Quotes About Bias

I knew no one in New York City was going to hire me if I had a southern accent.

Everyone judges, it's a human nature.

How much man likes or hates a person or a thing is dependent on how much he knows or does not know about the person or the thing.

Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen.

The idea that only the educated are privileged is an illusion.

Another weakness found in altogether too many people is the habit of measuring everything, and everyone, by their own impressions and beliefs.

we are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.

We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that's sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer.

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). Psychologists give it a fancier name, but my friend Marty has no training in behavioral sciences.

Author discussed what he calls the narrative fallacy. This refers to our limited ability to look at a sequence of facts without weaving an explanation into them.

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they

The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but

bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of reality.

Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself—and no doubt his peers.*

It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority.

An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual. This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.

Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even

We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical

naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas

I can find confirmation for just about anything, the

80 to 90% of people think that they are above the average (and the median) in many things.

In a nutshell, the survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the losers do not show up.