 I've been trying to convince people that mechanical pencils are superior because they'll let you fix your mistakes. But everyone just loves writing with the G2. That's fine, I guess. I don't want to come off as some sort of erasist. Alright, let's start with one of the hardest things I've ever learned. That should be okay, right? I mean, people pay super close attention to the first 30 seconds of a YouTube video. That totally happens. Culture is what shapes our intuition. If that culture is screwy in some way, it's really, really hard for us to tell because our intuition about what's okay and what's not is going to be screwy in exactly the same way. That was life-changing when I learned it, and it still surprises me when I remember to apply it. The realization that our gut feelings might be consistently wrong because we were raised to evaluate the world wrongly in the first place can be depressing. Even more depressing is the fact that some people believe that's not a big enough issue for them to worry about. Many are inclined to write off certain cultural biases as somebody else's problem, especially people like me, who's race, sex, sexual preference, preferred manner of dress, whatever, don't usually interfere with them doing whatever it is that they want to do. That attitude is what I want to address here. We generally agree that prejudices, like racism or sexism, are bad, but we don't really talk a lot about why they're bad. When we do, it's usually framed as a purely moral or ideological imperative, something abstract and fluffy like how you should hold doors open for people or tip well. But there's actually a compelling practical reason why everyone, even people like me who don't feel directly damaged by prejudice, should be concerned about fixing it. First, let's make sure that we understand the problem. Prejudice is the act of judging based on anything other than reason or experience. It can manifest in many different ways, both positive and negative, from unshakable brand loyalty to intrinsic distrust of anyone who shares a name with an ex-girlfriend. It's essentially mistaking correlation for causation. This thing that I felt good or bad about has this unrelated characteristic. Therefore, I'm going to assume that everything with this characteristic will also be good or bad. The judgments that we're most often discussing when describing prejudice against people are ones about how the quality of a person's character can be determined from some unrelated trait, like the color of their skin or what shape their genitals are. And as with almost anything cultural, it's not always obvious that that's happening from a cursory inspection. Things like racism and sexism aren't just about people who use the N-word a lot or tell women to make them a sandwich. There are biases buried in our culture that very subtly change how we think of and treat people who were born with certain characteristics. Some studies done on hiring practices illustrate this phenomenon fantastically. If you send a bunch of employers identical resumes with different names on them, depending on which prejudices those names might be subject to, certain fictional applicants will do significantly better than others. Tyrone's and Chaniqua's reliably get fewer calls back than John's or Mary's with exactly the same qualifications. In STEM research labs, John's, who graduated from the same school with the same GPA, taught in the same places and have the same number of published papers, will get significantly more chances to interview than Janet's. So, things like racism and sexism aren't just ancient history or isolated to a few guys wearing pillowcases on their heads. They're still a serious problem. And it's not just a case of there being a few racist employers either. The problem is cultural and everything the culture touches is affected by it, including us. If you've got some time, head on over to Harvard's Implicit Association Test. There's a link in the description. It's a simple matching game. Match faces of a certain type to certain words. Reliably, anyone who's been touched by American cultural conditioning is quicker to match faces like this to negative words and slower to match them to positive ones. With faces like this, that trend is reversed. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. There are various interpretations about why this might be the case, but it's definitely a striking enough phenomenon to wonder just how our subconscious has been shaped by culture to associate certain traits with certain people without evidence or reason. So prejudice is actually a thing and it's a pervasive thing. We've often heard that it's a bad thing, but why is that exactly? I mean, the bit that we always hear about is equality and the injustice of not giving people equal opportunities. But so long as you're not the one who's being denied opportunity, why should you care? Why should a straight white guy like me concern himself with feminism or gay rights or Black Lives Matter? Well, let's start from a prejudice that we've actually gotten over. People used to think that if you were the firstborn son of the king, that was a clear indication from God that you had amazing quality of character, that you deserved to run the country and be respected and lauded and to eat all the cake that you wanted. But these days, we're pretty sure that firstborn son of the kingness doesn't really say a lot about what kind of person you are. Most convincingly, because there have been a whole lot of monarchs throughout history who have been total debacks. Historically, it turns out that if you put someone in charge of a country just because they're the firstborn son of a king, some not very nice things happen. Wars, religious schisms, economic collapse, mass slaughter of their own subjects, you name it. Many of those problems could have been easily avoided if those people who were evaluating suitability for leadership hadn't had their judgment colored by that prejudice for firstborn sons of kings. That same principle applies to everything. By allowing those prejudices to influence people's judgment, every single system we interface with, companies, governments, PTAs, your local grocery store, everything suffers the same stupid drawbacks as the divine right of kings. That resume interview study is actually a perfect example of this. It's entirely possible that those people who weren't given a shot at these jobs because they had the wrong sort of name would have been better employees than the Johns who got called in because they had the right sort of name. Just statistically, that sort of thing has to happen all the time. That means both that a whole bunch of relatively competent people are being kept out of these positions and that a whole bunch of relatively incompetent people are allowed to keep working because they happen to be the equivalent of the king's firstborn son according to our cultural bias. And there's some great data illustrating what happens when those stupid criteria are dispensed with. The International Labor Organization has suggested that allowing women to take professional roles may be the single most important factor in reducing poverty in developing countries. Carter's Simkins and Simpson's 2003 paper finds a significant positive correlation between the diversity of Fortune 1000 firms, boards of directors, and the performance of those firms. And check out Dame Stephanie Shirley's fantastic TED Talk. She made millions of dollars by employing a totally untapped resource for her software company. A ton of remarkably talented and brilliant programmers who other software companies wouldn't hire because they were women. In short, prejudice poisons every single human resource pool that touches. There's good science demonstrating that how much melanin is in your skin when you're born or whether you have a penis or are sexually attracted to women has practically no relevance to how competent you are at almost any job. But we still act like they do. And so we end up employing the wrong people for those jobs. And we all suffer for it. So the next time you have to deal with an inept representative or wonder why a piece of software won't work or why something you just bought is broken, remember, without prejudice, all those things would be better. And if you make an effort to help fix it, they still might be. What system would you like to eliminate prejudice from first? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share, and don't stop thunking.