#intentionality bias

[harmonic-psyche]

The concept of "weaponized incompetence" strikes me as inherently ableist. It also reeks of cognitive bias.

Consider a person who says that they cannot do a task. Taking that person at their word is the only way I can imagine to respect disabled people:

Disability is a spectrum (well, many overlapping spectra) and is often undiagnosed. So, you can never know for sure that the person is not disabled.

Many disabilities are only detectable by the person with that disability. So, you can never prove for certain that the person is "faking it."

It is impossible to know for sure that someone's incompetence is intentional instead of genuine. So, if you do not take someone at their word when they say they cannot do a task, then you will struggle to avoid ableism.

Claiming that someone is “faking incompetence” or “weaponizing incompetence” is also very, very unparsimonious:

When two different theories explain the same thing equally well, and one theory makes more assumptions about what exists, then all else being equal, we should prefer the other theory. Calling something accidental just assumes that it happened, whereas calling it intentional assumes that it happened and that someone intended it to happen. Any claim that a certain intention exists should be justified. So, we should only assume that something was intentional when we cannot explain it as well by calling it accidental.

An intention only exists within a person's mind. Nobody else can read their mind to prove or disprove that a specific intention exists. So we can never know for sure that an action was intentional. Proving intention is questionable even in the clearest cases—just ask a lawyer. Trying to prove that a lack of an action was intentional is even more difficult, especially because the answer to “Why didn't you do X?” is frequently “I didn't think of X.”

The flagrant lack of parsimony, and disregard of Hanlon's Razor, in any accusation of "weaponized incompetence" border on conspiratorial. Calling incompetence "weaponized" reeks of cognitive bias. Let me explain…

Calling an accident intentional is much more common than calling an intentional choice accidental. This fact exists in a network of related cognitive biases: Agency Bias, Teleological Bias, and especially Intentionality Bias. They all roughly say that we are overly quick to see purpose in a coincidence.

From my evo psyc armchair these biases seem relatively simple to explain. Failing to spot a real pattern has a far greater evolutionary cost than seeing a pattern where none exists. So, erring on the side of paranoia and false positives is an adaptive trait that evolution selected for in humans.

Arguably, these biases are why conspiracy theories and superstitions exist at all.

I will conclude with a rule of thumb that I try to live by, an improved version of Hanlon's Razor: “Never assume malice when incompetence is a good enough explanation — at least, not the first time!”

there's undoubtedly some merit to the concept of "weaponised incompetence" but i don't think I can engage with it at all because my adhd ass has been accused of it. "you're just pretending to be bad at this to get out of doing it" is like a manchurian candidate activation phrase that makes me start biting. absolutely catastrophic intersection with disability as a whole, really.

I think those who discuss the concept have to reckon with the fact that they are not capable of distinguishing "bad at thing on purpose" and "bad at thing because disability". No, not even you, sit down. I'm not saying this as a burn, I'm saying this as a hard fact that not everyone who has a disability is obviously disabled, they aren't even necessarily aware they have a disability. If your activism can't handle a topic like that then you're fuckin' up!

[ruporas]

apologies if you've already been asked this but do you have any favorite trigun fics? i absolutely adore your art btw!

thank you!!! and i've answered this on insta, but i don't think i've ever shared on tumblr... i'm not good at reading fics, esp long ones, because my attention span is pretty bad, but from the ones i have bookmarked, i'll share some that i like in no particular order

hills like white elephants (meet me halfway) - adlvnam

pairing: vashwood word count: 1.1k, sfw, vague post v.10 spoilers ‘I read a story once,’ Vash says, unsure. ‘I’m kind of thinking about it right now.’

i like a lot of adlvnam's fics, i find them very unique and creative in their execution, and their writing is wonderful! this was the first fic i've read from them and it's stuck with me ever since. others that i like from them are in manus tuas (no spoilers) and vox dei (warning for post vol.10 spoilers).

stay - Anonymous

pairing: vashwood word count: 2.3k, sfw, no spoilers “Hold up,” Vash groans. He presses his free hand to Wolfwood’s mouth and shushes him. He’s probably going for a stern look, though between his poor attempts to stop grinning like the biggest idiot this side of the planet and the way he’s patting him, it’s hard to take him seriously. “Stop laughin’. Where’s the keys?” “What keys?” Wolfwood tries to ask, muffled by Vash’s hand, and his tongue is a little thick and slow in his mouth so… something comes out, but it’s probably not very wordy. Word-like. Not a sentence, probably. (or, wolfwood and vash get drunk, bicker, and then share a bed together.)

i enjoyed the mundanity and silliness of this fic and i think about it from time to time... i think fics where one of them or both drink together are pleasant to read.

