Quotes About Bias

Belief is frequently a matter of convenience rather than the result of objectively weighing evidence.

But the alternative is the "HiPPO" method — the "highest paid person's opinion." That one sucks worse.

As a professional, the teacher is "objective" when presenting the school curriculum: she doesn't "take sides," or "get political." However, the ideology of the status quo is built into the curriculum. The professional's objectivity, then, boils down to not challenging this built-in ideology.

But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Tutti i pregiudizi sono determinati da altri pregiudizi, e i più frequenti sono quelli che nascono dai loro opposti.

When we become sorry for ourselves we make our misfortunes harder to bear, because we lose courage and can't think without bias.

Zealous conviction is a dangerous substitute for an open mind.

Prejudice of one sort or another seems to be a universal human weakness. Few

You can't fix a problem you can't see. Simply saying that the laws (or the economy, or the rules that govern policing, or anything else) are racially blind doesn't mean that reality is racially blind. To attack problems head-on--to be anti-racist--begins with asking questions about race.

He seemed a fool-everyone who didn't feel like me seems a fool.

I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines.

DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad. BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between. (an early comment on backlash, from Glossary for the Eighties)

There is little doubt that had de Menezes been blond and blue-eyed, he would not even have entered the police's surveillance radar.

The colourblind view was grounded in the perception that blacks, whites, and non-white Hispanics now operated on a level playing field, and that no special consideration was to be given to the 'racial' background of, say, applicants for jobs or college admission.

the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

Human reasoning, she said—referring now explicitly to Socrates and Plato—human reasoning is imperfect. Human bias keeps us from perfect vision of what is happening around us. But the quest for truth—the quest to understand the world around us—must ultimately be how you enact the good.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

People are tagged with other labels that point to the lowest-status group they belong to, as in "woman doctor" or "black writer," but never "white lawyer" or male senator". Any category that lowers our status relative to others' can be used to mark us; to be privileged is to go through life with the relative ease of being unmarked.

Women hate each other in science. You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.

That thing you do where you don't give people a chance before they've had any chances in the first place.

but because in the default of the gender hierarchy, for some reason, the man's need as usual came first.

Hollywood is the definition of sexual discrimination.

Most of us form estimates of our intelligence, wisdom, and moral fiber that are considerably higher than an objective estimate would warrant; no doubt 90 percent of us think ourselves well above average along these lines.

From time to time, everyone distorts. We all tend to believe what supports our side of the question and doubt what weakens it. When we are under stress, we tend to believe what we need to believe.