have found that it does basically nothing. None of that stops companies from paying millions for it and good luck to the employee or executive that even dares suggest that perhaps there's bet…

It may in fact make things worse. >The Implicit Association Test has been used in online studies to assess implicit racial attitudes in over seven million participants. Although typically used as an assessment measure, results from four pre-registered experiments (N = 940) demonstrated that completing a Race IAT exacerbates the negative implicit attitudes that it seeks to assess. Increases in White participants’ nega…

This might be an aspect of the same problem that DARE had. If you castigate some act but at the same time speak in a way that says that act is common then the effect of making it seem normal will tend to trump the disapproval.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#90

Post by hannasanarion »

growlist wrote: post #31
tenpies wrote: post #8

Is it not the same for the current wave of anti-bias/discrimination/racism training? There is zero evidence that it has any effect. What few brave researchers have risked their careers exploring the effectiveness of the training have found that it does basically nothing. None of that stops companies from paying millions for it and good luck to the employee or executive that even dares suggest that perhaps there's bet…

Exactly! I had 'unconcious bias' training at work, one of the learning outcomes of which was to understand the 'scientific basis' for unconcious bias. After reviewing the material and finding myself somewhat dubious of its claims, I - as a good scientist working in a technical role in a technical company - went off to research for myself. Turns out the supposed scientific basis is deeply flawed. And yet, this trainin…

"bias training doesn't eliminate bias" isn't the same thing as "bias doesn't exist".
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