Crichton Dissonance Suppression Phenomenon

My career has been in management consulting, primarily related to technology.  I have long worked with émigré Indians in the US and around the world.  Particularly in the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia where I have lived and/or worked among Indian émigrés, I have wondered about the degree to which Indian cultural customs moved abroad and perhaps might be creating challenges unrecognized by those without a background in Indian history and culture.

This was more than idle curiosity.  In Australia, I was doing a turn-around on a low performing consulting practice.  It was so successful so quickly that we had to rebuild our entire recruiting process to accelerate identification, recruitment, and on-boarding of high end talent, including people from around the world and India.  

While building a common business culture, I wanted to make sure we were not inadvertently reinforcing negative cultural practices from elsewhere that might be illegal or unfair.  I had a number of conversations with my fellow partners in India, with Indian-Australians and partners in other practices with a large Indian employee base.  I learned a fair amount but never felt I got a good understanding of the dimensions of the possible issue of caste based discrimination outside India.  There was a lot of circumspection.

My suspicion was that there were prejudicial biases creeping in but I could never find purchase for validating that.  Of course, the issue was not just India.  All cultures have various forms of systems of bias, be they class, religious or ethnicity with differing degrees of impact, but India's caste system was both unfamiliar and legendarily pervasive.

Consequently, I was very interested to see How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley by Saritha Rai.  While a long form article, it didn't include as much insight or information as I had hoped.  The primary focus is on the caste system as it manifests in the Indian Technology education sector followed by highlighting a couple of cases in the US.  But kudos for at least broaching the topic no one wishes to discuss.

Oddly, no mention is made of Affirmative Action Around the World, Thomas Sowell's 2005 book examining the empirical evidence for the need and for the effectiveness of affirmative action policies in different countries around the world.  There was a whole chapter on India's uses of affirmative action policies to address the caste system.  Policies with very mixed outcomes.

However, I was distracted by a glaring error early in the article.  An error which betrays the consistent unawareness among journalists compounded by their desire to degrade American achievements.  Error highlighted.

Caste in India speaks, as race does in America, to centuries of social, cultural, and economic divisions. Unlike in the U.S., though, India has since 1950 had a national system of affirmative action designed to undo the legacy of bias. Among its provisions are ones that help Dalits and other oppressed groups get into and pay for college. For nearly half a century, IIT admissions have been subject to a reservation system that’s still hotly debated on the campuses. In recent years, the schools have opposed attempts to extend affirmative action to faculty hires, arguing it would dilute the quality of the applicant pool and undermine their meritocratic image.

I am not disputing that India has had a national system of affirmative action since 1950.  I am disputing that the US did not.

In 1948, President Truman desegregated the US military by Executive Order.  While primarily aimed against race bias, all such major policy initiatives end up including aspects of affirmative action to bring them into reality.  

There was a raft of various types of affirmative action initiatives at the federal level during the FDR administration in the 1930s and 1940s.  Various orders and legislation sought to outlaw racial wage discrimination, employment discrimination, union membership discrimination, etc.  

FDR's Order 8802, issued in 1941, prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry or government.  All of these actions and orders had elements of affirmative action based on race.  

And these examples are limited to the federal level.  An even greater array of early affirmative action legislation can be found among the states.  

So for a Bloomberg reporter to imply that America had no federal affirmative action efforts before 1950?  Where are Bloomberg's fact checkers.  How many editors did this pass before without anyone catching something so obvious?  Do all journalists really simply hate the US so much that they are comfortable misrepresenting its actual history when it reflects well on America's efforts?  

I truly don't know.  But it occurs to me that this reflexive trafficking in prejudicial misinformation deserves its own version of the Gell-Mann Amnesia phenomenon.  

This was proposed by Michael Crichton in 2002

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

But Crichton was highlighting the dissonance of assuming away the error differential within an entire paper between the article's you have knowledge of versus those where you are in ignorance.  Assuming that the errors in the material with which you are familiar are unrepresentative of the possible similar high error rate in all the other articles.

But what about the same phenomenon within an article rather than across a whole paper.  Perhaps it might be dubbed the Crichton Dissonance Suppression Phenomenon.

You start reading an article and quickly stumble across a simple and obvious error of fact, logic or interpretation which is well known to you.  The error highlights a profound innumeracy, absence of knowledge or inability to reason.  You skate over the error and continue to read the rest of the article in blind faith that all subsequent claims with which you might not be so familiar, must otherwise be true.  

With the media infatuation with Critical Race Theory, Social Justice, Postmodernism, etc. virtually all our news sources are permeated with such errors and listening to or reading the news is a massive experience of the Crichton Dissonance Suppression Phenomenon.