Biases

I believe that I have run across a dilemma.  For some reason, lying here in my bed I have begun to think about biases.
Take for example the facetious bias of “White men can’t jump”, just for examples sake…it’s the title of a movie and a pretty laughable well know ‘bias’ that seems to occur at random, in gymnasiums everywhere I go.

Let’s obviously assume that I actually believe this.

Now, where did I get this bias?  Where did it come from?  How did I come to have it?  One apparent way that this happened is because someone gave it to me.  So, under what conditions must I have received this bias?
Some must have passed it along to me.  I must trust this person, or at least hold them as a source of some merit; otherwise I would have no motivation to take seriously what they say.  Or, perhaps I would have a notion of it already.  Or, I have heard this information from many unreliable sources, and form the group opinion to my own.  In any case, this is all a result from receiving this bias from other people.  This is not what I’m after.  I’m curious about how biases arrive in the first place.
So, how is that an individual would go about arriving at a bias on his own?  So, maybe he has a lack of information.  But, any person in their right mind would know that it’s possible to have all information and knows better than to make a judgment based on misinformation.  So, if this avenue was the cause, it would be because of the viewer being unable to reconcile what they see and how the world could be.  So, this is human error.
What would also be attributed to human error is a bias arrived because of someone misrepresenting themselves.  A misrepresentation in a way also leads to a misinterpretation.  Say someone gave a bad first impression and then acted like themselves, then the person viewing them would be confused and perhaps form a bias about that person based on the first experience.  All in all, it seems legitimate to call a self misrepresentation ‘human error’, it just happens sooner in the chain.
But, how much bias could this human error cause?  Think of white supremacy, is this because white people accidentally came to believe that non-white races were inferior?  Did that nazi’s mistakenly come across the notion that jews and gypsies were deserving to die?  Perhaps I should rephrase my original thought, I’m not questioning biases on the whole, I’m talking more about stereotypes.  I don’t really mean bias in the sense of a conflict of interest.
So, if it wasn’t human error what was it?  Did some humans conspire at some time in their life to perpetuate sterotypes?  Why would they consciously do it?  Unfortunately, it does not appear that there is some other way that stereotypes begin…someone wants them to.
This is quite disheartening to conclude since this would mean there are truly evil, or power hungry people around.
Note, that it is not acceptable to say that people hold different beliefs, and that’s why they begin to stereotype and hold biases.  Thinking this would require their biases to exist in the first place, because nobody would hold irrational views for no reason.  Basically, I’m saying that biases plant the seed for having different beliefs, instead of vice versa.  Granted, my point is thrown out the window, if people fundamentally process information differently.

So, that leads me to two useless places.

1. People may stereotype, because they want to, or have some benefit if they do.  Maybe it keeps the population in line.  Maybe it led them to great wealth.  Maybe they just needed slaves to they bullshitted their way into convincing themselves that one race was inferior to another.


2. People fundamentally process things differently  Then fundamentally different and conflicting opinions might happen and cause people to have conflict over interpretations of the world…leading to ‘human error’ in processing these interpretations?

Gosh, which one could it bed?  Maybe bother?  Am I underestimating human error?  Wow, it’s a lot to think about.

This I Believe

A few weeks ago, Steen dropped me upon a wonderful website.  It was on the NPR site, it was a web-presence for their on going series “This I Believe”.  Apparently this series was first done in the 1950’s by Edward R. Murrow.  It was originally done because the climate of the country was fearful and shaky.  They felt it necessary to revive the series just over one year ago.  The producers invite regular people to submit their statements of personal conviction.  The contributors have ranged from Colin Powell to random everyday citizens.  This is my submission.  Who knows, it may be on the radio someday, but if not…I’ll lay it to rest in my blog.

