> I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge

I'm having trouble following this. Of course there's a difference between prejudice and knowledge.

Being aware that studies show pickup trucks are statistically more dangerous than other classes of vehicles (SUVs included, which is nuts!), and thus wanting to avoid them, is knowledge.

Thinking that pickup truck drivers are wannabe macho chuds, and thus wanting to avoid them, is prejudice.

From the outside, you have no clue whether avoidant behavior stems from knowledge-based-bias, or prejudice. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion I'd conflated the two.

> What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized

What?

> or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific

I have no clue what this has to do with our discussion.

> The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.

Ah, I see where you're going. You're wrong.

If you truly believe that you don't use lived experience to make prefactual assessments throughout life, you haven't thought about it enough:

When you walk up to a new computer, you don't assume that you have no idea how the mouse will work, just because this is a new mouse you haven't individually encountered before. You assume (and act on the assumption) that it will work the same as other mice. You don't swab it just in case it's a bomb, or covered in poison.

You just act on your expectations of how it will behave -UNTIL- you see evidence to the contrary.

The problem is you're trying to (as I said) equate bias with prejudice. The comment from pepperghost93 was about the belief in corporations' willingness to do bad things.

You and Permit1 clearly assumed they were merely prejudiced against corporations, and not basing their wariness of corporate malfeasance on factual data showing corporations being willing to, in fact, do immoral and illegal things.

tl;dr Ironically, you, in the process of decrying bias, used your own biased perception of prefactual judgements to assume they were coming from a place of prejudice rather than knowledge.