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Wednesday, August 08, 2018

Nissans And Unconscious Bias

Pondering unconscious bias a bit more after yesterday's post, I think I've hit on the fatal flaw in it. Let's call it UB for short. Like most social justice phrases, it's awful and deserves nothing more than an abbreviation.

First, you have to realize that UB isn't confined to races or even people. It's your hidden feelings about adjective noun. For example, real UB retraining might focus on your secret feelings about Eskimo lesbians, but the logic is just as applicable to walnut furniture, ground corn or cold days.

I've owned two Nissan (Datsuns at the time) pickups, a Nissan Maxima and a Nissan Altima. My son bought a Nissan Sentra. I recently rented a late-model Nissan Altima. According to UB, I have must have hidden feelings about Nissan vehicles.

How in the world can that even be detected? I don't have hidden feelings about Nissans, I have vocal, obvious, conscious, experience-based feelings about Nissans. The thought that there would be some ultra-secret storehouse of biases lurking in my subconscious affecting my opinion about Nissans is utterly insane.

My opinion of Nissans isn't based on UB at all. UB would be nothing more than noise about 60 dB below the level of my analysis of empirical data.

Further, my opinion of Nissans changes over time. I had thought I was a hopeless Nissan partisan, but I didn't really like that rented Altima I drove recently. It was a big meh. If I was going to buy a new car right now, I don't think I'd go back to Nissan. You could have sent me to a year's worth of UB reeducation camps and they wouldn't have done doodly-toot compared to my experience driving the Altima.

Unconscious bias is quackery.

It's not really quackery, though, is it? It's something much, much worse.

1 comment:

  1. I will leave the UB, so much social justice buffoonery.

    Nissan still has very good engine designs. The variable compression engine is just wild. But their insistence on the CVT saps driving fun. Their styling is pretty drab. I hope their purchase of Mitshubishi would improve the looks of the vehicles. Should know within a year now.

    I still have my Altima, bought for the huge back seat and my 6ft 15year old, now 21. The 23 year old has a Rogue, a good car for him here in MN.

    I think of myself as a Mazda guy. I wonder if that will last. They are colboratimg with Toyota now, probably only a matter of time before they are bought out.

    I also dream of driving a relatively late model Mustang year round here. With a 5 mile commute, I think I could...

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