Last Summer - varilien

pairing: vashwood word count: 741, sfw, no spoilers You are what you love.

tags on this one are "sunrises, morning routines, coffee, sentimental" which caught my attention. very sweet and beautiful.

Rain - Kokohamstar

pairing: none, wolfwood centric word count: 768, sfw, major spoilers - post v.10 Ever since he was a little kid listening to Bible stories, he dreamed of the day the world would be washed clean and wondered what the rain would feel like on his face.

as most wolfwood centric fics, it was a gutpunch and melancholic, but still soooo.. augh.... the last paragraph really does it for me.

water bucket blues - fathomfive

pairing: vashwood word count: 3.7k, sfw, major spoilers, post trimax Vash the Stampede goes on the record about a friend he once had. Also about card games, cats, family, and some other things. "Start with a piece of the whole, Meryl said. It doesn’t have to be the first piece. Start with a specific. That’s what they mean when they throw around the words human interest. I know the pieces. Believing they make a whole is another thing. But she’s a broadcast professional and I trust her advice. Maybe if I can figure out how to tell one piece—like the story of Wolfwood as I knew him—I can learn how to tell the others."

i love vash pov fics and i love it when it's first person and this one in particular hits because it's his pov and he speaks, honestly, openly, telling a tale that he can't really flub because it's about the people he loved. i love how grounded this fic is in the present of max, i love how vash grows within the 3.7k words, i love how he moves forward with the world he's living in. this fic makes me teary if i think too much about it... it's really wonderful.

it’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world - goldenglitz

pairing: vashwood word count: 3.9k, nsfw, no spoilers Vash has the lung capacity of a man who’s cried for 150 years. It isn't like Wolfwood takes more than he gives — but like with most things, he barely keeps up with Vash. He works his body to the limit, even as his lungs burn and his legs and arms give out under him. They fuck like they’re on borrowed time. All of this makes it so easy — so much easier than just talking. Wolfwood would sometimes rather pull new and interesting noises from Vash with just his mouth than do anything else with it. Their own dialect: moans, groans, and four words. “Yes” — “Please” — “Vash” — “Wolfwood.”

i love all of their vashwood fics, they only have 3 but they're all lovely and has a sort of characterization to both vash and wolfwood i don't see often. definitely one of my faves, especially when it comes to explicit vw fics.

i think these are all the ones i'll share for now!!

[harmonic-psyche]

mx. @gummybearattacktheworldofdespair ...... it's Mars. It's like Nestle.

Mars and Nestle are ALWAYS getting sued for some atrocity or human rights violation.

No, that doesn't make it okay. Yes, I genuinely appreciate you drawing attention to Mars candies including permanently brain-damaging (!) toxins like lead.

I had no idea about the lead or cadmium in Mars products. Last time I saw someone call the "female M&Ms" marketing a "distraction," they said it was a distraction for Mars' reliance on child slavery in western Africa.

Realistically, the best way for Mars and Nestle to "distract" from their many crimes and atrocities would be to simply stay out of the news for any reason, or at least avoid controversy. Releasing some marketing campaign that riles up conservatives would be a terrible way to "distract" from their atrocities, because now people are more likely to Google "m&ms controversy" or "m&ms news" than they were before.

I doubt that the stupid M&Ms marketing campaign was some kind of tactical 4D chess move deployed to distract from an atrocity that most news outlets were going to overlook anyway. I just don't have the evidence that these stories coinciding was intentional at all.

Maybe Big Little Joel (2022) put it best:

Sometimes, annoyingly performative "we love diversity!" corporate marketing campaigns aren't part of a nefarious secret scheme to gobble up the supposedly finite amount of human attention paid to their crimes. Sometimes they're just annoying.

