Best 289 quotes in «bias quotes» category

This book is dedicated to Israel's constructive and nuanced critics, whose rational voices are too often drowned out by the exaggerations, demonizations, and hate-filled lies put forth by Israel's enemies. Criticism is the lifeblood of democracy and a sure sign of admiration for an imperfect democracy seeking to improve itself.

This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.

This hinted at something that no one had ever suspected -- that the brain tracks moving things more easily that still things. We have a built-in bias toward detecting action. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes subtly over its surface. Experiments have even proven that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.

This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe?

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.

Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it's a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.

Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a bluebottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare...

To be wary of science is not to fear progress, or to be ignorant, or to fear the unknown. To be wary of science is to be skeptical about whether or not innovation belongs in human hands. No matter how intelligent a scientist may indeed be, like every human being who has ever lived, the promise of power coupled with one's own biases, prejudices and partiality will undoubtedly taint the end result. Science will always be used to push a certain agenda or to benefit specific people. To believe otherwise is naive.

Today's 'religious freedom' policies should not be seen as a problem limited to LGBT people but as a co-optation of religion that affects us all.

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

[T]wo major features of the production of reasons: it is biased— people overwhelmingly find reasons that support their previous beliefs— and it is lazy— people do not carefully scrutinize their own reasons. Combined, these two traits spell disaster for the lone reasoner. As she reasons, she finds more and more arguments for her views, most of them judged to be good enough. These reasons increase her confidence and lead her to extreme positions.

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

Urging an organization to be inclusive is not an attack. It's progress.

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

We are not as important to most people as we are to ourselves. As a matter of fact, we are—to most people—not important at all.

Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.

We encounter regression to the mean almost every day of our lives. We should try to anticipate it, recognize it, and not be fooled by it.

We hold all people to unspoken rules about who and how they should be, how they should think, and what the should say. We say we hate stereotypes but take issue when people deviate from those stereotypes.

We hold all people to unspoken rules about who and how they should be, how they should think, and what they should say. We say we hate stereotypes but take issue when people deviate from those stereotypes. Men don't cry. Feminists don't shave their legs. Southerners are racist. Everyone is, by virtue of being human, some kind of rule breaker, and my goodness, do we hate when the rules are broken.

We must come to grips with our biases, or they will surely keep a grip on us.

We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.

We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003)." from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior

Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.

Why is it that all the Christians I see on TV shows and movies are nothing like the Christians I know in actual life? The people I know have a sense of humor, aren't shallow, don't feel like they know all the answers, struggle, get scared, have hope, make sense, make peace, and hang on tight to their values because they're worth hanging on to. Have Hollywood writers just never actually set foot in a church???

Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes, that they behold, and see not what they see?

We tend to overlook only those vices that we also have.

We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

What does religious freedom mean if we would use it as a cover for hate and privilege?

Whatever proponents of false memory syndrome may claim and however persuasively they tell their stories and anecdotes, dissociative amnesia typically involves fragmented recall of trauma and is rather a retrieval inhibition than a forgetting (Spiegel et al., 2011). It may also involve complete loss of recall for sexual and physical abuse but most commonly, dissociative amnesia is partial, variable, and coexists with memories of trauma (Dalenberg et al., 2014). Studies addressing the accuracy of recovered abuse memories show that these memories are no less accurate than continuous memories for abuse (Scheflin & Brown, 1996). Memory is reconsolidated each time it is accessed and therefore potentially distorted (Bridge & Paller, 2012). Evidently, this does not disprove the possibility that some clinicians are too suggestive, one way or another, pushing their patients to adopt views that serve to confirm the therapist’s own perspective and beliefs.

What I have described as a blind spot is not a mere oversight on Sellars's part. I think it reflects Sellars's attempt to combine two insights: first, that meaning and intentionality come into view only in a context that is normatively organized, and, second, that reality as it is contemplated by the sciences of nature is norm-free. The trouble is that Sellars thinks the norm-free reality disclosed by the natural sciences is the only location for genuine relations to actualities. That is what leads to the idea that placing the mind in nature requires abstracting from aboutness. Now Aquinas, writing before the rise of modern science, is immune to the attractions of that norm-free conception of nature. And we should not be too quick to regard this as wholly a deficiency in his thinking. (Of course in all kinds of ways it is a deficiency.) There is a live possibility that, at least in one respect, Thomistic philosophy of mind is superior to Sellarsian philosophy of mind, just because Aquinas lacks the distinctively modern conception of nature that underlies Sellars's thinking. Sellars allows his philosophy to be shaped by a conception that is characteristic of his own time, and so misses an opportunity to learn something from the past.

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation.

When he came in first, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results.

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same.

When like-minded people argue, all they do is provide each other with new reasons supporting already held beliefs. Just like solitary reasoners, groups of like-minded people can be victims of belief polarization, overconfidence, and belief perseverance.

When theology recognizes one thing properly, it mis-recognizes something else all the more thoroughly.

When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.

When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.

When we hide discrimination under the guise of 'religious freedom,' we make a mockery of human rights.

When you've grown up mis-educated, surrounded by fear and hate, unaware of your privilege, lies can sound like the truth.

While most people love certain species to pieces (e.g. cats and dogs), others are more loved in pieces (e.g. cows and pigs)

While there are now fresh moves to revise NICE guidelines on CFS/ME in the United Kingdom, these advances are likely to have been hindered by the scale of epistemic injustices experienced by patients with ME/CFS (NICE 2017). Of the valuable participants in the ongoing discourse about ME/CFS, it is patients who are not only the most vulnerable but have the most to lose.

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.

You can never make someone like something they don't like, but you can always help them to better understand it.

With the rationalization of culture, and the corresponding disenchantment of religious ideas and beliefs, the modern world is ordered increasingly upon instrumentally rational grounds, and hence organizes itself less and less according to value-rational principles. This leads in turn to a world in which social action is separated increasingly from the sphere of (ethical) meaning, as particular (often technical) means are employed to realize specific ends regardless of the ethical significance or meaning of such action.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

An important thing to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias.

You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That's when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, 'He's just drunk,' and you'll miss the subdural hematoma.

Good managers have a bias for action.

Bias and impartiality is in the eye of the beholder.