Quotes About Bias

The minute you stop talking about individuals and start talking about a group, your judgment has a flaw in it.

The phrase rush to judgement is a silly one. When it comes to judgement, most of us don't have have to rush. We don't have to even leave the couch. Our judgement is easy to reach for.

Festinger argued that in reality we usually just find a way to ignore or discount dissonant information.

Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worst still, they appear to have a bigger bias blind spot, meaning they are less able to recognize the holes in their logic.

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

If you read an essay in Esquire and don't like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it's in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don't like it, there's something wrong with you.

software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he is a saint or they are not telling the whole story.

Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness.

You know they say a white man git in some kind of trouble, he'll fret and fret until he kill hisself. A n****r git into trouble, he'll fret for a while, then g'wan to sleep.

People don't generally like advertising that takes a stand.

When you have a white male making the arguments, they carry more weight... Should they carry more weight? Absolutely not. But do they? Yes.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

You misjudge us because you do not know us. —W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth

I never said all Democrats were saloon keepers. What I said was that all saloon keepers were Democrats.

A purely objective viewpoint does not exist in the cosmos or in politics.

Science is objective not because scientists are just naturally more objective thinkers—or due to any other quirk of the scientific brain (including intelligence)—but because scientists acknowledge their biases, and construct methods to counteract them

The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted or believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed

People with passionate convictions tend to see the world through the lens of their passion - whether psychological, spiritual, or economic - and interpret everything they hear according to whether or not it harmonises with their own one-note samba

When the news is good, the BBC view is: 'Get the government out of the picture quickly, don't allow them to say anything about it.' When the news is bad: 'Let's all dump on the government.'

A universal weakness of humanity is to equate the strength of an argument with their opinion of its maker.

Because someone else will mention it to you anyway, I will list Stephen Jay Gould 's book ( The Mismeasure of Man ). It gets the psychometrics wrong, it is wrong on brain size and intelligence, and it is written with strong anti-IQ-testing bias.

We tend to take what is familiar for what is natural