To be totally honest? I don't know how much evidence we have to call any PR campaign an "intentional tactical distraction." Ockham's Razor says that between competing explanations, we should prefer explanations with fewer assumptions. "It was intentional" is an assumption we simply don't need.

Intentionality Bias is the common thinking error of assuming without evidence that something is intentional.

Rosset's (2008) "[f]indings across the three studies suggest that adults have an implicit bias to infer intention in all behavior" regardless of whether there was a reason or evidence to call that behavior.

The next year, (Kelemen and) Rosset found that participants -- even scientists -- are biased to attribute intention even to natural events with no people involved!

People with schizophrenia are especially susceptible to Intentionality Bias.

So are angry people. (Subra 2021)

"So are drunk people" is what I would have said, but that study (Bègue, Bushman, & Rosset, 2010) has noted academic fraudster and idiot Brad Bushman's name on it so I'll shelve that one.

Check out the Skeptic's Dictionary for more info on Intentionality Bias.

The point is that we should be careful about assuming intention. We are far more likely to call an accident intentional than vice versa.

References

Kelemen and Rosset (2009), "The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults." DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.01.001

Bègue, Bushman, & Rosset (2010). "'There Is No Such Thing as an Accident,' Especially When People Are Drunk." DOI10.1177/0146167210383044

Rosset (2008), "It's no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations." DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.001

Skeptic's Dictionary, "Intentionality Bias."

Subra (2021), "The effect of anger on intentionality bias." DOI:10.1002/ab.21964

Variously Sized Joel (2022), "Woke M&Ms and the Art of Looking Away." youtu.be/yFX2q_HWUkM

[saturnniidae]

Wow, I sure do love being a black, jewish fan of a TV series that's only un-reedeemed villains are a greedy, hook-nosed merchant that travels the world and a foreign black man.

[zvaigzdelasas]

It's funny that even though ppl who freak out that "oh my God this AI is intentionally lying to me" are silly - if the answer the AI gives is actually wrong/implicitly takes a political stance....that does genuinely reflect something objective about the actually-existing state of readily-available information for real people to form their opinions around

[butwhatifidothis]

Ultimately, I think one of the worst things Hopes does wrt its writing of Claude is take out all of the complexities and contradictions that had made him so interesting to begin with.

OG Claude lies and manipulates people and closes himself off while still searching for the truth and wanting people to come together and be open with each other, because of how his traumas meld together with his dreams. He says that he'll do whatever it takes to get what he wants and shows off opportunistic tendencies and then buckles at the first sight of innocents getting hurt, because no matter how much he wants what he wants he still prioritizes the lives of the people around him over anything else. He knows of people's capacity to hurt others for petty or illogical reasons - was raised with that knowledge beating its existence into him - and yet still dreams of a world where people of different lands and cultures can still be friends, because that is how tightly he holds onto his dreams. He's a kind person with the capacity for being a dick, and his contradictions add on so much to his character; they in large part are his character.

Hopes Claude? He lies and manipulates people and closes himself off... and that's it. He says he'll do whatever it takes to get what he wants... and he does. He knows of people's capacity to hurt others for petty or illogical reasons... and has no real dreams of stopping it (or dreams of anything in the future really, by his own admission) and he indulges in that very behavior himself, seemingly without any awareness. He is untrustworthy, and manipulative, and opportunist... and that's it. What you see is what you get. And if this were a character unto themselves, if we're kind and we ignore all of the other issues with Hopes!Claude's writing, that would be a fun enough villain to follow around.

But it's not; this is supposed to be Claude. This is a character who has so much of his foundations be built on the idea that what he presents on the surface isn't all that he seems. That he's more than a character who is just "tee hee I'm only pretending to be nice but I'm actually eeeeevil evil evil evil evil evil evil," but someone who both uses kindness as a means to an end and embodies it genuinely. Warm yet calculated, a good man with real flaws - THAT is who Claude is. Hopes Claude is who Claude is if you strip him of any complexity - He Is Only Pretending To Be Good, But Actually He Is Bad.

