Quotes About Bias

Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

I am a bigot. I'm what they called a 'multibigot.' . . . A unibigot is a racist. A multibigot is just a prick.

Our own filters and biases cloud our abilities to understand and to communicate effectively. It

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

Part of the resistance of Westerners to becoming patrons is that they react negatively to the idea of participating in a society that is basically built on institutionalized inequality.121

A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of "Africans" into one single category and undifferentiated masses of "Indians" into another, while making fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination—purposefully carried out—of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

Availability bias prevents us from setting our prior beliefs appropriately, whereas confirmation bias stops us from updating them for new information.

But few of us really stop to ask ourselves what new information might change our minds, especially on questions of politics and identity. We fall into the trap of confirmation bias, in which rather than updating our prior beliefs, we mould new information into a form that will confirm them.

I'm not interested in teaching books by women... Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren't any women writers in the course. I say I don't love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence.

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

Unfortunately, we generally find it difficult to assess very small probabilities. We typically overestimate them (thinking the events more likely than they are) and underestimate very high probabilities.

Events don't actually occur as often as people predict they will. And this in turn is related to hindsight bias (the tendency to see past events as being more predictable than they were at the time), which I'll discuss shortly.

The human brain has a deceptive habit of filling in missing information and ignoring new information that doesn't fit the expectation.

Hilda observed that science always loses its way when guided by ideology or wishful thinking.

science always loses its way when guided by ideology or wishful thinking.

Social psychologists confirm that we are likely to perceive people outside our own community as more alike than those within it. We perceive members of our own group as individuals, but see other groups as more or less homogenous (psychologists call this the "outgroup homogeneity bias").

Men need to understand the sexual over-perception bias that afflicts their mating minds. They should know that, most of the time, the women smiling at them are merely being friendly or polite, not signaling sexual interest.

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

If you read only the New York Times- I said, 'Oh my God!' The readers of the New York Times are heading for a major, major breakdown shock if Trump is in fact elected.

In other words, they decided right from the start that there's no God, and they're setting out to try to prove that there's no God, ... That's their bias to start with.

Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope.

We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.