Quotes About Subjectivity

Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer… we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

A critic is a bunch of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.

The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats.

Noise is mostly a by-product of our uniqueness, of our "judgment personality.

The remembering self's neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.

In terms of noise, psychiatry is an extreme case.

people who make judgments behave as if a true value exists, regardless of whether it does.

In areas that involve vague criteria and complex judgments, intrarater reliability, as it is called, can be poor.

your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on.

If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence

Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.

Matters of judgment, including professional judgments, occupy a space between questions of fact or computation on the one hand and matters of taste or opinion on the other. They are defined by the expectation of bounded disagreement.

But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.

The same sound will be experienced as very loud or quite faint, depending on whether it was preceded by a whisper or by a roar.

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing the assessment than on the performance being assessed.

A matter of judgment is one with some uncertainty about the answer and where we allow for the possibility that reasonable and competent people might disagree.

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing

Happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does.

high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

The eyes are not windows. There are nerve impulses, but no one reads them, counts them, translates them, and ruminates about them. Hunt for as long as you want, there's nobody home. The world is contained within you, and you're not there.

Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who's to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?

George Berkeley makes the case that all our knowledge of the world comes to us through our senses, so in the end all we've really got is this sense data inside our heads. We cannot claim that is a chair out there, only that we have some chair sense data in our minds. So it is impossible to claim that the chair is anything more than a bunch of sensory experiences that we cobble together in our minds and call a "chair.

Thus, the "memories" that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression).

Pleasure and pain are merely states of mind, rather than situations. Every situation is neutral.