He's just... easier to swallow, in a sense. Claude is a good person who is willing and able to do bad things, but only up to a very specific, very clear point, all for a good dream he's held onto for years and plans extensively to make a reality in the future; Clyde is a shit person who's willing to do everything short of bombing specifically whatever land he himself is ruling, all for what essentially amounts to no concrete purpose. There's no need to think about Clyde as hard, since he just does what he does because he's doing it and that's enough.

It's why I'm glad I am Dev-Approved to just fuckin' ignore Hopes entirely as a horrific fever dream, because Hopes does not understand what made Claude so lovable at all

[frogathy]

childhood was spent thinking i’d go to hell and men would not love me if i swore so now to heal from that i am swearing as much as i fucking can until i come to my own fucking conclusion about how i feel regarding the usage of such crude vocabulary

[workingforitallthetime]

@umichhockey 2/3/23

[thermesiini]

the scary world that my moms lives in

[chimeric-art]

snakecharmer

[infiniteglitterfall]

I mean, I asked Wikipedia the same question, and it took some clicking around because they have so many separate pages on everything to do with Palestine and Israel.

But apparently what actually happened was:

Palestinian Islamic Jihad snipers fire at Israeli soldiers, injuring two of them.

Israeli air force strikes Gaza, killing two Hamas members.

PIJ and Hamas fire hundreds of rockets at Israel over the course of several days, killing a Palestinian mother and baby through a rocket misfire, killing three Israelis, and injuring hundreds.

Meanwhile, 30k+ people gulped down this unsourced, uncited take, and now I understand more of why so many ignorant people say things like, "Hamas is just the resistance! It wouldn't have attacked with such violence if Israel weren't constantly bombing it for 75 years!"

[ineedarealitycheck]

I naively thought the whole Gaming (the character) and gaming (the leisure activity) situation was gonna get a response of "Huh, that's going to be an awkward learning curve for English-only language speakers" then chuckle lightly and move on. But no, I forgot the internet Does Not Do That.

[thesummerstorms]

I feel like there's a solid group of fans (in all fandoms) who forget that there ARE differences between fanfiction and traditional publishing.

Transformative work is great about allowing you to explore secondary POVs and characters who aren't the focus of a text.

But traditionally published books are by their nature more constrained in their format. The physical nature of books + the publishing system means they only have so many pages. And those pages need to serve the central narrative of a story.

It can be fun to puzzle out 'man but what about the implications of x'? or 'oh, I feel like there's a connection between A and B, that's fun to think about!' or 'okay, but from Character M's point of view this is so tragic, even though they literally only exist in three scenes'. That's why transformative work is transformative, and for me, it's the fun part of fandom!

But what that doesn't mean is that the author is being mean or cowardly for not exploring those things in the source text. An author's focus has to be ultimately on the story THEY want to tell, and what makes that narrative or those themes work.

They do not have the luxury of including every digression your brain might have fun exploring, and it doesn't make them bad authors if their narrative focus isn't the one you would have personally chosen.

"But such and such character was robbed! They only appeared in x scenes and then-"

Okay, but did the scenes they were in serve their purpose? Did we get a sense of how they meaningfully impacted other characters, the plot, or the themes while still having a sense of personhood?

You can critique whether or not an author was successful in using their characters for story purposes or whether they successfully communicated their underlying message or whether the author unintentionally/intentionally included a bias that weakens their writing.

But an author not chosing to spotlight your particular minor character favorite does not make them a "coward" or bad at their craft.

[watchthirdlife]

you guys do know that a 60 second tiktok is not representative of the collective knowledge of every person that lives in the United States. please tell me that you know this

[deepseasmetro]

i mean, its crazy right? it is completely and totally just a matter of bias and preconceived notions and reactionarism pushing people to arrive at the idea that a person using a generative model soley based on their own work intentionally creating a specific piece of art they have already visualized in their mind is "not art" because... well... um...

well they can't even say! they say "it's not intentional" (it is, he already knows what he wants it to look like!), "it's not work/effort" (god i want you people to see how long it takes me to generate the simplest of anime girls in midjourney), or most bafflingly "the prompt is art but the image output isnt". and nobody can actually explain WHY because there ISNT a good reason! they just have this kneejerk hatred and disgust of this new technology and art form and any attempts at prodding at that feeling are met with aggression or blank stares.