Quotes About Bias

Our corrupt, partisan media are embarrassing.

All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.

Senator Schumer is a partisan.

Senator Blunt genuinely sees everything through the lens of partisan politics.

hunches are mostly your brain telling you what you want to hear.

And, if the "programming" (our beliefs) is flawed or the data is incorrect, then false conclusions will show up in place of what's true. Perceptions will be biased, but will appear to simply reflect reality.

status quo bias. This research demonstrates that people do not like to change unless there is a compelling reason to do so, such as an attractive incentive. Related research shows that people exhibit strong "loss aversion," in that they are twice as likely to seek to avoid losses as they are to acquire gains.

People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.

Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions

hyperbolic discounting, and

Talk radio has almost ruined the sports fan.

We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias. Baruch Fischhoff was the first to document the phenomenon in a set of elegant experiments.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias.

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don't find it, they impose it.

Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special.

There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.

Reading contemporary accounts brings home the fact that of any battle or campaign there are at least for different versions. One is that of those who fought in it, two is of the generals who commanded it, three is of those who reported on it at the time and made what they could of a mass of confused and often misleading information, and four is the version of those who had a theory about it and reported those facts which happened to fit the version they were trying to portray.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.

While evil can never be banished from the human heart and mistakes can never be banished from human behavior, such outrages were rare on the American side. They were not rare—they were policy—on the Communist side. Ignoring that fact only highlights the ignorance and bias of the anti-war movement.

The clinical distrust of mothers, simply because they are women, the eagerness to bend over backwards to like fathers, simply because they are men is mind-numbing.