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Comment by machiavelli1024 | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Funny that HackerNews seem to be unable to wrap their head around the fact that prejudice is just applied Bayesian statistics.

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I'm gonna say prejudice is actually not applied Bayesian statistics

and you would be right. Say I have a broken phone which is an Android. A prejudice would be that androids are likely to break. Mathematically we could represent as

  P(broken|android) =~ P(android|broken)

We see from Bayes rule that this is false, since

  P(android) >> P(broken)

Even worse, what actually happens with prejudice is that if I think that Androids are shitty phones, when I see a broken Android, I add it to my collection of “Shitty Android” data points.

But when my iPhone breaks, I take it into Apple for service and add it to my collection of “Apple gives great service” data points.

Saying that prejudice is just applied statistics completely mischaracterizes prejudice.

I’d argue that prejudice and bias applies most all statistics, but most often we just don’t notice or care. E.g. The biases inherent to specific domain, of those who captured the data, those who selected the data, selection of statistical techniques, real-world outcomes reinforced by usage of these statistics, etc.

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