The "This I Believe" website

I was playing in a grueling doubles tennis match on an uncomfortably warm May afternoon my junior year of high school, in a contest with our cross-town rival.  My doubles partner and I grudgingly dropped the first set, rallied back to take the second set, and were armpits deep in the deciding third set.  The set score became six games each, which in the Michigan high-school tennis world means – tiebreaker.
My partner and I quickly found ourselves on the losing side of the scorecard in the race-to-seven-win-by-two-points tiebreaker.  By this time the rest of the afternoon’s matches had already finished—the entire crowds eyes added weight to our already exhausted psyches—as we battled on the court with the tiebreak score now reading 1-6; we were a mere point away from losing the tiebreaker, match, and city bragging rights.
Then, something happened.  The tide might’ve turned, the moon could’ve shifted, the wind probably blew in a more favorable direction…at the time I didn’t really know how we ended up changing the course of the tiebreak.  But in retrospect, it was simple.  We just tried harder.  We dug a little deeper.
Running an extra lap at the end of a workout, being a bit more patient, putting a little more of the soul into work, jumping a little bit higher, studying an extra 10 pages of a textbook, running down a tennis ball that seems just out of reach.  These are things I believe in doing.  I believe in digging a little bit deeper.
Unfortunately for me, digging a little bit deeper is often one of the hardest things to do.  After all, why bother spending more time and effort than is necessary to do something?  It is more efficient to shirk nonessential pursuits, especially if the big picture is unaffected by it.  I’ll be the first to admit that there is a warm, gooey comfort that comes with lethargy.
On some levels it is illogical, but I have a strong conviction to try my hardest anyway.  Digging deeper is how I grow.  That little extra oomph adds up.  Eventually my serve is a little more accurate, or I’m a little bit better at solving calculus equations because I’ve dug deeper all along.  I’ve found not only that hard work pays off, but that extra effort pays off even more.  Giving 100 percent is the key to reaching potential, digging a little deeper seems to be the key to raising it.
That May afternoon, down a landslide in a third-set tiebreak, my doubles partner and I had to dig a little deeper to win a tennis match.  We dug, and we did win.  It remains the most character shaping match I’ve ever played, and the pinnacle of my short athletic career.  Former President Calvin Coolidge said that persistence is what solves humanity’s problems and I wholeheartedly agree.  Digging deeper has never let me down, and I don’t think it ever will.

Closeness.

I was just journaling, and wrote a particularly memorable passage. Let me share it with you.

-The context is, something I recently discovered...being open to letting other people get closer to you.

"That's the lure about friendship, you create something mystical-by forming the bond of friendship. It's powerful. It's an age old tradition of humanity. So once you make that magical bond, burturing it is what you want. We want to see things grow. We want to see life. So...closeness matters, and when [nurtured] at a special time, [closeness] is the best thing in the world."

I think I'll start watching the Colbert Report

"Jesse Kornbluth: All Hail Stephen Colbert (You Have to See It to Believe It): "If there was any doubt about Stephen Colbert's genius, it evaporated at the White House Correspondents dinner."

Normally, when I'm watching C-Span it's only a brief flittering through the channels and there's something semi-interesting on that catches my attention. Sometimes it's a speech, other times it's legislative sessions [Once I saw a session that the chambers were nearly empty and legislators were naming Post Offices].

I was flipping through my RSS feeds and saw a link to Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents. It was...HILLARIOUS.

With swash-buckling wit and a wonderful interpretation character, Colbert took stabs at President Bush that is seemingly on the tips-of-tongues of all Bush's critics. The difference being, he actually got them out.

Apparently, some first hand accounts of the tape - I watched online on a very low-res version - state President Bush as being "visibly uncomfortable"

See this link too: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/ignoring-colbert-part-tw_b_20130.html

Basically what it comes down to, is that the media kind of covered and hid on this one. I read some pieces from the AP, Reuters, and the Tribune (at the request of one of these links), and in my professional opinion as a reporter, it was an absolute debauchery of what the story should've been.

Basically, in covering the dinner Colbert's performance was screaming "Use me as the lead of your story!". These articles could've definitely been very clever, witty, and creative in covering the story.

Honestly, I could've done a better job.

Which leads me to a conclusion.

1. The reporters were not ballsy enough to report this in it's most significant form. They don't even have to write it making Colbert a hero, they could easily get criticism of Colbert's performance too.

2. It was canned by the editors. Hopefully the edit pages of these papers say something about it soon.

All in all, I'm a little dissapointed with the NYTimes this morning- they ran their story AP yesterday.

The Michigan Daily would've been ballsy enough to cover this well, It's a shame that that nation's top newspapers, granted they did write very accurately, didn't angle their stories to give the public who has not and will not watch the tape the full breadth of what happened at the White House Correspondent's dinner.